The sub-zero gale on the roof of The Glass Pavilion tore the breath from Ren’s lips before it could turn to vapor.
The train was hurtling down the runaway spur at forty miles an hour, swaying like a drunken giant beast over rotting pine frame stands that groaned and cracked beneath the sixty-ton weight. Below the tracks, through swirling curtains of freezing blizzard, the black void of the Blackwater ravine gaped open, its granite floor invisible eight hundred feet beneath the rushing snow.
Ren hauled himself through the copper-rimmed watching hatch, his right arm locked around Mira’s waist. He had wrapped her tightly in his old lambskin apron and heavy wool scarf, shielding her cold, crystal-clear arm against his own chest.
Her weight was dead and rigid. The smoky quartz in her shoulder and arm added fourteen pounds of dense stone ballast that threw off his balance with every violent shudder of the carriage. Every time the wheels hammered across an uneven rail joint, the shock traveled through the sheet-iron roof directly into his boots, threatening to pitch him into the deep pit.
“Hold the vent pipe rim!” Vane shouted through the howling wind.
The merchant lay flat on the curved sheet-iron roof ten paces ahead, his blackthorn stick wedged into the intake cowl of the air-flow hood to anchor himself against the heavy outward pull of the runaway curve. His velvet frock coat was soaked with sleet, freezing into an armor of ice across his shoulders, his silver mustache caked with rime.
“The coupling chains!” Vane yelled, pointing toward the gap between the saloon car and Freight Van Three. “The main draw-pin broke. But the backup emergency safety chains are still hooked to the undercarriage blade collar! If we don’t drop those chains before the train hits Trestle Nine, the freight van will drag us straight off the embankment!”
Ren crawled forward on his knees, his scuffed cobbler’s boots slipping against the frost-glazed metal of the roof. To keep from sliding, he used the silver tip of his reforged mammoth awl to scratch quick, three-stroke traction sigils into the zinc coating. Simple scribe-marks of friction that bit into the ice like climbing crampons.
CLANG.
An iron gauntlet slammed onto the edge of the watching hatch behind them.
Court guard-Captain Corvus Thorne rose from the hatchway like an iron demon clawing out of a fire. The blizzard whipped around his blackened breastplate, freezing the blood on his broken cheekbone into dark crimson pearls. His single dark eye burned with blazing bright, unbending dogmatism. His two-handed iron maul hummed in his fists, the crimson binding runes along its striking face flaring with evil heat that melted the falling snow into clouds of steam around the hammer’s head.
“You have broken your last seal, keeper,” Thorne rumbled, his voice cutting through the roar of the wind like grinding granite.
He stepped onto the curved roof. His heavy iron-toed boots didn’t slip. The crimson runes etched into his armored soles bit into the sheet metal with magnetic, magical adhesion.
He lifted the sixty-pound maul with both hands. He swung it back over his right shoulder in a crushing level arc designed to sweep Ren, Mira, and the air-flow cowl clean off the roof into the deep pit.
Ren couldn’t dodge. With Mira in his left arm and his collarbone broken, he had neither the speed nor the leverage to dive across the curved iron.
He drew the reforged mammoth bone awl with his right hand.
“Careful objection!” Ren screamed into the blizzard.
He drove the silver-wire tip directly into the sheet-iron roof between his boots.
He didn’t possess mana, but the awl was forged from fossil mammoth bone and sea-court silver, attuned to the ancient Lexicon of Binding. Ren channeled the deepest law of legal conservancy: The Doctrine of Non-Interference with Distrained Assets.
A blinding ring of pale violet light erupted from the silver metal ring, etching a three-foot circle of glowing contractual wards into the frosted iron plates.
KZZZZT-BOOM.
Thorne’s heavy iron maul struck the violet boundary.
The impact was cataclysmic. A blasting blast wave exploded across the carriage roof, stripping the sheet-iron of its frost and blowing the hatch cover sixty feet into the ravine. The forty-thousand-foot-pound impact didn’t crush Ren’s ribs. It was absorbed by the scribal ward, redirected downward into the carriage frames with an ear-splitting load-bearing groan.
The plate-glass panels of The Glass Pavilion beneath them shattered all at once, raining thousands of crystal shards into the luxury saloon below.
Thorne was thrown backward by the violent recoil, his iron boots tearing free from the metal deck. He skidded four paces toward the sheer edge of the roof, his maul gouging a deep, smoking furrow in the sheet iron as he fought for purchase against the forty-mile-an-hour wind.
