The smoke in the forward siege camp did not smell of cured birch or honest camp cooking. It tasted of sulfur, scorched grease, and the bitter tang of burned iron.
Iven crouched beside a smoldering trench fire of wet brushwood and ditch alder, her wool breeches soaked through to the shins with freezing mud. Her boots were caked in the gray marl of the lower river flats, and her fingers, raw and split from crawling along the riverbank stone, were blackened with chimney soot. In the pocket of her heavy leather vest, the jagged remnant of the torn linen map pressed against her ribs like a jagged bone.
All around her in the predawn gloom, the Ash Host prepared its machinery.
Two hundred paces behind the fire trench, the great bronze pipes of the thermal feed rose from the earth like the ribs of a stranded whale. Thick canvas wrapping, soaked in tallow and bound with lead wire, hissed wherever moisture dripped from the marsh fog onto the conduits. Men moved through the steam with lanterns swung low, their faces wrapped in grease-stained linen to protect their lungs from the foul vent gas. They were not line infantry; they were sappers from the high northern furnaces, their leather coats studded with copper rivets to ground the stray static discharges that crackled along the couplings.
