The Sunk Granary

aka Woolmark's hole

A caved-in Imperium grain-cistern off the Highbridge road, its stone throat swallowed by a sinkhole two winters back — worked now for the bronze auger-heads still bolted inside, and short one salvager who went in after the best of them and hasn't come out to spend the coin.

It was a farm well until the ground under it gave, and what it fell into was older: a stone cistern-vault the Imperium built to hold grain against siege, its walls still lined with the bronze auger-fittings that turned the grain to keep it from souring in the damp. Half the fittings have already gone to Highbridge smiths for good coin — that's Old Work, plain and known, and every farmer on the corridor knows exactly what a temple-bronze auger-head is worth and exactly how far down the last diggable ones sit. Sella Woolmark's brother Tam went down after the deepest ones a week and a half ago with a rope, a lamp, and a plan to be back for supper. The rope's still tied off at the mouth. Sella has not gone down after him — she knows better, and she knows the cistern's lower gallery flooded when the sinkhole opened, which means the water is doing something down there that a rope and a lamp won't fix. What she wants is not heroics. She wants someone who can go the distance a farmer's daughter with a bad knee can't, bring back whatever's left of Tam if it's bad news, and — if it isn't too much to ask on top of that — the auger-head he went down for, because the coin from it is the difference between keeping the croft and not. She is entirely honest that both things matter to her, in that order, and doesn't apologize for it. What the salvagers who come out never quite say aloud is why the vault is worth the risk and also why it should have been worthless. The Third Granary-Clerkship filled it against a siege the Prefect's readers foretold — eleven hundred measures of hard wheat under a bronze seal, enough to hold the corridor through a winter under the wall. The siege lifted, or was never real; the writ to break the seal and give out the grain never came, because to open it was to admit it had been filled in fear. So a full vault of plenty was sealed and forgotten while the corridor learned to go hungry — the Lean Years' cruelest joke, buried in stone. And the grain did not simply rot. Something got in and ate, and bred on what it ate, for four hundred years in the dark, and the biggest and hungriest of them never stopped growing. That is what waits in the flooded lower gallery now, past the drowned auger-wheels: not a curse and not a ghost, only the largest mouth in a room that careful men filled to feed a siege that never came — and that took Tam Woolmark when he reached for one deep head too many.

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