The seventh anchor was dead.
Standing on the iron narrow high walkway of the Star tower north gallery, her hobnailed boots surrounded by shattered lamp glass, crushed lime mortar, and smoking copper sparks, Ivara Quill felt the death of the machine through the marrow of her bones.
For twelve years, the central Star tower hub had served as the apex of an engineered ceiling. The keystone of an artificial sky that held forty square leagues of cold basin in unending, choking night. It had anchored the curved tension of the sky shield, funneling moving, heat, and high-pressure power from seven town wards into an unbending office circuit of extraction and terror.
Now, with the two solid bronze cylinders of the paired seals torn three feet clear of their grounded sleeves by Geth Marr and the guard post captain, that circuit was broken forever.
Above them, in the great curved dome that had occluded the sun for four thousand three hundred and eighty-two days, the physical tension died.
The sky shield had never been an abstract spell or a sky curse. It was a heavy-duty membrane. A vast, linked web of high-pulling copper cables, lead-shielded channels, and man-made vapor screens, held aloft by nonstop magnetic repulsion and forty thousand foot-pounds of lateral high-pressure thrust anchored into the mountain ridges.
