Five paces ahead in the narrow stone chimney pipe, Ji Mingchuan was working with the frenzy of an unsafe man.
The Scholar was kneeling directly atop the iron clean-out grate, unaware that beneath his sharkskin boots lay thirty arm-lengths of empty air and a roaring drain tube chute. His ivory robes were stripped to his waist, soaked with sweat, sulfur-dust, and the black serum weeping from his acid burns. His face was a mask of gray stone flour, through which his spinning double pupils burned with a terrifying, feverish soft glow.
In his hands, he held the royal hand-drill: a slender brace of hardened starmetal, fitted with an edge-gear gearwork that whined in high, screaming bursts as he leaned his chest against the breastplate.
The diamond bit had already bored two inches into the phonolite baffle.
A steady stream of white rock-dust was pouring from the hole, hissing as it fell into the cracks of the iron grate between the Scholar’s knees.
“Almost through... Almost through...” Ji Mingchuan muttered between his broken teeth, his breath rattling in his chest like dry pebbles. “One more inch... The baffle will crack... The bells will drop... The old ghost will die...”
Beside his left knee lay his final weapon. A heavy potion-made charge of tightly packed red phosphorus and spirit-liquid silver, wrapped in lead foil, fitted with a percussion cap of royal starmetal.
