The air on the high overhead frame tasted of burning ether, spark-charged ozone, and midwinter mountain frost.
Silas Vance stood with his gloved hand clamped around the iron starting lever, his crimson vestments whipping in the gale like a tattered battle banner. His face was a mask of fanatical triumph. Beneath his skin, the fine razor-sharp scars around his thin mouth twitched in thrilled excitement as the Judicator’s quad-boilers hummed beneath his boots.
“Don’t pull that lever, Vance,” Ren Vale said. He stepped across the chimney coping onto the overhead frame platform.
His voice was hoarse, scarred by the silence of his scroll-keeper’s vow. But it carried the flat, terrifying weight of an unchanging legal verdict. In his right hand, Ren held his ivory mammoth bone awl. In his left, he held the brass deed-metal tube containing the First Epoch reversion.
Beside him, Unit Ren moved with silent, hungry care.
The machine-man’s three-foot piston-wrench was unslung, held in his human right hand at a low slanted guard. His left shoulder mount—fitted with the newly forged magnetic bracket—hummed softly, ready to lock onto the iron overhead frame support posts. His amber rangefinder lens whirred, tracking the six Clockwork Guards who formed an iron wall between Ren and the Prior.
