Captain Vane stepped away from the bound High judge. Then he walked to the large pine drafting table where the stone-built blueprints of the Star tower lay pinned under brass weights.
The room had changed. The four guards standing by the spiral stair were no longer facing outward to repel civilian intruders. They had turned their backs on the door. Their cutlasses were held ready, their eyes fixed on Chancellor Morn with the cold, watchful indifference of men guarding an unsafe felon. The power that had governed Rookvale for four thousand three hundred and eighty-two days had collapsed in less than eight minutes. It hadn’t been overthrown by a foreign army or destroyed by a heroic spell. It had dissolved the moment the working men who held the keys discovered that their children were eating bread given freely by the people they had been ordered to murder.
Vane smoothed the linen blueprint flat with his iron-studded gauntlet, studying the height cross-section of the western works.
“Sergeant Karr has six men at Junction Four,” Vane said, his voice flat and tactical. “They have two crowbars, a timber jack, and two twelve-pound sledges. But those doors were built during the second spreading. Six inches of seasoned white oak, bound with three-quarter-inch boiler plate and slanted iron straps. Even with sledges, cutting through forty tiny fractions of an inch of oak will take seven to ten minutes.”
