In the center of the vault stood the Hollow Crown.
Stripped of the purple and gold velvet hangings that academy summoners used to drape over the gearwork during ritual inspections, the machine looked shockingly crude. It was a huge, eight-sided brass pipe hub, nine feet across, bolted directly into the bedrock with eighty cast-iron foundation studs. Above it hung the silver-traced psychic collection armature. A spider-web of beaten silver foil, copper grounding rods, and star-sapphire focus points designed to funnel spiritual agony into high-pressure control pistons.
“Where do we make the first cut, Korr?” Eren Tal asked, setting down his heavy iron sledge with a dull ring against the granite floor.
Korr Var unrolled a linen diagram across an empty packing crate, weighting the corners with a cold chisel. “We sever the backup bypass line first. That’s the channel that fed boiling discharge into the Fish Street fault. If we don’t bleed the leftover head of water and plug the rock collar with dry lime, any pressure fluctuation in the upper canal will blow the seals out of Mrs. Os’s pantry floor.”
Korr pointed his brass rule toward a four-inch copper-jacketed pipe that vanished into a dark fissure in the southern granite wall. “There. At the solitude pipe rim. Master Sorell had the bypass valve welded open with lead-tin solder so nobody could shut it down from the console. We cut the pipe rim bolts, drop the blind plate, and grout the bore.”
