It was a squat grey drum of stone, five storeys high.
Faust had always rather liked it.
It had been built by some Frost ancestor with a fondness for sentries and a profound distrust of neighbours. It stood on the north side of the estate, a little apart, and in the last few days the servants had been sheltering there.
Rita's women.
The old butler.
The cook and her two scullery maids.
Nineteen people in all.
A bright orange flower of fire unfolded from the base of the tower, and the stone groaned, and the whole structure began, very slowly, to lean.
"Powder," said Faust, who knew the smell, sensing the smell with his supernatural nose. "He packed the cellars. Reinhardt—"
But Reinhardt was gone.
The elders had turned toward the fire.
In the confusion, the clever young man with the empty smile had simply stopped being there, taking his valet and his horses and his secrets into the grey dawn.
"They're in there!" Isfrid was already running. "Faust, the maids—"
"I know!"
Faust ran.
He ran as he had not run in eighty years, boots slamming across the frozen lawn, the silver case already in his hand.
He had a collapsing five-storey tower and nineteen people trapped under it, and a deck that gave him whatever it felt like.
He reached the base as the first stones began to fall.
The east wall had already sagged outward.
A section of the roof slid and shattered on the lawn. Through the smoke he could hear women crying, thin and frantic.
'Please,' he thought, and pulled a card.
It was cold.
That was the first thing.
It was a cold he had never felt from the deck before, a clean sharp cold like a splinter of ice. He drew it into the light.
A tall grey tower, split by lightning. Two figures falling from its crown.
[XVI — THE TOWER]
"No," said Faust, aloud. "No, not now, you absurd little—"
It was the voice, then.
Not the Devil's voice.
Not the whisper in his skull.
A different one, dry as old paper, almost amused.
'You asked the wrong question,' said the Tower. 'You asked how to stop it falling. It is already falling. The question is where.'
He stared at the card.
At the tower in his hand and the tower before him, leaning in the smoke.
And he saw.
Now his eye was not merely seeing the stone from above, it was seeing the load, the great hidden lines of force running through the structure like veins in a leaf.
The place where it would break.
The one place, among a thousand, where a single hard strike would tell it which way to fall.
There.
The northeast pier.
A keystone the size of a barrel, already cracked.
"Isfrid!" he roared. "The keystone! Northeast corner, three metres up! Hit it with everything you have!"
Isfrid did not ask why. He sprinted, leaped, and Frost swept down in an arc of white fire.
The keystone shattered.
The Tower fell away.
It fell exactly as Faust had seen it fall.
The whole north face collapsed outward onto the empty lawn in a thunder of stone and dust, and the inner staircase, hanging by a thread, dropped straight into the cellar vault where the servants huddled, scaring them half to death but sparing every one of them.
When the dust settled, nineteen figures covered in dirt and dust crawled from the wreckage, coughing and weeping and alive.
Faust sank onto the frozen grass, the card a dead weight in his hand.
It had lost its cold. It lay warm and still against his palm, the lightning bolt etched in silver.
'Ruin,' said the Tower, softly, as the smoke rolled away. 'Is only a clearing. It is what you build there that matters.'