The sound in Foundry Nine was not thunder. It was a metal scream.
It hovered around four thousand hertz. A piercing, teeth-grating back-and-forth swing that set the marrow of Lin Ke’s teeth buzzing like trapped hornets.
The chamber was the size of a dry-docked battleship, cavernous and vaulted with blackened dark rock arches. Suspended from the ceiling hung four massive bronze distillation cooking pots, each wrapped in coils of thick copper channel that glowed with a dull, cherry-red heat.
Below them, on an iron narrow high walkway suspended over a pit of bubbling sulfur slurry, fifty junior scribes ran in blind, shrieking circles under the strobe of crimson warning lanterns.
“Deploy the Frost Runes!” a junior clerk screamed, stumbling over his own grease-blackened robes. “Where are the Third-Grade Glacial Magic charms? Stick them on the pipe rim!”
“No, you idiot!” Bai Song shrieked back, his voice shredding as he clung to a bronze handrail. “The casing is bronze alloy! If you freeze the outside while the star-fire is boiling at two thousand degrees inside, the heat contraction will snap the rivets clean off like dry twigs!”
A cloud of white-hot steam burst from a failing seal ring thirty paces overhead. A young clerk caught the edge of the spray across his forearm. The skin peeled back like boiled onion skin. His scream was swallowed whole by the clockwork shriek of the channel.
