The air inside the conduit collapsed into a suffocating vortex of boiling steam and sulfur fumes.
Sir Cael Ardent did not hesitate. He had dropped his broadsword on the catwalk above, discarding the ancestral greatsword forged during the early centuries of the Crown Furnace, and now he knelt in the scalding mud before the fallen lintel. He slipped his hands beneath the rough, fractured underbelly of the granite beam, feeling for purchase along the bedding plane where the rock had sheared away from the ceiling.
The stone was searingly hot. The radiant heat from the boiling mercury pool sixty feet below had soaked into the granite until the rock was hot enough to scorch leather, but Cael did not pull away. The smell of singed calfskin rose from his gloves as the hide began to blacken against the mineral crust.
He set his boots into the fractured basalt floor, wedging his iron-shod heels into the mortar seams between the foundation blocks. He bowed his neck, lowered his head, and drove his armored shoulders directly into the crook where the two-ton granite block pressed against the iron guide-rail.
“Jon!” Cael’s shout was ragged, torn raw by the steam. “Get your hands on his collar! Be ready!”
