The brass-studded door didn’t merely swing open. It snapped off its lower hinge under the impact of Ren’s silver-sleeved awl, collapsing inward onto a deep velvet carpet the color of crushed mulberries.
The sudden shift from the freezing, lead-lined darkness of Freight Van Three to the inside of The Glass Pavilion was an assault upon every mortal sense.
The air inside was suffocatingly warm, heavy with the cloying perfume of imported damask rosewater, burning bitter pine-resin, and medical-grade oxygen high-pressure in copper tanks. Above, crystal chandeliers swayed gently from gold-silver metal ceiling bosses. He cast golden pools of light over paneled walls of polished bird’s-eye maple and gold-trimmed roof ledges. A silver wine cooler filled with chipped mountain ice sat beside a velvet-upholstered divan. A half-eaten partridge on a royal fine china plate rested upon a gleaming dark wood dining table. It was an environment engineered to insulate the master of the estate from the grease, the frost, and the dying of the provinces.
And in the center of the saloon car, bolted directly to the heavy steel floor heavy beams with polished bronze brackets, stood the Mark Seven Breath-mask.
It was an obscenity of industrialized medicine. Six feet tall, built from burnished brass cylinders, back-and-forth steam pistons, and spiraling copper heat-exchangers. At its core, three glass pressure columns filled with liquid silver pulsed with a rhythmic, sickening rhythm:
Chhh-hiss. Chhh-hiss.
Suspended within a heavy bell jar of curved, three-inch layered quartz at the front of the machine was Mira Vale.
She was held upright by padded leather restraints wrapped around her waist and thighs. Her charcoal shawl had been torn away, discarded in the corner like a dirty rag. Her simple linen dress had been slit to the right shoulder. She exposed the flawless, terrifying expanse of her condition to the warm parlor light.
From the hollow of her throat down across her right shoulder, chest, and arm, the flesh was entirely semi-clear smoky quartz. It caught the chandelier light with an eerie, lilac fire, internal amethyst striations pulsing with an unnatural, forced deep ring. Her right forearm had been forced into an airtight brass metal tube equipped with air-powered suction cups, while four copper needle-leads were tapped directly into the stone veins along her wrist.
Every time the steam piston plunged—Chhh-hiss—the machine drew a pulse of pressure-sparking energy directly from her living crystal lattice.
With every pulse, Mira’s head jerked back against the padded headrest. Her lips were parted, pale and dry, emitting a high, painful crystal-clear chime. A sound so pure, so sharp with mortal agony, that the champagne flutes on the dark wood sideboard shook in their silver racks.
“Exquisite,” a dry, wheezing voice murmured from the shadows beside the hearth. “Listen to the ringing decay. Four hundred and forty-two cycles. Not a single trace of limestone clouding. Julian was right. She’s a Stradivarius of the bone.”
Lord Malakor sat in a high-backed armchair of emerald velvet. He was wrapped in a mantle of Siberian ermine that pooled around his withered legs.
He was a horrible ghost. Eighty years old, his skin parchment-thin and liver-spotted, his skull bald save for a few wisps of silver hair. Over his mouth and nose was strapped a gold-silver metal breathing mask, held tight by leather straps buckled around his ears. From the base of the mask, two ribbed copper breathing hoses snaked back to the central pipe hub of the machine, feeding the old man the cold, stone-enriched oxygen pulled out from Mira’s marrow.
Beside Malakor stood his personal bodyguard. A towering Spire duelist clad in form-fitting grey silk breeches and a polished steel breastplate, his hand resting upon the swept-handle basket of an electrified fencing dress sword.
Ren took one step onto the velvet carpet. His boots, coated in black locomotive grease and canal slush, left foul, oily tracks across the mulberry wool.
His left arm hung uselessly, his fractured collarbone grinding with every step, his face pale as chalk beneath streaks of soot and dried blood. But in his right hand, the reforged mammoth awl burned with a pale, violet light that seemed to swallow the chandelier glare.
“Let her out,” Ren rasped. The words tore from his throat like broken glass.
Lord Malakor didn’t jump. He didn’t even reach for a weapon. He merely blinked his watery, pale blue eyes. He looked down at Ren’s filthy boots with mild high-born distaste.
“Julian has truly lost his grip on outer edge discipline,” the High Peer wheezed through his gold-silver metal mask, the chest muscle fluttering with a metal buzz. “First an explosion in the coal bunkers, then a cut coupling. Now a greasy back kitchen boy tracked mud onto my silk runner. Captain Kael, execute this trespasser and throw his carcass onto the ballast.”
The Spire duelist didn’t waste time with formal challenges.
With blinding, fluid speed, the dress sword cleared its sword sheath with a singing hiss. The steel blade was etched with current-carrying lightning runes that crackled with blue voltaic fire as the captain lunged across the dining table, his point aimed directly for Ren’s throat.
