The sound of the pendulums didn’t enter through the ears. It entered through the teeth.
Two miles down in the depression, the air was dense with a sound shaking so heavy that every breath in felt like pulling cold liquid silver into the lungs. High above the black fiery curtain wall, the twelve huge bronze overhead frame arms swung their iron balance weights back and forth across sixty-degree arcs.
THWUMMM... VIBRATE.
THWUMMM... VIBRATE.
Every pass of a swinging weight displaced forty tons of air. On the salt flats below, the fine grey dust didn’t lie flat. It arranged itself into sharp, shifting sharp-angled ridges. Fine, detailed, circular Chladni figures that formed, dissolved. Then he reformed with every stroke of the clockwork escapements.
Ren-the-Cinder lay flat on his stomach in a shallow furrow of salt, his grease-stained grey cowl pulled down over his eyebrows.
In his right hand, the Coward held his Exit Compass, the needle spinning with wild, uneven twitches like a dying hornet trapped beneath a drinking glass. In his left hand, he held a twelve-inch steel knitting needle wrapped in copper wire. It he pressed delicately into the salt six inches ahead of his chin every three seconds.
