The dawn over Mount Khor-Vann didn’t bring warmth. It brought light to a slaughterhouse of iron.
At half past seven in the morning, the first pale rays of the autumn sun sliced through the thick sulfur clouds, painting the jagged granite crags in shades of dull bronze and cold ash. The wind, which had howled with hurricane fury throughout the night, died down to a bitter mountain breeze that carried the reek of scorched animal fat, sulfur ash, and crushed brick across the launch terrace of Cloud-Rest.
Down in the four-thousand-foot deep pit of the Cloud-Cleft canyon, the pride of the Grand Senate lay shattered.
A huge column of greasy black smoke, dense as boiled tar and five hundred yards wide, rose straight from the canyon floor toward the morning sky. At the base of that pillar lay the twisted, burning carcass of the Vitreous Giant beast. Her silver-mirrored armor plates were scattered across two miles of broken dark rock boulders like discarded tin foil. Her three thirty-foot bronze propellers were buried deep in a landslide of shattered rock, while twelve thousand pounds of boiler iron smoldered in pools of molten glass.
Heat updrafts from the burning wreckage drifted up the face of the cliff, carrying charred scraps of silk navigation charts, shredded velvet tapestries, and flakes of white ash that settled over the low roof walls like a mocking snow.
