The abandoned boiler vault smelled of dead iron, lime scale, and forty years of cold water drops.
It sat two hundred feet beneath the fourth chimney pipe stack, wedged between the foundations of an ancient intake channel and the dark rock wall of the fiery rift. The steam pipes overhead were eight inches thick. It was wrapped in rotting stone wool that hung down in pale, moth-eaten tatters. No royal court guard had patrolled these narrow high walkways since the great boiler explosion of the last reign. The iron floor was blanketed with an undisturbed layer of black coal soot two inches deep.
In the center of the vault sat an empty pressure vessel. A twenty-foot iron metal tube with a bolted manhole door. Inside, wrapped in dry burlap sacks and heated by three clay pot jars of hot charcoal, Mira was resting.
Outside the metal tube, the Speculum of Forfeited Paths rested upon a rusted workbench.
Its gold-silver metal frame glowed with a dull, silver deep ring. As Ren Vale stood over the table. He rubbed his aching right forearm where the Sixth Exclusion had left an angry, weeping furrow of un-augmented flesh, the silver plane of the mirror rippled like disturbed liquid silver.
