Dawn broke over Crown-Reach like a pale, frozen blade cutting through gray grease.
The blizzard had subsided into a biting, freezing drizzle that coated the upper fifty feet of the Great Sky-Spire in a nonstop, glassy skin of black ice. At five hundred and fifty feet, the tower was no longer an eight-sided room. It was a narrow, tapering spire of solid white marble blocks, scarcely twelve feet in width. It ended in a massive projecting top stone ledge carved with royal laurel wreaths.
Resting atop that top stone ledge, dominating the sky like a huge, menacing bell, sat the Great Bronze Crown of the First Sovereign.
It was eighty tons of cast statuary bronze, twenty-four feet in width and thirty feet high, shaped into an open royal coronet surmounted by eight huge fleur-de-lis and a central globe supporting a gold-trimmed cross. Decades of sky sulfur and river moisture had weathered the bronze to a deep, crusted patina of green rust green, streaked with dark black ribbons where rainwater drained from the cast moldings.
Tomas Reed hung directly beneath the western bearing bracket of the top stone ledge, his boots braced against the ice-slicked marble, his rope harness secured to two heavy steel ice-pitons he had driven into the bed joints with his mason’s hammer.
