The twilight didn’t fall upon Mount Khor-Vann. It was lowered by steam-winches.
At six in the evening, the western horizon should have displayed the cold crimson afterglow of the alpine sun. Instead, a huge wall of black iron and silvered gas-silk slid across the canyon, casting Cloud-Rest into a choking, clockwork eclipse.
Ren Vale stood in the arched embrasure of the gatehouse tower. His boots were pressed firmly against the mortar joint. The cold stone beneath his feet was his only defense against the sudden, violent lurch of dizziness that threatened to unhinge his stomach whenever he looked toward the sky. He kept his left hand flat against the frost-caked granite. That let the rough quartz flecks bite into his palm. Every breath of the thin mountain air tasted of sulfur, cordite, and cold animal fat.
“Twelve cruisers,” Captain Jon Varek said. His voice dropped into a dry, hollow whisper beside him. “Four bomb-ketches. And the flagship.”
The Third Sky-Flotilla of the High Spire had assumed its siege cordon.
They hung in two nested crescent arcs, suspended between eight hundred and twelve hundred feet above the mountain spur. The outer ring consisted of thirty-gun ironclads. It was heavy, flat-bottomed gun-hulks plated in overlapping sheets of blackened river-steel, their twin steam-turbines churning the mountain air into a nonstop, ear-splitting bass roar. Long spark cables trailed beneath their keels like glowing jellyfish tentacles, discharging leftover lightning-salts into the swirling cloud floor with sharp, crackling snaps.
