The wind off the Black Sluice Industrial Canal smelled of sulfur, damp bituminous coal. The greasy steam that vented from the melted rock waste-cooling pits.
Tomas Reed walked on the leeward side of the towpath, his shoulder brushing against the sodden hemp lines of the coal barges moored along the timber wharf. Beside him, Olla carried the stiff canvas messenger folio strapped across her chest. Her small hands were tucked deep into the pockets of her giant woolen jacket. Every hundred paces, the earth beneath their boot soles shuddered. A dull, underground thud that rattled the loose gravel on the canal bank as the Grand Steam Hammer of the South Foundry struck its thirty-ton die.
The canal itself was an open sewer of heavy industry. The water was not river-brown or silt-gray. It was an oily, rainbow-bright black, coated in patches of orange rust-scum and flecks of floating ash. Low-draft iron lighters, piled high with red hematite ore from the northern foothills, were being hauled upstream by teams of four heavy cart horses whose coats were caked in black grit.
“They don’t sweep the road here,” Olla murmured. He watched an iron-wheeled ore cart rattle past, its ungreased axles screaming against the iron spindles.
