The air-flow grate was three feet square, forged from two-inch wrought-iron bars spaced four inches apart and bolted directly into the granite coping of the terrace floor. It had been installed sixty years ago to vent stale air from the underground battery banks. But the rising heat column that blasted through the sky-slit was neither stale nor cold.
Len knelt beside the iron bars. Then, a wave of dry, searing heat struck him full in the face. It wasn’t the damp, choking warmth of Doma’s kitchen steam or the chemical heat of the salt kilns. It was the intense, blinding heat wave of high noon on an arid mountain pass, packed into an updraft that smelled of scorched mica and molten copper. The air was so dry that the moisture on his eyeballs evaporated in three seconds. That forced him to squint against the stinging glare.
Thirty feet below, suspended in the center of a circular chamber lined with white firebrick and lead plates, hung the Great Quartz.
It didn’t look like a stone. It looked like a captured star suspended in a cage of heavy brass gimbals. The crystal was an eight-sided prism, fifteen feet in height and six feet across the flats, cut from man-made quartz forged in the capital’s military arsenals before the war. Twelve years ago, when Ivara Quill had surveyed its mounting brackets, the prism had been water-clear. Its polished faces reflected the flickering animal fat lamps of the installation crew like sheets of clean…
