The earth didn’t shake. It heaved.
Beneath the white heat-proof stone of the High Blast Crucible, the dark rock foundation cracked as four hundred tons of cold-rolled hard dark metal plate shifted its balance point. The four thick umbilical cables of braided copper wire—the synaptic channels carrying the screams of four thousand two hundred and eighteen bound workers—snapped taut like ship’s mooring hawsers in a hurricane. Their brass end-post boxes ripped free from the stone platform in blinding showers of cerulean sparks. It scattered hot copper washers across the iron rails.
The Iron Judicator Null-01 stood to its full, terrifying height.
Forty-four royal paces high. A four-story castle of blackened iron, its huge dark shape blotting out the northern star-patterns. The steam venting from its four quad-boilers was not white vapor. It was a dense, glowing violet plume that smelled of burnt bone, sulfur, and spark-charged soul-grease. It roared into the alpine sky with the sound fury of an erupting volcano.
In the starlight, the machine looked down at the command overhead frame.
Its head—a three-tiered clockwork guillotine of linked hard dark metal gears—rotated ninety degrees with a shriek of dry teeth that sent shakes through the soles of Ren’s boots. The heavy iron blade inside the neck housing dropped three inches. It locked into the firing notch with a bone-shaking metal THWACK.
