The subterranean air within the immense cavern felt heavy with grease, powdered sulfur, and the sterile hum of negative gravity.
Crouched in the deep shadow of the colossal dwarven pillar sixty paces above the cavern floor, Gideon and Lyra kept their breathing shallow and measured. Beside them, Lady Talia and the four veteran Void-dancers knelt in absolute silence, their hands resting flat against the cold basalt flags to ground their body-heat into the stone.
Down in the fractured trench, the grotesque quadrupedal Scavengers continued their frantic, jerky labor.
Three dozen of the iron-and-glass arachnids were climbing the sheer western wall of the cavern. Their four elongated limbs ended in spinning drills of white-iron that bit into an exposed vein of pure dwarven star-iron with high-pitched, screaming shrieks that sprayed showers of hot blue sparks across the quartz-crusted floor.
Whenever a five-hundred-pound chunk of raw star-iron was sheared from the rock face, four Scavengers caught the falling boulder with magnetic nets of purple static, scuttling backward on six-foot legs to drag the ore into the cracked hull of the fallen moon-citadel.
Lyra closed her hazel-grey eye, opening the True Loom through her left.
Her sovereign violet sight peeled away the petrified moon-rock of the broken ship.
Deep within the bowels of the two-hundred-pace wreckage, where the anti-gravity engine had once sat, was an immense chamber of living, translucent amber glass twenty paces wide. The chamber was flooded with boiling, milky liquid light that hissed with volatile, ungrounded celestial energy.
Suspended at the center of the liquid was a shape.
It was not a machine.
It was an organic chrysalis, twelve feet long, woven from dense, metallic sinew that pulsed in agonizing sync with the subterranean heartbeat vibrating through the mountain:
THUMP.
THUMP.
Within the translucent membrane of the chrysalis, a silhouette was forming: four colossal wings of folded star-iron, limbs ending in curved, scythe-like talons of weeping void-sapphire, and an elongated, crested skull with three burning, vertical eye-slits.
"A Void-Matron," Lyra whispered, her voice a mere thread of sound that barely traveled an inch beyond Gideon’s ear.
Gideon’s jaw tightened, the cords in his thick neck knotting like forged rope. His thumb traced the hilt of his claymore. "A queen?"
"An architect," Lyra corrected, her hand coming up to touch the silver-red mark beneath his collar. "The Celestial Inquisitor was just a soldier, Gideon. The fleet left this core behind because it carries the genetic archive of their civilization. It's using the dwarven star-iron to gestate a sovereign constructor. If that creature emerges from the cocoon, it won't just rebuild the gravity keel. It will reproduce."
"Thousands of those glass bugs," Talia breathed from the shadows, her hand gripping the shaft of her phosphorus-bolt crossbow. "They'd hollow out the roots of the North like dry wood."
"We don't give it the chance to hatch," Gideon rumbled, his bass vibrating in his chest like an engine.
He leaned close to Lyra, his lips brushing the curve of her ear as his sharp amber-gold eyes mapped the cavern floor with cold, military genius.
"Look at the ceiling," Gideon murmured, pointing a scarred finger up into the darkness above the wreck.
Two hundred feet above the cavern floor, spanning the roof of the chamber, was a colossal dwarven drainage sluice: an immense aqueduct carved from solid granite, six paces wide, supported by four massive stone arches. The sluice had been built four centuries ago to divert the glacial meltwater of the upper Frost-Spires away from the deep mines.
"The aqueduct is dry right now," Gideon said. "Because the northern passes are in mid-summer thaw. But three leagues up that tunnel is the Great Weir of the Iron horn Basin. It’s holding back eighty million gallons of freezing glacial water."
Lyra’s gaze followed his finger, her hazel-grey eye lighting with sudden, brilliant realization.
"A hydraulic breach," she breathed.
"We don't need dragon fire down here, little bird," Gideon whispered, a slow, terrifying predator’s grin touching his scarred face. "Dragon fire will choke us on smoke. But eighty million gallons of sub-zero glacial water dropped from two hundred feet will crack that moon-rock like a dry egg. The thermal shock will shatter the star-glass cocoon into sand, and the flood will wash the wreckage five leagues down into the lightless trenches of the earth."
"And the keystone?" Talia asked, squinting up at the four stone arches supporting the aqueduct. "The dwarven masonry is three paces thick. A keg of black powder won't scratch it."
"A keg of powder won't," Lyra said softly, her violet eye flaring with steady, confident light. "But an inverted Weave-spike will."
She looked at Gideon, her slender hand coming up to cup the back of his neck, her fingers curling into his dark hair.
"You need to draw the swarm, Gideon. The Scavengers have magnetic sensors tuned to celestial energy. The moment I touch that keystone with starlight, all three hundred of them will scale the walls to intercept me."
Gideon reached behind his back, loosening the twin five-foot claymores in their iron back-harness, rolling his massive shoulders until his joints cracked with a sharp, lethal cadence.
"Drawing the swarm is what I do best, Queen of mine," Gideon growled, leaning down to press a hard, bruising kiss against her lips.
He pulled back, his amber eyes burning with unbridled, feral butchery.
"Talia, stay with the Queen on the eastern ledge. Cover her climb with the phosphorus bolts. Once she sets the spike, you get her into the upper ventilation shaft."
"And you, Alpha?" Talia asked, her grip tight on her bow.
Gideon rose to his full, terrifying six-foot-six height in the shadows, drawing both five-foot star-iron blades with twin rings of singing steel that cut through the cavern's metallic drone like diamond.
"I’m going to make some noise."
He stepped out from the shadow of the dwarven pillar onto the edge of the sixty-foot drop.
He didn't search for a staircase.
With a roar that shattered the acoustic drone of the Scavengers into dead silence, the King of the North hurled himself out into the empty air of the cavern, falling like an anvil of iron and fury straight into the center of the swarm below.