The inside of the backup boiler exhaust chimney pipe was three feet in width. It was built from riveted sheets of low-grade iron that had been coated with grease to prevent sulfur rusting. It was pitch-black, suffocatingly hot, and smelled of rendered pig lard, coal soot, and the bitter reek of sulfuric acid.
Ren-the-Cinder led the column on his hands and knees, moving with the wild, soundless agility of a sewer rat fleeing an incoming tide.
His knees were wrapped in thick sheepskin pads tied with hemp cord. His fingers, stained with machine oil and brass shavings, traced every seam of the metal channel before applying weight. Around his neck, his ring of sixteen brass skeleton keys was wrapped in greased wool strips to prevent a single metal clink.
“Watch the third rivet on the left,” the Coward whispered back through the darkness. His voice shook with automatic panic. “The solder failed forty years ago. If you put twenty pounds of sideways push on that pipe rim, the whole section shears. We drop forty feet into the lime-slurry settling tank. You ever inhale lime slurry, Ren? It boils your lungs into white pudding in eleven seconds. I timed it once in a tannery fire. Horrible way to die. Absolutely unseemly.”
