The four-man iron ram struck the attic door of Tenement Forty-Two. Then, the sound was not the splintering of seasoned oak.
It was the ringing crash of a high-speed cannon ball striking an iron anvil.
THUUUUM-CLANG.
The striking force of the four-hundred-pound timber balk didn’t penetrate the door. It reversed along its own vector, channeled through the blood-sealed Writ of Sanctuary Inversion Ren had bound to the foundation timbers. The iron-shod head of the ram exploded into fragments of jagged shrapnel. The four hired blades holding the handles were hurled backward across the narrow landing like dry leaves in a storm, their arms out-of-joint at the shoulders, their breastplates dented inward by the air-powered backblast.
Captain Corvus Thorne was thrown wildly against the banister, his lacquered iron shoulder plate tearing away from his shoulder as he crashed into the plaster wall, coughing a mouthful of bright red blood.
“What in the hells...” Thorne choked out, struggling to his feet through the swirl of powdered lime, broken spindles, and shattered wood. “The door... The door is warded with crown seals! Bring up the sulfur charges! Blow the entire frame!”
Down in the courtyard, Ren didn’t wait for Thorne to recover his wits.
“Now!” Ren shouted, sprinting out from behind the coal wagon with his ivory awl gripped like a trench dagger.
The two outer edge guards stationed by the front archway barely had time to raise their short heavy steel crossbows. Vane Vale was already upon them.
The merchant didn’t draw a sword. He had none. Instead, Vane stepped inside the first guard’s guard with the cold, easy footwork of a master fencer, his gold-headed walking cane lashing out with razor-sharp, terrifying care. The heavy brass metal ring struck the junior guard directly on the forearm nerve of his right wrist.
Crack.
The guard’s fingers opened involuntarily. His heavy steel crossbow clattered onto the muddy cobbles. Before the second guard could swing his six-foot hooked pruning blade, Vane hooked the crook of his cane behind the man’s knee and pulled hard while driving his manicured left elbow straight into the man’s throat.
The guard went down in the sludge with a strangled gasp, his iron helmet clattering against the wagon wheel.
“Passable,” Vane muttered, adjusting his silk cravat with one hand while holding his cane over the fallen men with cold, haughty disdain. “A standard dockside dispute resolution. Go, Ren! To the stairs! I’ll hold the carriage line!”
Ren bolted through the tenement entrance, taking the stairs three at a time.
The stairwell was choked with white plaster dust and the sharp, rotten-egg reek of exploded wards. On the second landing, two dazed guards were crawling on hands and knees, their ears bleeding from the sound blast wave of the reversed strike. Ren vaulted over them, his boots kicking an abandoned iron crowbar down the stairs. Then he reached the third-floor landing.
Captain Corvus Thorne was leaning against the shattered banister, his heavy six-foot iron maul raised in his right gauntlet. His single good eye burned with psychotic, bloodshot fury.
“You,” Thorne snarled, spitting a mouthful of red spit onto the floorboards. “The ink-rat returns to the trap. You think a scrap of blood-thick parchment saves your neck from the crown?”
“Drop the maul, Thorne,” Ren said. He held his blood-stained ivory awl level with the court guard’s throat. “The Sanctuary Writ is registered. Every strike you make against this landing is high felony treason under the Great Charter. The Notaries’ Guild will revoke your pension before noon.”
“I don’t give a damn about your charter, scribe!” Thorne roared. “Master Voss owns the city! And Lord Malakor owns the judge who wipes his backside with your paper!”
Thorne lunged forward with terrifying speed for a man in full plate. He swung the six-foot iron maul in a level arc designed to take Ren’s head from his shoulders.
The air shrieked beneath the passage of the heavy iron head.
Ren dropped flat onto his stomach. The whistling iron passed three inches above his skull, smashing into the brick door frame and showering his neck with pulverizing brick-dust and sparks. Before Thorne could recover the driving force of the heavy swing, Ren scrambled forward, jammed the needle-sharp silver tip of his ivory awl directly into the leather lacing of Thorne’s right knee-cavalry boot. Then he twisted with all his strength.
Skrrr-ch.
The needle-sharp tusk pierced the boiled leather, sinking an inch into the knee tendon.
Thorne shrieked—a high, agonized bellow of pure rage and pain. His right leg buckled beneath him, and the massive court guard crashed down onto one knee, the heavy maul clattering from his numbed gauntlet onto the landing floorboards.
