The air smelled of burnt grease, sulfur, and frosted iron at noon on Day 17.
Outside the Seventh Tower, the distant howling of spirit hounds echoed through the obsidian streets. Pack by pack, the Second Tower’s blood-trackers were scouring the lower furnace bays, sniffing every drainage grate and coal bin.
These were Nether-Blood Hounds, vicious Tier 4 beasts bred in the frozen kennels of the Second Spire. Their crimson eyes could pierce thick darkness, and their long snouts could track a single drop of spilled blood through three feet of solid basalt.
Inside the fifth-floor Inner Sanctum, the mood was calm.
Deacon Vane squeezed through the maintenance flue, wiping dark grease from his brown merchant coat.
From an oiled sheepskin satchel, the former sect deacon pulled a pair of heavy inquisitor boots. They were stitched from the scaly hide of scarlet fire-drakes, trimmed with blackened iron buckles.
They were Blood-Cauldron Master Vex’s personal boots, stripped before the inquisitor had been welded into the bronze pot.
“The hounds are sniffing out Vex’s scent across the central plaza,” Deacon Vane whispered, setting the boots down on the low ink-jade table. “The enforcers locked down the outer bazaar at dawn. Three herbalists were dragged off in chains for missing stall permits, and the hounds tore through four meat shops.”
