The great horn of the hall loosed a long cry, and it was a jagged vibration that tasted of the dread of men.

  The laborers of Karras froze in the aisles, and their soot-stained faces turned toward the central altar of brass. The lie held for the fraction of a breath, but then the watchman by the intake-valves leveled his heavy iron-shod pike.

  "The mummer's play dies here," August growled.

  He grabbed the lapels of the cheap grey wool, and the seams parted with a sharp tear. He stripped the clerk’s coat from his broad shoulders and cast it to the wet flagstones. The heavy Warden-plate beneath caught the fierce, pulsing light of the sphere, a glint of cold steel and polished leather. He reached into the ruined lining of the discarded coat, and his thick fingers found the leather-wrapped haft of the Dweorg hammer. He hauled the black iron free.

  The metal drank the sickly light, heavy and unyielding in his grip.

  "Bar the iron," Bella commanded.

  Her hands were already buried in the exposed copper veins of the brass altar. She gripped a heavy faceplate and drove the heel of her hand against the edge, and the copper screws yielded with the violence of a breaking bone, scattering like musket-shot against the brick walls. She ripped the plate loose and cast it aside.

  "They must not touch these dials," Bella cried, and her eyes tracked the chaotic spin of a dozen pressure-dials. "If they draw the primary lever, the void-pull turns the air in our lungs to fire."

  August stepped backward, and he kicked the heavy iron doors of the control chamber shut. The hinges tore at the air in the torment of fifty years of rust. He dragged the thick steel deadbolt across the track, and the locking pin fell into place with the heavy weight of dead iron.

  "The door will not hold a mob," August said, raising the heavy hammer. "Tell me where to strike the beast."

  "Strike nothing!" Bella commanded. A shower of sparks rained from the brass altar, spraying over her stiff wool dress and singeing the fabric, yet she ignored the smoke and tore a fistful of silver wire from the brass logic-plate. "If you crack the casing, the pull burns us to ash. Bar the iron, and buy me time to read the numbers."

  Heavy fists beat against the outer iron, and a boot struck the metal. The impact shuddered through the small chamber, trembling in the soles of August's boots.

  "Ten counts, you said!" August shouted over the fell crying of the horn. He pressed his shoulder against the door. "The iron bends already!"

  "Then brace it with your back! The root of the cycle I must find." Her eyes flicked across the spinning dials, and her mind locked around the chaotic measures like a steel trap.

  August threw his left shoulder against the heavy door. The metal was freezing, and it sweated with condensation from the steam outside. Another impact struck the exterior, hard enough to rattle his teeth, a heavy wooden timber wielded as a battering ram. He planted his boots on the damp flagstones and lowered his center of weight, and beneath his shirt the clockwork-springs of Bella’s articulated armor compressed against his ribs, absorbing a fraction of the kinetic force.

  "Open the iron, Miller!" the voice of the foreman shouted through the thick metal, stifled and heavy with dread. "The Arch-Mage has eyes on this ward. You hang on the gallows for this!"

  "If I open the iron, you die right now!" August cried back, and his throat was raw from the steam. "Run, you fool!"

  Behind him, Bella cursed. A coarse, gutter-oath, breaking against the sharp clip of her usual speech.

  "He seeks to fold the wave," she murmured. Her fingers bled from the sharp copper edges of the stripped brass, yet she did not cease her toil, and smears of red stained the dials. "He presses it as grapes in a vat, but the Aether is structure, and it demands a foundation."

  "Speak plain!" August shouted.

  The door buckled inward a fraction of an inch, and the heavy wooden beam struck the center of the iron again, sending a heavy, dead impact through the steel plates of his armor and deep into his spine.

  "Give me the measure!" August forced through clenched teeth, shoving his massive weight back against the buckling metal. "How heavy is the fold?"

  "It turns backward upon itself," Bella said. She traced a complex array of glowing glass tubes, and her face was pale in the fierce violet light. "A reverse shear in the current. Karras used sun-stone dust as a primary conductor. It is madness. Sun-stone degrades under such weight, and it creates a ruinous cycle of returning power. A doom-engine he has built, and he called it an Aether-forge."

  "Can you cut the fuel?"

  "The fuel is the air!" she screamed back. "The iron-bellows principle applied to artifice. It breathes the ambient tide. If I sever the intake, the void-pull collapses the casing. We cannot cap the well, August. We must bleed the current into the earth."

