For thirty-six nonstop hours, the underground foundry of Cloud-Rest was an antechamber of the underworld.
Above their heads, eighty feet through solid granite and vaulted stonework, the sky-fleet kept an uninterrupted, rolling bombardment. Every ninety seconds, a heavy lightning-shell or fire-powder cask struck the ruins of the outer keep. The blast waves traveled down through the rock. Muffled, rhythmic thuds that sent showers of stone dust and white lime raining down into the smelting pits.
Down in the dark, nobody looked up. Looking up was a waste of breath, and breath was needed for the bellows.
The great crucible—a five-foot cooking pot of heat-resistant fireclay heavy with forged iron bands—sat suspended over the central earth-heat magma-vent. Inside, four tons of salvaged iron scrap were boiling.
It was an unholy brew of frontier history. The rusted drop-gate of the First Epoch, the tire-irons from the desert refugee wagons, the blue-steel breastplates stripped from dead Spire shock troopers, and forty-two iron cooking pots had melted together into a thick, glowing river of white-hot liquid steel.
For thirty-six hours, the earth-heat foundry was a cathedral of blisters and choking soot.
The heat streaming from the magma-vent was so intense that the refugees had to wrap their boots in wet sheepskins every twenty minutes to keep the soles from melting against the cast-iron floor. The four mountain blacksmiths worked in twenty-minute shifts, their eyes bloodshot from sulfur fumes, their forearms covered in bubbling second-degree burns.
