The substructure of Cloud-Rest didn’t sleep. It dripped.
Every four seconds, a bead of water drops gathered on the apex of a lime-crusted granite arch, hung trembling in the rotten-egg torchlight. Then it fell into a stone trench cut during the First Epoch.
Ren Vale knelt in the slurry of crushed shale and stone dust, his ivory mammoth-bone awl poised two inches above a four-inch drilled shaft drilled into the bedrock. His knees were cushioned by a folded sheepskin sack. But the cold of the mountain rose through the wool, numbing his shins. His fingers were stiff with dried dark oak-ink.
Beside him stood Marshal Ren. It held a three-foot bar of eight-sided iron wrapped in spirals of heat-softened silver wire. The Marshal’s heavy engineer’s coat was unbuttoned at the throat. He showed the scarred muscle of a neck that looked as though it had been turned on a lathe.
“Hold the pin flush,” the Marshal commanded, his voice scraping like a rasp on iron. “Not three degrees left. Not two degrees right. If the silver wire binds against the drilled shaft casing before the ink seats, the moving circuit will ground into the mortar instead of the plutonic plate. You get one strike. You miss the center, and the first broadside turns this entire vault into flying gravel.”