  August turned his head, pressing his cheek against the cold, sweating iron of the door, and the floor beneath his boots thrummed.

  "The stone here is terrified," August said. "It will not take a raw charge. It shrinks from the light."

  "It must," Bella replied. She locked her cold eyes upon him. Her face was smeared with black grease and blood, and her jaw was set like carved marble. "You shall make it listen."

  The door hinges protested with a high and tortured tearing of metal, and the laborers outside swung the battering beam a third time. A heavy iron rivet yielded under the pressure, shooting across the room like a musket-ball to shatter against the far brick wall.

  August abandoned the center of the door and let it fall open a hand's breadth. Men yelled outside, pushing forward, but August drove the serrated claw of the Dweorg hammer deep under the gap. He threw his weight upon the haft and wedged the dark iron against the uneven flagstones, locking the heavy door in place against the frame. Wood splintered against iron outside, but the door held.

  He left the hammer there and ran to the screaming heart of the machine.

  The foundation block of the beast was hewn from First Dominion basalt, dead and cold for ten thousand years, but now it boiled. The stone wept a thin layer of condensation that seethed and turned to a scalding mist upon the surface, and the violet light of the sphere above cast long, erratic shadows.

  August dropped to his knees and placed his bare hands flat against the boiling stone.

  The heat blistered his palms instantly. He choked, stifling the stench of his own burning flesh, the smell of pork and lightning, but the heat was nothing compared to the discord within the rock. It was a jagged, hostile measure, the cry of a dying beast chewing off its own leg to escape a snare. The vibration traveled up his forearms, bypassing his muscles, and settled directly into his skull like a host of angry wasps.

  "The pulse strikes at intervals of three!" Bella shouted. She dropped to her knees beside him and grabbed his armored shoulder, her fingers digging into the steel pauldron, ignoring the heat that radiated from the metal. "Can you match the weight?"

  "It burns!" August ground his teeth together until the enamel ached. The veins in his neck stood out like thick cords of rope, and the old scar on his right arm throbbed, an ache flaring to life, the flesh remembering the bite of raw power. "The stone weeps under the pressure."

  "Hold it, August. Be the anchor." Her voice was a steel rod driven through the chaos of his mind. She offered no comfort, only direction. "I shall call the turns. When I say drop, you lower the measure."

  "Tell me the shape of it!" he gasped, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the blinding violet glare of the sphere.

  "A spiral descending. A measure quartered." Bella stared at the trembling needle on the main brass gauge mounted to the side of the housing. "Now!"

  August forced his blood into the stone.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  He did not ask the rock to move, but he commanded it to open, and a visible shockwave ripped through the thick layer of coal-dust upon the floor, expanding outward from his knees in a perfect, rippling circle. He pushed his own vitality into the dead basalt, searching for the jagged, artificial rhythm of the failing Aether.

  "Shift the current!" Bella commanded, and her voice cut through the fury of the driven brass. "Bearing south by the dial. Bleed the pressure!"

  "It fights me," August heaved.

  A spray of dark red blood dotted the pale, steaming stone beneath his hands, for his capillaries burst under the strain of forcing the connection, and a hot, coppery taste flooded his mouth. "There's a heavy cost in the blood."

  "The heat-flow runs backward," Bella snapped. Her eyes tracked the frantic spin of a secondary dial, and her hands flew over the manual release valves. "The primary valves he has bypassed. The core attempts to consume its own exhaust. If we do not open the ground, the void-pull shall draw the walls in. Shift the current south, August!"

  "The grain runs sideways!" August shouted. The pain blinded him, a white-hot spike driven behind his eyes. "It fights the downward pull. There's a knot of quartz in the way."

  "For the grain I care nothing! Break the lattice! Shift the tide south, thirty degrees. Force the current through the flaw."

  "It'll crack the floor!"

  "Let it crack! If the sphere falls, the Foundry goes with it. Three, two, one, pull!"

  August screamed, a guttural sound torn from his chest, primitive and raw. He shoved his power down, bending the tide of the angry Aether, and he forced the massive, pressurized charge into the stubborn grain of the basalt.

  A violent fracture split the air, a breaking of stone that struck the ears like a cannon-shot, louder than the great horn, louder than the men battering the door.

  A jagged fracture spider-webbed across the floor between his blistered hands, and the flagstones heaved upward an inch, grinding against one another with a heavy, earthen protest.

