The iron ladder was six hundred feet of rusted rung-bolts driven directly into the upright dark rock cliff of Smoke Stack Nine.
Every sixty yards, a semi-circular iron upkeep hoop encircled the ladder, barely two feet wide, designed to keep boiler mechanics from falling into the four-hundred-foot deep pit below if high-pressure exhaust blew through the check ports. The air was a freezing, howling updraft that smelled of alpine ice, pine resin. The sharp sulfur fumes escaping from the darkened foundries below. The wind tore at Ren’s wool tunic, snapping the fabric like a wet whip against his ribs.
Ren climbed with his fingers stiff and red from the freezing iron.
His leather satchel, containing the brass deed-metal tube and the three canisters of liquid bismuth, was lashed securely across his chest with waxed hemp twine. His right arm—still tender from the violent living rejection of the brass shrapnel—throbbed in the bitter mountain wind. But his grip on the rungs was steady. He kept his eyes fixed on the rusted bolts four inches ahead of his knuckles. He refused to look down at the sheer drop.
Above him climbed Mira.
She climbed with her mortal left hand gripping the upright iron rails, her fingers sure and nimble from five years of needlework. Meanwhile, her right arm—the smoky, faceted quartz arm—was hooked over the rungs for balance.
