The iron shell struck the mountain like an executioner’s maul driven into the crown of a skull.
One heartbeat before impact, Noll Vey had just dragged his heavy stone frame through the inner archway of the Hall of Witness. His boots hit the chalked circle of the witness ring, and the Dominion circuit locked home, completing the current between the foundation bedrock and the core chip throbbing beneath his granite ribs. He had Tessa Dene tucked firmly behind his right shoulder, shielding her with the solid bulk of his back while his shattered left shoulder socket hummed with angry static.
Then the world split open above their heads.
The eighteen-pound rogue shell did not burst in the open air. It plunged straight through the rotted timber capping of the old mine ventilating shaft, sheared through thirty feet of dead spruce cribbing, and slammed into the solid limestone crown twelve feet directly above the Hall’s central vault.
The detonation was an earthquake contained in a stone cellar.
A shockwave like a solid wall of iron slammed downward through the limestone arches. The concussion blew every tallow candle and horn lantern in the chamber into instant darkness, leaving only the pale, cold blue luminescence of Noll’s core chip and the smoky red embers scattered from the gallery braziers.
