Acid Tears and Broken Lines

The mountain did not give warnings, only deadlines.

When forty tons of dead god began to shift in the cleft above, the basalt did not groan. It gave a dry, splintering snap, like a butcher cracking marrow bone between his palms. The twisted spearhead I had driven into the seam screamed under the load, spitting sparks of shaved iron against the frost. The beast's snagged harness cord dragged hard against my waist; I slashed the fouled cord clean with a backhand chop of my cleaver, severing the tether, and kicked off the rock with both boots before the anchor tore loose.

Falling on purpose is the first trick an Assani crag-skinner learns, and the last one he forgets. I threw my weight out into the empty gray fog, letting the hemp descent line hiss through the bronze friction-rings at my waist. Air hammered my ribs. My harness jerked upward, cutting into my thighs with the full, awkward drag of the twenty flight plumes lashed across my shoulders. The bundle caught the crosswind like a split sail, twisting my torso forty degrees off center.

Above me, the titan let go of the gorge.

It did not tumble like a boulder. The severed stump of its left wing flapped uselessly against the chimney walls, trailing ribbons of curdled blue fat, while the remaining right wing caught the cliff face and sheared off four yards of rotten limestone overhang. The roar was not sound; it was pressure in the molars, an avalanche of meat and stone dropping through the mist directly down my path.

I jammed my gloved thumb into the brake ring.

Friction bit hard. The goatskin on my palm charred instantly, reeking of scorched grease, but the braided line held long enough to arrest my drop. I swung hard to the left, penduluming under an arching rib of dark basalt just as the carcass hammered past.

The wind of its passage tore the breath from my nostrils. A shower of pulverized grit and greasy black blood washed over my shoulders, pattering against the stiff leather of my jerkin. Down below, deep in the lower fissure where the chasm narrowed to a throat of jagged teeth, the corpse struck bottom with a dull, wet thud that shook the entire buttress.

The silence that followed was worse than the crash.

Then the sky began to weep.

It was not rain. The clouds rolling over the jagged crown of Jebel-Assani had curdled into a dirty, bruised violet, thick with the oily smoke of the slaughter down in the valley. What fell from the cloudbank was a fine, prickling mist that smelled of vinegar and scorched tin.

A droplet struck the back of my bare wrist, right between the leather cuff and my glove.

It hissed. A yellow blister rose on my skin within three heartbeats, stinging with the sharp, acidic bite of quicklime.

"Curse your wings and curse your mothers," I muttered, blinking caustic moisture from my eyelashes as I tucked my chin into my collar.

A dying celestial does not just rot where it drops. Its blood poisons the water table, its marrow breeds worms, and the vapor rising from its punctured lungs turns the high air into lye. If I stayed on the open face for another twenty minutes, this mist would strip the skin off my knuckles and eat the hemp right out of my harness.

I had no clean descent line down the north chimney. The rockslide from the morning hawk-strike had obliterated the lower steps, leaving a four-hundred-foot vertical drop over sheer, glassy basalt. My only route back to the garrison's northern sally-port lay across the western shoulder, through a narrow crevice known to the fortress skinners as the Weaver’s Cleft.

To reach it, I needed to make three diagonal traverses across sixty paces of exposed, outward-sloping granite.

I hauled myself up slightly on the line, settling my boots against a two-inch ripple in the stone. Every movement felt twice as heavy as the climb up. The twenty flight plumes lashed across my harness weighed forty pounds of dead, cold-burning lumber, pulling my shoulders back toward the void. Beneath the stiff leather of my jerkin, nestled against my chest in the inner oilskin pouch, five handfuls of loose celestial down sat utterly weightless, radiating an eerie, bone-deep chill that made my ribs ache with every breath.

I checked my gear by touch. The heavy cleaver hung at my right hip, grease-slicked and notched. Two flasks of ordinary mutton tallow swung from my belt, balanced by the two flasks swollen tight with cold celestial fat. The half-empty water skin bumped against my ribs.

I reached for my bronze ascender hooks, slotting the left hook into a hairline crack to take the strain off the main line.

