The violet fog rolling through the Sunken Crater smelled of boiled away amethyst and cold flint.
It rose from the heat fissures of the volcano bowl floor in dense. It waved banks that swallowed the floating dark rock giant pillars. That turned the five-mile deep pit into a maze of drifting shadows. The barge St. Mira remained moored beneath the Anchor Stone, her weightless oak hull rocking gently upon invisible gravity swells.
On the forward watching platform, Ren Prime crouched behind a breastwork of sandbags and scrap boiler iron, his oak walking stick resting across his knees. Beside him, Mira was step by step sharpening bone bodkins with a sandstone rasp, her left hand moving with steady rhythm. Meanwhile, her crystal-clear right forearm rested against the gunwale.
A sudden, sharp tug pulled at the hem of Ren’s frieze coat.
“Down! Get your skull down below the iron plate!” Ren-the-Cinder hissed wildly from a narrow crevice between two water casks.
The Last Coward was trembling so wildly that his brass skeleton keys sounded like dried peas rattling in an iron kettle. His twitchy, bloodshot eyes were fixed not on the open air, but on a thin layer of fine charcoal dust he had sprinkled across the top of a barrel.
