The abandoned ice-slow weather-station clung to the western cliff edge of the Seventh Peak like a barnacle on the hull of an iron ship.
Built eighty years ago by the early surveying teams of the High Zenith, the structure was built from massive blocks of pitch-sealed spruce anchored into the granite cliff with heavy iron guy-wires. Most of the outer watching narrow high walkways had long since collapsed into the gorge below, snapped away by decades of avalanches. But the central instrument shed remained intact, sheltered beneath an overhanging brow of black dark rock.
Inside, the air was freezing. It smelled of dry rot, ancient lamp-wax, and the cold, metal dust of rusted brass gauges.
Night had fallen over the Razor-Spires with the sudden, violent finality of a dropped iron drop-gate. Outside, the alpine blizzard shrieked through the support cables, rattling the heavy spruce shutters until the iron latches jumped in their hasps.
In the center of the drafty room, an overturned zinc boiler served as an improvised hearth.
Unit Ren knelt motionless on the frozen floorboards beside it, his massive, seven-foot iron frame hunched to conserve space. The machine-grafted summon’s left high-pressure arm—melted into a twisted knot of melted rock waste during the Vulcan fire battle—was strapped tightly against his chest with tarred hemp. His right hand, a heavy four-jaw heavy-duty chuck, rested upon the boiler’s rim.
