Blood on the Stone

The smash of flesh against limestone carried a specific sound, wet and abrupt, like a ripe bladder slapped flat across an anvil.

Ruiseart stepped onto the terrace ledge, his horn-cleats biting deep into the frost-slick shale. The sulfur draft rising from the deep rift vents stung his throat, but he kept his mouth shut, nostrils flaring as he sifted the thick air. Blood smelled the same whether it fell from the ceiling or bled out of a guttered calf, but beneath the copper reek lay something far rarer: the oily, resinous tang of raw pitch.

"Right in the middle of the shelf," Calumh muttered behind him. The older tracker crouched by a fractured boulder, his fingers tucked inside his thick wolfskin sleeves to ward off the downdraft. "No warning pebble. No shout. Just three stone of meat dropping from the roof like a spoiled turnip. Ceiling bastards have no manners at all."

"Keep your eyes down," Ruiseart said. "Look for the black shimmer."

Calumh spat into a crack. "I am looking. If the fall shattered his bones, it shattered the glass too. You will have us sifting gravel until next moon."

Ruiseart ignored him, stepping past the red spray that coated the vertical rock face. The ceiling warrior lay forty paces out on the flat limestone. The impact had ruptured the corpse completely, flattening the ribcage and snapping both femur shafts out through the boiled leather trousers. The body had hit feet-first at terminal velocity before whipping forward to pulverize the skull against the bedrock.

Ruiseart knelt three paces away, his bare palm pressing against the stone.

The rock was cold, but around the impact crater the shale bore distinct black smears. He leaned close, scraping a fingernail through a gummy streak near the shattered right wrist. He brought the scrap to his tongue, tasting the bitter bite of petroleum and ground hematite.

"Unburned pitch," Ruiseart murmured.

"Failed ignition?" Calumh walked over, his knees popping with the dry click of worn joints. He carried a shallow horn tray and a pair of bone tweezers at his belt.

"The wind chimney swallowed his spark," Ruiseart said, pointing to the angle of the blood smear. The spray fanned out toward the southern lip, angled twenty degrees off the vertical line. "He crossed the midpoint without a flame on his point. Floor gravity took him while he was still tumbling. Five hundred feet of dead drop onto solid rock."

"A wasteful way to butcher yourself," Calumh said. He bent over the shattered torso, his tweezers already working. "Ah. Here is one."

With a sharp flick of his wrist, Calumh lifted a triangular shard from the ruined shoulder muscle. The fragment was three inches long, deep black and semi-translucent along its pressure-flaked edge. It caught the dull reddish glow of the rift vents, shining with the greasy perfection of true obsidian.

Calumh dropped it into the horn tray. It landed with a musical, vitreous chime.

"High-grade vein," Calumh muttered, his cynical demeanor dropping for a fraction of a second. "No bubbles. No ash inclusions. You could shave the fuzz off a newborn goat with this edge."

"Search every inch of the spatter zone," Ruiseart commanded. "He carried a spear and two side-daggers. If the points shattered on the stone, the core pieces will have bounced outward."

Calumh knelt without further argument, his weathered hands sweeping methodically through the bloody gravel. In the floor realm, five years of deep mining had yielded nothing but brittle chert and crumbly shale. A warrior could spend two moons grinding a river stone into a crude handaxe only to watch it fracture against the rib of a bull-boar. But three inches of ceiling glass could tip eight hunting spears, each capable of punching through hide armor without dulling.

Ruiseart rose and walked along the outer perimeter of the impact shelf. He was not looking for glass now. He was looking for what had survived the drop.

Ceiling divers never hunted alone. A raiding party traveled in squads of three or five, tethered by wind-lines or falling in tight formation to share the thermal updrafts. If this dead diver had plunged straight down the central chimney, the others had dropped beside him.

He reached the eastern margin where the limestone shelf broke into a field of loose scree.

Ten paces out, a pale smudge marked the gray dust. Ruiseart crouched.

It was a heel print, narrow and light, with the distinct cross-hatched pattern of ceiling cord-wrapping. The stride was long, showing a heavy skid where the runner had absorbed the crushing weight of the floor's downward gravity. Five feet beyond it lay a second mark, deeper on the left side, followed by a scuff where an injured limb had dragged through the pebble drift.

Two survivors. One sound, one limping.

Ruiseart followed the scuff marks with his gaze. They led straight toward the dark shoulder of the shelf, where the stone fractured into a labyrinth of narrow fissures. Beyond those cracks lay the sunken hollows of the lowland nursery, where the pregnant megafauna cows nested in the warm sulfur mud.

"Seventeen pieces," Calumh called out from the corpse. He stood up, shaking the horn tray. The black shards rattled like loose teeth. "Four large enough for lances, six for throwing points, seven small cutting flakes. The spear shaft was ash-wood, snapped into firewood, but the copper bindings are intact."

Ruiseart did not turn. "Pack the tray in fleece. Do not chip the edges."

Calumh trotted over, his boots crunching on the scree. He followed Ruiseart's stare down toward the fissures. His gray brows drew together. "They survived the inversion?"

"Two of them," Ruiseart said. "One landed clean. The other took a bad hit on the scree—strained tendon or cracked patella. They cached their gear and took the lower seam."

Calumh peered into the dark throat of the cleft, his mouth twisting into a dry grimace. "Heading for the pens. They want the calves."

"They want food," Ruiseart said. "The ceiling is starving. You do not dive a thousand feet through the void unless your belly is eating your spine."

"If they reach the nesting pools, they will poison the water with that foul pitch," Calumh muttered. "One cup in the drinking trough will curdle a cow's milk and kill six litters before dawn. We should blow the war-horns and send the sweepers in."

"No," Ruiseart said, his voice flat and final. "A sweep squad makes noise like a herd of blind tapirs. If the ceiling rats hear the horns, they will slit their own throats or throw their reserve glass down the rift vents before we can lay a hand on them."

He reached to his waist and drew his broad hunting knife—a heavy piece of forged bog-iron, dull and thick compared to the obsidian shards in Calumh's tray. He turned the iron blade over in his scarred palm. The metal was pitted, soft, and constantly in need of grinding. It was a tool of desperation, just as the ceiling's raid was an act of hunger.

"We do not drive them out," Ruiseart said. "We bottle them."

He pointed his knife toward the three narrow exits of the nursery basin where the sulfur steam rose thickest.

"Take four hunters and seal the southern culvert with thorn-hurdles," Ruiseart ordered. "Stay downwind. If they try to double back to their ascent point, herd them toward the deep nesting wall. I will take the center seam myself."

Calumh looked at the tray of gleaming black stone, then up toward the dark maw of the chasm hanging inverted above their heads. "And if they fight?"

"They will fight," Ruiseart said, his lips pulling back in a hard, predatory line. "That is why we will take them with the net before they can strike a spark. I want their glass intact, Calumh. And I want the divers breathing when we strip it from their flesh."