High on the northern granite pinnacle of Rookvale, three hundred and twenty meters above the darkened valley basin, the central control gallery of the Star tower smelled of scorched mica, ozone, and hot machine grease.
Chancellor Ves Morn stood at the edge of the suspended iron narrow high walkway, his calloused hands resting heavily upon the cold brass handrail. His heavy gray wool uniform coat, once immaculately pressed with the silver collar-pins of the Country Engineering Corps, was rumpled, stained across the cuffs with black high-pressure fluid, and stiff with coal dust at the elbows. His eyes were bloodshot, circled with the bruised, purple hollows of a man who had not slept more than three in a row hours in twelve days. He was fifty-eight years old. He had spent the first thirty years of his life calculating bridge loads and town reservoirs under open sunlight, and the last twelve managing the most huge, terrifying secret in the history of the eastern continent.
Below the narrow high walkway, suspended within a giant gimbal of counterweighted glowing-bronze rings forty feet in width, sat the Broken-Sun Core.
It was a twelve-foot sphere of fused quartz and leaded heat-proof glass, its surface six inches thick, heavy with a linked lattice of forged silver-steel-alloy ribs. Inside that see-through sphere burned the kept charge of Rookvale.
