The ram hit the workshop door with a bone-shaking boom that sent flakes of iron rust raining into Ren’s hair.
“Second high-pressure stroke!” a muffled voice bellowed from the street. “Charge the steam pigtail! Set the wedges against the bottom hinge!”
Ren Vale pressed his shoulder against a backup timber strut, wedging it beneath the oak crossbar. His left knee screamed with sudden, brittle agony. Not the dull ache of strained joint padding. But a sharp, crystal-clear bite that felt like chipped flint grinding inside his knee tendon. He glanced down at his boots, half expecting to see quartz crystals pushing through the cobbler’s seams. His skeleton felt dense, heavy, and terrifyingly unbending.
Across the workshop, beside a stone slurry basin, Artificer Ren was entirely unconcerned with the high-pressure ram battering their threshold.
He had unrolled a three-foot strip of oiled elk-hide across a granite slab. Arranged in neat, razor-sharp rows were thirty-two specialized lapidary instruments. Diamond-tipped scraping blades, tuned steel wedges, brass feeler gauges, horn-handled burnishers, and six tuning forks forged from cold gold-silver metal, each stamped with an exact sound hum.
“Stop leaning on that timber with your collar bone, you idiot,” the Artificer said without looking up, his fingers deftly selecting a three-sided diamond-pointed scraper. “You’re bearing two hundred pounds of crushing force on a skeletal frame that now has the fracture toughness of window glass. If that oak strut kicks back, your collarbone will shatter into twenty-four pieces.”
