The thunder of the air-powered hammers was an unrelenting, bone-shaking assault on the ears. Every four seconds, forty-ton steam pistons slammed down onto chilled cast-iron anvils with a sound like thunderclaps. It sent showers of blinding orange sparks arching across the overhead frame narrow high walkways. The blast waves traveled through the soles of Arthur’s boots, rattling his teeth and shaking through the marrow of his shins.
Arthur ran low beneath the tangle of overhead steam channels, his combat boots dodging pools of bubbling heavy-duty grease. Through the thick haze of coal smoke and atomized oil. His Monocle Loupe was locked onto the main forging station fifty paces ahead.
Bound upon a massive eight-sided steel table was a mature female Iron-Spined Terrapin. Her limbs were locked inside six-inch-thick steel shackles anchored to the floor with heavy tension turnbuckles. Over her dorsal shell hung the massive head of Steam Hammer Three. Three cult blacksmiths, wearing heavy leather aprons and full-face mica respirators, were using seven-foot iron tongs to position a glowing, white-hot iron-hard metal rivet—four inches in width and a foot long—over a freshly drilled pilot hole through the living scute of her marginal rim.
The tortoise’s eyes were rolled back in panic, white foam bubbling from her horned beak as she thrashed against her bonds, her claws gouging futile streaks into the iron table. The scent of scorched horn-protein drifted across the platform. A sickening, rotten-egg odor that signaled the coming soon destruction of her outer shell layers.
