Harvest on the Shear

The beast’s amber eye rolled back beneath a translucent caul, but the pressure in my skull did not slacken. It hummed through the crowns of my back teeth, a sour vibration that tasted of copper filings and burned pine needles. Below my boot heels, the titan’s pewter-scaled ribs rose and fell in shallow, uneven heaves. Each breath puffed a cloud of pale vapor into the chasm, smelling of wet wool and ozone.

I spat over the ledge, watching the glob of phlegm drop into the fog before it struck anything solid.

"Die on your own time," I muttered. "I have daylight to burn."

Carving a fallen celestial is nothing like dressing a mountain ibex. A goat has joints where nature intended them: ball, socket, gristle, and bone. Heavenly things are built wrong. Their flight muscles tie directly into an internal lattice of silver-ribbed cartilage, woven together like wicker baskets and packed tight with cold-burning grease. Strike the breastplate square with an axe, and the edge skips off the enamel; hit the hollow pinion tubes without severing the vascular bundle first, and the whole wing curdles into gray slime within ten minutes.

I adjusted my harness, making sure the braided hemp line looped twice around the steppe spearhead I had driven into the basalt fissure. The forged steel held solid against my test tug. Satisfied, I unhitched the broad butchering cleaver from my belt sheath. The iron blade was four fingers wide and notched from five years of hacking through gristle, but the whetstone had given its curved belly a razor bite.

I stepped off the stone lip and landed both iron-shod soles directly onto the titan’s left shoulder hump.

The creature groaned beneath me. The sound was not a roar; it was an organ pipe groaning under too much wind, vibrating straight through the soles of my boots and rattling the marrow in my shins. A wave of nausea hit the back of my throat. My vision doubled, smearing the gray gorge walls into twin towers of smeared charcoal. I bit my tongue until the sharp iron tang cleared the fog from my head.

"Steady, Skinner," I told myself. "Just forty tons of useless poultry."

I dropped to one knee, planted my left palm on the primary wing hinge, and felt for the seam. The skin there was thin, scaled with hexagonal flakes the color of tarnished pewter, cold to the touch like river slate in midwinter. Right beneath the surface, three thick ligament cords pulsed with a sluggish, rhythmic twitch.

I raised the cleaver and brought it down with the full weight of my shoulder.

The iron sheared through the scales with a dry, crunching snap, biting deep into the fibrous gristle. A spurt of pale, glowing ichor splashed across my forearm. It did not scald; it bit with freezing needles, frosting the wet wool of my cuff instantly into a stiff white crust.

The titan convulsed violently. Its tail lashed against the far basalt pillar fifty feet below, cracking rock and sending a shower of loose shale clattering down into the dark. The entire gorge shuddered with the impact. My boots slid three inches across the slick scales, but I threw my hip against the upper rock face and kept my balance, my free hand gripping the creature’s primary quill spine.

I didn't give it time to thrash again. I drove the cleaver into the opened notch, twisted the blade forty-five degrees to pop the joint, and jammed the bronze ascender hook into the gap to keep the cartilage from snapping shut.

With the joint held open, the harvest revealed itself.

Deep inside the socket, nestled between silver bone struts, lay the primary down cushions. They looked like clumps of newly spun silk, glowing with a soft, milk-blue luminance that cast no shadows. They emitted no heat, only that faint, crisp chill that smelled like high-altitude frost. Along the leading edge of the wing spar, forty prime flight plumes jutted out like polished silver blades, each one three paces long, barbed with interlocking vanes that shimmered between indigo and pale gold.

Warlord Kaddour wanted the flight plumes for the fortress ballistas, hoping their cold-burn would split the steppe siege engines like dried kindling. Quartermaster Yasir wanted the tallow grease from the deep sockets to grease the iron winch cables on the upper gate.

And I wanted the down.

I worked fast, the rhythm returning to my wrists. With my skinning knife, I severed the quill roots one by one, slicing each stem clean at the vascular collar before the blue marrow could oxidize and turn black. Each plume came away with a wet, sucking pop. I gathered twenty of the longest, straightest flight feathers, bound their bases with waxed twine, and lashed the bundle securely across my back harness.

Then I dug my fingers into the inner joint.

The down was cold enough to numb my fingertips through my goatskin gloves. I tore away five large fistfuls of the prime celestial fluff—pure, dense, weightless down that felt like breathing in cold mountain air. Instead of stuffing it into Kaddour’s collection crate, I pulled open the hidden oilskin pouch stitched inside the lining of my leather jerkin and shoved the down deep into the bottom alongside the sample feather I had taken earlier.

One hundred plumes sat locked under my cot in the garrison. With the harvest from this morning and the dense fluff now pressed against my ribs, I had enough down clusters to match twenty full flight shafts. A pair of usable wings needed two hundred full plumes and three pounds of inner down to catch an updraft. I was past halfway. If Kaddour’s garrison held for another fortnight, I wouldn't need his gates or his mountain roads. I’d step off the highest battlement at dusk and let the valley wind carry me over the steppe siege lines and into the southern plains.

A low, liquid gurgle in the titan’s throat interrupted my counting.

From the severed shoulder joint, celestial tallow began to seep—thick, translucent grease that looked like congealed lard but burned with a persistent, pale blue flame when exposed to the air. I unhooked two of my four tallow flasks, dumped their cheap mutton oil over the precipice, and jammed the brass funnels directly against the fat gland, milking the cold, glowing grease until both bladders swelled tight as drums.

"Two pints of high-tier grease," I said, stoppering the flasks and tucking them into my side pouches. "Yasir will complain about the smell, but he won't refuse the receipt."

Now came the dangerous part.

To free the remaining quills and keep the carcass from rotting on the anchor ledge, I had to drop the severed wing into the crevasse. The wing was thirty feet long and weighed more than five grown men. If I didn't cut it clean, its downward momentum would drag me off the ledge along with it.

I stood up, braced both boots against the basalt wall behind me, and took the cleaver in two hands.

"One clean chop," I whispered.

I struck the rear tendon cord.

The iron bit true. The white ligament snapped like an over-taut bowstring, letting out a sharp crack that echoed across the chasm. The massive wing detached instantly. For half a second it hovered on the rising gorge wind, its twenty-foot span catching the updraft, before gravity seized its dead weight. It flipped downward, tumbling through the fog like a silver leaf, until it crashed into the scree fields five hundred feet below with a distant, muffled thud.

The sudden loss of sixty stone tore through the titan’s delicate balance.

The carcass groaned, tilting violently as its torso slipped down the basalt slot. The beast’s trailing harness cords snagged my safety line, violently wrenching the hemp rope taut against my hips. Above my head, the scavenged steppe spearhead twisted sideways in its crevice with a sickening shriek of grinding iron.

The plunge arrested with a shuddering jolt, leaving the beast suspended six feet lower over the void. The anchor stone had fractured under the torque, hairline cracks spidering across the basalt, but the twisted spearhead bit deep into the underlying seam and held.

The violent shudder died into the whistling fog.

I remained pressed flat against the freezing rock, letting my breath slow while the dust drifted down into the dark. Through my goatskin gloves, I felt the faint, steady pulse of cold fire humming in the bundled quills across my shoulders. High above the valley of blood and iron, the silence closed in over the shear, cold and complete.