White smoke curled up from the shattered green glass of the smallest lens. Pip sagged onto its belly among the twisted bronze fragments, clear mineral sap dripping steadily from both fractured antlers onto the stone while its ribs heaved in silent, ragged gasps.
At the central stone table, the fourth archive stone was still spitting yellow sparks around its collar, its internal spring whining at a high pitch as it struggled to re-establish the broken ring through the six remaining lenses.
“Reset the key!” Edris shouted, his scholar’s composure gone as he threw himself across the stone table toward the open trunk. “Turn it back to the first notch before the core discharges into the table!”
Sister Osha was already standing at the corner of the table.
She did not reach for the hot brass key with her fingers, and she did not look at the man who had sheltered her for ten years. With both ink-stained hands, she snatched up a heavy five-pound bronze lens-counterweight lying beside the brass reader dish, lifted it to the height of her shoulder, and brought it slamming down squarely onto the brass-and-iron activation key sticking out of the fourth stone’s side.
Crack.
The tempered iron stem sheared off flush with the stone’s collar in a shower of brass splinters. The slotted handle bounced across the granite table and spun off onto the flagstones, leaving the jagged iron stub jammed dead inside the ruined keyway. Within the dark gold-veined sphere, the whining spring gave…