  "Hold the king-stone!" Bella yelled. Her fingers dug harder into his shoulder, and her nails bit into the leather straps of his armor, for she was his only anchor to the physical world, the only weight keeping him from being consumed by the resonance. "Do not let the foundation shatter. Bleed the fifth valve. Route the flow through the feldspar vein. Angle forty-five."

  "I have the current. I hold it." August felt the hot, oily slick of the Aether slip into the physical crack he had forced in the earth, and it flowed like thick, burning sludge.

  "Lock the current there. Do not yield an inch." Bella pulled a heavy iron wrench from the folds of her ruined skirt. She struck a frozen release-valve on the side of the housing, and she broke the brass locking-pin with a shower of sparks.

  The steam vented with the sudden fury of a striking serpent, and a thick, scalding cloud spread directly over their heads, raining condensation down upon them, boiling hot.

  The room shook with brutal force. Loose bricks fell from the domed ceiling, shattering against the exposed brass pipes. August's eyes remained squeezed shut, and a thin line of dark blood ran from his nostril to his chin, dripping onto the collar of his linen shirt. Bella's voice was the only tether keeping him from slipping into the dark. She was pure, brilliant logic, and he was the crude physical extension of her mind. They were a single grim mechanism operating in desperate union. Brain and muscle, math and blood.

  "The pressure builds in the third circulation-ring," Bella ordered. She choked through the thick steam and waved a hand to clear her vision of the dials. "Another shift of the tide. West, thirty degrees. Deepen the measure by half."

  "The ground is deaf," August said, his throat raw. His arms shook with a wild tremor, the muscles jumping and twitching under his skin. "The Aether is too thin. I push mud through a sieve."

  "Push harder! We possess only a count ere the casing warps."

  August bore down. The skin upon his palms tore, and raw meat pressed against the boiling rock. He matched the temper of the beast of iron and breath, finding the ugly, artificial rhythm Karras had built, and he sang a counter-note with his own blood. He shoved the excess energy deep into the earth, forcing the dead stone of the First Dominion to swallow the fire, and it burned his veins, hollowing out his marrow.

  The violet light flared.

  It burned a blinding, impossible white, and it erased the shadows in the room, bleaching the brick walls to the color of bone. The sound peaked, a measure so high it bypassed the ears entirely, shaking the jawbone directly.

  The glass faces of every dial on the brass altar shattered in a single burst, and shards of crystal rained down upon them.

  August braced for the doom. He leaned forward, throwing his broad shoulders over Bella, seeking to cover her with his armored body.

  Then came a sudden, heavy drop in pressure.

  The physical sensation was sickening, a violent absence of weight, as if the air had been drawn from the room and replaced with deep, freezing water.

  The tormented vibration died instantly.

  The blinding white light snapped out, and it left only the dim, sickly yellow glow of the emergency gas-lamps mounted upon the brick walls.

  The silence that followed was heavy, ringing in their ears with a high and piercing tension, and the only sound in the great hall was the angry breath of cooling steam escaping the cracked pipes, and the steady gathering of condensation falling from the domed ceiling. The fall of water. The escape of heat. The solitary strike of moisture upon cold iron.

  The beast was dead. The Aether had been grounded into the deep earth.

  August fell back, and his heavy boots slid upon the wet flagstones. He landed hard upon his back, his chest heaving, his mouth open as he sucked in the metallic air. He held his hands up in the dim yellow light. The palms were raw, blistered red and weeping clear fluid, and strips of dead skin hung from his fingers. The pain was distant, drowned out by the sheer physical exhaustion of the drain, and his bones felt like hollow glass.

  Bella dropped to her knees beside him.

  Her grey wool dress was soaked with sweat and black oil, and the stiff collar was torn open at her throat, revealing the pale skin beneath. Her face was streaked with soot, and her hair escaped its severe pins to hang in damp, tangled strands about her face. She looked down at him, and her chest rose and fell in harsh, ragged breaths.

  She did not hesitate. She reached out and took his raw hands in hers, uncaring of the dirt, uncaring of the blood. Her touch was cool, grounding him to the floor, pulling him back from the hollow void of the resonance.

  "Is it done?" August asked. His voice was a ruin of a rasp, the sound of boots upon gravel.

  "The pressure breaks," Bella said softly. Her eyes tracked the dark, silent sphere above them. "The core sleeps."

  "My hands feel like lead."

