The inside of the Giant statue of Khorat was a heavy-duty inferno of scalding bronze, screeching iron drive-chains, and choking white steam that burned the back of the throat like acid.
Ren crawled across a raised narrow high walkway of punched holes in iron plate, his knees slipping in puddles of boiling pig lard, whale oil, and graphite grease used to lubricate the massive eight-foot drive-shafts. The heat was choking, well over a hundred and thirty degrees. His lambskin apron was blistering against his chest, the leather curling and smoking. Every breath he drew tasted of skin-burning ammonia, scorched copper, and bituminous coal dust.
Directly below the narrow high walkway, suspended within a massive cage of riveted iron heavy beams, lay the main air-powered metal tube. An eight-foot-wide tube of cast bronze, bound with twelve hoops of cold-rolled steel. Within that metal tube, a potion-made steam piston pulsed back and forth with bone-jarring violence. He drove the sixty-foot solid black-iron ram backward into its launch cradle. The ear-splitting, clockwork thunder of the stroke echoed through Ren’s marrow, threatening to loosen the teeth in his jaw.
“Intruder on the narrow high walkway!” a harsh voice shrieked through the whistling steam.
Standing on the raised firing platform twenty feet ahead was Master Artificer Hest. The royal engineer wore a heavy apron of thick asbestos cloth. His eyes shielded behind was dark glass goggles mounted in heavy brass frames, an iron ventilator strapped over his lower jaw. In his right hand, he wielded…
