The upper blacksmith’s shop behind the twelfth winch house was filled with the bitter, choking stench of bituminous coal smoke and burning river mud.
Tomas Reed stood by the four-hundred-pound cast-iron anvil, his leather smith’s apron tied over his gray wool coat. His right arm swung a twelve-pound hand sledge in steady, rhythmic cadences. That brought the flat, hardened steel face down onto a white-hot bar of two-inch angle-iron that Jared Vance was holding across the beak with heavy tongs.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
Sparks showered across the earthen floor, stinging Tomas’s bare forearms and dying in the gray silt near his boots. With each blow, the blazing bright iron yielded. It bent at a precise ninety-degree angle to form the bottom corner frame of the check cage.
Beside them, Sile Rook and old Corin were working on the floor of the cage.
They had salvaged a four-foot square of three-eighths-inch boiler plate from an abandoned donkey-engine tender down at the gravel pit. Sile was punching rivet holes along the margins using a hardened steel punch and a sixteen-pound maul, each strike shaking the stone walls of the forge shop with a dull, bone-shaking THUMP.
“Straighten the pipe rim, Jared,” Tomas ordered, his voice cutting through the ringing iron. “If the corner isn’t square within a sixteenth of an inch, the mid-air bridle will cock sideways when the wind catches it off the spillway.”
