At one hundred and forty feet, the chimney ended beneath an iron-grated check hatch set flush into the heavy oak floorboards of the main hoist house. Above the grating, the air was hot and choking, thick with the smell of boiling stone oil, metal tube animal fat, and coal steam.
Nessa Vale reached the top first. Squeezing her slender frame into the narrow recess beneath the timber floor beams, she held her sound horn against the iron flooring.
Above her head, through the half-inch gaps between the oak planks, came the heavy, stomping tread of iron-shod mercenary boots and the harsh, barking voice of Captain Vane Skarn.
“Bring up the iron sinking bucket!” Skarn was shouting, his voice echoing off the corrugated iron roof of the hoist house. “Rig four men with heavy crossbows on the rim! If anyone is alive on the Level Two drift, shoot them on sight and drop their bodies into the sump! Get the steam pressure up to eighty pounds!”
From the next-door engine pit came the rhythmic, thumping hiss of the sixty-horsepower Cornish steam engine, its massive ten-foot cast-iron flywheel spinning at forty turns a minute as the engineer prepared to engage the backup hoisting drum.
