The silence that settled over the Shattered Crucible in the wake of the Man Who Returned’s ultimatum was heavier than the granite vault above them.
Across the broken nave, the nineteen summons lay or knelt in varying states of dissolving. They didn’t bleed mortal blood. Their spiritual matrices were leaking pale, rainbow-bright vapour that pooled in the hollows between flat stone slabs. They smelled faintly of incense, machine oil, scorched parchment, and damp earth.
Ren Prime knelt in the center of the debris. His mammoth ivory awl was held loosely between fingers that trembled with body tiredness. His apron was stiff with dried sweat and dark oak-ink. Every muscle in his back screamed from the strain of the block. The silver tip of his awl was blackened, its ivory shaft etched with hairline stress fractures from the impact with the gold-silver metal shard.
Beside him, Mira sat on a toppled stone base of dark rock. She had wrapped her torn left palm in a strip of linen torn from her smock, using her teeth and her right quartz fingers to knot the bandage tight. Her breathing had steadied. But the pure silver deep ring in her crystal-clear collarbone had deepened into a low, mournful drone. It shook through the stone like a distant cello.
