The huge thing spidered over the dusty stone floor, and Gyre, Kit, and the two remaining soldier-constructs followed in its wake. They passed down a short corridor lined with more constructs, low-slung, six-legged, insectoid things of metal and black muscle. Kit eyed them with distrust.

“These guys weren’t willing to come help us outside?” she said.

“They are not yet active,” Naumoriel said. “The constructs here are … different. Without the Core Analytica, they are incomplete.”

“A construct army?” Kit said skeptically. “Is that the power you’ve come to find?”

Naumoriel said nothing.

Gyre had expected the whole mountain to be a maze of tunnels, like Refuge or the ruins under Deepfire. Instead, after only a few minutes, they came up into a much larger space. Much larger, he realized, as he stared around it. Even his silver eye couldn’t make out the ceiling or the far walls. They must have hollowed out half the mountain. They stood on a long walkway, a smooth rock wall to their right, while to their left and ahead of them was …

The scale of it was hard to grasp. A metal plate, stretching below the level of the walkway and up over Gyre’s head. A narrow seam, and then another plate, and another, on and on. Like a building, a fortress, the Spike laid on its side. Gyre was about to ask why the ghouls would build their fortification here when he spotted the curving, jointed shapes in the distance, like …

Legs?

His mouth fell open and stayed there.

It’s a construct. Something like Naumoriel’s war-construct, armored in steel, but vast beyond imagining. The size of a city. A mountain.

“Leviathan,” he whispered.

“Indeed,” Naumoriel said. He’d opened his canopy again, leaning forward to look at the awesome thing with his huge, rheumy eyes. “The greatest project ever created by my kind. The pinnacle of our mastery of dhaka, our power. It has slept here, undisturbed, for four hundred years.”

“This … this is what you’ve been looking for?” said Kit. For once, even she didn’t have a sarcastic remark.

“Of course,” Naumoriel said. “My father led the team that created it. It was designed to assault the Chosen in the heart of their power, to crush their precious city and bring their empire to ruin.”

“What happened?” Gyre said. “Why is it still here?”

“My father was betrayed,” the old ghoul snapped. “Before the Core Analytica could be completed, he was brought down by those who wanted to hide instead of fight. Those who thought it better to cower in the earth while our children were burned like vermin than to strike back and inflict the same pain on our destroyers.