Dawn arrived over the Razor-Spires not with warmth, but with the brutal, blinding glare of sunlight reflecting off upright walls of blue ice.
The blizzard had blown itself out in the early hours, leaving the sky a pale, hard turquoise. Down in the canyon, six thousand feet below the weather-station, the cloud deck lay like an unbroken sea of whipped cream, hiding the smoking wounds of Vulcan-Khorat from view.
Inside the instrument shed, Apostate Ren knelt on the rough floorboards. He was surrounded by sheets of scrap zinc salvaged from the collapsed roof-vents.
Using a piece of burnt charcoal, the summon was scribing complex sharp-angled matrices across the metal plates. Overlapping circles, logarithmic spirals, and dense blocks of fractional equations that looked more like naval projectiles than standard arcane runes.
Ren Prime leaned against the timber doorframe, watching the Astrologer work.
“It lacks ballast,” Apostate Ren said without pausing his charcoal. “To stabilize a heavy local gravity nullification field large enough to shield a moving column, I need more than paper and charcoal. I need physical conductors with high core thickness and zero crystal-clear deep ring.”
“In plain speech, please,” Vane Vale called out from the bunk. The merchant was step by step polishing his calfskin boots with a greased rag, trying to restore their luster after yesterday’s trek through the slush. “Some of us were educated in commercial law, not the delusions of lunatic star-gazers.”
