Hunters in the Cloudbank

I flattened my ribs against the basalt until the rough stone bit through my wool tunic.

I wanted to slip past these aerial pickets without a fight, crawl into the upper fissure, and reach the dying titan's crevasse before midday. If the scouts spotted me against the black crag, Kaddour wouldn't even have to bother hanging me from the fortress gates; these steppe riders would spear me for target practice, and every cold-burning plume I needed to weave my escape wings would rot into putrid slime before I ever touched them.

The shadow of the lead war-hawk swept over my boots, cold and heavy as wet canvas. Above me, the great wings beat the thin air with rhythmic, leathery thuds that rattled the loose gravel around my grip. I shoved my chin into the grit of the ledge, keeping my eyes fixed on a hairline fracture three inches from my nose. A single upward glance would give them the pale oval of a human face against stone, and steppe scouts did not waste arrows on men they could skewer like marmots.

The bronze whistle shrilled again, three short bursts followed by a descending trill. The second rider answered from fifty paces out in the mist, banking hard along the thermal current surging up the chimney.

Holy messengers of the higher heavens, the lowland priests liked to call them. To anyone with chalk on his knuckles, a falling celestial was just a four-ton turkey with clumsy steering, dropping out of the clouds to turn the mountain passes into open butcher shops and draw every scavenger for twenty leagues. When gods crashed, the border tribes watched the peaks as greedily as Warlord Kaddour did, sending their hawk-riders to skewer garrison scavengers before anyone could haul the plumage down. But up here, two thousand feet above the vertical shear, I had no business being alive.

The lead hawk circled back. Its crimson-dyed primary feathers sliced through the fog bank with a dry, ripping hiss.

A heavy draft pushed past my shoulders, carrying the sweet, rotting tang of celestial marrow mixed with ozone. The dying titan wedged in the upper crevasse was bleeding vapor into the crags, and the dense, freezing current rolled down the vertical clefts like spilled milk. The war-hawks hated that smell. The lead bird banked erratically, its yellow talons flexing as it fought the sudden drop in temperature.

Then iron clinked against horn.

The scout on the nearest mount had spotted something. Perhaps the scratched patina on my top anchor wedge, or the dark streak where my boot heel had scraped away a patch of grey lichen.

A heavy shadow plunged toward the wall.

The rider did not shout. Steppe doctrine was quiet and methodical, treating aerial ambushes like shooting mountain sheep in a pen. A three-pronged, barbed throwing spear dropped from the cloudbank, trailing a braided horsehair cord. It slammed into the shale ledge four feet above my head with the force of a ballista bolt. The impact snapped the wooden shaft clean off, blowing a shower of sharp stone flakes across my neck and splitting the fractured shelf directly over my anchor pin.

Basalt groaned under the sudden tension.

I did not wait for the second javelin. But I was a skinner who never left good metal behind when a climb turned dirty. With a quick wrench of my gloved fist, I yanked the shattered spearhead free from the split stone—a foot of tempered steppe steel tipped with three recurved barbed prongs and an iron lanyard eyelet. It was heavy enough to serve as a brutal butchering chisel or a deadweight cam. I jammed the stolen steel spike into my chest holster.

My left hand ripped my brass anchor wedge from my equipment belt. I jammed the serrated iron teeth into the deepest vertical crack running along the inside corner, hammering the head home with the flat heel of my palm until the metal bit deep into solid rock. I snapped my secondary climbing line into the ring, kicked hard against the crumbling shelf, and launched myself out into the empty air.

The void opened beneath my boots—a two-thousand-foot drop down to the jagged scree of the valley floor, swallowed in swirling grey clouds.

The rope went taut with a sharp jerk that wrenched my collarbone. I used the momentum of the fall to swing across the face, carving a broad pendulum arc toward the deep, shadowed chimney forty feet to the west.

Above me, the second rider wheeled his bird into a steep dive to cut off my swing. The war-hawk came in fast, wings tucked tight, beak open in a soundless snarl of fury. Its hooked rear talons lashed out to snatch me from the rope.

I tucked my knees to my chest. The yellow claws missed my thighs by inches, catching the hemp cords of the supply sack slung below my harness.

The beast’s weight hit the canvas with violent force. The sudden drag nearly ripped the anchor from the rock above, pulling my shoulders flat against the cliff face. Leather straps groaned under the strain.

I reached to my hip, drew my butchering cleaver in a single backhand sweep, and slashed through the primary load-cord of the supply pack.

The canvas pack tore free. My spare iron wedges and hammer lanyard tumbled into the mist. The hawk shrieked in frustration, tumbling sideways as the sudden release of thirty pounds of dead weight threw its wings out of trim. The bird thrashed in the crosscurrents, its wingtips clipping the jagged wall before it caught an updraft and spiraled back out into the open sky.

Behind me, the damaged shelf gave way.

The shockwave from the javelin strike had shattered the root of the basalt pillar. With a deafening crack that echoed through the gorge, three tons of fractured rock slid from the cliff face. The rockslide roared downward in a churning cascade of dust and stone, wiping out the entire chimney pitch I had spent two grueling hours scaling. It tore through my lower guide ropes, sheared off the steel pitons in the lower chimney, and left a pale, polished scar running down to the fog line.

I hit the far fissure hard, driving my left shoulder into the narrow cleft. My fingers clawed into a frozen seam of quartz, locking my body inside the shadows just as the cloudbank closed around the mountain once more.

Above the mist, the bronze whistle blew two flat notes—a signal of broken quarry. The sound faded eastward toward the steppe encampments, swallowed by the rising wind. To the scouts, a falling climber and three tons of shattered basalt meant one more dead garrison rat at the bottom of the pass.

I hung in the vertical chimney for several minutes, waiting for the trembling in my forearms to subside.

The air inside the fissure was bitter and thick with frost. Above me, the cold-burning vapor from the titan hissed through the stone channels, coating the rock with a thin skin of rime.

I hauled up what remained of my secondary line. The braided hemp ended in a frayed tassel sixty feet down, severed cleanly where a falling slab had sheared the rope against an arête.

I reached down to my harness to take inventory.

The cleaver was still secure in its scabbard, the barbed steppe spearhead was safe in my chest holster, and my bronze ascender hooks hung intact from my belt. The supply pack was gone with my spare wedges, but all four clay flasks of Yasir's tallow oil remained secure in the leather loops of my climbing vest, along with half a skin of sour water.

I looked down between my boots.

The lower face was gone. Where there had been chimneys, ledges, and climbable cracks, there was now only a vertical sheet of slate-smooth basalt, stripped clean by the landslide. Descent without two hundred paces of fresh rope was impossible.

I could not go back to the fourth tier. I could not retreat down the wall to safety.

There was only one way off the mountain now.

I adjusted the straps of my harness, tapped a single iron wedge into the frost-rimed fissure above my head, and began climbing toward the sound of the titan’s dying breath.