The storm drain beneath the North Sidings was three feet wide, lined with soot-blackened brick that oozed icy cooled water into the knee-deep sludge.
Ren Vale crawled on his elbows and knees through the dark, dragging his leather satchel beneath his chest to keep the thick parchment dry. Every inch of forward progress was an exercise in calculated friction. The rough brick tore at the wool of his trousers. Meanwhile, the freezing sludge—a vile slurry of coal run-off, tanning acid, and melted snow—soaked through his lambskin apron.
Above his head, separated by only eighteen inches of vaulted stonework and crushed limestone ballast, the earth shuddered continuously under titanic weight.
THUD-clack. THUD-clack.
Each revolution of the eight-foot driving wheels of Locomotive 808 sent blast waves rattling through Ren’s cracked ribs. The pain was a sharp, iron stitch behind his chest bone. But he breathed through it, matching his pace to the rhythmic scrape of Vane’s blackthorn stick against the brickwork ahead.
“Three paces to the check hatch,” Vane whispered back through the darkness. His voice was muffled by the wool scarf tied around his mouth. But the clipped, high-born rhythm was clear. “The drain empties directly beneath the water column at the western edge of the coal bunkers. Watch your head. The iron rungs were installed during the second reign of Duke Kaelen. The lime mortar has dissolved to gravel.”
Ren paused in the muck. He reached into his satchel to verify his instruments by touch alone. His callused fingertips traced the chilled baked-clay neck of the ferric-acid etching solvent, the two rolled sheets of Harker’s High court thick parchment. The cold ivory grip of the reforged bone awl. The silver metal ring was cold as ice. But the mammoth tusk held a faint, leftover warmth from his own ribs.
“In my timeline,” Vane murmured from the shadows ahead, his breath pluming in the narrow brick chimney pipe, “I never crawled through this filth. I bought a first-class compartment on the midnight express to the coast. I wore a beaver-felt overcoat and drank hot spiced brandy. Meanwhile, the porter loaded my leather trunks. I had twelve thousand gold sovereigns in an iron strongbox under my seat.”
Ren wiped a smear of greasy silt from his cheek. “And Mira?”
The silence that followed was heavier than the train tracks overhead.
“Mira was already dead,” Vane said, the words falling flat and hollow into the freezing water. “She died three days before the Solstice in the public solitude ward at Saint Jude’s. When the hospital messenger brought the death certificate to my counting-house, I didn’t even open the envelope. I was negotiating the purchase of three wool mills in the South Reach. I simply handed the boy two silver pennies and told him to file the bill with my head clerk.”
Vane turned his head slightly, his slate-grey eyes catching the faint, greenish eerie glow of canal mold on the brick.
“I spent twenty years convincing myself that there was nothing I could have done,” the merchant whispered. “That turning to glass was a rock-solid act of God. That a dead sister was the price of a sovereign fortune. Don’t let that train leave this platform, Ren. If that engine clears the gorge, you’ll spend the rest of your life realizing that all the gold in the world can’t buy back a single heartbeat.”
Ren reached up, his fingers finding the first iron rung. The metal was pitted with century-old rust, crumbling like coarse brown sugar beneath his grip. He hauled himself up three paces. He tested each rung with the toe of his scuffed cobbler’s boot before committing his weight.
He pushed the circular cast-iron grating aside by two inches.
A blast of sub-zero winter air hit his face like a slap of frozen salt. Sleet drove horizontally through the gap, stinging his eyelids.
Through the narrow crescent between the iron rim and the platform ballast, Ren looked out into the belly of the beast.
Platform One was drowned in a blinding, violet-white glare. Thirty spirit-gas arc lamps hissed atop iron pylons, their high-pressure flames lighting up the blizzard until the falling snow looked like millions of spinning glass needles.
The Solstice Express stood motionless on the central rails, a huge spine of blackened iron and riveted boiler plate stretching two hundred paces down the granite shed. Steam vented from its undercarriage in thick, churning clouds that rolled across the ties, smelling of sulfur, hot stone oil, and scorched machine grease.
On the roof of the second-class passenger carriages, four royal guards in hooded oilskin coats paced back and forth. Their repeating was heavy steel crossbows cradled in the crooks of their arms. Every thirty seconds, their heavy iron-shod boots clanged against the sheet-metal roofs as they turned, scanning the dark outer edge fences.
At the rear of the train, coupled behind Freight Van Three, sat The Glass Pavilion.
Through the curved, crystal-layered windows of the private saloon car, the inside glowed with the choking warmth of an emperor’s parlor. Golden chandeliers swayed gently on gimbaled mounts. Silver decanters caught the amber light of silk-shaded sconces.
