The iron floor of the central watching gallery radiated a dull, shaking heat that rose through the soles of Ivara’s boots like the deck plates of a steam frigate.
She sat on an unpainted spruce bench beneath the curved granite vaulting. Her out-of-joint right wrist was bound tight to her ribs with five turns of rough tarred hemp. Corve had loosened the lead chain before leaving. But the iron manacle remained clamped around the swollen, purplish flesh of her forearm, its cold ring biting into her skin whenever she drew a breath. Across the gallery, everyone could feel the bitter, metal smell of hot ozone and boiled away stone oil, mixed with the dry, scorched stench of overheated slate.
Chancellor Ves Morn stood twenty paces away, his thick back turned toward her, his hands clasped behind the greasy skirts of his technician’s frock coat. He was looking down through a narrow, double-paned slit of green quartz cut directly into the gallery floor.
Below them, thirty feet down in the solid dark rock bedrock of the mountain crest, the central pool of the Sky Shield pulsed with a slow, blinding violet radiance. Every six seconds, the light swelled from a dull plum color to an intense, eye-searing bright purple glare that washed across the iron roof beams of the ceiling. It cast the shadows of the support cranes forty feet long against the granite walls.
