The mountain shivered like a dying beast.
Deep beneath the corundum melted rock waste floor of the tiered arena, the water-hammer blast waves were already exploding.
The two-ton cold-iron axle had snapped. Then, the million-gallon torrent of diverted river water that drove the twin Pelton turbines had nowhere left to discharge. The striking force of ten thousand tons of surging mountain water slammed wildly into the closed bronze gate-casings. That created pressure spikes that exceeded ten thousand pounds of pressure.
A series of muffled, underground thuds rolled through the bedrock. The sound of four-foot cast-iron water chutes bursting like dried seed pods under the pressure.
Along the outer edge walls of the tiered arena, cracks thick as a man’s thigh shot up through the twelve stories of white Carrara marble. The gold-trimmed bronze stone railings warped and snapped off, tumbling down into the lower galleries with thunderous clatter.
Across the smoking crater of diamond dust, Arch-Lapidary Kael clung to the iron dog-latch of the emergency drainage water gate.
His face was blackened with soot, his silver hair soaked in blood, his silk robes shredded into crimson ribbons. A broken marble top door beam had crushed his left hip. But he held an iron pry-bar in his bloody hands, jamming it into the teeth of the emergency release gear to prevent it from resetting.
