The dreadnought didn’t approach like a ship. It approached like a falling continent.
At seven in the morning, through the dense, boiling haze of sulfur steam and morning mist, the Vitreous Giant beast broke through the cloud ceiling directly above Cloud-Rest. She was no longer hovering at eight hundred yards. She maintained the safe, cowardly cruising height of an aerial flagship. Driven by the desperate, manic fury of an old man whose lungs were collapsing beneath him, Lord Malakor had brought the three-hundred-yard flagship down to barely eighty yards above the castle launch terrace.
The sheer scale of the vessel was a physical horror that crushed the breath from the men gathered in the courtyard below.
Her silver-mirrored hull, scarred by black soot and pitted with shrapnel gouges from the exploding Vesper, stretched across the sky from mountain ridge to deep pit. She blotted out every trace of the morning sun. The three huge thirty-foot stern-screws beat the thin mountain air into a nonstop hurricane of displaced wind that tore the slate shingles from the keep’s roof and sent clouds of crushed gravel whistling across the pavers like grapeshot.
Beneath her keel, four massive steam-exhaust pipe hubs vented plumes of boiling, white vapor that hissed wildly against the cold mountain stone. It filled the courtyard with the ear-splitting, clockwork roar of twelve thousand horsepower driven under emergency draft. The smell was choking. Hot machine oil, scorched metal tube packings, spark-charged copper. The rank, dry musk of ozone that preceded lightning…
