Ivara Quill didn’t allow her hand to linger on the trip lever. The clockwork pawl seated into the release notch. Then, she followed the stroke through with the entire weight of her torso. She drove the bronze handle to the bottom stop and set the heavy steel safety wedge with the heel of her boot.
The response from the mountain was instant, bone-shaking, and brutal.
Eighty feet below their feet, the three-ton high-pressure drop-gate dropped like a guillotine through greased upright channels. Four inches of layered boiler plate, cross-braced with heavy iron angle-irons and secured with three-quarter-inch load-bearing rivets, plummeted across the arched portal of the check cage. The heavy iron had been forged forty years prior in the old foundry at the River Ward, designed to survive the total moving recoil of steam line explosions. It moved down the greased brass runners with a sickening, speeding up roar that displaced hundreds of cubic feet of hot air.
The lower edge struck the granite threshold. Then, the impact sent a violent sound blast wave tearing through the stonework.
On the survey board beside Ivara, the liquid silver columns in both U-tube manometers leaped three inches into the air, dancing against their graduated brass scales with a wet, shivering rattle before settling into their glass wells. Fine clouds of lime dust and powdered magnesium mortar puffed out from the mortar joints in the ceiling. It drifted through the amber lantern light like cold winter snow. A shower of blinding orange sparks…