Ren didn’t move. He couldn’t. His body was running on the last fumes of fight-or-flight rush and body-energy tiredness.
CRACK.
Vane Vale’s blackthorn stick intercepted the dress sword a half-inch from Ren’s neck-vein.
The impact discharged a shower of blue sparks that scorched the wallpaper, but Vane didn’t flinch. The merchant’s slate-grey eyes narrowed, his left hand snapping forward to catch the duelist’s wrist in an iron grip.
“Captain Kaelen Thorne,” Vane said, his voice dropping into a register of icy, high-born power. “Commissioned third lieutenant in the Ducal Guard, discharged twelve years ago for embezzling the regimental mess funds. Your debt bond is held by the House of Malakor at an interest rate of fourteen percent per annum. You’re not a bodyguard, captain. You’re a collateralized debt-bound servant.”
The duelist froze, his eyes widening in shock.
“Ren! The intake pipe hub!” Vane shouted, twisting the captain’s wrist with brutal leverage. He drove the blunt end of his cane into the man’s knee.
Ren surged forward, his boots digging into the crushed mulberries of the carpet.
He ignored the duelist, ignored the old lord in his velvet chair, ignored the silver champagne flutes shattering under his heels.
He leaped onto the brass framework of the Mark Seven Breath-mask.
His silver-wire tip found the main air-powered pipe hub. The four-inch copper pipe that fed empty pocket pressure to the metal tube holding Mira’s arm.
“Stop!” Lord Malakor screamed, his voice cracking into a desperate, scared shriek as he tried to rise from his chair. “You’ll destroy the pressure seal! My lungs! My lungs can’t take surrounding air!”
“Then breathe the cold, you old vulture,” Ren snarled.
He drove the silver point of the mammoth ivory awl straight through the copper casing.
KZZZZT-SHRRRRK.
He channeled every scrap of scribal seizure he possessed into the strike—the total nullification of a fraudulent property debt claim.
The silver sleeve discharged a blinding flash of violet fire that short-circuited the machine’s electric-shock coils. The liquid silver pressure gauges exploded in showers of silver droplets. The back-and-forth steam pistons jammed with a violent, grinding screech of snapped bronze gear-teeth.
With a massive hiss of venting steam, the empty pocket clamp on the glass metal tube released.
The air-powered suction cups popped free from Mira’s skin. The copper needle-leads ripped out from the crystal-clear veins of her wrist, spraying droplets of lavender-tinted lymph across the glass.
The bell jar cracked from top to bottom.
Mira’s body slumped forward, falling limp against the shattered crystal. Her left hand—warm, human, and frail—fluttered open, her fingers reaching out blindly into the steam.
“Ren...” she gasped, her voice barely a whisper above the hissing copper pipes.
Ren caught her with his right arm, pulling her against his chest. The right side of her body was cold as an iceberg, the smoky quartz of her shoulder streaming a pale, humming soft glow that sent shivers through his broken ribs. But her head rested against his shoulder, her breath fluttering warm against his neck.
In the pocket of her torn linen apron, his fingers brushed against a small, hard object: her carved boxwood thimble. Even through the abduction, even clamped in a High Spire machine, she had kept it with her.
“I have you,” Ren sobbed, his forehead pressing against her tangled hair. “Mira. I have you. You’re out.”
“You... You’re bleeding on my dress,” she whispered, her dry lips curving into the faintest ghost of a smile before her eyes fluttered shut, slipping into exhausted blackout.
Behind them, Lord Malakor fell back into his emerald armchair. He clawed at his gold-silver metal mask as he began to choke on the raw air of the room, his frail chest heaving like a stranded fish. Across the broken dining table, Captain Kaelen lay crumpled on the floor, disarmed and groaning from Vane’s brutal cane-strikes.
Steam billowed from the burst pipe hubs. It filled the saloon car with a white, choking fog that smelled of hot copper and ozone. Ren shifted Mira’s weight, supporting her limp body with his right arm. Meanwhile, his fractured collarbone screamed in protest.
And then, from the shattered doorway of the saloon car, came the heavy, iron-shod footfalls of Guard Corvus Thorne.
The doorway groaned as a towering dark shape stepped into the haze. Clad in blackened, lacquered iron plate, his white blind eye milky and dead beneath the brim of his helm, the court guard-captain carried his two-handed iron maul resting casually across his shoulder. The binding runes etched into the weapon’s steel face glowed with a dull, evil crimson light, charged with ink that had dried on execution warrants.
Beside Thorne stood Master Notary Julian Voss, his linen sling soaked with fresh blood, his leftover eye fixed on Ren with blazing bright, murderous hatred.
“End of the line, apprentice,” Thorne rumbled, the iron plates of his gauntlet creaking as his grip tightened on the wooden handle. “Set down the asset, or I’ll paint this carpet with your brains.”