The chimney was an open throat of fiery fire. It exhaled the heat of the planet’s core into the desert night.
At the terminus of the lateral irrigation chimney pipe, the ceiling gave way to a huge upright shaft eight arm-lengths in width. It rose seventy deep-water lengths through solid dark rock and hematite rock to the high plateaus above Khor-Sula. A powerful, rushing updraft of heat air roared through the chimney. It carried a thick, yellow plume of hydrogen sulfide gas, hot stone steam, and crushed fiery ash.
Around the outer rim of the chimney ran an ancient, spiral upkeep scaffold built of stone-hard hardwood timbers and bronze peg-ladders, erected hundreds of years ago by the miners of the First Dynasty. Many of the wooden rungs had rotted away under the unending steam. That left terrifying gaps of empty air that looked down into the bubbling, rotten-egg lava pools far below.
“This is the only way out,” Nomad Ren shouted over the roar of the heat gale. He stood at the base of the ladder, testing the first bronze peg with his flint knife. “The lower channels are fully flooded. In ten minutes, the water from the Siphon Tower will reach this shaft. Boiling salt water hits that lava pool below. Then, this entire chimney becomes a steam cannon. Anything inside it will be cooked like salt-fish.”
