Motif · Book 7, This Inevitable Ruin

The city defence towers

Larracos's hundred-odd towers — red-jewelled fire lances, green poison, black gale strikes, yellow hobble goo — which spin up when Carl bombs the Piccadilly and lock on to him with Inexorable: 'It will not stop firing on you until one of you is paste.'

Segment appearances

• Chapter 50 — The Temple of the Dagda
• Chapter 69 — Interlude — Several days earlier; Interlude — Rosetta; Zarogoths
• Chapter 70 — City of Broken Dreams
• Chapter 71 — Donkey Kong
• Chapter 72 — Diah
• Chapter 73 — An act of fiendish cruelty
• Chapter 75 — Stayfast Ink
• Chapter 76 — The Oak Fell
• Chapter 77 — Not yet
• Chapter 78 — The Scavenger's daughter is with us now

Progression

Britney learns the system with its diggers (ch. 11); whoever holds the throne room runs it (ch. 1); the war mages inherit it for half an hour's grace (ch. 68). Tower 22, red-jewelled, ten Fire Lances a second (ch. 70); Carl's bombs turn them on; a black gale tower locks on with Inexorable and digs a ditch under him (ch. 71); Donut snipes them one by one (ch. 73); Lucia's net drinks their leaked power (ch. 75). They go inert when the mages abandon the castle (ch. 77).