The chamber before the vault of the Weeping Cistern was a circular arena thirty paces wide, floored in polished white marble that had been scored and pitted by the tracks of heavy iron treads.
In the center of the arena stood the guardian.
It didn’t look like a statue. It was an engine of holy execution.
Eight feet tall, forged from blackened boiler iron two inches thick, the Reliquary Golem of Saint Eleazar rested upon a heavy cast-bronze stone stand. Its torso was shaped like an exaggerated, hollow ribs, inside of which burned an internal coal fire that bathed the arena in a sullen, cherry-red glow.
Suspended within the glowing ribs. It was wrapped in a sealed sphere of leaded quartz crystal, rested the relic that powered its clockwork animation. The desiccated, embalmed heart of Saint Eleazar the Unbroken, still beating with slow, clockwork rhythm at sixty pulses per minute. He drove high-pressure valves that hissed with high-pressure steam.
In place of hands, the iron-puppet was fitted with two massive, flanged iron maces, their four-inch steel fins crusted with hundreds of years of dried blood.
As Ren, Vane, and Brother Ren stepped across the marble threshold, the golem’s steam valves hissed.
PFFFFFT.
Two copper sound horns mounted upon its iron shoulders rotated with a sharp, clockwork clatter. The internal brass pistons of its hearing array engaged. It tracked the sound of their footsteps on the stone.
The arcane gearwork groaned as its internal array engaged: Eleazar-Four. Main Relic: Embalmed Heart of Saint Eleazar the Unbroken. Targeting Matrix: Living Acoustic Pulse (>80 BPM). Weaponry: Dual Heavy Kinetic Crushing Flanges. Legal Mandate: Total physical Total ruin of Heretical Core.
“Targeting matrix,” Vane whispered, freezing mid-step, his cane locked against the floor. “The deacon wasn’t exaggerating. It tracks heart pulse rate. Ren, your heart is currently beating at one hundred and ten beats per minute. If you take three steps, it will reduce you to strawberry jam.”
“What about Brother Ren?” Ren whispered back, keeping his breathing as shallow as possible.
Vane looked at the monk.
Brother Ren stood calmly in his ragged habit, his cracked lead basin resting against his thigh, his breathing slow and rhythmic. His scarred chest rose and fell with total, unnatural peace. His pulse, disciplined by decades of absorbing mortal fever, sat at an unrushed fifty-two beats per minute.
“Targeting error,” Vane muttered, a sharp grin touching his lips. “To the iron-puppet’s sound sensors, the monk is legally a corpse.”
The golem’s steam exhaust roared.
BOOM!
The eight-foot machine leaped from its bronze stone stand with terrifying speed. Its iron treads struck the marble with a bone-shaking crash that sent cracks spiderwebbing through the white stone. The right flanged mace swung in a wide, whistling arc, aimed dead at Ren’s chest.
Ren couldn’t move. The sheer shifted weight of air was choking. The speed of the three-ton iron-puppet was impossible for mortal reflexes to evade.
Brother Ren stepped forward.
He didn’t draw a blade. He didn’t run. He stepped directly into the path of the whistling iron pipe rim, raising both scarred forearms in a cross-block before his chest.
CRACK!
The impact sounded like an anvil falling from a bell tower.
The three-hundred-pound iron mace struck Brother Ren’s forearms with enough striking force to shatter an oak tree. The stone beneath the monk’s linen-wrapped feet crumbled into white powder. His habit shredded along the shoulders as the blasting blast wave tore through his frame.
Both of Brother Ren’s forearm bone bones snapped with a sickening, heard crunch.
Yet he didn’t fall.
Martyr’s Osmosis: Slamming Absorption.
Brother Ren’s eyes widened, his pupils flaring with silver light. His mouth opened in a silent, painful gasp as his living engine took the massive moving load of the impact and forced it through his cellular structure.
The bones of his arms shattered—and right away knit back together with a wet, grinding scrape of calcium, leaving thick, purple keloid ridges where the fractures had been. The striking force didn’t rebound. It was swallowed by his meat, venting from his skin in a cloud of scalding, rotten-egg steam that hissed through the fabric of his habit.
“Ren!” Brother Ren choked out, his scarred fingers locking around the steel flanges of the mace. He held the three-ton iron-puppet in place with the sheer, impossible strength of absorbed driving force. “The... The charter! The spine!”
The golem roared, its left flanged mace rising to crush the monk’s skull.
Vane Vale suddenly darted across the marble floor, snatching a heavy bronze candle-stand from the wall. “Hey! Iron pot! Over here!” Vane shouted, hurling the bronze stand with all his might directly into the golem’s sound horn.