  "You held it." Bella squeezed his fingers gently, mindful of the blisters, and her thumb brushed his bloody knuckles. "You held the fire, August."

  "I only pushed where you pointed." He looked up at her, finding her eyes in the gloom.

  The brass washer she wore upon her ring finger caught the dim yellow light of the gas-lamps. It was greasy, cheap, and convincing.

  They sat in the wreckage of the deep-delved laboratory, and the air was thick with the smell of their narrow survival. Ozone and burnt blood. The intense, unspoken relief hung between them, a heavy, physical thing. They had faced the fire, and they had not burned.

  A ruinous collapse of breaking stone shattered the quiet.

  The heavy iron door, which had been wedged open by the Dweorg hammer, was finally forced completely off its upper hinges. It fell inward with the heavy toll of a broken bell, striking the flagstones and sending a harsh vibration through the floor, and the heavy black hammer skittered across the wet stone.

  The Foundry guards rushed in. They held their pikes lowered, and their faces were pale with terror. They expected to find a crater, but they found a ruined brass altar and two miserable clerks sitting in the dirt.

  Before the guards could advance, they were shoved aside with brutal force.

  The heavy, measured tread of iron-shod boots filled the steam-filled hall. Men clad in the black and silver tabards of the Mage Council stepped over the fallen iron door. They moved with a cold, terrifying precision, and their hands glowed with prepared spells. The air about them dropped in temperature as they pulled the ambient Aether into their palms, and frost crystallized upon the brick archway as they passed.

  These were no simple watchmen. These were Vorlag’s elite hosts.

  The guards scattered. They dropped their pikes and pressed themselves against the brick walls, terrified of the magic.

  A Senior Mage stepped forward. His silver-trimmed robes swept over the wet stone, absorbing the puddles of condensation. He was tall, and his face was a sharp, aristocratic mask of disdain. He surveyed the cooled Aether-forge, the shattered glass of the dials, and the deep, jagged crack in the basalt floor where August had forced the current.

  Finally, his cold eyes settled upon the two figures sitting in the wreckage.

  Bella stood. She did not brush the dirt from her dress, but she reached down and pulled August up with her, her hand steady upon his arm. She straightened her ruined, stiff collar, and her spine snapped straight as a plumb-line. In an instant, the terrified girl was gone, replaced by the cold, unyielding mask she wore for the high-born. Ice and architecture.

  The Senior Mage looked at the forged papers scattered upon the floor. The ink was bleeding into the puddles. He looked at the heavy Warden-plate visible beneath the torn rags of August’s coat.

  "You have laid hands upon a forbidden engine," the Senior Mage said. His voice echoed in the damp hall, smooth and dangerous. "By whose warrant do you trespass in this place?"

  Bella met his gaze without flinching. "The warrant of survival we hold. A pyre you lacked the sight to see burning, we have cooled."

  The Mage’s eyes narrowed. He looked at the complex, brutal modifications made to the brass logic-plate, the ripped wires, the exact mechanical precision of the sabotage. Then he looked at the raw, blistered hands of the giant beside her.

  "You are the Artificer," the Senior Mage said softly, and the realization chilled his tone. "And the... mason."

  August stepped forward. He placed himself slightly ahead of Bella, and his heavy boots ground the broken glass into the stone. He did not bow.

  "Tell the Arch-Mage we plugged his leak," August growled, staring the Mage down. "And tell him we need a carriage."

  The Senior Mage stared at them for a long, tense moment. The glowing spells in the hands of the hosts behind him dimmed, flickering out as the Senior Mage raised a single, gloved hand, and the frost upon the archway began to melt.

  "The Council sees what you have wrought here," the Senior Mage said. His voice was devoid of warmth, but heavy with a new, grim respect. It was the sound of a beast of the wild recognizing another. "This day shall not be forgotten."

  He stepped aside. The hosts parted, leaving a clear path through the wreckage to the ruined door.

  August bent down, retrieved his black hammer from the floor, and slipped it into his belt. He took Bella’s arm, guiding her through the ranks of the Council Mages, and they walked out of the doomed laboratory, exhausted, bruised, their muscles trembling with the aftershocks of the Aetheric drain.

  They stepped over the fallen iron door and out into the cold, foggy street of the Foundry. The air tasted of ash and river water. The brass washer felt heavy upon Bella's finger as they moved into the mist, walking straight toward the blinding, grim doom that awaited them.