The scrap yard of the Salt Works was an unlit maze of twisted channel iron, shattered firebrick, and mountains of green bottle cullet that had been rejected for bubbles or sulfur contamination.
They entered the outer edge through a drainage ditch beneath the security wooden wall, slipping past the main weighbridge where two watchmen in gray wool capes stood huddled inside a glass-windowed guard shack, their lanterns shuttered to thin slits against the biting wind. Bram Ash led the way, his heavy frame moving with surprising, silent stealth through the familiar ground shape of his former turf. He used the rusted hulls of abandoned steam boilers to mask their approach from the high overhead frame lookouts.
The surrounding heat of the yard was astonishing.
They stepped between two three-story piles of crushed soda-glass. Then, the freezing alpine wind was suddenly swallowed by a massive, choking downdraft of dry, white-hot air that poured off the roofs of the casting sheds. The heat surged forty degrees in the space of ten paces. Len felt the cold sweat on his forehead flash to salt. His skin tightened like dried parchment as the blasting heat from the brick stacks washed over his face.
Beneath his boots, the ground was a nonstop apron of compacted coal cinders and black iron melted rock waste, ground to coarse gravel by the iron-shod wheels of hundreds of heavy hand-trucks.
