The camp at the lip of the Hadal Shaft smelled of woodsmoke, bitter walnut liniment, and the cold, stone salt of the inner earth.
Beneath the massive dark rock overhang of the ruined pre-cataclysm water-gate, eighteen thousand paces below the surface datum of Low-Khorat, the small expedition had established its bivouac. A low fire of tightly packed pine-lignite briquettes—salvaged from the abandoned winter stores of the Synod’s lower guardhouse—glowed with a steady, dull orange heat inside a shallow iron fire bowl. The smoke was drawn away smoothly by the twelve-knot downdraft rushing into the circular mouth of Shaft Zero. That left the terrace clean and dry.
Vane Vale sat perched upon an overturned, lead-lined archival chest, his polished leather boots resting on a flat limestone flat stone slab to keep them clear of the damp silt.
His gold-trimmed pocket counting frame clicked in his fingers with a wild, sharp rhythm that sounded like a beetle trapped in a dry gourd. Around his feet lay a dozen scattered bronze inventory tags and lead shipping seals, recovered from the mudflats of the drained riverbed.
“A disaster,” Vane muttered for the eleventh time that evening, his thin mustache twitching with sorrowful anger. “A complete and total office disaster. We have just liquidated six hundred years of accrued royal liens, and what do we have to show for it in tangible salvage? Forty-two deep-water lengths of salvageable gold-silver metal chain, eight bronze reduction pulley wheels, three barrels of hardened whale-grease. An iron descent cage…
