The second wave brought the siege engines of the Outer Sects to the threshold of the thirty-first gate.
Through the dense smoke of crushed insect hard shell and burning fire-oil that drifted across Entry hall 380, three huge breach-crawlers advanced in line abreast. Each machine was thirty arm-lengths long. It was built from layered sheets of riveted void-iron and powered by high-pressure steam boilers that chugged with deep, bone-shaking exhaust strokes. Suspended from their forward gantries were rotating milling heads three paces wide, tipped with hardened void-steel diamond cutters, designed to chew through twenty arm-lengths of solid granite per hour.
Escorting the crawlers were ten thousand armored queen locusts—larger than the worker brood, their back shells banded with thick copper plates, their flight bladders high-pressure with liquid aqua regia.
The air in the chokepoint was a fire of acidic steam, smelling of scorched oil, sulfur, and calcined limestone. The heat at the threshold had risen to seventy degrees, coating the white green jade doorstep in greasy water drops that made the polished stone as slick as wet lard. In the ancient water-mapping treatises, such water drops was known as the Sweat of the Siphon—a bitter-salt film that dissolved friction and caused heavy sledges to slide wildly into the drainage races.
