Vertical Slaughter

The draft along the canyon floor did not blow east or west. It drew inward, sucking cool marsh air into the three-hundred-foot basalt throat where the woman stood cornered.

Ruiseart felt the pull of the draft against the grease smeared across his chin. A diver trapped against vertical stone looked for only one thing: an updraft strong enough to catch a pitch spark. If she found the thermal seam in the rock, the narrow chimney fissures overhead would draw her straight toward the upper fractures.

He raised his clenched left fist. Behind him, the four vanguard hunters locked their shale mantlets together, shoulders grinding against hide padding.

"Keep the shields tight," Ruiseart said, his voice low beneath the roar of the nursery vents. "She has no room to dive. When she lunges, take her shins."

Across forty paces of loose shale, Sorcha did not shift her weight. Her feet were set wide on the rubble, toes gripping the fractured rock through thin rawhide soles. In her right hand, she gripped a palm-wide obsidian spearhead, its flaked edges catching the dim violet glare from the burning culverts behind them. Her left hand remained tucked against the side of her leather rig, fingers closed around a dark horn cylinder.

"You dropped from the ceiling to starve our calves," Ruiseart called out, taking two deliberate strides across the scree. The serrated knife taken from the captured girl rested balanced in his right grip. "Now you have no draft, no line, and no crew."

Sorcha's gaze did not leave his throat. "You have glass," she said, her voice flat, clipped of all breath to save her lungs against the sulfur. "You do not know how it cuts."

"Calumh," Ruiseart murmured without turning his head.

"Right behind your shoulder, hunter," the old tracker grunted, shifting a heavy boar-spear tipped with freshly bound ceiling glass. "Though if she drops another dead body on my neck, I'm billing your clan three hide bags of salt for the neck ache."

"Shields up. Close the arc."

The four vanguard hunters surged forward in a disciplined wedge, the shale slabs overlapping like fish scales. Two obsidian-tipped lances jutted through the center seams, while the flanking pair held notched throwing-darts ready against rawhide cords.

Sorcha did not wait for the circle to lock.

She drove off her rear heel, launching low across the shale. Her movement lacked the heavy, stamping impact of floor hunters; she skipped across the loose rock with the eerie, weightless balance of someone born to roofs and roosts.

"Darts," Ruiseart commanded.

Two ash shafts snapped from the flanking throwers. The points whistled through the humid air, aimed low to break her knees.

Sorcha did not dodge. She twisted her torso in mid-stride, letting the first dart graze the horn plates of her ribs, while her obsidian spearhead sheared the second shaft cleanly in half with a ringing crack. Before the splintered wood hit the gravel, she closed the distance to the shield wall.

She did not ram the front. Instead, she planted her left foot on the sloped boss of the lead hunter's shale shield, pushed upward with explosive strength, and vaulted clean over the barricade.

"Turn!" Ruiseart roared.

The lead lancer tried to pivot, but the weight of the floor realm's downward pull dragged at his heavy limbs. Sorcha came down behind him like an owl striking a vole. Her obsidian blade struck the juncture where neck met shoulder, cleaving through boiled leather, sinew, and collarbone without a shred of resistance. The high-grade glass parted bone with a wet, effortless hiss.

The hunter dropped instantly, his boots drumming once against the scree.

"Lances inward!" Calumh shouted, thrusting his ash shaft to box her flank.

Sorcha spun, parrying Calumh's thrust with the flat of her salvaged spearhead. The impact sent black flakes scattering across the stones, but the diversion gave Ruiseart his opening.

He closed the five-pace gap in a single lunging step. He drove the serrated obsidian knife straight at her ribs, using all the mass of his heavier frame.

Instead of trying to block the descending strike, she caught his forearm with her open left palm, twisting her torso to take the strike along her leather girdle. The serrated glass tore through three layers of cured steer-hide, biting an inch into the flesh above her hip.

Hot blood washed over Ruiseart's knuckles.

