Through the drifting haze of black kerosene smoke and bitter salt dust, the Great Kiln Hall felt less like a factory of industry and more like a tomb whose seals were being pried loose with cold iron.
The spilled petroleum in the floor trenches was smoldering under mounds of damp sand. It sent up thin, oily ribbons of gray smoke that stung the eyes and coated the tongue with the taste of sulfur and lead. The roaring fire wall was gone. But the surrounding heat remained stifling, hovering at well over a hundred degrees near the cooling Lehrs. Across the cracked flat stone slabs, Melli Dorn stood on the raised iron platform before the Salt Ward Claimant Cabinet, her heavy steer-hide apron charred black at the hem, her bare forearms streaked with soot and drying sweat.
The cabinet was an imposing monolith of riveted plate iron, five feet wide and eight feet tall, anchored into the dark rock bedrock by four two-inch foundation bolts. For twelve years, it had stood at the center of the Salt Works like an unblinking bronze eye. It hummed with the nonstop, high-hum shaking of thirty-six stolen working lives. Through its wire-gauze air-flow grilles, a faint, sickly violet eerie glow pulsed in time with the central Star tower line.
