The unloading bay of the lower shrine was a wide, barrel-vaulted chamber carved directly out of the dark grey mountain dark rock, lit during the upkeep window only by low orange animal fat lanterns set along two long wooden workbenches in the center of the floor. Through the gap between the front floorboards and the bottom burlap sack, Seyun could smell the sharp, nose-stinging steam of boiling white vinegar mixed with the metal tang of wet loadstone crust.
Along the two central workbenches, sixteen Coal- and Flame-realm orderlies wearing thick pigskin glazier’s gloves and leather aprons stood bent over the twelve disassembled bronze registration ward-lamps. Some were scraping thick grey-black flakes of current-carrying magnetic ash off the brass tuning plates with horn chisels. Others were dipping the plates into steaming vats of vinegar to dissolve the stone bridges, while old Hob the master lamp-trimmer walked down the line with a copper oil-can refilling the reservoirs with refined stone oil and powdered loadstone.
Every person on the wagon knew what those copper oil-cans meant. Their physical disguise—Mother Renn’s homespun shawl, Mina’s clinic badge, Ilyra and Daro’s grey wagon driver coats, and the pungent bitter-reed sacks hiding Seyun—worked only against human eyes in animal fat light. Hob finished refilling those twelve reservoirs. Then, bolted the scraped brass tuning plates back into the bronze housings. Then it struck the master flint at nine o’clock, the white-violet spirit vein-sensing field would flood every inch of the unloading bay and the entrance tunnel.
