The Hollow Cathedral

Most of them got free. Nobody counted the ones who didn't. When the great clock stopped, the bound souls of Hollowmere rose up out of the copper and went wherever it is that names go. That is the story the city tells itself now, six weeks on, huddled around wood fires in a dark where the trams and the foundries and the heated floors have all gone quiet. It is not the whole story. The ones threaded deepest, bound longest, wired into lines laid before the Expansion, did not rise. The way out was never built to reach that far down. They frayed instead. There are hundreds of them still in the cooling conduit under the cobbles, not released and not dead, and the Church never troubled to write a word for what they are. Cal Vane burned out his gift to stop the machine and has a shaking hand to show for it. He cannot hear them. Soot can. And something down in the deep wire has begun testing the lines, a slow hungry pulse feeling for whatever is left, and the lost have learned to go silent when it comes. Above the Ash Quarter, a Dissenting cleric named Maren Soldt walks into a dark corridor carrying a candle and eleven years of preparation, and says, to nobody at all, *we begin anyway.* In a room at the Weaver's Rest, Kira Marsh's body goes on breathing while the rest of her is somewhere in the Escapement Wheel, still reaching for her son. And in the Cathedral, the Arch-Cogitant has an offer. One quiet word in the right ear and Cal's brother withdraws the incompetence claim, the Vane inheritance is safe, and the truth about the machine stays exactly where it is. The city would only burn if it knew. **The Hollow Cathedral** is Book Two of the Hollow Clock Saga. Read after The Hollow Clock. Free to read in Kindle Unlimited. - Gothic gaslamp fantasy with a slow-burn M/M romance at its center - A dead architect reassembling himself out of the city's own copper - The price of a rescue that only half worked - Book Two of three. The trilogy finishes in The Hollow City.