The Three-Legged Mottled Brass Cauldron stood in the center of the workshop like a sunken reef in a river of ash.
It was two feet two inches tall from the clawed tips of its tripod feet to the beaded rim of its mouth. Cast forty years prior from a raw composite of red copper, lead, and tin, its outer belly was mottled with dark green rust, sulfur crust, and nested rings of scorched heat-bloom. Three stylized tiger claws supported the ball-shaped hull, each claw anchored to an eight-sided dark rock stone base recessed into the flat stone slab floor.
Above it hung a cone-shaped sheet-iron hood that vented smoke into the dark rock chimney pipe. Below it opened the draft pit, an ash-choked brick trench connected to the hand-pumped bellows.
Old Monster Gui sat on his stool by the chimney pipe, his breathing wheezy and shallow. A cup of warm bitter pine-resin wine sat untouched beside his elbow.
“Every two months,” Gui rasped, gesturing with his hickory cane toward the crucible, “the crust inside must be scraped, and the draft lugs checked. If the vents clog with sulfur soot, the air stagnates. When the air stagnates, heat pools in the belly. A cooking pot that pools heat will crack along its casting seam, spit thirty pounds of molten lead across the room, and take off your legs.”
