The mortal body doesn’t forget what it has refused.
By afternoon, the High Blast Crucible was crawling with scavenging apprentices and freed stokers hauling copper wire and salvaged brass gauges from the debris. The smell of burning fat had been replaced by the earthy, damp chill of melting alpine snow trickling down the granite chimneys.
Ren Vale sat upon an overturned grease tub in the shadow of the shattered chimney pipe arch, trying to stand.
He couldn’t.
He placed weight upon his left leg. Then, the knee joint gave way with a sickening, grinding slip that sent a lance of white-hot agony straight up into his hip. The kneecap was displaced. Two torn joint cords on the lateral side throbbed with a dark, purplish swelling that stretched the skin taut and shiny. During the scramble across the Judicator’s collapsing hull, when three hundred tons of falling iron had shuddered against his boots, the tendon had simply snapped under the clockwork blast wave.
He was nineteen years old, and he couldn’t walk three paces without collapsing into the ash.
Master Smith Kaelen approached, carrying a heavy velvet-lined leather case.
“Here, lad,” Kaelen said gently, kneeling beside Ren’s ruined leg. “You broke the giant, but you took the giant’s kick. You can’t cross the northern passes on an out-of-joint hinge.”
