The three narrow doors opened at once.
They were at the bottom of the well’s access shaft, below the operations office: three doors of dark iron, each a shoulder’s width, side by side in a curved wall. One for each seal. When the lock’s delay ran out on the pump hall’s dial, all three swung inward together, without a sound, as if they had been waiting all this time for exactly this and had no wish to make a fuss about it.
Behind them, a lift.
A cage of iron bars on a cable, wide enough for six, its floor a grating. Sen stepped into it first, with two of her crew: a woman with a coil of hose over her shoulder and a man with a gauge case. Then Mara, with the rod’s case against her ribs. Then Caldris.
Sen pulled the lever. The cage dropped.
It went down through the city’s hidden heat exchangers.
Mara had not known they were there. Nobody on the upper terraces knew, Sen said; most of the lower terraces didn’t either. Below the operations office, below the service shaft, the well’s throat was wrapped in exchangers: great banks of pipe, layer on layer, carrying the guild’s water down from the pump hall to the well’s jacket and back up hot. The cage dropped past them. The air turned warm, then hot, then wet. Steam. Condensation dripping from the cage’s bars.