“Ren!” Vane roared, pointing down into the gap between the carriages. “The safety chains! Now! He’s recovering!”
Ren scrambled to his feet within the glowing violet circle. Supporting Mira with his left arm, he lunged forward. It slid down the icy slope of the roof toward the front entry hall hood.
Below the buffer plate, two heavy, three-inch forged-iron safety chains were whipping wildly against the timber framework of the runaway freight van. Every time the carriages surged over a rail joint, the chains pulled taut with a sickening, metal screech, threatening to buckle the bogies and flip the entire train down the mountainside.
Ren leaned out over the roaring, ice-choked gap between the cars. The wind tried to rip Mira from his grip. But he held her with the desperate, unbending strength of a man who has nothing left to lose. Her face was pressed against his neck, her cold breath fluttering against his collar, the faint glassy chime in her chest shaking in time with his racing pulse.
With his right hand, he reversed his grip on the mammoth awl, holding it like a cold chisel.
He jammed the silver metal ring into the master link of the starboard safety chain.
DISSOLUTION OF Promise. RELEASE OF TETHER.
The silver wire flared with white-hot heat. Ren channeled the third clause of the Sequestration Writ—the total severance of town transit bonds.
CRACK.
The three-inch iron link snapped in two, its cut ends whipping through the blizzard like striking vipers.
The saloon car lurched wildly, shedding half its drag.
Behind them, Bailiff Thorne was back on his feet. The soldier’s face was a mask of cold, unrelenting duty. He dropped his two-handed maul, drawing a heavy, double-edged broadsword from his hip. A weapon etched with High court execution sigils that crackled with black lightning.
“You die on the iron, apprentice,” Thorne snarled, lunging forward across the shattered roof with a two-handed thrust aimed directly for Ren’s throat.
Vane Vale moved.
The merchant didn’t possess armor, nor did he carry steel. But he carried thirty years of hungry, back-alley mercantile cunning.
Vane hurled his blackthorn stick horizontally between Thorne’s armored knees.
The heavy, lead-weighted wood tripped the court guard’s forward driving force. Thorne stumbled, his broadsword point slicing harmlessly through the empty air above Ren’s shoulder, his heavy iron cuirass slamming into the sheet-metal roof with a thunderous clang.
Before the court guard could rise, Ren brought the silver-sleeved butt of his mammoth awl down with everything he had.
THUD.
The strike caught the side of Thorne’s lacquered iron helm. The silver metal ring discharged its stored moving deep ring directly into the metal cheek-guard. The court guard’s head snapped sideways. His dark eye rolled back into his skull as mind abandoned him.
Thorne went limp, his armored body sliding slowly down the slick, curved roof toward the shattered watching hatch, his broadsword clattering into the darkness below.
Ren collapsed against the air-flow hood, chest heaving, blood dripping from his nose into the snow. In his arms, Mira stirred, her cold, crystal-clear fingers twitching against his apron.
“Ren...” she murmured, her eyelids fluttering open against the driving sleet.
“I’m here,” Ren gasped. He pulled her closer against the gale, his hand resting gently against her cheek. “I’m here, Mira. Hold onto my coat.”
Vane scrambled over the roof, his breath ragged, his shredded velvet coat flapping like the wings of a broken raven. He looked down at the unconscious court guard, then looked ahead through the blizzard.
The merchant’s face went chalk-white.
“Ren,” Vane whispered, his voice trembling with genuine, plain terror.
Ren looked up.
Two hundred yards ahead through the swirling snow, the tracks ended in a jagged, splintered void.
The Blackwater Gorge opened like the jaws of a frozen giant beast. The ancient timber frame stands had collapsed fifty years ago under the weight of an alpine landslide. Only two twisted iron rails jutted out over the eight-hundred-foot deep pit, suspended in empty air above the roaring river rapids below. The wind rushing up from the canyon floor sounded like the screaming of ten thousand drowned sailors.
And standing on the open rear platform of Freight Van Three, clutching the runaway handbrake with his bleeding, bandaged hand, stood Master Notary Julian Voss.
His stitched plum coat was torn to shreds, his silver hair plastered across his skull by the gale, his glasses gone. In his good hand, he held a heavy iron signal flare, the magnesium flame sputtering with blinding crimson sparks that lit up his face with demonic madness.
“You took my clinic, Vale!” Voss screamed across the iron gap, his voice carrying above the screech of the wheels. “You took my charter! But you don’t get the girl! Nobody gets the girl!”