The canvas curtain hanging across the warehouse doorway was shoved aside with a sharp, violent rustle. Melli Dorn stepped across the brick doorstep into the forge shop.
The salt-glass forewoman was breathing hard. Her breath whistling through was clenched teeth, her muscular shoulders hunched under the weight of a five-foot steel pinch bar that rested across her right collarbone like a levered rifle. Her leather kiln apron was sodden, blackened with sulfur mud and machine grease from the flooded sump, the heavy cowhide slashed across the left thigh where flying shrapnel from the locomotive screw-jack had grazed the leather. Her hands, thick and broad, were wrapped in frayed hemp sacking stiff with dried lime wash.
She didn’t look at the carpenter’s workbench right away. She stopped four paces inside the room, her boots grating on the coal grit, her sharp, pale eyes sweeping the shadowed corners of the brickwork before settling on Bram Ash.
“Morn’s people are moving faster than we calculated,” Melli said, her voice flat, cold, stripped of all inflection. “They’ve brought two light brass field pieces onto the upper switchback above the turntable—six-pounders salvaged from the South Gate armory. They’re setting the spades into the granite roadbed fifty yards above Platform One, training the muzzles straight down into the freight warehouse roof.”
