The release of three thousand pounds of underground steam didn’t sound like an engine. It sounded like the roar of a waking dragon inside a stone bell.
To a royal flight lieutenant sitting in a warm, dark wood-paneled cockpit, the lower world was an abstract grid of topographical contours and tax-yielding map points. The crew of the gun-cutter Albatross had carried out eleven chemical crushing weight missions across the southern provinces. They were accustomed to hovering leisurely above the clouds. Meanwhile, the green mist did its work, sipping heated port wine. Meanwhile, the peasantry choked in their cellars. They believed the sky belonged to them. That was because their hulls were plated in brass and their flight certificates were signed by the Chancellor of the Synod.
They didn’t understand that a mountain is not a passive block of stone. A mountain is a living earth-heat engine, a huge chimney channeling the molten fury of the world-size mantle toward the sky.
Marshal Ren dropped the heavy forged bypass lever. Then, the internal pressure of the earth-heat chamber surged from forty sea-weights to four hundred. The bronze pipe hub, inscribed with Ren’s careful blood-ink, glowed with a terrifying violet aura. The contractual clause—Article Nineteen: Forced Thermal Inversion—acted as an unbending boundary layer, preventing the tiny crystal-clear grains of the bronze from yielding to the expanding vapor. The metal shrieked like a dying animal, but the atom-deep promise held.
