The heat inside the Basin Cooperative Foundry was a physical presence that pressed against the chest like a heavy wool blanket. The great coke-fired small roof-dome fire roared with a deep, muffled thunder, its white-hot blast throwing a vivid orange glare across the blackened timber roof beams and soot-stained brick walls. Master Founder Orson Vance stood at the edge of the casting pit, wearing a full-length apron of wet split-hide, an iron wire face-mask pushed up onto his soot-blackened brow.
Beside him stood Eren Tal and Pella Rook. She watched two journeymen skim the glowing waste scum from the surface of a two-man crucible using long-handled graphite ladles. The molten metal beneath the crust was liquid gold, swirling with pale green fire as the copper and tin blended in perfect eutectic harmony.
“Look at that melt, Eren,” Master Vance bellowed over the roar of the fire blast. “Eighty-eight percent copper, ten percent tin, two percent zinc. We didn’t buy a single ounce of imported metal bars from the merchant houses. Every pound of metal in that ladle came from the snapped pipe hubs of Davin Sorell’s Hollow Crown. We melted down the extraction collars, burned out the academy silver flux. Then he boiled the metal until the copper was sweet as mountain water. We took the machine that choked the river and turned it into honest bronze that will outlast the Senate building.”
