Lean Meat on the Basalt Ridge

Black crags of Braam-Duin rattled whenever the beast scraped its horns against the stone.

Gijsbert van der Meulen squatted on a ledge above the sulfur vent, resting his thick forearms on his knees. Down in the fissure, eight tons of slate-gray, iron-plated ram chewed sullenly on a clump of copper briars. The creature's shoulder blades worked beneath its hide like stone millstones, hard and knotty, without a yellow seam of tallow in sight.

"Nothing but sinew," Gijsbert grunted into the sulfuric draft. "Cardio. Endless cardio. A beast that lives on a cliff face never develops proper marbling."

His gut gave a long, hollow rumble. Three days had passed since the last pot of simmered ox-spine broth had gone dry, and the hollow ache in his lower belly was growing sharp. In the Grand Cauldron lineage, flesh did not run on thin air or high-minded meditation. Every pound of bone-cracking force came from the calories banked behind the navel. When the kettle went cold, the martial arts went with it.

The ram lifted its head. Two spiral horns, thick as beer casks and ridged with jagged bronze veins, swept back over its nape. It caught Gijsbert's scent on the updraft, snorted two plumes of gray ash, and turned toward the climb.

Gijsbert adjusted the broad hemp sash binding his midsection. He planted his flat-soled leather boots into the loose basalt scree. The slope dropped three hundred yards into a pit of bubbling yellow brimstone, but falling was a secondary concern. The immediate insult was the beast's flank.

"Look at you," he muttered, descending three strides to meet the incline. "Not even four fingers of fat over the ribcage. You spent five centuries cultivating iron-bone arts just to turn your brisket into boot leather."

The ram lowered its snout. Its cloven hooves struck the volcanic rock with iron rings, gouging sparks from the black shelf. It accelerated without preamble, a mountain of dense muscle and horn hurtling up the thirty-degree grade. The air whistled in its wake, smelling of hot mineral oil and scorched gravel.

Gijsbert did not sidestep. Sidestepping was for duelists with ribbons on their rapiers.

He dropped his hips, wide and low, tucking his chin behind his collarbones. When the horn tips were two arm-lengths away, he stepped forward into the collision, shifting his weight onto the lead heel.

The impact tore through the soles of his boots, shattering the stone shelf beneath them into gray powder. The ram's left horn struck his chest plate with the sound of a blacksmith's sledge hitting an anvil. Gijsbert took the force through his thighs, his vertebrae locking in a rigid arch. His hands shot out, callous-rough palms slamming into the ribbed bronze ridges behind the monster's ears.

He locked his fingers into a tight collar-tie grip around the base of the skull.

The ram brayed, a harsh metallic screech that echoed off the high crags. It drove its hindquarters hard, trying to shove Gijsbert off the edge and into the sulfuric sinkhole below. Loose basalt spilled past his heels, clattering down into the smoke.

Gijsbert ground his back teeth together. Deep behind his belly, a tight knot of slow-braised oxtail essence flared. The banked heat rushed down his meridian channels into his legs, multiplying his mass until his boots anchored three inches deep into the volcanic bedrock.

"Too light," Gijsbert said through gritted teeth. "All horn, no soup."

He clamped his left arm under the ram's thick jaw, wrenching the snout upward to break its downward drive. With his right hand, he caught the outer spiral of the right horn, twisting the beast's neck five degrees off-center.

The ram's neck lurched under the shift, its front hooves flailing to catch the stone.

Gijsbert used the beast's own forward momentum. He hooked his right calf around the beast's front knee, driving his hip into the hollow of its throat. An inside thigh sweep, executed with eight tons of charging fury behind it, had only one physical answer.

The ram's balance evaporated.

Gijsbert pivoted on his left ball, arching his spine backward over the drop. He pulled the massive head tight against his collarbone, hoisting the ram clear of the scree by leverage and sheer hip lift. The world tilted. Sky and boiling sulfur traded places.

With a deep bellow from his diaphragm, Gijsbert snapped his hips through and hurled the beast over his shoulder in a full belly-to-belly arc.

The ram flew through the air, hooves kicking wildly at empty sky, before crashing spine-first into the flat terrace behind him. The impact split the basalt floor into a spiderweb of smoking cracks. Stone dust billowed ten yards high, choking the wind.

The beast gave a wheezing rattle, all four legs twitching as the breath left its iron cage.

Gijsbert landed on his knees beside the pinned head, driving his forearm across the thick windpipe until the struggling horns went slack. He held the position, breathing hard, feeling the cold hollow in his belly widen. That single throw had consumed two days of stored broth. His knuckles twitched with the sudden tremble of low blood sugar.

"Dry," he gasped, leaning over the beast's neck to inspect the hide. He pinched a fold of skin along the shoulder. "Tough as harness strap. Femke will curse me for two hours before she even touches the cleaver. I'll have to simmer the neck shanks until midnight just to make them chewable."

He stood, wiping a smear of black rock dust from his jaw with the back of his hand.

Below the terrace, the wide expanse of the lower disc stretched out toward the liquid fire sea. Usually, the jagged cliffs of Braam-Duin offered nothing but barren smoke and the occasional wandering beast looking for sulfur salt.

A deep thrum cut through the wind.

Gijsbert paused, his hand still resting on the horn tip.

Three blunt, bronze-plated skiffs slid silently through the low cloud bank below the ridge. Their hulls were long and angular, bound in overlapping plates of cold-forged iron that bore the three-strand braid sigil of the Iron-Braid Empire.

Iron grapnels shot from the bow of the lead ship, biting into the black rock of the lower crags with sharp metallic thuds. Heavy bronze chains rattled tight, anchoring the vessels directly beneath Gijsbert's hunting path.

Hatches dropped with heavy clangs. Dozens of soldiers clad in immaculate silver-braided lacquer coats marched onto the ledges, carrying iron-weighted capture poles and massive perimeter stakes.

Gijsbert looked down at the soldiers, then back at his eight-ton ram.

"Of all the ridges on this disc," he muttered, "they have to park their tin boats right under my kitchen."