Seizing the Steering Rudder

Pitch smoke choked the narrow deck as fire chewed through the star-canoe's port outrigger. Roopinen braced his heels against the smoldering gunwale, tasting scorched pitch and copper vapor on his teeth. Below the reed hull, thirty leagues of empty black void waited for the thermal lift to fail, while thirty paces ahead, the First Sun-Gate's colossal bronze rudder wheel turned slowly against the solar tide. To clear the gate before their hull dissolved into ash, he had to reach the central lock housing and pry out the locking pin before the Vanguard's rear dreadnoughts boxed them in.

"Three breaths to impact!" Vilhelmiina shouted from the stern. Her boots remained planted wide upon the scorched deck, hands gripping the shuddering steering tiller with white-knuckled force. "Roopinen, find the balance point!"

"Working on it!" Roopinen spun his marsh-oak quarterstaff in a flat arc, knocking aside a flight of bronze quarrel-bolts that rattled against the reed siding. "Markkalt, give me an updraft!"

"The embers rise, the dragons wake!" Markkalt yelled, his cloak whipping in ribbons of flame. He lunged forward, thrusting his rapier straight into the air above the bowsprit. Radiant heart-fire surged down the tapered blade, releasing a searing column of heat that met the cooler air of the shadow zone.

The sudden thermal gradient caught the star-canoe's forward sail, lifting the bow ten cubits higher just as the burning port spar struck the lower cradle of the gate's mechanical housing.

Wood splintered with a sound like tearing bronze. The star-canoe shuddered violently, wedging its forward frame directly into the massive gears of the rudder platform.

"Move!" Annikki commanded.

She vaulted over the crushed bowsprit, her bronze halberd sweeping in a lethal hemisphere. Two Vanguard sentries guarding the platform lunged forward with poleaxes, but Annikki's blade caught their shafts on the cross-hook, wrenching both weapons downward before she drove the pommel into the lead soldier's breastplate. The impact rang across the bronze structure, sending the armored guard skidding across the grease-slick gangway.

Roopinen did not wait for the deck to settle. He leaped onto the splintered port rail, used the rebound of a burning strut to launch himself upward, and planted the copper tip of his quarterstaff against the hub of the colossal bronze wheel.

The rudder wheel spanned thirty paces from rim to rim, thick as a watchtower and held fast by five counter-weighted iron teeth. Four armored Vanguard engineers were working frantically to seat the master deadlock, rushing to freeze the gate's aperture permanently.

Roopinen planted the staff tip on the rim and vaulted cleanly over their raised shields, landing light-footed on the catwalk between two startled sentries. "Pardon the intrusion, gentlemen. The trade route is reopening."

A heavy wrench whipped toward his skull. Roopinen leaned back, letting the bronze tool whistle past his ear, then drove his staff downward into the nearest engineer's wrist. Bone cracked, the wrench clattered into the abyss, and Roopinen dropped onto the platform with a rolling tumble.

A second defender swung a broad-bladed cleaver. Roopinen swept the marsh-oak staff across the man's ankles, caught the descending blade on the iron-wrapped center of his weapon, and kicked the engineer straight off the platform edge into the dreadnought rigging below.

Below him, more Vanguard reinforcements surged up the service ladders from the docking cradles.

"Vilhelmiina! Annikki!" Roopinen called out, wedging his staff under the master locking pin. "The release dogs are frozen in their tracks! I need the heat broken and the mass shifted!"

Vilhelmiina arrived with a thunderous crash. She did not bother with the ladders, leaping fifteen feet straight from the star-canoe's stern gunwale to land flat-footed on the platform. The impact sent a spiderweb of cracks through the bronze deck plates. Her two-handed sun-flail swung in a blinding overhead circle, the heavy bronze head glowing white-hot as she gathered her internal furnace.

"Stand clear," she said.

