Len stepped onto the iron grating of the watching platform, his uninjured right hand raised to shield his eyes from the blinding radiance bleeding through the check port of Kiln Four.
Even through the circular quartz disc, two inches thick and tinted dark bottle-green to filter the heat spectrum, the light that struck his eyes was staggering.
Inside the reverberatory chamber, beneath a vaulted ceiling of white-hot heat-proof firebrick forty paces long, was an expanse of molten heat-proof glass three feet deep. It didn’t behave like ordinary liquid melted rock waste, and it didn’t glow with the honest, comfortable red-orange of a blacksmith’s hearth.
It was a blazing bright, churning sea of blinding violet-white soft glow, shot through with branching, emerald-green veins of raw spark deep ring that pulsed across the molten surface like captured lightning.
It looked like a piece of a sky-high noon sun, ripped from the open sky twelve winters ago, tightly packed beneath a million pounds of granite, and forced into a heavy-duty crucible to boil in the dark.
Len felt his breath catch in his throat.
His Road Sense shook through the soles of his river boots, reading the terrifying physical mechanics of the fire. The firebrick walls, four feet thick and heavy with massive iron buckstaves, were under huge water-pressure and heat tension. Millions of heat units were churning inside that bath, streaming outward with a pressure so intense that the heavy steel tie-rods spanning the vaulted roof were humming at a pitch that…
