The salt crust beneath their boots was humming at sixty cycles a second, a high, nauseating shaking that made Ren’s teeth ache and blurred the horizon into shivering grey lines.
Ren Prime knelt over the calfskin thick parchment. He held his carved mammoth ivory awl with a steady, unrushed grip.
His veins burned with the dark fire of the Ink-Rot, the acid-burning iron-gall acid pulsing in his forearm. But he ignored the pain. In careful contract law, every force applied to an object was governed by an underlying promise of action and reaction. If a slaver could project striking force into the earth through steam-driven steel rams, that force could be audited, counter-balanced. Then he redirected by altering the contractual medium through which it traveled.
“Mira,” Ren said, dipping his awl into a small phial of packed salt water-ink. “Give me the root note.”
Mira stood atop a two-ton granite monolith at the edge of the salt basin, her wool shawl cast aside.
Her right arm—faceted, semi-clear smoky quartz from collarbone to fingertip—was held level to the earth, her five crystal-clear fingers spread wide. The air around her knuckles was shimmering with purple pressure-sparking corona. When the next thumper-pulse tore through the bedrock, Mira didn’t flinch. She absorbed the moving wave through her heels, channeled the shock up her spine. Then she emitted a clear, sustained, ringing tone from her crystal-hardened chest that sounded like a silver chime struck inside an iron bell.
