The draft-bulls that hauled the first acid wagon were massive, six-horned beasts from the fiery pastures of the Northern Rift, their shoulders armored in heavy boiled leather and their hooves shod with iron cleats.
They labored heavily under the yoke, their breath issuing from their flared nostrils in long plumes of white steam that condensed against the cold greenstone walls of the Throat. Behind them rumbled the wagon. An iron-framed carriage carrying a tube-shaped tank of heavy riveted lead, loaded with eight hundred gallons of packed potion-made burning acid. The iron-shod wheels of the wagon groaned under the four-ton burden, grinding against the hard speckled rock pavers with a high, screeching shriek of metal upon stone.
Captain Meng’s vanguard was now one hundred and twenty paces ahead, approaching the midpoint of the narrow passage where the ceiling dropped to its lowest clearance.
Up in the hoist-shaft forty arm-lengths above the hall, Qiao Ming knelt upon the narrow granite footing beside the main balance weight well.
The well was an upright shaft four arm-lengths square, dropping sixty feet through the core of the stonework directly into the bedrock foundation of the Ark. Suspended inside the shaft was the thirty-ton balance weight box. An iron-heavy timber chest filled with cast-lead metal bars, held at the ceiling line by four links of three-inch forged iron chain.
