The Starving Wedge

How many horse lengths of iron remained between her starving rear guard and the bottomless black below?

Mielikki Valtainen wiped grease and spattered tallow from her visor slit, her boots skidding across the frosted rivet heads of Mooring Link 409-West. Behind her, the three iron-banded supply carts they had just seized from the overrun League barricade groaned under the weight of salted barley sacks—the only provisions keeping forty-one steppe-pikemen from eating their own scabbards. Ahead, down the curved spine of the iron mooring chain, eighteen barded destriers were building a catastrophic gallop.

The Iron-Girdle League had not abandoned the link. They had merely traded broken footmen for plated shock cavalry.

A pulsing crimson banner scrolled across the corner of Mielikki’s vision.

"Brace wedges!" Jalo shouted, his young voice cracking against the whistling updraft of the void. "They’re riding three abreast! They’ll bowl us into the drop!"

"They will if you stand on the crown," Mielikki snapped, her voice cutting through the thundering iron vibrations beneath their boots. "Pikes down to the gutter seam! Now!"

The iron chain links were twenty paces wide, cast with a rounded, convex crest that dropped sharply toward grease-slicked lateral edges. Charging cavalry owned the crest; their heavy steel bards gave them downward mass, but mass on a curve had an unforgiving flaw.

Mielikki dropped into a low crouch, planting the spiked butt of her eight-foot ash pike directly into the recessed channel between two massive plate rivets. Her shoulder muscles burned with the dull, hollow ache of a two-day fast, but as she locked her elbows, the brand-new gold sigil of her Tier-2 promotion flared behind her collarbone.

A cold surge of adrenaline flooded her limbs, numbing the gnawing cramp in her belly.

"First rank, knee to rivet!" she roared. "Angle sixty degrees left! Let their own iron shove them off the flank!"

The forty-one pikemen moved with the ragged precision of veterans who preferred impalement over plunging into five miles of empty sky. Twelve front-line pikemen drove their steel butt-spikes into the rivet channels. The second and third ranks locked their shafts across the shoulders of the first, forming a dense, bristling porcupine of blackened steel that slanted obliquely toward the abyss.

The lead knight was a monster clad in overlapping fluted plate, his lance leveled straight at Mielikki’s throat. His pennant bore the roaring anvil of the League.

"Yield the marker, steppe filth!" the knight bellowed through his grated helm. "By the laws of planar chivalry, surrender your baggage and take the rearward descent!"

"We ate the chivalry yesterday," Mielikki muttered. "Hold!"

Fifty paces. The iron link shuddered under twenty tons of charging horseflesh and plate armor. The sound was deafening, a shrieking metallic drumroll over the howling winds.

Thirty paces.

Ten paces.

"Drop!" Mielikki screamed.

The front rank did not thrust; they dropped their weight flat against the iron link, levering the pike points upward into the armored chests of the horses.

The collision tore the breath from Mielikki’s lungs. The lead destrier struck three tempered steel points at full tilt. Wood groaned, iron screamed, and the kinetic shock wave slammed back through Mielikki’s pike shaft, jarring her collarbone. But the [Hungry Momentum] aura held her boots rooted to the seam.

Instead of shattering the infantry line, the knight’s forward inertia met the angled wall of pikes and slid violently down the link’s convex slope. The massive warhorse shrieked, its steel-shod hooves losing grip on the greased iron curve. With an ear-splitting crunch of snapping saddle girths, the lead horse and its fully armored rider tumbled over the edge, their silhouettes shrinking into the gray clouds of the abyss.

Behind the captain, the second rank of cavalry had nowhere to turn. Trapped on the narrow crown by their own speed, three more horses impaled themselves directly on the braced pike wall, while two others clipped the wreckage and vaulted sideways into empty air.

"Drive forward!" Mielikki barked, spitting copper-tasting bile onto her gorget. "Clear the crowns before their outriders wheel!"

She surged up from the seam, driving her side-cleaver into a dismounted lancer’s neck joint. Steel met flesh; blood hissed against the freezing chain iron.

Jalo and the front squad thrust in unison, their pikes punching through plate seams boosted by the hunger-driven piercing bonus. The remaining cavalry vanguard broke apart in shrieking chaos, the confined space turning their armor into dead weight.

Then a splintering crash echoed from behind them.

Mielikki spun on her heel.

Two secondary outriders had circled wide along the lower mooring lip, bypassing the main pike hedge entirely. Their heavy broadswords sheared clean through the wooden axle of the lead supply wagon. The wagon tilted, barley sacks bursting open, raining pale yellow grain into the howling updraft.

"The carts!" Jalo yelled in horror.

The second wagon’s team of draft oxen panicked at the scent of blood, rearing wildly against their harness. The wooden tongue snapped with a sound like a ballista discharge. The wagon slid sideways across the frosted iron, its heavy iron-banded wheels spinning off the lip.

Mielikki sprinted back toward the rear, her boots pounding the rivets. "Cut the oxen loose! Save the third cart!"

A wounded steppe soldier threw himself onto the cart hitch, hacking at the leather traces with a dagger. But the weight of the tilting wagon was already absolute. The iron bed tipped sixty degrees, dragging the ox, the soldier, and six sacks of cured meat over the precipice.

The third wagon, smashed by the thrashing draft beasts, teetered precariously on the brink of Mooring Link 409-West.

Mielikki reached the tailboard, gripping the rough wood with both gauntlets. Her muscles tore with strain as she tried to heave the dead weight back onto the crown. For two seconds, her boots held the seam.

Then the rotten floorboards gave way. The entire wagon sheared in two, spilling fifty sacks of grain, dried beans, and salt pork into the bottomless void.

The abyss swallowed the supplies without a sound.

A bleak silence fell over the forty-one surviving pikemen, broken only by the whistling void wind and their ragged, wheezing gasps.

Jalo looked over the empty lip of the chain, his pike trembling in his blistered hands. "The grain... it’s all gone. Every single sack."

"Look on the bright side," Mielikki said, wiping blood from her cleaver against her leather thigh-guard. "We don't have to carry the damn bags anymore. And the System says we're eight percent faster."

"Matron," Jalo said with a grimace, "we have about sixteen hours before the men start chewing their pike grips."

Mielikki turned slowly, raising her eyes toward the colossal structure hanging three links ahead.

The Blind Spire Orthodoxy fortress loomed against the dark planar sky, its black iron towers vast, solid, and utterly silent. Plumes of warm smoke drifted from its lower kitchens, carrying the faint, unmistakable aroma of roasted grain and cured tallow across the abyss.

"Then we don't forage," Mielikki said, racking her pike back into her travel harness. "We take the church."