The blast wave hit with catastrophic force. The window detonated, filling the room with a hail of razor-sharp glass that tore the curtains to tatters. The floor bucked as though a gargant had kicked it. Eleanora, who had her back to the window, was thrown from the bed to slam into Romilla with a scream. They both hit the back wall hard enough that Romilla had the breath driven from her body and felt a burst of agony as something cracked.

Dust billowed.

The air filled with a muffled whine.

Woozy and half-stunned, Romilla stirred and tried to stand. She gritted her teeth as bone ground together, somewhere inside her chest. Pain was an old acquaintance, however, and the priest ignored the feeling as she disentangled herself from Eleanora. For an instant she feared the worst as she saw blood pouring down the engineer’s face, but a swift check revealed a scalp wound and some bruising, and nothing worse. Eleanora’s eyes were open and wild with panic, but they focused on Romilla well enough.

‘You’ve hit your head, but you’re going to be all right,’ Romilla said. All she heard was a distant suggestion of words, like someone speaking softly through a plaster wall. She realised Eleanora was trying to reply, but that her voice, too, was muffled and unintelligible. Falling back on the practical, Romilla quickly checked them both over for injuries. Aside from the internal break, which she could do nothing about, and a few stinging wounds where flying glass had cut her, she found herself to be more or less in one piece.

Eleanora, too, could have been hurt far worse. Her scalp wound looked nasty, but it was superficial and quickly staunched. The engineer had other small wounds where broken glass had peppered her back and nicked a sliver from one of her ears as it whipped past. Yet her insistence on always wearing the heavy, tanned leather garb of the Ironweld had been her salvation, as the thick material had stopped the majority of the vicious glass projectiles that could otherwise have cut her to ribbons.

Romilla surveyed the ruin of their room, working her jaw to try to encourage sound back into her ears as she did so. The window was a gaping hole, fringed with tatters of curtain. Their bags, the remaining equipment, and most of the chamber’s furniture had been picked up and hurled against the back wall, and now lay in dust-plastered heaps. Romilla’s eyes widened as she took in the heavy cross-beams that had fallen through the half-collapsed ceiling. They had crushed Eleanora’s bed entirely.