Arch-Lapidary Kael didn’t lower the hammer.
A manic, frantic fury twisted his high-born features into a mask of pure desperation. To a man who had ruled Ostraka from behind gold-trimmed stone railings for forty years, the notion that an assistant clerk and five hundred slurry-workers could dictate terms on his private cutting floor was an obscenity beyond understanding.
“You have no power here, clerk!” Kael shrieked, his voice straining against the ten-thousand-RPM scream of the wheel. “The stone obeys only the hand that strikes it!”
With all the strength in his wiry, silk-clad shoulders, Kael brought the two-handed hammer of black star-fallen iron down toward the Master Cleavage Wedge.
The foot-long chisel of black diamond was aimed directly at the center of Mira’s exposed heart-sac. At the glowing, faceted quartz node that hummed with the glass-like shear chord of her life.
If that hammer completed its arc, forty thousand pounds of focused striking force would drive the black diamond through her ribs, cleaving her heart into twelve dead, polished sectors.
Ren Vale couldn’t lift his left arm. He couldn’t throw his own fragile body across the table. The impact of Kael’s hammer would have shattered Ren’s quartz skeleton into unrecoverable dust.
