The lead seal snapped with a dry, metal snap that shook through the bones of Ivara’s right shoulder.
She had calculated the drop weight of the archive fire drop-gate four years before the war engine ever reached the border, back. Just then, the Survey Office still kept regular town check logs. It was four hundred and eighty pounds of forged iron. Four upright bars an inch and a half thick, tied together by three level cross-ties and tipped with chilled steel chisel shoes. The balance weight was a five-hundred-pound block of gray freestone suspended in a grease-choked upright chute inside the stonework. When the pawl cleared the release tooth, the freestone didn’t go down with a glide. It fell like an anvil dropped down a mine shaft.
The sound that followed was not a rattle of chains. It was a bone-shaking, sky thud that punched the sulfur steam straight out of the ceiling vaults and drove a shower of lime flakes from the mortar joints.
The chisel shoes struck the granite threshold doorstep with an ear-splitting ring. The iron hit so hard that twin sparks jumped two feet into the air, lighting the soot on the ceiling with a brief, violet flash.
