The wreckage of the Iron Sieve lay scattered across a quarter-mile of crushed salt crust like the skeleton of a beached giant beast.
Twisted boiler pipes, shattered caterpillar treads, and smoking lumps of hard coal sizzled in the shallow salt water pools that were already welling up from the crushed bedrock. The three Glass dust-Wyrms, their sense receptors overloaded by the total blast of the steam engines, had pulled back into the cool, silent depths of the world-size crust. That left the white basin utterly deserted.
Ren Vale, Mira, Nomad Ren, and Lord Ren walked through the smoking debris, their boots crunching on brittle salt shards.
Beneath the crumpled iron roof of the crawler’s forward wheelhouse, pinned by a three-ton steel drive axle, lay Kaelen Voss.
The caravan-master was dying. His bull-hide coat was shredded by quartz shrapnel, his chest crushed beneath the weight of the axle, his breath coming in bubbling, bloody gasps through cracked lips. In his limp right hand, he still clutched his iron-nibbed slaver’s metal pen, its heavy nib snapped clean in half.
Ren’s shadow fell across him. Then, Voss turned his bloodshot right eye upward, his brass lens-shutter hanging by a frayed wire.
He stared at Ren’s ink-stained leather apron, then at Mira’s smoky quartz arm glowing quietly in the afternoon light.
