The smell inside the chimney pipe was not the honest stench of chimney soot.
It was the smell of grease, dead animal fat, and burned up hundreds of years. The tube-shaped chimney pipe was three feet wide, forged from rough boiler iron and lined with crumbling firebrick. For three hundred paces, Ren Vale pulled himself forward on his elbows through the stifling black chute, his cobbler’s boots dragging behind him in three inches of greasy fiery silt. Every shift of his ribs sent a dull, throbbing ache through his thirty-year-old joints. The lingering tax of ten body years surrendered to the watchmaker’s clock.
Ahead of him, Berserker Ren crawled on all fours like a badger navigating a collapsed warren. The giant’s shoulders were so broad that the blackened iron plates of the chimney pipe shrieked as his shoulder blades scraped the rivets. He wore only scorch-hardened leather breeches, his bare back a ground shape of thick, stringy rope-burns and soot. Every few yards, the beast stopped, raised his heavy snout, and sniffed the baking draft. A low, wet rumble rang in his throat, thick with hunger.
Behind Ren, Vane Vale was wheezing through a soiled silk cravat.
“If the soot doesn’t suffocate me,” the merchant hissed, his voice echoing in the cramped pipe like dry leaves, “the sheer financial indecency of this approach will. I’m dragging a tailored midnight-blue frock coat through the town melted rock waste-gutter of a heresy. Do you have any concept of the import duties on…
