The crack of a leather bullwhip echoed across the volcanic terrace like a gunshot.
“Faster, you lazy dogs!” an overseer’s shrill voice barked through the sulfur fog. “If the cauldron pressure drops below eight atmospheres, Warden Krahl will throw your whole family into the magma pits!”
Across the inner refinement ring, fifty conscripted alchemists were drenched in greasy sweat.
Their eyes were red and stinging from sulfur vapor, their robes scorched by drifting embers, and their hands blistered as they stoked the Earth-Fire vents beneath thirty-ton bronze cauldrons. The ambient heat was suffocating, thick enough to roast pork on the bare flagstones. Dense plumes of yellow brimstone gas billowed toward the blackened granite ceiling.
At Table Seven, Alchemist Linnea stirred an iron pot of simmering cooling brine with a long brass ladle.
She occasionally added dried mint leaves and white salt to the mixture, creating fragrant steam that helped mask their corner from the acrid smoke of neighboring crucibles. Beside her, Old Barnaby wiped his soot-stained brow with a greasy rag, theatrical groans of exhaustion pouring from his throat whenever a patrol passed by.
Behind them both, nestled atop a cozy five-foot hill of hundred-pound spirit-coal sacks, lay Kaelen Vance.
