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The Clockwork Under-city

The third band below the Upper Deep, from 40,960 to 81,919 rows below the old floor of the world. Long before Nyrath the makers built a city here: streets and halls of cut gearstone, galleries full of steam, vaults lined with brass, and an eye of emberwork on every door. They watched everything, so that the Wane could not take what nobody watched. It took them anyway. Their city is still running.

The craft Wick sells in Aldhearth, ember dust and levers and lamps, is theirs. He found it again by himself; they had it first.

Getting in

The band begins under a seal of gearstone, the city's own rock. Gearstone (and everything the makers cut from it) gives only to an embersteel pickaxe with a pick temper of II or more: see Might and temper. The Grown here are born with a Might of about ×2.3 at the band's top and ×3.5 at its bottom.

Its three kinds

The band's strata take turns, 512 rows each:

• The Gearworks: the buried city itself. Streets one above the other, joined by ladders down shafts; halls with galleries; chambers shaped like great gears cut out of the rock, their axles still standing in the middle; pools of molten brass. Huge gears are carved into the walls behind everything.
• The Steam Galleries: long vaulted galleries with brass pipes along their roofs, low corridors with crushers in their ceilings, steam vents in every floor, and flooded cisterns at the bottom of each stratum. Pipes and pressure gauges run up the walls.
• The Brass Vaults: rooms on rooms, two tiers on every level, lined with brass panelling. Many of them still have a strongbox in them.

What the makers left

• Brass ore lies hidden in the gearstone (it looks like the rock around it until you are close), richest in the Brass Vaults. Smelt it at a furnace into brass ingots. Brass ingots are the material of temper III: 16 of them and 859,000 gold for each place (weapon, armour or pick; 48 and 2,577,000 gold for all three), at Hild's Master Forge or a Deep anvil.
• Ember cores: an ember sealed in brass, still warm. The makers' constructs run on them (now and then one leaves its core when you slay it, an elite or an apex more often), and the vaults' coffers hold them. Break one down at a furnace for 8 ember dust, or make a vault door with it.
• Gearstone masonry (2 gearstone at a Workbench) and brass panelling (a brass ingot and 4 gearstone at an anvil make 4), to build with.
• The vault door (2 brass ingots, an ember core and 2 masonry at an anvil): an ember part. No hand opens it, only warmth on its wires. Stack them up to five high and the stack opens and shuts as one; lay one flat for a hatch. It never shuts on someone standing in it.

Hazards

Two things in the city's works still go, on their own beat. A warning comes up on your screen just before either one strikes you.

• Steam vents (grates in the floors): every few seconds a vent hisses, and a moment later blows a plume of steam three tiles high that scalds whoever stands in it, armour or not: about a quarter of your life each time.
  • Watch the beat: step over a vent right after it blows.
  • An oilskin cloak keeps the steam off you for 4 minutes (3 wheat, a charcoal and a brass ore at a Workbench; use it from your bag).
  • A valve wheel on a wall nearby, turned (F), quiets every vent within 10 tiles for a minute, for everyone.
  • A vent is the city's own stone: a tempered pick takes it out of the floor.
• Crushers: old rams in the ceilings that slam down to the floor on a beat. A crusher shudders first, then slams: a third of your life if you are under it. Only its own column; watch its beat and go through just after it lifts.

Nothing scalds or crushes you in a town's ground, or at peace.

Landmarks

• Gear vaults: the makers' locks, puzzles of real emberwork in front of a vault door, with a coffer behind it. They are kept as they were: nothing gets you in but solving them, not a pick, a blast charge, a ram or fire. There are three designs:
  • the lever lock: four levers in a hall, and the door opens while they stand as the lock wants. Follow their wires: a grey latch on a lever's wire means that lever must be up.
  • the hourglass run: a pull-cord at the far end of a hall full of crushers. Pull it and the door at the other end opens, and an hourglass of 30 seconds starts. Run.
  • the proving hall: a lever starts the makers' trial. Their constructs come out of the walls, wave on wave; slay twelve and the door opens (the dial counts them).

A coffer gives what it holds once a day to each character who reaches it, from right beside it: brass ingots, ember cores, brass ore, a Gearwright's draught, ember dust and gold, and now and then a page. Shut in? Step on the plate on the block inside the door: it lets you out. A vault winds itself back (levers down, the door shut) once its door has stood open for two minutes, or when nobody has been near it for one.

• Clock towers (rare): towers of masonry 56 rows high, three floors up a ladder. Their great clock keeps Aldhearth's time and strikes the hour, heard far around. A chest waits in the room under the roof, the clockmaker's ledger is wedged in the works, and on the roof the makers' sun-and-moon stone lights two lamps at night.
• Steam lifts: a station in most strata of a region, always on your minimap. Turn its valve wheel and choose: the station a stratum up or a stratum down. The boilers take 3 seconds to wind up (moving or being hurt stops them), and then you are on the brass of the other station. Nobody rides hurt (wait 10 seconds after a hit), and the lift will not carry a trade pack or a murderer.

The Grown of the city: the Wound

The makers' constructs, wound up once a thousand years ago and still going. Brass and iron, with an ember glowing in the chest: the Clockwork Hound, the Gear Spider, the Brass Sentinel (it shoots), the Boiler Brute, the Piston Mantis and the Coilwyrm. They come in swarms of Coglings too, more often here than in the bands above.

The Clockwork Warden

The great one of the band's lairs. Its brass turns every blow while its three cores burn in the air about it: strike the cores down (a few blows each) and its plates hang open for 20 seconds. Then they grind shut, and the cores form again.

• Its overcharge is telegraphed before it lands: a beam the breadth of the hall at the height of the one it hunts (jump it, or drop under it), or three pillars, one on you and one either side (step out of them). It does not overcharge while its plates hang open.
• At 60% and 30% of its life it winds up its Coglings, and they pour out of its seams.
• Felled, it leaves brass ingots, ember cores and ember dust, a brass plate with the Warden's orders on it (a page), and now and then its trophy, the Warden's mainspring. A raid chest in the band may hold the mainspring too.

Weapons

Weapons of this band. At a Deep anvil, 20 Brass ingot, 4 Ember core and 500k gold make the Piston hammer, a greathammer of 163 damage. The great one here leaves The Warden’s Mainspring (greathammer, 179, Quaking Smite) one kill in five. To forge it you must first read its forging notes, Forging notes: Piston hammer: the Clockwork Warden always leaves them the first time you kill it, and one kill in four after that; the band's Grown drop them now and then (an elite more often), and the chests of its landmarks may hold them. See Weapons of the Deep.

Pages

The makers' story is in their pages: the first law over a vault door, the clockmaker's ledger, a lift-keeper's notice, the first tinker, the last count, and the Warden's orders. Read them from your bag; they stay in your codex. Show one to Wick.