The backup cooling court terrace thrust outward from the eastern flank of the Star tower castle like the blunt prow of a stone freighter suspended twelve hundred feet above a dead sea. The floor was composed of dressed granite slabs six feet square and ten inches thick, bound together by lead-poured seams that had resisted the heat shudder of seventy years of heavy-duty testing. On three sides, a low, three-foot low roof wall of dry-stacked dark rock marked the boundary between the work platform and twelve hundred feet of sheer, upright drop into the limestone talus below.
Len Vey stood at the edge of the stone apron, his boots planted in the center of a scarred flat stone slab where an ancient crane derrick had once pivoted. His left arm was numb beneath the cold pressure of the cedar splints. But the dull, throbbing fire in his fractured radius had pulled back into a manageable ache, kept at bay by the bitter mountain chill that stiffened the linen wraps.
He looked down into the dark.
From this height, the valley of Rookvale was an abstraction of shadow. The inversion layer of sulfur fog that had choked the lower wards for twelve years had drifted away toward the northern gap, faded away by the collapse of the town heating circuits. Without the hot, stale updrafts from the five outer anchor radiators, the basin had cooled by twenty degrees in the space of three hours. The air that rose from the depths…
