The circular baked-clay chimney pipe dumped them onto the dry flat stone slabs of a backup valve junction fifty feet below the Middle Spire walkway.
It was an eight-sided stonework vault, thirty paces wide, lit by flickering gas sconces whose brass mantles had been left burning. Just then, the town staff fled. The air here was dry and hot. He smelled of machine grease, rotten-egg chimney pipe gas, and the faint, bitter odor of aqua fortis. The packed strong etching acid used by royal artificers to etch bronze seals and clean high-pressure bearings.
One hundred and twenty-four refugees lay sprawled across the flat stone slabs. He gasped for breath, their clothes caked in dry baked-clay dust and soot.
Women were weeping softly as they inspected their children for chemical burns. Men were leaning against the curved granite walls, their cooper’s adzes and iron prybars resting on the floor between their knees. Brother Ren was seated against a pillar, his eyes closed in quiet prayer as Mira finished wrapping his blistered palms in clean linen.
In the center of the vault stood the massive bronze pipe hub of Main Hydraulic Control Valve Four.
The valve was a titanic piece of Second Epoch civic building. A cast-bronze sphere six feet in width, housed within an iron cage, connected to sixteen diverging channels that controlled the drainage of the entire northern half of Val-Khorat.
