Having returned from the snowy frontier summit of Black Rock Citadel back to the Seventh Ward foundries, Lin Ke had spent five sleepless days preparing defensive grounding arrays before the looming Imperial Inquest dropped.
The smell of boiling animal fat and raw pyrites always arrived thirty seconds before the headache.
Lin Ke leaned his hip against the iron railing of Crucible Platform Four, the metal shaking through his trousers at a steady thirty-six hertz. His right forearm throbbed with familiar, dull heat where the patched cooling lines ran beneath scarred flesh. In his left ear, the high-hum whistle of his tinnitus kept time with the bellows.
Down in the lower water gate, sixty tons of molten red melted rock waste groaned as they hit the water jackets.
Then the horn blew.
It wasn’t the sect’s bronze bell. It was a flat, brassy drone that carried the heavy weight of a royal steam keel. It shook so low it rattled the lime dust loose from the workshop rafters.
Through the yellow smog of the gorge, a crimson-and-gold barge tore through the mountain clouds.
Its keel was plated in dynastic iron, stamped every six feet with the coiling dragon seal of the Great Yan Ministry of Heavenly Patents. Thirty court guards in lacquered black breastplates stood along the prow, their axe-spears tipped with cold magnetic jade.
