The blast tunnel beneath the coke ovens was forty feet wide, paved with cracked firebricks. Then it choked with choking heat.
Every sixty yards, an iron chimney pipe damper hung from the arched ceiling, dripping black petroleum residue into dry channels where heavy-duty run-off had baked into hard, tarry crusts. Ren ran with his hand pressed tight against his leather satchel. He felt the heavy glass canisters of antimony and bismuth knocking against his ribs. His lungs burned with an acrid, chemical heat. Every breath sounded like parchment tearing across dry slate.
Behind him, Vane Vale was wheezing, his tailored velvet coat gathered up in his kidskin gloves to keep the hem out of the soot.
“Fifty thousand sovereigns,” Vane gasped, stumbling over a broken brick before catching himself against a rusted rail support post. “Fifty thousand! The boldness of that office butcher! An empire’s ransom for a boy who can’t even hold a copper groschen without turning it to melted rock waste!”
“Silence your vocal chambers,” Unit Ren rasped from twenty paces behind them.
The machine-man was moving backward in a steady, high-pressure retreat. His three-foot piston-wrench was held in a low level guard. The burlap sacking that had hidden his iron chassis had been torn to ribbons. His copper dorsal heat-sinks were exposed, venting rhythmic pulses of scalding white steam that hissed into the damp tunnel air.
