By two o’clock in the afternoon, the six massive outdoor baking ovens behind the central tram depot had been brought to white-hot heat with dry birch cordwood hauled down from the mountain slopes above the middle gate.
The ovens were built of heavy fire-brick salvaged from the old locomotive repair chimney pipes, banded with three-inch iron straps to contain the heat swelling. Their vaulted brick mouths opened directly toward the sunlit expanse of the square. For twelve years, those hearths had been dead, cold stonework—unsafe by Chancellor Morn’s town fuel overseers as “grossly inefficient open-air heat dissipators.” The government had mandated that all communal baking take place sixty feet underground in the underground reverberatory chimney pipes beneath the Salt Ward. There, the waste heat from the sky shield’s copper channel coils could bake bread without consuming precious cords of cordwood.
In those underground chimney pipes, baking had been a heavy-duty horror.
The dough had been mixed with gray, cellar-damp flour that smelled of moldering sacks and rodent droppings, moistened with bitter-salt canal runoff that tasted of sulfur, and kneaded beneath the flickering, jaundiced glare of unshaded copper lamps. The resulting loaves had been dense, heavy, leaden bricks with tough, rubbery, charcoal-black crusts that tasted of stone oil and coal smoke. People had eaten them. That was because the human belly needs four hundred calories to turn a pump handle. But every mouthful had been a reminder of the iron ceiling hanging over their heads.
