Mira Vale sang.
Her lips were pressed against the cold, carved mouthpiece of the sight white spar-stone horn.
She didn’t close her eyes against the storm of blue static-electric fire dancing along the rim of the emery wheel. She didn’t look at the heavy bronze control pulpit where Arch-Lapidary Kael was screaming curses and hauling madly on the turbine bypass levers.
She looked straight down the length of the semi-clear Iceland spar barrel. She let the glass-like shear chord fill her throat.
It was the same pure, steady note her mother had hummed over boiling cabbage on winter evenings in the Outer Sinks. The same melodic shaking that had sustained her through months of terrifying turning to stone as quartz veins crept up her arm.
Now, stripped of all disease, freed from uneven sour note by Artificer Ren’s razor-sharp micropolishing, her singing heart operated not as a tumor, but as an engine of total, ringing order.
The sound pulse entered the narrow intake of the horn.
Inside the trigonal crystal lattice of the Iceland spar, the physics of double refraction took hold. The ordinary wave traveled along the central bore. The extraordinary wave was bent along the seventy-four-degree rhombohedral cleavage boundaries.
