The Great Kiln Hall was vast enough to house its own weather.
Beneath the central high window row, forty feet above the floor, the heat-rising draft from the cooling annealers collided with the freezing mountain mist that seeped through the shattered glass of the roof monitors. The result was a churning, boiling hot heat inversion. A layer of rotten-egg, oily smoke that hung motionless in the rafters, trapping the bitter-salt dust and the black soot from the newly ignited oil burners in a choking, purple-gray haze.
For twelve years, those rafters had remained an uninspected territory. The iron roof beams, riveted from six-inch angle-iron during the heavy-duty spreading forty winters ago, were covered in thick, furry blankets of dry soot and lime scale that muffled the sound of the wind outside. No living fire tender or night watchman had climbed the upright iron check ladders since the sky shield had closed. A fall from forty feet onto the concrete cullet bins or the glowing melted rock waste troughs below was certain death. The narrow iron flanges offered no safety netting and no handhold for a man carrying an oil lantern or an iron pike.
Beneath the roof beams ran the heavy steel crane rails, once used to transport fifty-ton pots of molten glass from the melting tanks to the rolling beds. Suspended from those rails were obsolete traveling carriages, counterweighted pulleys, and miles of braided steel hoisting cable, left to corrode in the damp, acidic air.