He tightened his grip on her wrist, intending to smash her down into the rubble. "Got you, diver."

Sorcha did not cry out. Her stone-grey eyes locked onto his, cold and empty of fear.

"You have stone," she whispered. "You do not have the wind."

Her left hand slipped free from his bloody fingers, not pulling away, but snapping downward toward her belt. When she brought her hand up, she was not holding a blade. She held a heavy earthen ampoule sealed with pitch and dry sulfur-moss.

Ruiseart recognized the cylinder instantly—the last blister-ash charge.

She slammed the base of the ampoule against the flaked edge of her obsidian spearhead.

The friction sparked. A hot, brilliant red spark caught the dry pitch seal.

"Back!" Ruiseart yelled, shoving against her chest with his left shoulder to throw himself clear.

The displacement ignited with a concussive crack.

Distilled pitch did not burn like camp wood. The moment the flame touched the cardinal wind seam in the basalt chimney, gravity inverted along the vertical axis of the charge.

A second floor hunter, lunging forward with a lowered boar-spear, stumbled into the three-foot aura of the ignited pitch.

The downward drag of the floor realm vanished beneath the hunter's soles in a fraction of a heartbeat. His boots lifted from the scree. With sudden, violent velocity, the hunter was yanked straight upward into the vertical shaft, his terrified shout echoing through the basalt chimney until he slammed against the limestone roof three hundred feet above.

"Merciful roots," Calumh spat, throwing himself flat on his belly and driving his knife into a stone seam. "The sky took him!"

The expanding plume of blister-ash and inverted pitch caught the upward thermal corridor. The heat reacted with the caustic sulfur fumes lingering in the chimney, erupting into a blinding sheet of white-violet magnesium fire.

The flash struck Ruiseart full in the face before his eyelids could snap shut.

A searing, agonizing brightness burned through his retinas, instantly stripping away his vision. The concussive heat knocked him flat onto his back among the sharp shale shards. His skin blistered across his forehead and cheeks, and the air in his lungs turned to scorching ash.

Ruiseart rolled violently across the gravel, coughing blood-flecked phlegm, his hands clawing at his stinging, blinded eyes. Darkness swam before him, stained with pulsing circles of violet and scarlet fire.

Around him, the roar of the wind chimney rose to a shriek. The draft tore through the box canyon, carrying the updraft straight toward the narrow venting fissure in the roof. A scraping rattle of boots against sheer rock echoed once, twice, climbing rapidly into the darkness above, then faded into the distant rush of the upper flue.

The canyon went dead quiet, save for the crackle of burning shale and the groans of the surviving hunters.

Ruiseart pushed himself onto his hands and knees. Every breath felt like inhaling crushed glass. He dragged his sleeve across his brow, wiping away grease, sweat, and peeling skin, blinking furiously into the black void. His sight did not return; only faint, shapeless shadows of heat and stone registered against his ruined vision.

"Calumh," Ruiseart rasped, his voice raw.

"Still here, hunter," came the tracker's strained cough from ten paces away. "Still attached to the floor, though my boots felt light enough to float for half a breath. The diver is gone. Rode the chimney fire straight into the high draft."

Ruiseart felt the ground before him. His fingers closed over a cold, heavy object resting in the scree.

It was Sorcha's salvaged obsidian spearhead, snapped at the tang from the concussive force of the ignition, its razor edge smeared with his own blood and scorched pitch.

He closed his fist around the broken glass until the sharp facets bit through his calloused palm. The pain was sharp, clean, and grounding.

She had poisoned their nursery, ruined the breeding waters, and burned his eyes to cinder. But she had left her stone behind, and she had shown him how the pitch inverted the chasm.

Ruiseart stood slowly, planting his boots into the solid, heavy stone of the lowland floor.

"Gather the glass from the gravel," Ruiseart said, his voice hard as quarry granite in the dark. "Bind the lances. We are climbing."