The explosion of the lower high-pressure chimney pipes shook the Citadel of Khor-Sula to its fiery foundations.
Ten thousand tons of underground stone salt water, trapped beneath the dark rock bedrock under fifty sea-weights of earth-heat pressure, surged upward through the shattered pipe hub pipes in an unstoppable, boiling wall of water. The iron walkways tore loose from their stone anchors with the screech of screaming metal. It plunged into the frothing, rotten-egg torrent thirty arm-lengths below.
“Injunction carried out!” Ren shouted over the ear-splitting roar of the deluge.
He sprang across a buckling bronze channel, his rawhide boots catching the edge of a stone support pillar. Just then, the central overhead frame collapsed into the churning deep pit. Behind him, Chief Assessor Malakor was screaming in shrill, helpless despair. He watched his life’s work dissolve into a churning whirlpool of bitter white foam.
“My ledgers!” Malakor shrieked, clutching a fistful of soaked parchment to his chest as the water rose around his knees. “The tithe-rolls! The contracts! You’ve drowned three million talents in raw salt water!”
“Consider your debt discharged, tax clerk!” Ren yelled back, not pausing for a split second.
Down in the five hundred suspended cradles, the freed laborers were scrambling out of their leather slings. Men and women, their skin crusted with white salt but their limbs energized by the rush of oxygen and returning blood, dropped onto the leftover narrow high walkways. They seized the iron pry-bars and broken bronze pipes that littered the floor…
