Luring the Vanguard

The ironwood door split with the sound of snapping bone.

I heard the crack echoing down the vertical exhaust shaft from thirty feet above. Striking the prism now from the deep chamber was useless if Soshi secured the upper forge and fanned his raiders into the terrace tunnels instead of pursuing me down the shaft. I needed them inside the vertical kill-box. I vaulted onto the iron ladder, climbing the rungs and the greasy guide-rope and hauling my torso over the lip of the open maintenance hatch just as the forge door's upper hinges tore out of the stone frame. Splinters the size of short-swords showered the forge floor, the collapsing timber throwing Jiro against the far masonry wall with a sickening crunch. I had exactly one objective in this room: draw Commander Soshi and his entire vanguard down into the deep flue shaft before they could butcher Warden Kento, the dying Yamato, and the retreating terrace survivors. If the raiders stayed on this level, they would clear the residential tunnels with boar-spears in twenty breaths.

Through the wreckage stumbled four raiders in frost-hardened leather, their faces hidden behind slitted bone visors. Behind them walked Commander Soshi.

He carried no shield. Glacial river ice, two inches thick, was bound across his broad chest with frozen sinew. Frost smoke drifted from his shoulders as the furnace air met his rimed coat.

"Clear the hearth," Soshi barked. His voice rasped like gravel scraped across iron. "Bind the smiths. Any man who breaks a nodule loses his tongue."

Warden Kento swung the empty hilt of his broken cleaver at the lead raider's temple. The raider caught the blow on a forearm plated in frozen timber, barely flinching under the impact, and rammed a triangular gut-spear through Kento's thigh. The district boss collapsed against the stone anvil, his fingers scrabbling uselessly across the blood-slicked flagstones.

Near the quench tub, Yamato sat slumped against the wall. His big hands were clamped over his torn belly, bright red bubbling between his knuckles with every ragged wheeze. He looked up at me through swollen eyelids, his teeth bared in a grimace.

"Still working on those deposit knives, Tadashi?" Yamato coughed, spitting crimson onto the soot. "You're late."

"The stone needed persuasion," I said. "And your manners haven't improved with ventilation in your gut."

"I told you," Yamato wheezed, managing a blood-flecked grin. "Three coppers buys masterwork speed, not an artisan's tea break."

I drew my personal trench-knife from its sheepskin sheath. The blade had been knapped from pure, unshocked deep-flue obsidian—six inches of razor-black glass, grounded at a flat forty-five-degree facet. I dragged the spine across the rough basalt coping of the hatch.

Friction met stored heat. A blinding crimson glow flared along the conchoidal edge, throwing knife-edge shadows across the ceiling vaults. The sudden thermal wash shoved the stench of burnt grease and scorched hair into the room.

Every raider head snapped toward the light.

"That's flue glass," one of the vanguard shouted, pointing a hooked spear at my chest. "He has prime nodules on him!"

Soshi stepped past his spearmen, his pale eyes locking onto the glowing blade in my grip. "Drop the glass, boy. Step away from the shaft and you keep your fingers."

"You came down four tiers wearing sixty pounds of frozen pond water," I said, stepping backward toward the open chute. "By the time you reach the second rung, you won't be conquerors. You'll be boiled mutton in leather sacks."

Soshi's jaw tightened. "Take him alive. Secure the vent access."

Three vanguard troopers lunged.

I did not wait for the strike. I dropped straight through the hatch.

Gravity seized my stomach. I caught the greasy guide-rope with my left leather glove, boots skidding against the vertical basalt chute. The friction scorched the hide of my palm, but I kicked off the south face, using the thirty-degree inward cant of the chimney to steer my drop. Two yards down, my heels hit the first iron rung. The metal shuddered, screeching against its stone sockets as I slid down another twenty-four feet, landing in a crouch on the narrow maintenance walkway of the upper flue.

Above me, boots slammed onto the iron ladder.

"Down the shaft!" Soshi roared from the workshop. "Do not let him seal the lower gates!"

