Inside the Great Kiln Hall of the Salt Works, the heat didn’t merely touch the skin. It pressed against the ribs like a solid weight of white-hot lime and dry bitter salt dust.
The hall was a cavernous nave of blackened melted rock waste brick, three hundred feet from the iron intake doors to the rear chimney pipe stacks, vaulted by exposed iron roof beams that cried water drops of acid-burning salt water. For three ages, the glassmakers of Rookvale had gathered here to fire the dense, chemical-resistant heat-proof glass that lined the province’s pharmaceutical stills, mine lanterns, and high-pressure steam boilers. For the last twelve years, however, the kilns had not burned coal or dried pitch. They had been tethered directly into the underground copper bus-bars of the Salt Ward anchor. They drew raw, unmetered spark current through six massive heavy dark metal coils that glowed in the darkness with a blinding, blazing bright violet glare.
Melli Dorn stood on the upper charging platform of Annealer Three, her boots planted on the punched holes in iron floorplates. She was forty-two winters old, broad in the shoulders, her forearms crisscrossed with silvery crescent scars where flying shards of hot cullet had bitten into her flesh across twenty years of fire labor. Over her wool work-trousers she wore an apron of double-cured steer hide, stiffened with dried animal fat and powdered borax until it stood off her body like plate armor. Her face was hidden behind a wire-gauze mask fitted with…
