The scream that reached the tram platform was muffled by three successive tiers of dressed dark rock retaining walls, but to a courier who had spent six years listening for distress whistles in mountain snowstorms, the hum was clear. It wasn’t a shout of anger or a challenge from a patrol. It was the high, thin cry of bone being crushed under dynamic clockwork force. It was followed by the wet thud of seventy pounds striking stone.
Len Vey didn’t wait for Ivara Quill’s check. He dropped from the fir workbench into the gravel. His right hand gripped his jointed brass sounding pole like a crutch to absorb the downward impact. His braced left arm shrieked inside its split-ash casing, the jagged ends of his fractured radius grating against one another as his boots hit the stone. A cold wave of dizziness washed across his temples. That turned the yellow flare of the copper lamps into blurred, sickly rings. But he clamped his teeth onto his lower lip until the copper taste of his own blood cut through the nausea.
“Bram! Kester!” Len rasped, his voice cutting through the hiss of the steam pipes. “Take the hooded copper lamps and the short ash clubs! Leave the guide lines alone! Step only on the dry ballast!”
