The cathedral dome didn’t fall with a roar of tumbling stonework. It fell with music.
When the four huge curved crystal mirrors reached their critical shear threshold at the pitch of glass-like shear, they didn’t shatter into coarse rubble or heavy flat stone slabs. They crumbled into millions of tiny, razor-sharp, many-sided crystal-clear needles that sang with a clear, silver chime as they detached from their brass armatures.
CHING-CHING.
The sound cascade was ear-splitting. It filled the huge limestone cave of the nave with a shimmering, sky chorus. It sounded like an ocean of crystal wine glasses being ground to dust beneath a slow-moving iron wagon wheel.
Then came the blizzard.
A storm of singing quartz needles, lit up by the dying violet embers of the burst liquid silver-vapor boiler, plunged down through ninety paces of empty air. The glass sliced through the ancient silk tapestries hanging from the high window row, snapped the ropes of the great bronze chandeliers. Then he drove deep into the carved oak pews below like a volley of diamond arrows.
The stampeding congregation screamed in terror, diving beneath overturned prie-dieus, scrambling under the heavy oak stalls of the choir, and overturning the massive marble fonts to shield their skulls from the falling needles. Noblemen trampled their own velvet cloaks. High court guards scrambled on their knees through drifts of white quartz dust. Elderly bishops crawled beneath the altar steps. He grabbed their silver crosses as the singing glass shredded the gold-trimmed canopies above them.
Eighty paces above the floor, the Aeterna Monstrance gave its end-post shudder.
BOOM!
The central liquid silver boiler burst.
The bone-shaking explosion blew the main boiler plates twenty paces into the air. It tore the steel narrow high walkway in half with an ear-splitting screech of shearing rivets. A blast of white-hot steam and white-hot brass shrapnel swept the platform clean, shearing through the leftover copper steam channels like scissors through twine.
Judge-Prelate Malachai was lifted off his feet like an unstrung puppet. His golden vestments burning, his arms flailing against the blinding vapor, the High Provost was hurled through the buckled stone railing and plunged sixty feet through the falling glass, crashing directly into the great flaming oil basin on the high altar dais below. A pillar of black, greasy smoke erupted from the font. It carried the scent of burning silk and rendered animal fat into the rafters.
Ren Vale didn’t look at the fallen prelate.
With Brother Ren’s limp, charred body draped across his left shoulder, Ren lunged toward the western mid-air anchor.
The narrow high walkway beneath his boots was folding inward, tilting at a thirty-degree angle as the southern cables snapped. In less than ten seconds, the five-story brass machine would drop like an iron anvil into the center of the nave.
Ren reached into his leather tool satchel. His blistered fingers closed around a heavy iron climbing carabiner he had scavenged from the winch room.
He snapped the forged steel ring over the greased, three-inch balance weight cable that ran from the dome winch down to the western pillar base.
“Hold to my neck, Brother!” Ren roared into the monk’s soot-blackened ear. “Hold with everything you have left!”
Brother Ren’s right arm—the one not wrapped in melted lead melted rock waste—hooked feebly around Ren’s throat. His blistered fingers locked into the wool collar of Ren’s tunic.
Ren wrapped both arms around the monk’s waist, kicked wildly off from the collapsing steel overhead frame. Then he swung out into the eighty-pace void.
SKRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
The careful audit registered with contractual care: Basilica of Dawn. Structure: Lantern Dome & Aeterna Monstrance Mid-air. Failure Vector: Harmonic Vitric Shear (a deep hum) / Boiler Ruptu. Casualty Status: Judge-Prelate Malachai Liquidated. Descent Path: Western Counterweight Cable (80-Pace Slide). outer edge Status: Mutinous Justiciars Secure Lower Sluice Gat.
The iron carabiner shrieked along the greased steel cable, throwing blinding showers of orange friction-sparks into the darkness as they hurtled downward through the falling glass.
The wind was a freezing knife against Ren’s burned face. Shards of falling quartz sliced through his linen sleeves, scoring long, bleeding gashes across his shoulders and cheekbones. But the lead sleeve of his reforged awl, tucked tight against his ribs, absorbed the surrounding static charge that whipped through the air.
Below them, the floor rushed upward with terrifying speed.
Fifty paces. Thirty paces. Twenty paces.
Ten paces above the marble floor, the balance weight cable hit its end-post snub-pulley.
SNAP!
The cable jerked taut, arresting their upright plunge and swinging them in a massive, swinging weight arc across the western cross-hall.