The flail slammed into the master deadlock casing. A deafening clang reverberated through the entire Sun-Gate assembly. The brittle bronze casing shattered into smoking fragments, exposing the glowing core of the internal gear teeth.

Annikki followed instantly, thrusting her long halberd into the exposed gear train to hold the teeth from sliding back into the catch. Veins bulged along her throat as she exerted her full physical leverage, holding tons of bronze counter-weight with pure martial posture. "Markkalt! The thermal fuse!"

Markkalt bounded onto the rim of the wheel, his boots dancing along the narrow bronze teeth with preposterous grace. He flourished his rapier, saluting the vast formation of advancing dreadnoughts that were closing in from the outer ring.

"A lock of iron, a gate of pride," Markkalt recited, his voice ringing crisp and clear over the howling void. "Broken wide by the scarlet tide!"

He drove the tip of his rapier directly into the release cylinder. Pure, concentrated Gale-Edge heart-fire discharged from the blade into the mechanism's thermal core. The superheated bronze expanded instantly, snapping the frozen locking dogs with three successive cracks like cannon fire.

"Roopinen, now!" Markkalt shouted, leaping backward off the rim.

Roopinen threw his entire body weight against his quarterstaff, using the platform's anchor rail as a fulcrum. The marsh-oak bent into a severe bow, groaning under the immense strain. For a fraction of a heartbeat, his boots slipped on the oil-slick bronze. Then his internal qi caught the wood's grain, channeling a sudden surge of kinetic momentum straight through the lever.

The master pin popped free.

With a grinding roar that shook the marrow of their bones, the colossal rudder wheel began to spin.

Thousands of tons of bronze linkages groaned in unison across the gate superstructure. The massive sun-mirrors flanking the passage tilted on their colossal gimbals, swinging outward. As the reflecting shields parted, the bottled solar current of the Great Meridian Hearth burst through the gap in a blinding torrent of red and gold radiance.

The blast of thermal wind hit the burning star-canoe, instantly extinguishing the outrigger fire and snapping the main sail taut.

"Back to the ship!" Vilhelmiina barked.

The four leaped from the platform in unison, landing upon the star-canoe's charred foredeck just as the vessel surged forward on the crest of the newborn thermal wave. The trailing Vanguard dreadnoughts, caught in the sudden backdraft of opening currents, were thrown into wild disarray, their heavy hulls colliding in the turbulent wake.

Roopinen grabbed the mast stays to steady himself, catching his breath as the rushing air cooled the sweat on his brow. His quarterstaff bore deep scorch marks, and the soles of his boots were blackened to charcoal. He kicked the smoldering heels against the mast. "Three hundred bronze coins for imported Suvantor hide, cooked to ash before we even cross the border. The guild better reimburse my gear."

Beside him, Markkalt sheathed his rapier with an ornate flourish, though his singed cloak hung in tattered shreds. "A performance worthy of the grand archives, if I say so myself."

Vilhelmiina gripped the tiller, steering them dead-center into the golden stream. "You sing too much, Markkalt. But the blade was straight."

Markkalt blinked, placing a hand over his heart. "Was that... praise, mistress of the hammer?"

"It was an observation," Vilhelmiina replied without looking at him. "Do not make me regret it."

Annikki cleaned the gear-oil from her halberd blade with a scrap of sailcloth, her chin held high as she surveyed the retreating fleet. "The First Sun-Gate is broken. The Warlord's vanguards will not hold this threshold again."

Roopinen walked to the bowsprit, leaning against the stays as the star-canoe cleared the massive bronze portal and shot out into open space.

Ahead of them, the crimson thermal river stretched across the void toward the Second Disc, Suvantor. But where bright green terraces and shimmering water-rings should have gleamed beneath the hearth-sun, a colossal canopy of dark bronze reflecting-plates stretched across the horizon, casting the entire continent into a deep, perpetual twilight.

The First Sun-Gate was behind them, but the true shadow of the Eclipse Warlord had only just begun.