As though in answer, the shaking increased. The tremors ran up through her chair, seeming to vibrate through her bones. From somewhere else in the guildhouse, Eleanora heard a muffled bang. Someone’s volatile experiment going wrong, she thought. Distantly, she heard running feet, and a voice yelling about fire. Yet her attention was drawn back to her workbench, where the cogs and wires, and even her tools, were engaged in some sort of strange dance.

Eleanora watched in rapt fascination as small metal components drifted free of the desk and floated gracefully into the air. They wobbled on obscure trajectories, spiralling around one another as a constellation of wire and metal and glass rose in slow motion from her workbench to fill the air before her.

Another jolt shot through the chamber and Eleanora let out a shriek of surprise as the violent motion toppled her chair, and her with it. The next instant the air was full of hurtling metal shards, and she screamed again as hot pain blossomed across her back.

Panicked, uncomprehending, Eleanora scrambled on all fours beneath her workbench. Only then did she grope at her back and find small, cold objects embedded there. She hissed and whipped her hand away. Her fingers were red with blood.

The floating metal. It had, what, exploded? But no, she realised. It hadn’t exploded. As she stared out from under her workbench with wide eyes, Eleanora realised that only her fall had saved her life. Across the chamber, cogs, wires, tools, bolts and glass had struck the far wall with enough force to embed themselves. Wrought in wreckage was a crude face ten feet wide, arcing outwards on one side, curving concave on the other so that it resembled some great leering moon. And its eyes… Eleanora stared fearfully across the chamber, into the same eyes that had cursed her dreams since the night before they came to Draconium.

‘The eyes that see into your soul,’ she whispered.

It was a good ten minutes before Eleanora gathered the nerve to emerge from under her workbench, and another twenty before she could finally bring herself to start prising shrapnel from her back, and then the wall.

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

BLAME

The common room of the Drake’s Crown had become less crowded with each passing night. Where before folk had sought company and tried to reassure one another in bluff tones that all was well, the endless days of driving rain and ill omens had dampened all but the most ardent spirits. Hendrick suspected that most Draconium citizens who didn’t have to be out of doors were huddled in their homes, doing their best to keep the rainwater out and a semblance of heat in. He felt a certain sympathy for the poorer folks down in Rookswatch and Docksflow, not to mention the Slump.