The Barricaded Tier

The dry ventilation flue of the Weaver’s Cleft smelled of roasted bats and three generations of soot. It was narrow enough that my shoulders scraped raw stone on both sides, which suited me fine. Friction was the only thing keeping forty pounds of butchered god from snapping my spine on the two-hundred-foot drop into the citadel.

My left wrist throbbed where the caustic rain had eaten through the leather cuff. A raw blister rubbed against the basalt every time I shifted weight, but pain was a useful clerk. It kept my head clear of the hum.

The hum had changed since midday.

Up on the high shear, the dying titan’s cry was a freezing needle driven through the ear. Down here, muffled by solid granite, it curdled into a thick drone that shook the fillings in my molars. It set the chimney soot drifting down my collar like greasy snow. Lashed across my pack frame, the twenty flight quills shuddered in their hemp cords, glowing with pale, cold phosphorescence. At my hips, the two flasks of mutton tallow clinked against the two leather bottles of celestial grease. Inside my jerkin lining, nestled alongside the three-foot sample feather from the crevasse, the five stolen handfuls of prime down stayed silent and weightless against my ribs, cold as cellar frost.

I jammed my cleaver into a mortar seam and hung there by one arm to listen.

Beneath the shaft, where the flue opened onto the upper gallery, men were screaming. Not war cries. Not the disciplined bark of Kaddour’s sergeants drilling for a breach. These were the wet shrieks of conscripts who had spent six hours trapped in a stone vault with an itch behind their eyes they could not reach with a fingernail.

I worked the blade loose, hitched the pack higher, and slid down to the iron ceiling grate.

The grate opened onto the vaulted landing of the main stairwell. The garrison had lost its wits. Conscripts who would run from a steppe horse had bricked the stone steps into a barricade, piling cedar chests, cracked ballista timbers, and paving rubble to seal the lower barracks from the upper battery.

I hooked my bronze ascenders into the overhead masonry seams, kicked off the sill, and swung past the blocked stairwell entirely, dropping four feet onto the clear gallery stones with the cleaver drawn.

Three conscripts sat slumped against the revetment. None of them held a spear upright. Their bronze-tipped pikes lay scattered across the paving stones, smeared with dark streaks that smelled of copper and earwax.

The nearest soldier was rocking on his tailbone, his fingers dug deep into the sides of his head. Dark, tarry blood had dried from both ears, running down his neck into the collar of his quilted tunic. His fingernails were broken to the quick, rimmed with stone dust and bloody shreds of his own scalp.

"Make it stop humming," he muttered to the flagstones. His voice was cracked and raw. "Tell the butcher to slit its throat. It’s chewing the rafters. It’s chewing through my teeth."

"The butcher’s on the cliffs," I said, keeping my back against the wall.

The soldier’s head jerked up. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils dilated until the brown irises were thin rings around pools of black ink. He saw the bundle of plumage towering over my shoulders, shining with cold blue fire, and his jaw dropped.

"More feathers," he wheezed, scrambling backward on his heels. "He brought more of them! It’s in the walls! It’s crawling into the porridge!"

To his right, a second sentry pushed himself off the barricade. This one had stuffed raw wool into his ears, but blood had soaked the wool black. He leveled a shortened boar spear at my belly, his arms trembling violently.

"Halt," the sentry rasped. His gaze darted between my face and the glowing pack. "Warlord’s orders. No carrion through the upper arch. The granary beast is still weeping down below... Yasir said the fourth cistern is fouled. We drink this week, we sprout beaks by next moon."

"I am carrying twenty flight quills for the warlord’s siege engine," I said, stepping forward until the spearhead was inches from my chest. "If Kaddour doesn’t crack the steppe line before sundown, nobody in this ditch needs to worry about sprouting beaks. The horse-clans will roast you on your own spit."

"He’s carrying the rot!" the rocking soldier screamed from the floor. "Cut him down!"

The sentry lunged. It was a sloppy, frantic thrust, born of fever and panic.

I did not bother with the cleaver’s edge. I stepped inside the thrust, caught the ash shaft just behind the spearhead with my left hand, and wrenched it downward. The sentry stumbled forward. I drove the heavy bronze butt of my ascender hook into the side of his helmet.

The copper bowl rang. The sentry crumpled without a sound, folding over his knees into the loose rubble.

Before the third man could even reach for a rock, I stooped, sliced the heavy brass gate-pin from the unconscious sentry’s belt with the point of my cleaver, and tucked the metal toggle into my pocket. In this fortress, an iron spear made you an assassin, but a five-inch brass winch-pin made you an engineer.

The soldier on the floor backed away until his shoulders hit the cedar chests, whimpering and covering his face.

"Stay there," I told him, stepping over the fallen boar spear. "Breathe through your nose. If you scratch deeper, you’ll dig your own brain out, and Yasir doesn't have the salt to pickle another casualty."

I left them by the barricade, hitched the forty pounds of celestial bone higher on my shoulders, and headed down the northern corridor leading to the battery works.

The air here was colder, biting with drafts that whistled through the stone arrow slits overlooking the western valley. Below, the distant rhythmic thump of the steppe army’s rams sounded against the outer curtain, slow and steady as a butcher’s mallet on frozen beef. But closer at hand, the fortress was drowning in its own stench.

The smell of celestial grease—sweet, cold, and cloying as overripe melon—filled the vaulted hallway. Runoff from the upper terrace had seeped through the ceiling joints, leaving streaks of luminescent slime that dripped into the stone drainage gullies along the wall.

At the end of the corridor, where the gallery opened into the wide staging landing before the catapult ramparts, a heavy oak gate had been dropped into its iron track. In front of the portcullis stood Yasir al-Nader.

The quartermaster had discarded his wool mantle. His linen undertunic was drenched in dark sweat. In his right hand, instead of his cedar tally stick and ink horn, he held an iron-shod trench shovel like a staff. A row of three water barrels stood behind him, each stamped with the seal of the Fourth Cistern.

"Put it down, Mounir," Yasir shouted as soon as my boots hit the landing stones. His voice cracked with strain. "Turn around and drop that filth out the murder hole."

"Kaddour sent me up the chimney for thirty stone of wing," I said, easing the tension on my pack straps. "I brought twenty prime quills and two flasks of fat. Open the gate, Yasir. My legs are shaking and this grease is burning cold through my trousers."

"Look at the barrels!" Yasir slammed the shovel blade against the paving flags with an iron clink. "I told you this morning the granary beast’s bile would hit the conduits! The water from the fourth well came up tasting like copper and curdling tallow. Two cooks drank a ladleful and spent the afternoon puking black bile and screaming that their ribs were turning into cages!"

He stepped toward me, his round, sweat-streaked face twisted in fury. He pointed the iron blade straight at the bundle of flight feathers strapped to my shoulders.

"The warlord wants his miracle engine," Yasir spat. "He wants to throw cold-fire at the steppe rams. But if you haul that dripping carrion across this threshold, every drop of fat that leaks into the floor cracks drains straight into the main reserve. When the water goes, five hundred men die with their bowels rotting out before the horse-riders even cross the ditch. I will not open this gate."

I stopped four paces from his shovel blade. Behind him, through the iron bars of the portcullis, I could see the bronze winch of the grand catapult resting on its timber turntable, surrounded by Kaddour’s inner guard.

"Yasir," I said softly, the weight of the harvest dragging at my aching shoulders. "If you don't open the gate, Kaddour will hang you from the battery beam by dinner. And if you do open it, we both might live long enough to die of thirst."

Yasir did not move the shovel. He planted his boots wider on the wet stones, his knuckles white against the ash handle, and stared me down.