Smoky yellow glare from an enclosed brass Davy lantern cut through the thick white steam hovering inside the intake shaft of Sector Eight beneath the fish market quays. The underground vault stank of rotten river-weed, scalding sulfur vapor, bitter-salt boiler salt water, and the bitter turquoise green rust of corroding bronze brackets. Halfway up the slick stonework wall, the twenty-inch opening of Lateral Eight-B gaped like a brick oven throat.
Senior Town Surveyor Korr Var crouched at the lip of the lateral with his brass sounding bar and an iron check mirror on a said clearlyjoint. His lungs breathed the humid 120°F air through a vinegar-dampened linen sponge tied over his nose and mouth. Behind him in the upright access shaft stood Foreman Eren Tal with eighty feet of waxed hemp safety line snubbed around an iron cleat. Meanwhile, Pella Rook monitored the speaking tube and the liquid silver pressure gauge column.
Korr had to squeeze through a twenty-inch lateral pipe where boiling slow leak from Sorell’s Crown had melted the animal fat joint seals. Thanks to Auditor Varo Nenn’s midnight watchbook extracts, they had timed their descent for five-thirty in the morning. Exactly thirty minutes after Sorell’s four-o’clock high-pressure purge had subsided. Just then, the pipe was still streaming fierce leftover heat but the water level in the invert had dropped to four inches.
