The morning light of the Lower Ninth Heaven didn’t bring warmth. It brought iron chains.
At the fifth watch bell, martial lockdown horns blared from the upper castle walls. Armored pikemen of the Ministry’s guard post sealed every blast door leading from the lower work floors to the residential barracks. Three thousand junior scribes, apprentices, and fire stokers were locked at their workstations under armed watch.
The water aqueducts were cut. The spirit-grain troughs were padlocked.
“Conspirators walk among you,” a self-running voice boomed from the brass ceiling trumpets every twelve breaths. “Any clerk who leaves his assigned desk will be decapitated for treason. Shift quotas are increased by fifty percent to compensate for criminal sabotage.”
Down in the abandoned drainage chimney pipes thirty deep-water lengths beneath Foundry Nine, the air was cold, damp, and smelled of stale sulfur water.
Sixty men and women sat packed tightly together in the dark, lit up only by the faint, blue glow of three spirit-fungus lanterns. They were the senior shift leaders, the veteran tally-clerks, the fire foremen. The pipe-runners who had kept the Ministry of Thunder alive for hundreds of years.
Every face was pale, hollow-cheeked, and marked with the telltale slate-gray veins of Thunder-Scorch Rot.
