The second Furnace Mantis came up through the tower's own foundation at the ninth hour and eleven minutes.
It had walked the culvert line under the eastern quarter for most of the night, which nothing in the Association literature says a Grade Six will do. The first one took a corridor, five zones, four hours, a compressed grade trial, plus a Grade Six strike to put down.
This one was dead in thirty-one minutes, with the man who killed the first one sealed in the strongroom. Nobody has ever suggested the difference was luck, since Blackforge had spent nineteen days making certain it would not be.
Vell was on the eighth floor when the foundation went, with a sealed office door in front of him. The lower stairwells folded into the counting hall inside a minute, so the only people standing on the ground were the two captains already on it.
[Structure: Ivory Guild tower. Lower stairwells: collapsed.]
