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that it was necessary for someone to be in there to check the readings. He, on
the other hand, was standing right between the fettered rockface and the
driving pistons, holding the lanyard of rope which would release the new
shackle from its temporary wooden cradle above the old one. The two women were
beside him, still working. For the extraordinary thing was how quickly their
spells faded;
like ink into blotting paper, spit on a hot stone. That chalcedony, for all
the power it contained, was sucking in more and more magic through its woven
casing. Kate was on the far side of the mechanism, leaning over the swell of
her belly in a way that gave Durry a brief pang, and Mary was on his side of
it.
Durry studied his pocket watch as the second hand beat towards the hour of
three. He glanced back along the pounding tubes towards the brick igloo and
saw Harrat raise a thumb through one of the portholes. Durry's fingers
tightened. Mary Borrows, sensing the coming moment, stepped back a little,
tripping slightly as she did so. Kate continued working. SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM. The moment was perfect, and he pulled the rope.
The new shackle dropped beautifully in the shuddering pause between the beats,
falling and displacing the old one with precision and a certainty beyond the
mere pull of gravity. The old device shattered on the stained concrete in a
tumbling spray of steel and silk, whispering up in smoke. Fragments of its
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metal spun around them and Durry heard
Mary Borrows give a small gasp. But the new shackle fitted instantly,
wonderfully, into its cradle, and its chalcedony glowed. The whole moment was
such a triumph and the stillness which followed seemed so right, that even
Aethermaster Edward Durry's senses were momentarily bewitched. But the silence
held. The engines, without a single moment of slowing or hesitation, had
stopped beating.
Several things, then, happened at once. Those three perfect pistons, solidly
aethered, could halt more easily from one moment to the next than the hands of
his watch. But they were powered through the great axle from Engine Floor
above. In stopping, their pistons drove that force back up. Durry heard, felt,
the long, solid axle sheer and give, sheer and give, all the way up through
the rock towards the surface. But those many fractures weren't enough. From up
top, the silence was rent by a series of earthquake detonations.
But the other thing which happened was that the glow of the chalcedony, which
was already searing, increased. Spires of light broke out through the shackle,
solid as polished steel. Somehow, without moving, they revolved, focused,
pulsed. The scene would have been beautiful were it not too quick and too
terrible for his dazed senses to understand. Then, like a snake coiling, like
the snap of a chain gone wild, the glow turned in on itself, burst in a silent
thunderclap and regathered as a glowing sphere some new, unrecorded state of
aether
which drove upwards and out across Central Floor at the exact point where Kate
was standing with such wyrebrightness that Durry was sure he saw the shine of
her bones, the grin of her skull, the beat of her blood and the shape of her
baby. Then it puffed out. And was gone.
But for the tick of astonished dials, lower floor was silent. The chalcedony
had lost almost all of its glow. Kate was just standing there looking shocked
whilst Mary Borrows was sucking at a cut on the heel of her palm. They all
stepped away, still gazing at the stilled pistons as
Harrat stumbled from the igloo. They moved first towards the lift, which had
lost all power, then found the iron stairway of the emergency route.
All the people of Bracebridge stopped what they were doing at three o'clock on
that July Halfshiftday in the 75th year of the Third Age.
Dogs began barking. Babies cried. Slates slithered from roofs. The old
Ropeworkers' tower and several other of the town's frailer buildings collapsed
in pale sighs of dust. Black-white plumes poured up from the crackling ruin of
Engine Floor as the whole town rushed towards those famous gates with their
friezes of Providence and Mercy. Word, as
Aethermaster Edward Durry's fellow gangsmen instinctively sought each other
out, quickly spread that he'd been down there alone.
But as the first figures of the steamworkers emerged bleeding, coughing from
the smoking wreckage, Edward Durry shrugged off the questioning hands and
drove into that spilling heat. Truly, that afternoon, he was a man possessed.
He saved six, eight men. He lifted up one of the fallen main beams
single-handed. He moved through the ruins with the strength of an automaton,
although, as the heat beat against him, his flesh became as blistered and
smoking as the men he'd rescued. He was almost a hero and the story was that
they'd finally had to hold him, strap him to a stretcher, when they'd given up
screaming at him that there was no one left to save.
But most of Edward Durry was already gone by then. He understood, in the
instant after the one when the engines stopped beating, that he'd betrayed his
guild in the grossest possible way, and that he was ruined. When he awoke to
the smell of mop buckets and bleached laundry and the slippery stick of pain
in the astonishing, engineless quiet of Bracebridge's Manor Hospital, he was
already the
Potato Man. He was in a ward with three other men. They took it in turns to
scream. Oddly, for him, there was less pain, although the figure who was
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sitting beside him in a spill of summer moonlight seemed so dark and powerful
that for a moment he almost cried out. But it was only Grandmaster Harrat.
Harrat was in tears, offering limp apologies. Just like Kate and
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