The room smelled like rune-oil and old stone.
Soren Hald had been stationed at Morreth garrison for twenty-seven years, and in twenty-seven years the building had acquired the specific sensation of had been continuously occupied for longer than most of its occupants had been alive. Stone dust. Iron. The residual warmth of rune-heaters that had been cycling since installation, the units bolted to the corridor walls in Year 461, before Hald's posting, before most of the current garrison had been born. The smell was stable. The smell was the garrison. The smell did not include rune-oil, because rune-oil was a workshop substance, an engine-works substance, a smell that belonged to places where things were being built rather than places where things were being held.
The communications room smelled like rune-oil because the apparatus was new.
