Melli Dorn waded through the black under-road drain slurry with her heavy leather kiln apron rolled up and tucked firmly into her canvas belt.
The water was twenty inches deep now. It smelled of rancid mutton fat, machine oil. The bitter, choking reek of sulfuric acid that leached continuously from the Survey Citadel’s chemical chimney pipes. It rose to the middle of her thighs. It pulled against her boots with the sluggish, heavy drag of cold grease.
Her bare forearms, thick as birch logs and mottled with dozens of pale, circular burn scars from twenty years of handling molten salt-glass, brushed against the slimy brickwork of the under-road drain vault. In her right hand she carried a four-pound cast-steel framing hammer. In her left, an unlit animal fat torch wrapped in five layers of oiled hemp.
“Twelve years,” she muttered under her breath, her boots grinding on the coarse melted rock waste washed down from the locomotive ash-pits. Her voice was a low, deep-throated rasp that seemed to vibrate out of her broad ribs. “Twelve years of my boys blowing forty-tiny plate glass until their cheeks cracked and their spit tasted of bitter salt, thinking we were manufacturing watching slits for border artillery.”
