The air in Entry hall 858 smelled of cold charcoal, put out bronze, and the clean stone dust of cut stone that had rested undisturbed for seven thousand years.
After the violent roar of the water chutes and the choking sulfur of the upper reaches, the Seventh Foundry felt less like a heavy-duty ruin than an ancient crypt carved for giants. The hall was five hundred arm-lengths long and eighty arm-lengths high, its ceiling supported by two rows of squared giant pillars forged from solid sea-bronze, each pillar as wide as a castle tower and green with the velvety patina of deep-water green rust. High above. There, the capitals met the stone vaulting, the bronze was carved with massive relief figures depicting the thirty-six founding guild-masters of the First Epoch, each holding a lead line-weight, a square, or a sounding-rule.
Here, in the earliest hundreds of years of the Great Flooding, the master smiths and water-scribes had forged the massive ironwork of the House. The ten-thousand-fathom anchor chains, the counter-weighted water gate gates, and the eight-sided lead plumbs that measured the sinking of the world. Every fitting had been cast under huge deep water pressure, cooled slowly in tanks of stone-rich hadal salt water so that the metal would never suffer fatigue, crystal-forming, or electric-shock rot.
