The Grand Cathedral of Val-Khorat rose into the bruised sky like a stone-hard mountain of black granite and white Carrara marble.
The massive plaza before the cathedral steps—traditionally the site of the Solstice processions and royal coronations—had been transformed into a fortified death-ground by the Cult of the Restored Dawn.
Around the outer edge of the plaza, forty-foot barricades of un-burned Schismatic giant stone had been thrown up, manned by two hundred grey-hooded cult zealots armed with air-powered heavy steel crossbows and time fire-projectors. The wide marble steps leading to the great bronze portal were crisscrossed with deep trenches filled with bubbling, un-set burning lime powder and razor-sharp tripwires of extruded time glass.
The grand avenue of the cathedral had been widened eighty years ago to accommodate the royal cavalry regiments of the Grand Synod. Today, it was packed from wall to wall with the gathered defiance of a dying city.
At the front of the guild contingent, Master Tanner Bran Vane leaned against a four-foot iron hide-scraper, his yellow-stained beard bristling like an old hound’s. Beside him stood six hundred men: iron-molders from the railway foundries carrying twelve-pound sledgehammers, canal bargemen with heavy boat-hooks, and weavers from the Sun-Crown quarter carrying bronze-shod measuring rods.
