The crack that began at the bronze tip of the bone-awl did not travel with the slow, creeping pace of weathered stone.
It raced across the black dark rock face of the Eighty-Ton Keystone at four hundred and twenty feet per second. It was a jagged, branching fork of tiny destruction that emitted a high, singing whine like a diamond scribe cutting across cold window-glass. In the pale blue light of the glowing awl, the fracture split into sixteen backup fissures that zapped across the eight-sided outer edge of the block, severing the atom-deep empty pocket-seals between the keystone and the eight converging granite stone props.
Above their heads, the forty-eight bronze sounding-bells began to ring.
It wasn’t a peaceful call to prayer, nor was it the gentle chime that announced the turning of the tide. It was a wild, cascading, destructive ringing crescendo that climbed through the sound registers from eighty cycles to four hundred, eight hundred, and sixteen hundred cycles per second. The bronze bells, cast during the First Epoch to harmonize with the Ark’s stone lungs, were now shaking at their destructive shear-hum. It rattled upon their stone mounting-pins with such violence that flakes of ancient green rust showered down like emerald snow.
