The iron door of the Archive of Universal Encumbrances slammed shut behind them, cutting off the vast cave of the Great Scriptoria with a heavy, bone-shaking boom that shook through the soles of Ren’s boots.
Right away, the heat plummeted.
The air in the mixing vaults didn’t just smell of old dust. It smelled of a potion-made butcher shop. It was a choking, oily stench of packed burning acid, boiled bone-glue, bitter sheep-bile. An overwhelming, metal tang of ozone that made the fillings in Ren’s molar teeth throb with electric pain.
“Watch your footing,” Artificer Ren’s voice clipped, the Tenth Summon manifesting beside Ren in a faint shimmer of amber light. The gem-cutter wore his heavy leather apron, his multi-lens jeweler’s loupes flipped down over both eyes. “The floor is slick with stone runoff. The friction multiplier is near zero. If you take a bone-shaking fall on this dark rock, your left kneecap will shatter like an unannealed quartz crystal.”
Ren slowed his pace, his felt-soled boots gripping the greasy, purple-stained stones.
They stood on a raised iron overhead frame overlooking the central mixing vat of the Stygian High court.
The vat was huge. A circular cooking pot cast from solid dead-house bronze, fifty paces in width and thirty feet deep, suspended above a pit of smoldering, green necro-fire. Chained to the overhead frame rails were massive iron stirring paddles. It was driven by thick high-pressure pistons that rose and fell with a slow, wet sucking sound:
