The steam siren mounted on the central watchtower of the Star tower didn’t chime. It tore through the mountain mist like a circular saw cutting green oak. It was a potion-made pressure horn, powered by sixty pounds of white-hot boiler vapor, emitting a high, piercing shriek that shook the granite stones of the upkeep terrace beneath Len Vey’s boots. The sound rose in a waving, metal howl that echoed back and forth between the sheer granite faces of the gorge, flattening the whistling of the blizzard into a distant hiss.
On the terrace stone base, Len didn’t wait for the sound to reach its peak.
Through the four-power transit telescope, he saw the metal angled slats of Chimney pipe B’s exhaust blow open under a sudden, violent surge of white steam. The metal slats rattled wildly against their stone casing, and three figures tumbled out onto the frozen scree sixty feet below on the quarry floor.
On the scree below, the three women lay tangled in forty pounds of canal-soaked wool and heavy courier webbing. The freezing air struck their steaming bodies like a bucket of ice water. They condensed their sweat into thick white halos that billowed around their hoods. Melli Dorn rolled onto her knees. It spat out a mouthful of sulfur silt, her hands still clamped around the charred hickory handle of the sledge. Beside her, Edda used her teeth and her good right fingers to jerk the steel carabiners loose from Ivara’s drag-sling, freeing the land-mapper’s…