“Mira!” Ren yelled, throwing his shoulder against the warded door. “Mira, it’s me! Draw the bolt!”
From inside the attic, the heavy scrape of the iron stove being dragged across the spruce floorboards answered him. A second later, the iron latch clicked.
The door swung open four inches.
Mira stood in the gap. She was pale as a ghost, her charcoal shawl wrapped tightly around her chest. Her left hand gripped a pair of sharp eight-inch dressmaker’s shears. Behind her, the attic was in ruins. The deal table overturned, the crockery smashed. The skylight shattered by the bone-shaking blast of the ram.
“Ren!” she cried, reaching out with her left hand to grab his sleeve.
“Are you hurt?” Ren gasped, lunging toward the doorway. “Did they breach the room?”
“No,” Mira said, her silver-grey eyes wide with fight-or-flight rush. “The stove held. But Ren... Look at the floor!”
Before Ren could cross the threshold, a terrifying sound tore through the tenement. The groan of overstressed floor beams snapping like dry twigs.
From the second floor below, an ear-splitting crack rang through the building.
Julian Voss had not relied solely on the battering ram.
While Thorne had attacked the front door, a backup sapper squad in the apartment directly beneath the attic had driven four screw-jacks into the ceiling timbers, packing the cavities with packed mining powder and sulfur gel.
BOOOOOM.
The center of the attic floor exploded upward in a fountain of splintered floor beams, shredded lath, burning straw, and blinding white smoke.
The spruce floorboards beneath Mira’s feet dissolved into empty air.
“Ren!” she screamed.
Her right arm—the fourteen-pound bough of smoky quartz—dragged her downward like an anchor of solid lead. She fell through the gaping hole in the floor into the smoke-filled ruins of the second story, her left hand clawing desperately at the air as the ragged edges of the broken timber gave way.
“MIRA!”
Ren threw himself forward. He skidded across the splintered edge of the crater. His left hand reached into the smoke. His fingers closed around the frayed wool fringe of her shawl just as her weight pulled the cloth taut.
The sheer stone mass of her glass-fused arm hit him like an iron anvil dropped from a church roof.
His left shoulder popped with painful, tearing pain. The raw rope-burns across his palms split open, pouring fresh crimson down the wool fibers. He was being dragged over the cliff edge. His ribs scraped against the jagged ends of broken oak beams, his boots finding no purchase in the sliding sawdust.
“Hold on!” Ren roared, blood dripping from his chin onto her face below. “Mira, hold on to me!”
Below him, through the swirling smoke of the second floor, a figure stepped out from behind a shattered wardrobe.
Master Notary Julian Voss.
Voss was wearing his rubberized surgeon’s smock, his cobalt glasses gleaming with cold, triumphant malice. In his right hand, he held a brass spring-loaded beast-doctor syringe charged with four ounces of dark purple fluid: Vitric Sclerosing Compound, Formula Nine.
“Hold her steady, apprentice,” Voss purred, stepping over the debris toward Mira’s dangling legs. “The frozen stillness injection works much cleaner when the sample is suspended. Less tissue trauma to the focal crystal.”
“Get away from her!” Ren roared, his voice cracking with useless, tearing fury as his fingers slipped on the bloody shawl.
Voss raised the brass syringe. The six-inch hollow steel needle glinted in the gloom.
“Delivery Parcel Nineteen,” Voss whispered, driving the needle deep into the living flesh of Mira’s right shoulder, directly above the collar of smoky quartz. “Delivered in full.”
Mira gasped. It wasn’t a scream. It was a choked, inward breath in that froze in her throat.
A flash of blinding, blazing bright lavender light surged through her body. The smoky quartz, which had stopped at her collar bone, raced across her chest like a river of flash-frozen ice. The skin of her right breast, her between-rib muscles, and the anterior wall of her right lung crystal-hardened in less than three seconds. The living tissue solidified into semi-clear, sharp-angled prisms.
Her left hand twitched, reaching into her apron pocket. With a dying effort of will, she pulled out her small, carved boxwood needle-case and threw it upward toward Ren’s bleeding face.
“Ren...” she choked out, her voice turning into a high, clockwork chime. Her right lung turned to solid stone. “The... Ledger...”
Her fingers lost their grip. The wool shawl tore in Ren’s bloody hand. Mira dropped into the arms of Voss’s waiting snatch-squad below.