Ren kicked his heavy cobbler’s boots forward, bracing his legs as they slammed into an overturned oak confessional box. The seasoned timber shattered with a splintering crash that absorbed their leftover moving driving force. Ren rolled across the marble floorboards on his right shoulder. That kept his own body between the hard stone flags and Brother Ren’s broken, fragile ribs.
They slid ten paces across the glass-carpeted marble, coming to a halt in the shadow of the great western portal.
Ren lay on his back, gasping for air, his blistered lungs burning with quartz dust and cold draft.
Above them, with a titanic, earth-shaking CRASH, the five-story Aeterna Monstrance broke its final mid-air chains and plummeted into the center of the grand nave. The impact crushed sixty rows of carved oak pews, cracked the limestone foundation flags three feet deep. Then he sent a blast wave through the cathedral walls that blew out every leftover pane of stained glass along the lower aisles.
A thick, white cloud of crushed quartz and plaster dust rolled across the nave like an avalanche.
Through the fog, a familiar dark shape emerged from behind a carved stone pillar.
Vane Vale walked toward them, his velvet frock coat torn at the elbow and dusted with white plaster. His ivory-headed walking cane was tucked beneath his arm. In his right hand, the Merchant held his pocket brass counting frame, his fingers flicking the counters with furious, agitated care.
Clack-clack.
“A fully un-audited descent!” Vane snapped, coughing through the white quartz fog. “Zero safety margin! No backup arrest harness! If that carabiner had experienced metalworking fatigue, Ren, our liquidated assets would have been scrubbed off this floor with a wire brush!”
Ren pushed himself up onto his knees, spitting blood and dust. “The Monstrance is down, Vane.”
“I’m well aware it’s down!” Vane snapped back, gesturing with his cane at the smoking five-story crater in the middle of the church. “Its market value is now exactly zero sovereigns! We have created twenty thousand tons of raw scrap brass and sixty thousand square feet of dangerous quartz dust waste, with exactly zero salvage contracts signed in advance! Plus, my frock coat is ruined. This velvet was imported from the Lower Reach and cost four silver crowns per yard!”
Behind Vane, Sergeant Justin stepped out from the cross-hall shadows, leading twelve mutinous Justiciar Knights who had discarded their white church surcoats. Their broadswords were drawn, their steel breastplates smeared with soot. They formed an iron-hard defensive ring around the western side-doors.
“The nave is clear, Conservator,” Justin said, his voice deep and steady beneath his visor. “The congregation has fled into the northern streets. The town watch is overwhelmed by the panic. Malachai’s body has been recovered from the font by the court guards. But he will speak no more warrants. The path to the lower drainage water gates is open.”
Ren looked down at Brother Ren.
The Disgraced Saint lay upon the marble floor, his head resting against a splinter of oak. The charred skin across his chest was weeping clear serum. His breathing was shallow, faint, but steady. The melted lead from his basin had cooled into a thick, dull grey gauntlet that covered his left forearm and hand, shielding the scarred flesh beneath like a second skin.
Through the soot on his eyelids, Brother Ren opened his grey eyes. He looked up through the shattered dome at the quiet winter stars shining in the night sky.
“The bells...” the monk whispered, his cracked lips trembling. “They have stopped.”
“They have stopped, Brother,” Ren said gently, lifting the monk’s right arm over his shoulder. “The church has fallen silent.”
Mira stepped through the western archway, with Father Garrow and twenty armed lepers from the lower wells. Her right arm—smoky quartz from shoulder to fingertip—gleamed softly in the starlight. It hummed with that faint, melodic deep ring. She rushed to Brother Ren’s side, her nimble left hand checking the pulse at his throat.
“He’s burning with fever, Ren,” Mira said, her voice tight with concern. “The wounds... He absorbed everything the machine threw at you. The heat in his chest is like an oven.”
“We move now,” Ren said, getting to his feet with Justin’s help. “Before the High Synod’s cavalry arrives from the upper cantonments. Into the sunken water gates. We take the barges to the Blackwater River.”
Vane tucked his counting frame into his waistcoat with a heavy sigh. “Very well. But I’m recording the barge toll as an advance against future running capital.”
They turned toward the dark stone arch of the drainage stairs. That left the burning ruin of the Basilica behind them.
The damp underground stair was slick with river algae, but neither man slowed his descent. Behind them, the roar of the cathedral fire died to a sullen rumble, muffled by thirty feet of ancient foundation granite. Ren looked down at his salt-stained hands. He felt the phantom heat of Brother Ren’s wounds pulsing through the sympathetic bond. Every step away from the basin was a step toward the frontier guard posts, where iron oaths and silent guards replaced the holy deceit of priests.