The grenadiers of the Azure Firmament Sect were not miners. They were shock troops trained to crack open mountain strongholds with potion-made fire and packed burning acid.
Six of them, clad in heavy coats of boiled rhinoceros hide plated with overlapping bands of red bronze, had cornered themselves before the sealed vault-door of Entry hall 527. The door was a massive round slab of green snake-like jade, eight feet in width, carved with the sky-high chart of the Winter Solstice. Behind it lay the sacred storehouse of the Hydrographic Ephemerides—three thousand rolls of lead-foil charts recording the gravity anomalies of the Drowned Sea.
The grenadiers had wheeled up an abandoned four-wheeled acid cart. A squat, iron-heavy carriage bearing a two-hundred-gallon tank of heavy cast lead, filled with packed aqua fortis and fuming spirit-acid.
Two of them were setting up a potion-made breaching-drill against the jade door. Meanwhile, the squad sergeant—a burly man with scarred cheeks and yellow teeth—adjusted the brass pressure control valve atop the acid tank. A hand-pumped brass bellows was whistling softly as an apprentice pumped thirty pounds of pressure into the lead pool.
“Aim the discharge nozzle directly at the central pivot-ring!” the sergeant barked, his voice muffled by the thick pig-snout breathing mask strapped over his mouth. “Once the acid eats the bronze hinge-pins, we drive the iron wedges into the gap and blow the jade with three red-powder charges!”