Heavy bodies dropped into the chimney behind me. In the cramped, four-foot conduit, their frozen armor worked against them. The suffocating draft rushing up from the magma throat was already nine hundred degrees. As the raiders slid down the basalt chutes, their ice slabs began to hiss and pop. Great clouds of blinding white steam erupted in the tight vertical passage, accompanied by the panicked curses of men who had suddenly realized their armor was turning into boiling soup against their ribs.

I sprinted along the narrow catwalk. The stone beneath my boots was red basalt, pitted and cracked by centuries of heat pulses. Every foot of this chimney had a personality: the western wall bulged with unstable sulfur scabs that gave way under fifty pounds of pressure, while the eastern ledge was solid volcanic bedrock.

A raider hit the catwalk ten paces behind me, his spear lowered. His frost-cloak was dripping scalding grease, but his stride was fast and murderous.

"Stand, knapper!" he snarled.

I reached the pressure-relief valve—a heavy iron flap held shut by a counterweighted bronze pin, linked to an overhead safety winch by thick hemp-and-iron cable. As I passed, I hooked the heel of my boot under the bronze pin and kicked it sideways.

The pin sheared. The counterweight dropped.

A blast of superheated volcanic gas screamed out of the lateral duct with the crack of a thunderclap. The expanding plume hit the chasing raider squarely in the chest. His ice breastplate did not shatter; it flashed instantly into steam, the sudden vapor explosion blowing him backward off the catwalk into the open vertical drop. His scream died in the rumbling abyss below.

Before the rest of the pack could vault the gap, I brought my glowing thermal trench-knife down across the suspension winch cable. The forty-five-degree conchoidal cutting plane sheared through the iron-core rope like dried reeds. With an earsplitting groan of bending metal, a two-ton basalt portcullis slammed down into the chute behind them, sealing the upper chimney.

They could not retreat. I held the only open path, and every step they took forward was a step deeper into the throat.

I leaped across the five-foot gap separating the walkway from the central suspension gantry. My boots caught the edge of the iron grating with a jarring clang that rattled up into my teeth.

The gantry hung by four massive chain links directly over the throat of the deep magma flue. Beneath the iron grid, fifty feet down, the orange magma pool churned and bubbled like a pot of thick porridge. Suspended in the center of the chamber, wedged tight across the primary vent throat, sat the primordial obsidian prism.

My bronze punch was still seated in the conchoidal junction, right where I had left it. The tiny white fracture line glowed like a thread of spun glass under the magma light.

Footsteps clattered on the iron ladder behind me.

Soshi dropped onto the catwalk, followed by six of his heaviest vanguard raiders. Their ice breastplates were cracked and half-melted, sloughing chunks of grey slush onto the hot basalt, but their boar-spears were leveled and their eyes were fixed on the central gantry.

"Nowhere left to drop, boy," Soshi said, drawing a broad, notched iron cleaver. He wiped sweat and soot from his brow with the back of a scarred wrist. "Hand over the billet and step off the bridge."

More boots pounded the rungs above. Ten more raiders spilled onto the upper perimeter ledges, fanning out along the iron chains to cut off every escape route. Within moments, the entire raiding vanguard was crowded onto the narrow gantry directly above the magma throat.

Exactly where the thermal back-pressure would vent.

I reached into my tool belt and drew the heavy sea-cow bone billet.

Above our heads, through the exhaust grates that vented into the Fourth Terrace residential tunnels, a sound cut through the roar of the magma pool. It was the desperate, rhythmic clatter of refugee carts, accompanied by the sharp, terrified shouts of children and Kento's guards trying to push the wounded through the upper choke-point.

They were still in the tunnels. The district had not cleared.

If I struck the punch now, the upward eruption of choking ash and volcanic gas would tear straight through the exhaust grates, engulfing every soul on the Fourth Terrace before they could reach the safety of the lower tiers.

Soshi took two heavy strides onto the suspension gantry, the iron chains groaning under his weight. He leveled his cleaver at my throat.

I lifted the bone billet, resting its weighted head against the butt of the bronze punch.