And seated in a high-backed velvet armchair beside the dark wood dining table sat Lord Malakor.
Even from fifty paces, Ren could see the ugly frailty of the High Peer. Malakor was wrapped in a mantle of white ermine that made him look like a desiccated falcon. Over the lower half of his face was strapped an elaborate mask of filigreed gold-silver metal, connected by two flexible copper tubes to the towering brass lung behind his chair. As the machine hissed, the old man’s chest rose and fell in unnatural, clockwork spasms.
Beside Malakor stood Master Notary Julian Voss.
Voss’s right hand was wrapped in heavy white linen bandages, pinned in a stitched silk sling across his chest. His florid cheeks were flushed with anger. His left hand gestured wildly toward the dark inside of Freight Van Three. There, the iron deadbolts remained locked.
“Look at him,” Ren whispered, his knuckles whitening against the drain rim. “Voss is demanding the transfer clearance be expedited. He knows we have the ledger.”
“He knows his skin is on the line,” Vane murmured. He peeked over Ren’s shoulder through the grating. “Lord Malakor doesn’t tolerate office delays. In the High Spires, a broken delivery contract is punished not with fines, but with asset forfeiture. If that train doesn’t clear the Khorat junction by midnight, Malakor’s bank will foreclose on Voss’s entire clinic before dawn.”
Vane reached into his borrowed dyer’s apron, pulling out his brass pocket horologe. He snapped the lid open with a faint click.
“Eleven-thirty-eight,” Vane whispered. “Master Garrow’s crew should be entering the lower vent of Silo Three right now. Two minutes until the blast.”
Ren lowered the grating a fraction of an inch to shield his eyes from the glare. His heart hammered a wild, irregular rhythm against his ribs.
In his inner breast pocket, the Speculum pressed against his chest bone. The gold-silver metal frame was scorching hot. Not with fire, but with a cold, spirit heat that seemed to leach the warmth from his blood. Through the greased canvas wrapping, he could feel the low, steady shaking of the silver glass.
The mirror knew.
It knew they stood on the razor edge of a permanent divergence. If they failed here, Mira would be hauled into the sky, her blood turned to quartz. Her living heart was locked in an aristocrat’s parlor as a sound toy. And Ren would die in the gravel of Platform One, his body dumped into the canal with the rest of the nameless refuse.
“Ren,” Vane said softly. The mocking, acerbic bite was entirely gone from his voice.
Ren turned his head in the dark under-road drain. The merchant’s face was inches from his own. The same high cheekbones, the same narrow, stubborn jaw, but marked by twenty years of bitter luxury, unpayable debts. The crushing guilt of an empire built on an empty grave.
“When the lamps go out,” Vane said, his grey eyes piercing through the murk, “don’t look at the guards. Don’t look at Voss. Keep your eyes on the undercarriage bogie of Van Three. The high-pressure draw-pin is located between the second and third wheel sets. You have forty seconds to introduce the acid and drive the awl before the reserve dynamos kick in.”
“I know the blueprint,” Ren whispered.
“Knowing the blueprint isn’t the same as driving the strike,” Vane said. His fingers tightened on Ren’s shoulder like an iron clamp. “When you strike that pin, reality will push back. The moving recoil from a royal train coupling carries the weight of forty thousand foot-pounds. Your silver metal ring will take the strain. But your shoulder will feel like it was struck by an anvil. If your grip slips by a sixteenth of an inch, the draw-bar will crush your wrist to powder.”
“My grip won’t slip,” Ren said.
“Good,” Vane murmured. “Because I didn’t surrender a fleet of merchant brigantines to watch you die under a freight carriage.”
Across the yard, the great iron tower of the Grand Central Clock began to gather itself.
Deep within the stone belfry, forty-ton bronze gear-trains groaned under high-pressure balance weights. The preliminary chime—four dropping notes that shook through the tracks like rolling thunder—rang out across the frozen roofs of Khorat.
BONG. BONG. BONG. BONG.
Three-quarters past eleven.
On Platform One, the guards snapped to attention. Court guard Corvus Thorne stepped out from the station office. His blackened iron breastplate shone in the arc lamps. He looked toward the front of the train, raised his ink-charged iron maul. Then he shouted a hoarse command to the locomotive engineer:
“Clear the track points! Solstice Express prepares for departure!”
Locomotive 808 answered.
The steam whistle erupted from the forward dome. An ear-splitting, ear-splitting scream of white-hot pressure that tore through the blizzard like a jagged iron blade. The sound rolled down the river valley, rattling the windowpanes of every tenement in Low-Khorat, announcing to the night that the High Spires were taking their prize.
And then, fifty paces to the west, Silo Three exploded.