The silence that fell over the northern pass was louder than any thunderclap.
High above the mountain road, suspended forty paces in the crisp spring air, the royal sky-dreadnought Heavenly Mandate hung motionless. Its sixteen massive floating arrays were dark, cold, and dead, their glowing violet star-fire put out into dull gray melted rock waste. Only the two five-ton star-iron anchor chains held the eighteen-thousand-ton giant beast from plummeting into the roadbed. It shook with a high-pitched, singing hum that set the teeth on edge.
On the road below, the pear-wood frame stand table was covered in fine, gray ash.
The Great Tax Scroll had ceased its wild, violent boiling. The current-carrying red stone-jade ink had fully glass-fused along the thirty-yard margin. That turned into a solid, unreadable ribbon of black glass that locked the country debt directly into the flagship’s fuel registers.
Lord Scribe Wu sat huddled in the mud beside the table, his damask robes smeared with clay, his eyes glazed with the vacant stare of an unsafe man.
“It’s over,” Wu muttered, his fingers plucking aimlessly at the scorched threads of his sash. “The fleet is numbed. The Ministry will send judges. They will strip my family of their old family tombs. They will flay my soul for seven lifetimes.”
