“Get down, engineer!” Jon Hale roared, lunging forward a single step from the intake stanchion as Marshal Ors’s six-pound iron siege mace swept through the red-lit steam in a two-handed horizontal swing.
Beside the central bronze pedestal, the bald Ash Host chief engineer had less than half a second to turn his head. He had spent the past twenty minutes wedging the chisel-point of his four-foot iron pry-bar into the bolted copper inspection seam directly beneath the Viewing Plate, and the pressurized bronze collar around the three-inch-thick quartz lens was already bowing outward like an over-inflated bladder under the heat of the uncooled core.
“Marshal, no—the mercury ring is under full head!” the engineer screamed, throwing up his leather-gloved hands in front of his face.
Iven’s bowstring twanged behind Jon’s shoulder. Her third bodkin shaft streaked across the twenty paces of flooded granite and struck the thick iron Pauldron of Ors’s right shoulder with a ringing clang, glancing off the curved border-plate a heartbeat too late to spoil the general’s follow-through.
The flanged iron head of the siege mace crashed squarely into the center of the glowing amber quartz lens.
For the space of a single eye-blink, the ancient three-inch crystal held the blow, ringing like a struck cathedral bell while a blinding spiderweb of white and gold fractures raced outward from the point of impact to the twelve bronze retaining bolts around the rim. Behind the cracked glass, the swirling white filaments of the valley’s stored temporal pattern—the residual…
