The wall of fire that divided the Great Kiln Hall was an impassable, roaring frontier of twelve hundred degrees of heat-rising heat.
The spilled kerosene had ignited the piled up coal soot and petroleum residue in the floor gutters. That created a burning moat six paces wide that stretched from the charging deck of Annealer One to the brick wall of the mixing bays. The flames were not bright yellow. They burned with the angry, spitting orange of sulfur-contaminated crude, sending rolling billows of dense, greasy black smoke curling into the rafters, blotting out the roof monitors and reducing clear sight on the floor to ten feet. The draft from the four giant annealing chimneys drew the flames sideways, feeding the firestorm with thousands of cubic feet of fresh mountain air that howled through the cracked high window row windows.
Len Vey lay on his side in the white bitter salt dust, coughing wildly, his lungs fighting against the choking soot. Every breath tasted of scorched wool, sulfur fumes. The bitter, chemical stench of burnt kerosene. His right hip throbbed where he had struck the stone, but his braced left arm was intact. The split-ash boards had held, the linen ties had not slipped. The shattered radius had not breached the skin again. The fever in the bone was a hot, rhythmic pulse. But it was a familiar pain, grounded in the reality of living tissue that had survived another impact.
