The iron rungs of the upright check ladder were hot enough to blister grease.
Ren Vale climbed with his teeth clenched against the searing pain in his palms, his cobbler’s boots slipping against the wet, rotten-egg silt that coated the chimney pipe shaft. Behind him, Vane Vale was wheezing like a burst bellows, his velvet frock coat torn at both armpits, his brass pocket counting frame shoved down into the waistband of his trousers to keep both hands free. Above them, scaling the iron shaft with the terrifying speed of a giant spider, climbed Berserker Ren.
The giant didn’t use the rungs. He jammed his bare, soot-crusted fingers into the mortar joints between the dark rock blocks. He hauled his three-hundred-pound frame upward with single-armed yanks that showered rock dust down into Ren’s eyes.
They emerged onto the mezzanine of the Outer Ring. A fortified heavy-duty gallery carved directly into the lower inner rim of the volcano bowl, forty feet above the lake of molten copper.
Before them rose the Great Blast Sluice. A pair of massive, lead-plated portcullises, twenty arm-lengths high and four feet thick, counterweighted by forty tons of river-iron pigs. The water gate was the sole physical barrier separating the underground chimney pipe works from the central tiered arena of the Great Loom. Through the narrow arrow slits cut into the lead plating, Ren could see the outer ring foundries. A vast network of terrace platforms where five hundred Cult legionaries stood arrayed in bronze plate, their…
