Three hundred feet above the mudflats of Lowbank, beneath the gleaming white granite tiered halls of the Summoners’ College, the sub-terrace command vault of the Hollow Crown smelled of hot spermaceti oil, scorched copper green rust. The sharp, metal tang of hammered bronze. Unlike the damp brick cellars of the river wards, the walls here were dressed cut stone blocks four feet thick. Even so, even at this depth a faint trace of river silt stench and white pipe lime seeped through the lower floor seams where the shaft plunged down into the ancient gorge.
Examiner Corvin Hest stood on the iron gallery walkway with his leather portfolio tucked tightly beneath his arm, watching six foundrymen in leather aprons tighten the turnbuckles on a twelve-foot ring of cast glowing-bronze. On a small marble side table near the entrance, an attendant had set a silver pot of boiled tea and a plate of dry sourdough crust for the night watch, untouched since midnight.
Below the walkway, filling the center of the cavernous chamber, rose the upper dome of the Hollow Crown. It was a huge hemispherical cage of linked bronze bus-bars, each bar inlaid with nonstop, unbroken tracks of twenty-four-karat gold leaf. Thirty feet beneath the bronze dome, invisible behind bolted cast-iron check hatches, the entire torrent of the Third Gate was being forced upward through a narrowed venturi throat.