That was when I smelled the hemp burning.

It was not the hot, dry smell of friction from the brake ring. It was a cold, sharp stench, like green wood smoldering in a winter bog.

I looked down at the main load-bearing line coiled across my left hip.

Where the thick, three-ply braided rope pressed against the bundle of harvested titan plumes, the hemp was turning pale silver. The pale, ghost-blue luminescence pulsing from the quills was not merely glowing; it was freezing the moisture out of the plant fibers, crystallizing the oil Yasir had worked into the rope until the braid became as brittle as dried grass.

Tiny frost-needles bristled along the twist of the cord. Even as I watched, three outer strands snapped under the static tension with small, dry clicks.

A cold prickle traveled down the back of my neck, entirely unrelated to the freezing mist.

The feathers were eating my ropes.

"Greedy bastards," I growled through clenched teeth. "Even dead, you can't stand anything keeping you off the rocks."

If the line parted while I was swinging across the western slab, I would not even leave a greasy smear on the lower rocks. The wind would scatter my carcass across the enemy siege lines before the garrison cooks finished the midday soup.

I could not stop to re-rig the harness. The caustic rain was thickening, turning the granite face into a slick sheet of burning slime. Droplets sizzled against the cold plumes on my back, boiling away in wisps of bitter, blue-tinged steam.

I clamped the ascender hook with my left hand, jammed the cleaver into an overhead fissure with my right, and kicked off into the traverse.

The descent became a frantic, calculated scramble against gravity and rot. I did not rappel with long, steady bounds; I skipped across the face in short, ragged lunges, keeping my boots driving against every microscopic ledge, using the cleaver as an emergency brake whenever the brittle rope shuddered.

Thirty feet down, a gust of crosswind caught the feather bundle, wrenching me sideways. My left boot slipped on a patch of acid-etched slate.

I dropped three feet before the rope caught.

The line twanged like an over-tightened lute string. Halfway between my harness and the upper piton, six inches of frosted rope frayed apart, shedding a shower of crystalline white powder into the mist. Only a single core strand remained intact, stretched so tight it vibrated with a shrill, singing hum.

I did not breathe. I did not swear.

I reached out with my left arm, hooked my elbow over a horn of dark basalt, and pulled myself flat against the rock.

The ledge of the Weaver's Cleft was ten feet below me, a shadowed horizontal slit wide enough to hold a man on his hands and knees. Below that cleft, the interior chimney was sheltered from the caustic clouds, offering a protected chimney pitch that dropped straight into the fortress's upper redoubt.

Ten feet. One frayed core strand.

I unhitched the cleaver from my belt, jammed its broad blade deep into the horizontal seam beside my shoulder, and leaned my full weight onto the steel. With my other hand, I sliced the frosted descent line above my harness knot.

The rope whipped upward into the fog, instantly torn away by the gale.

I hung by the iron blade, my boots scrabbling against the slime-covered granite, the forty-pound pack of feathers dragging me backward toward the abyss. My shoulder muscles burned with tearing heat. The acidic rain stung the raw flesh of my face, dripping into the corners of my mouth with the bitter taste of copper and bile.

Setting my teeth, I swung my lower body inward, found a purchase with the toe of my right boot, and lunged into the black mouth of the Cleft.

I hit the floor of the fissure on my chest and knees, rolling hard against the dry, sheltered basalt wall.

The bundle of flight plumes struck the stone behind me with a dry rattle of stiff quills. The two flasks of celestial grease sloshed safely in their leather pouches. Inside the lining of my jerkin, the five handfuls of hidden down rested cold against my ribs, intact and secure.

Outside the cleft, the sky poured its caustic venom across the jagged face of the mountain, hissing against the stone like a million angry vipers.

I sat in the dark fissure, nursing my chemical-burned wrist, listening to the acid rain dissolve the rocks I had just climbed. Above my head, the remnants of my climbing ropes were gone.

I had forty pounds of warlord’s fire on my back and an escape wing in my shirt, but to reach the gates below, I was going to have to climb down the guts of the mountain with nothing left but my bare hands and an iron cleaver.