Four days melted away beneath the silent crimson glare of the celestial reticle. During twenty hours of that interval Kaelen held Tracks 1, 3, and 4; he also held Track 2 for a separate twenty hours, two minutes and thirty seconds, allowing its fractional balance to settle at the seal.
With only eleven real days remaining before the orbital weapon reached maximum charge, the air over the northern ocean turned brittle as glass. The sea beneath Crater Island had flattened into a gray mirror, reflecting the blood-red circle that hovered in the heavens.
High on the upper struts of Sky-Tether Two, Inquisitor Thorne-Crow paced the narrow catwalk. His dark robes fluttered against his skeletal frame, and his hollow eyes burned with feverish desperation.
“Unveil the towers,” Thorne-Crow rasped, his voice echoing off the iron scaffolding. “Do not wait for the central core to stabilize. Bring out the soul-hooks.”
Behind him, heavy iron winches groaned as twelve massive wooden hoardings were hauled aside.
Twelve needle-thin siege spires stood revealed, mounted upon reinforced obsidian bastions ten miles above the water. At the crest of each spire rested a colossal ballista cast from astral cold-iron. Their bowstrings were woven from the sinews of void-serpents, and each carriage was loaded with a thirty-foot harpoon carved from pure soul-silver.
