The descent into the sub-basement of the tram sheds was a journey into the heavy-duty plumbing that kept Rookvale’s frozen public works from locking solid.
While Doma Reel and her two trusted kitchen apprentices kept the peat fires roaring in the upper ranges, banging iron pans and shouting orders across the empty worktables to maintain the illusion of a fortified, fully occupied guard post, Len, Ivara. Bram slipped through the grease-soaked floor hatch beneath the tram upkeep pit.
The hatch opened into an upright shaft of damp limestone, four meters deep, fitted with rusted iron rungs that left flakes of wet orange rust on Len’s blistered palm. At the bottom lay Conduit Seven: the main cooled water return chimney pipe that carried scalding wastewater from the tramway generator plant north toward the High District cooling vaults.
Len’s boots struck the brick invert of the under-road drain. Then, the freezing bitter salt chill of the upper world vanished, replaced by a choking, tropical wall of heat and humidity. The air inside the tunnel was nearly forty degrees. It smelled intensely of hardened rubber, stale machine oil, and the bitter, coppery tang of hard pipe-crust. Dense plumes of white steam billowed from leaking spreading collars along the suspended pipe racks, reducing clear sight to less than five feet.
