The high stone gallery running above Entry halls 135 through 140 had been carved by ancient masons as a raised aqueduct to feed the decorative fountains of the Middle Courts.
Flanked by square fluted pilasters of white Green-wave marble, the gallery was thirty paces wide, four hundred paces long, and hung eighty arm-lengths above the flooded floor of the lower halls. It had stood dry for three hundred years. Because of that, its broad banded limestone surface had been chosen by the surviving air-officers of the Pyre-Furnace Court as an ideal forward staging post for their leftover forty-two flying war-chariots.
There, safe above the black silt of the Sunken Navel, the Conclave mechanics had pitched iron repair-tents. Portable spirit-coal forges flamed red in the dusk. Bronze fuel-pumps chattered with oily rhythms as technicians patched warped copper wings, replaced shattered intake-vanes, and mounted heavy repeating ballistae along the marble low roof wall.
“Secure the wheel-blocks!” the air-marshal shouted, his gauntleted hand slamming onto the bronze nose of his flagship chariot. “Once the backup steam pressure reaches eight hundred pounds, we launch in three waves! We dive straight down the central light-well into Entry hall 145! Target their food-stores with incendiary iron pots! Burn them until they choke!”
