The instrument gallery of the Star tower had been designed as a temple of office surveillance. Lined with polished dark wood desks, brass-rimmed dials, and telegraph keys connected to every ward in the province, it was the room where Chancellor Morn had spent a decade monitoring the energy harvest pulled out from three ages of citizens.
Now, the dark wood desks were covered in broken glass, fine lime dust, and dried grease-pencil charts.
Behind Ivara Quill stood two defected Star tower soldiers, their leather brigandines unbuckled at the throat. Their iron boarding pikes were held across their chests to block the door that led to the upper executive suites. Outside that door, echoing through the keyhole, came the wild, muffled banging of Morn’s personal office clerk, pounding his fists against the locked iron panel, shouting threats of military tribunals and summary executions that meant nothing in a mountain that was shaking itself free of darkness.
“Let him shout,” Ivara muttered without looking back from her smoked quartz sighting glass. “Words don’t alter the heat swelling multiplier of hardened glass. Let the high judge file a legal petition with the steam.”
From the raised instrument gallery, Ivara Quill observed the discharge through a smoked quartz sighting glass three inches thick.
