Urel spat a mouthful of dark, soot-streaked blood onto the boiling flat stone slabs between his boots.
His palms burned through three layers of flax wrapping as the governor wheel fought against his grip with the violent, shuddering persistence of an uncaged beast. The counterweighted return spring stood less than four feet from his right ear. A towering, eight-foot helix of forged spring steel, coiled in twelve massive spirals around a polished central piston.
Even through the blinding cascade of water from the overhead nozzles, Urel could hear the high-pitched, metal singing of the tightly packed metal. Forty-eight thousand foot-pounds of potential torque were locked inside those twelve coils. The spring had been made in the military arsenals of the capital twenty winters ago to close the blast-ports of heavy coastal guns. Here, Chancellor Morn had repurposed it into an office headsman.
For eleven years, Urel had served as the chief upkeep technician of the sight array. He knew the metalworking history of every bolt, pipe rim, and leaf spring inside this mountain. He remembered the cold autumn afternoon twelve years ago when Chancellor Morn had gathered the senior building staff in the Survey auditorium and laid out the forged military dispatches. Morn had spoken of a huge hostile war engine crossing the western marches, claiming that Rookvale’s only salvation was to cloak the basin beneath an emergency sky shield for seventy-two hours.