The bronze clanged against the horn with an ear-splitting ring. The iron-puppet shuddered, its hearing array overloaded by the sudden ringing spike, its left mace hesitating for three vital seconds.
Ren didn’t hesitate.
He lunged past the flaring fire of the golem’s ribs, sliding across the shattered marble on his knees. He circled behind the iron monster, his mammoth bone awl gripped in both hands.
Bolted to the iron-puppet’s bronze spine was its main running charter. A six-inch plate of cured thick parchment wrapped beneath a sheet of leaded glass, inscribed with the legal binding covenants of the First High court.
Ren drove the silver needle of his awl through the glass.
SHATTER!
The leaded glass exploded into shards. The silver metal ring of the awl bit directly into the thick parchment, channeling Ren’s own blood and careful fury into the central running clause:
Clause Zero: Immediate revocation of ecclesiastical turf!
Execution: Nullify the heart proxy! Sever the steam valves!
Ren dragged the ivory point across the ancient scripture, slicing through the sacred notary seal with a bone-shaking spark of purple fire.
HSSSSSSSSSSSS!
The golem’s internal boiler shrieked.
The embalmed heart of Saint Eleazar inside the quartz sphere shuddered, missed three beats. Then he locked in eternal diastole. The high-pressure steam valves burst along the iron-puppet’s shoulders, venting a blinding cloud of white vapor into the vaulted chamber.
The huge iron machine went limp.
The left flanged mace, poised two inches above Brother Ren’s temple, froze in mid-air. The red glow in its iron ribs faded to a dull, dead orange.
The three-ton iron-puppet toppled forward with an ear-splitting crash, hitting the marble floor like a fallen cathedral pillar.
Brother Ren stood swaying in the steam, his burlap habit drenched in sweat and dark blood, his forearms swollen and purple from two dozen compound fractures that had forced themselves closed.
He looked down at the fallen machine, then at Ren, his breathing ragged and wet.
“The gate is open, little brother,” the monk whispered, wiping blood from his chin.
Ren rose from his knees, his mammoth bone awl smoking faintly in his grip. He stepped over the wreckage of the iron golem and pushed through the heavy oak doors.
Beyond lay the Weeping Cistern.
The ear-splitting clang of the golem’s collapse echoed through the circular arena. It shook hundreds of years of dust from the vaulted ceiling.
Vane Vale emerged from behind a shattered marble sarcophagus, coughing in the swirling clouds of steam. He picked up his ivory-tipped cane from the debris, inspected the metal ring for scratches. Then he dusted the knees of his trousers with dramatic disgust.
“A thoroughly undignified engagement,” Vane grumbled, his voice shaking slightly with leftover fight-or-flight rush. “I threw a bronze candle-stand worth eighty sovereigns at a boiler engine. If that iron-puppet had swung four inches to the left, my counting frame would have been flattened into brass foil.”
Ren knelt beside Brother Ren in the hissing steam.
The monk was seated on the cracked marble floor, his back propped against the golem’s overturned iron shoulder. Both of his forearms were swollen to twice their normal thickness, dark purple with under-skin hematomas where the blasting blast wave of the three-hundred-pound mace had been absorbed. Yet even as Ren watched, the purple discoloration was slowly receding, drawn downward into the cracked lead basin that sat between the monk’s bare feet.
The water inside the lead basin was bubbling, thick with oily black scurf that hissed against the metal rim.
“Brother,” Ren whispered, his hand hovering over the monk’s ruined arms. “Can you stand?”
Brother Ren opened his eyes. The silver flecks in his grey pupils had steadied, returning to that calm, terrifying gentleness. He bent his calloused fingers. The fractured bones in his forearms clicked with a wet, grinding sound, setting themselves into rigid posture.
“The bones have learned their lesson, Ren,” the monk whispered, his voice hoarse but fully steady. “A martyr’s meat doesn’t hold a grudge against iron. Help me up. The children are on the other side of that timber.”
Vane stepped over the shattered clockwork gears, his cane clicking against the iron tread. “The steam release will drop the pressure across the entire sub-level. The temple watch will notice the valve drop in less than five minutes. If we’re entering the water tank, we enter now.”
Ren took Brother Ren’s scarred hand and hauled him to his feet. Together with Vane, they approached the massive double doors of the Weeping Cistern.
Ren placed his greased lambskin gloves against the oak timbers. With a slow, heavy groan of rusted iron hinges, the doors swung inward into the darkness.