To replace the cut telegraph lines for urgent, district-wide working alerts, Ivara Quill and Melli Dorn had spent the preceding two hours transforming the three highest stone-built structures in Rookvale into a sight signaling network.
Eighty feet above the central market square, on the flat lead roof of the abandoned town clock tower, two salt-kiln workers stood behind a heavy iron fire bowl filled with glowing metalworking coke. Mounted before the fire bowl was a clockwork shutter assembly. Three sliding sheet-metal plates operated by counterweighted foot treadles, capable of projecting a blinding beam of copper-green light through heavy, cut-out iron stencils.
Len Vey stood on the raised walkway of the tram overhead frame, forty feet above the switching yard. His brass pocket telescope was pressed to his right eye. The brass barrel was braced against the cold iron pipe rim of a roof support post to steady his trembling hand. His braced left arm was wedged securely between his ribs and his coat front to prevent the wind from catching the ash slats.
The valley air was freezing, soaked with the bitter, bitter-salt stench of the Salt furnaces and the wet, rotten-egg reek of the River Ward’s sulfur mud. Through the circular field of the glass, the summit of the clock tower was a sharp, jagged dark shape against the oily black membrane of the sky shield.
