The noise inside the channel gallery was not a sound that entered through the ears.
It entered through the teeth. It shook the roots of Ren Vale’s back teeth and set up a sympathetic deep ring in his crystal-clear-stressed ribs. He stood at the edge of the central staging platform, seventy feet above the fire floor. He looked out across the main steam nexus of the Great Loom. His frayed apron flapped in the violent updraft of white-hot copper vapor, the hem stiff with dried ash and salt.
Before them rose the pipe hub. A huge, hemispherical boiler dome of forged river-iron, thirty paces across, studded with four-inch brass rivets that cried greasy, rainbow-bright cooled water. From the crown of the dome radiated six main steam trunks, each as thick as a wine vat. It carried the boiled away causal mass of the drowned continent directly upward into the spinning shuttles of the Loom above.
Vane Vale had taken off his kidskin gloves.
The merchant stood with his feet braced wide on the shaking iron plates, his midnight-blue frock coat scorched at the elbows and powdered with grey dust. His silver-topped cane was planted firmly between his boots. But his right hand moved with wild, blur-like speed across his pocket counting frame. The brass frame was smeared with sweat and carbon. The polished bone beads clacked like hail falling on tin shingles.
