The crack of the bone token striking the iron grating was with a deep, underground groan that shook through the very bedrock of the Heavenly River metropolis.
GROOOOOAN.
From the deep sub-basements of the Thousand Treasures Pavilion—far beneath the empty silver vaults, below the water intake channels of the river—came the heavy, rhythmic thud of huge clockwork limbs awakening from three hundred years of cold sleep:
THUMP... THUMP... THUMP.
With every bone-shaking beat, dust motes showered down from the carved rosewood ceiling rafters sixty feet above. The crystal globes lighting up the fourth-floor gallery flickered wildly, their white light dimming to a dark, blood-red emergency glow that bathed the hall in the surreal hues of a charnel house.
The deep, low, deep shaking rising through the floor was not an earthquake. It was the clockwork rhythm of an ancient, eighteen-ton combat iron-puppet whose star-iron joints were moving for the first time in three hundred years. The Precursor high-pressure pumps beneath the sub-basement were screaming under sudden high-voltage power injection, superheating the stone oil in their lines and sending plumes of acrid, blue-tinged smoke billowing up through the floor grates.
Guild Master Jin threw his head back and laughed. A high, screeching cackle of unhinged triumph that echoed off the star-granite walls like the shriek of a dying falcon.
