The steel rails sang under the relentless hammer of six driving wheels.
Inside the enclosed engineer’s cab of The Iron Bastion, the heat was an intense, living force. Master Borin Bronze-Lung stood stripped to his leather vest, shoveling dark, glistening lumps of metalworking coke into the roaring white maw of the twin fireboxes.
Every swing of the dwarf smith’s heavy scoop threw thirty pounds of carbon fuel across the shaker grates. The draft dampers hummed with a fierce, nonstop intake of mountain air.
“Boiler pressure two hundred twenty-four pounds,” Borin called over the roar of the cylinders.
“Water glass steady at half full. Injectors one and two feeding cold river intake.”
Giles Croft stood with his hand resting lightly on the polished brass control valve lever. His boots absorbed the rhythmic sixty-cycle shaking of the heavy running gear.
Beneath the cab floor, sixty tons of counterbalanced steel surged back and forth in clockwork harmony. The side rods were a silver blur, spinning the sixty-two-inch drivers at three hundred turns a minute.
Beside him, Toby Karr held a silver pocket watch in his palm, counting the click-clack of the rail joints against his marked chart.
