The chimney nook smelled of hot chimney pipe-soot, sulfur steam, and bitter almond oil.
Perched sixty feet above the Lower Basin on a narrow upkeep overhead frame wedged between two huge iron air-flow pipes, Ren Vale adjusted the leather strap of his braced forearm. The overhead frame was barely three feet wide, its rusted iron mesh floor suspended over a yawning drop into the sulfur canal below. Every four seconds, a gust of hot, dry exhaust from the district smelting furnaces rushed past the iron grating. He carried flecks of blazing bright cinder that hissed as they hit the damp stonework wall.
Beside him, Artificer Ren was kneeling on a thick felt blanket. He laid out four specialized bypass tools on a flat slate shingle.
“Look at this seal,” young Ren whispered. He pointed with the silver tip of his mammoth bone awl to an iron access hatch bolted into the stonework wall ahead.
The hatch was round, two feet in width. It was built from riveted boiler-plate and sealed with a heavy lead padlock stamped with the three-faceted cog of the High Archive. Around the keyhole, a ring of red sealing wax had been inscribed with three nested circles of micro-calligraphy.
