The release of the World-Nail was not a gunshot. It was an act of world-size revenge.
For six months, Cloud-Rest had endured the shadow of the Grand Senate’s aerial armadas. They had arrived with polished silver hulls, shining brass propellers. The unbeatable certainty that those who walked upon the earth were merely cattle to be snapped from above. They had poisoned the skies with sulfur exhaust, burned the mountain forests with liquid fire-powder. Then they demanded the living flesh of a sixteen-year-old girl to fuel the failing lungs of an eighty-year-old oligarch.
Now, eighty yards above the launch terrace, the pride of the Senate hung stationary, blinded by its own arrogance.
On the firing platform of the thirty-foot polished dark rock trough, Master Kroll knelt beside the main storage tank valves. His heavy wrench shook in his grease-stained fists. The pressure needles on the bronze pipe hub dials were shaking wildly against their stop-pins, hovering at five hundred and twenty pounds of pressure.
For three sleepless nights, Kroll and a dozen village blacksmiths had labored over these pipes, cutting threads into salvaged boiler casing, packing the flanged joints with braided hemp and graphite paste, and bracing the entire assembly against the mountain’s granite spine with heavy oak baulks. A single weak rivet, a single flawed casting. The expanding fiery steam would rip the firing trough into shrapnel, killing every defender on the terrace before the harpoon ever left the cradle.
