Forewoman Melli Dorn dropped the iron pulpit ladder with the unrushed, heavy-footed deliberate balance of a woman who had spent thirty winters working above open melted rock waste pits.
Every step of her thick cowhide boots was solid, driving the dust from the steel rungs. She carried her seven-foot iron skimmer in the crook of her left arm like a shepherd’s crook, its chisel head still hissing faintly where droplets of condensed sulfur steam dripped from the overhead rafters.
She stopped three paces from where Len, Ivara, and Bram stood beside the firebrick cooling bench.
She stripped off her heavy asbestos gloves. She tucked them into the thick leather tool belt cinched around her waist with a forged iron buckle. Her hands were huge: the palms broad, square-boned, and scarred by decades of handling hot graphite molds. The skin of her knuckles was dark, thickened like horn. Then she patterned with dozens of pale, circular burn scars where spitting soda ash had eaten into the flesh before it could be scrubbed off with vinegar.
She didn’t look at Bram Ash, though the former court guard dropped his gaze with a faint, embarrassed nod of deference. She looked directly into Ivara Quill’s gray eyes.
