The final charge of the Pyre-Furnace Court’s clockwork cavalry through the western approach hall was an exercise in pure, blind chaos.
Four hundred clockwork void-striders, their iron chassis battered and their steam boilers hissing with leaky copper seams, charged down the narrow row of stone pillars of Entry hall 195. Behind them rumbled the surviving twelve flying war-chariots, their copper wings stripped of afterburners, flying barely ten arm-lengths above the floor. They were the desperate rear-guard of an armada that had lost its heavy engines, its tunnel diggers, and its sonic adepts, driven forward by the fanatical radio-commands of Zhu Heling from the high flagship.
“Charge through the archway!” the radio-horns on their command chariot crackled with static. “Do not stop! The Mapmaker has no more water-gates! Ride through the dark rock throat and seize the first line of statues!”
The cavalry charged. But they were riding directly into the sound wake of the Nine-Heaven Thunder-Hex.
Although the roaring thunder had passed, the narrow dark rock hall kept a powerful, invisible residue of deep-rumbling shaking. The air was pulsing at seventeen point two cycles per second. A hum that directly disrupted the delicate liquid silver gyroscopes mounted inside the clockwork striders’ guidance cores.
