There was no spectacle in history more terrible than the solitude of Davin Sorell on that rain-lashed six-sided platform eighty feet above the boiling river. For forty years, he had been the most powerful man in Lathmere. The master builder of the Great Sluice, the confidant of High Chancellors, the master who held the keys to the city’s survival in the palm of his velvet glove.
Now, the velvet was gone, soaked with mud and grease. The Chancellors were huddled in their high stone towers, reading Varo Nenn’s audit reports and preparing their defenses for the Royal Judiciary. The students who had bowed to his robes had laid down their tokens. The technicians who had greased his gears had fled along the safety ropes. The city he had claimed to protect was saving itself with ash planks and sandbags.
He stood alone on twenty square feet of shaking granite, his hands welded to a seized wheel that turned nothing, his eyes fixed on a sky that gave no sign. He wasn’t a monster of legend. He was a brilliant, frightened, arrogant engineer who had built a machine too proud to admit an error, and who had spent forty years constructing an intellectual prison whose doors were locked from the inside. He had become the ultimate unvented boiler. Full of tremendous, boiling pressure, and fully unable to let out a single breath of truth.
