The Wedged Titan

The chimney narrowed until my shoulders scraped both walls at once, grinding basalt grit through the weave of my woolen tunic. I needed to reach the titan's carcass before the steppe hawk-riders circled back over the ridge or the cold meat began to rot. Every foot of upward progress took three distinct movements: jam the bronze ascender hook into the frozen fissure, haul twelve stone of dead flesh and stubborn bone against gravity, and kick the toe of my boiled-leather boot into whatever notch the mountain offered.

Without the canvas pack, my balance felt strange. The loss of my spare wedges and hammer lanyard left my belt light, but my ribs took the brunt of the four clay tallow flasks clinking in their leather loops. The scavenged steppe spearhead was tucked through my harness strap, its barbed point wrapped in an oiled rag so it wouldn't gouge my thigh with every heave.

Fifty feet above the sheared rockslide, the air went sour.

It was the unmistakable stink of fallen divinity: a nauseating blend of burnt sulfur, wet sheep fleece, and crushed pears left to rot in a closed cellar. Lesser carcasses smelled mostly of grease and old blood, but the big ones brought an ozone reek that tasted like tin shavings on the back of the tongue.

Near the throat of the cleft, a loose basalt slab blocked the ledge. I worked the steel socket of the scavenged spearhead beneath the block, leaned my weight against the heavy steel, and levered the stone until it dropped into the seam with a sharp crack, seating a rigid platform for my boots. I hauled myself onto the shelf.

The ledge was barely two arm-spans wide, slick with frozen seepage, but it held. Below me, the sheer wall dropped into an empty gray void where the avalanche had erased the lower chimneys. Above me, the crevasse opened into a jagged cathedral of shadowed basalt, sliced down the middle by a thin ribbon of pale midday sky.

That was when the humming reached my marrow.

It did not come through the ears. It traveled up through the soles of my boots, up the shin bones, and settled directly behind my molars. The pitch was so low and resonant that the moisture in my eyes vibrated, turning the dark crags into double silhouettes.

The priests down in the lower valley called that sound the celestial choir, an echo of the spheres weeping for the sins of the earth. In my line of work, we had a different name for it: the death rattle of forty tons of poultry that didn't know how to flare its wings in a downdraft.

I wiped a crust of frost and rock dust from my eyebrows and edged deeper into the crevasse.

The cleft widened into an amphitheater of split pillars, where the mountain had cracked open ten thousand years ago and never bothered to close. Wedged between the two opposing faces of black basalt, sixty paces across the void, lay the titan.

It was vast. Even after eight years of harvesting whatever dropped out of the clouds onto Jebel-Assani, my throat tightened at the sheer scale of the carcass.

The creature’s torso was thicker than the fortress gatehouse, covered in overlapping scales the color of tarnished pewter. Two pairs of massive serpentine arms hung limp across the gorge, each finger ending in an ivory claw the length of a cavalry lance. Its central chest was pinned between two converging basalt ridges, crushed under the impact of its fall, but the wings—the wings were magnificent.

Each primary wing stretched thirty yards from joint to tip, arched across the chasm like suspension bridges made of silver and frost. The outer coverts were bruised and broken where they had smashed into the cliff, leaking thick ribbons of luminous cerulean blood that hissed as they hit the ice. But beneath the mangled outer shield lay the primary flight quills and the dense beds of under-down.

Cold blue luminescence drifted off the plumage in faint, swirling wisps. The down was untouched. Pure, thick, and burning with the steady, arctic glow of the highest heavens.

One hundred plumes of that quality were already sewn into the oilskin harness hidden under my cot in the third tier. Looking at the expanse of this left wing alone, there were easily three hundred more waiting to be plucked. Enough to finish the frame, seal the gliding vanes, and carry a man twenty leagues past the siege lines before the warlord even noticed the meat was gone.

The carcass twitched.

The shudder sent a shower of powdered rime cascading down the rock walls. The humming in my jaw spiked into an agonizing thrum, vibrating the metal cleaver at my hip until its bronze sheath rattled against my scabbard pins.

The beast was still alive.

I dropped into a low crouch, pressing both palms against the frozen dolerite to steady my balance. The stone beneath my knees pulsed with a rhythmic, sluggish heave—once every ten heartbeats. A dying giant took a long time to empty its lungs. If it thrashed while I was carving the joint, the spasm would snap my anchor line and grind me to paste against the opposite cliff.

"Easy now, bird," I murmured under my breath, my voice swallowed instantly by the droning resonance. "Just hold your breath until I get the cleaver in."

I unslung the butchering cleaver from its belt frog and gripped the scavenged spearhead in my left hand. Moving along the narrow basalt rim that skirted the northern wall of the crevasse, I closed the distance toward the left shoulder socket. The stench grew thick enough to choke on—sweet, metallic, and cold as grave dirt.

The rock narrowed to a ledge five paces above the main wing joint. Here, where the creature's back met the cliff, the basalt was fractured into vertical fissures.

I chose a clean split in the stone, set the point of the steppe spearhead into the seam, and hammered the pommel home with the brass spine of my cleaver. Three sharp blows seated the steel three inches deep. I knotted my climbing line around the spear’s socket, hauled on the rope to test the purchase, and tied the other end to my waist harness. The steel held firm.

Leaning out, I reached down with the flat of the cleaver and pressed it against the quivering flight feathers.

The reaction was immediate. Pale frost raced up the bronze blade. The chill bit through my leather grip with dry cold, but the quills held their spring. The marrow had not decayed.

Working fast, I notched the edge of my cleaver into the base of the foremost quill, sliced through the fibrous cartilage, and pulled free a prime three-foot flight plume. The down burned with steady blue light, weightless in my palm. I slid the plume into the oilskin pouch inside my vest, feeling its cold pulse against my ribs—the first and purest feather of the harvest.

A sound like grinding millstones broke the silence.

The titan's massive neck began to twist beneath the overhang. Frozen slime peeled from its pewter scales as the skull rose from the shadows. The head was broad and armored, lined with dark sensory vents.

In the center of its forehead, a heavy eyelid peeled back.

The eye was milky amber, ringed with three golden pupils that turned in slow circles until they locked onto me.

The stone stopped humming.

A cold silence flooded my skull. The crevasse faded, replaced by a sudden vision of the valley below Jebel-Assani. I saw the siege lines stretched across the mud, ten thousand men butchering one another in the trenches, and dark vapor rising from the slaughter into the clouds. The gods were not falling by chance. The stench of human war was poisoning the upper sky, dragging the great beasts down into the crags like drowned birds.

The vision broke, dropping me back onto the frozen ledge. The titan remained motionless, pinned between the basalt pillars, its three-ringed eye staring at me with dull recognition.

I wiped the cold sweat from my jaw, tightened my grip on the cleaver, and leaned back against the safety line.

"I see you," I said into the quiet. "Now let's see how much grease you've got left."