The upper watching bunker was a six-foot cube of dry-laid granite blocks, perched beneath the shattered leftovers of the keep’s eastern watchtower.
Through an eight-inch level vision slit cut into the three-foot-thick stone, the world was an expanse of frozen, clockwork terror. The sun had risen behind a dense bank of bruised gray clouds. It cast a dull, pewter twilight over the canyon.
Floating five hundred yards out and six hundred feet above the ruins of the outer courtyard, the Vitreous Giant beast held its siege station.
The huge silver dreadnought was not idle. Her forward gondola had been patched with heavy river-steel plates to cover the breach from Ren’s earlier sequestration shot. Her thirty-two lightning-guns were maintaining a steady, deliberate barrage against the keep’s backup vaults. Every forty seconds, a sheet of blue-white electricity lit the mist, followed by the bone-shaking jolt of four hundred pounds of solid iron striking the stonework above Ren’s head.
Inside the bunker, Ren Vale sat on an upturned ammunition crate, his knees pulled up to support an iron writing board.
Beside him, Marshal Ren stood with his eye clamped to his twenty-four-inch brass sight rangefinder, his lead line-weight swinging in a narrow, steady circle between his boots.
