The Lord-Marshal's Treason

Would the third gunner on the starboard battery recognize a five-pointed seal of the High Chancellery before loose naphtha liquefied the stones under Reinier's boots?

Lord-Marshal Reinier Sluishuis pressed his spine against the hot bronze flank of the six-ton cauldron, his polished leather boots slipping on a fresh smear of suet. Overhead, the eighty-ton belly of the Gilded Halberd blocked the harsh afternoon sun of Braam-Duin, casting the entire terrace into rust-colored twilight. The four-foot ironwood paddle Gijsbert had shoved into his chest remained clenched in both hands, slick with marrow grease and smelling intensely of roasted bone and scorched cedar. Fifty paces down the basalt incline, Gijsbert van der Meulen stood squarely beneath the whistling descent of a three-inch hawser, bare forearms crossed over his massive chest, appraising the warship's iron anchor as though considering whether it could be beaten into a turnspit, while Femke drove iron skewers into the meat rack nearby to anchor the hanging carcass against the downdraft.

Reinier shifted the heavy paddle into his left armpit and lifted his right hand into the narrow shaft of light slicing past the ship's keel. Sunlight caught the heavy silver of his signet ring, throwing a bright, harsh flash of glare against the scow's lower blister.

"Lower deck deck-chief," Reinier muttered under the roar of the suspension screws. "Third viewport from the winch house. Signal down. Signal the retrieval sling."

No sling dropped. Instead, an iron hatch slammed back against the ship's oak siding with the dry crack of a butcher's mallet. A bronze-plated firing cradle groaned along grease-packed slides.

"Range four score paces," a voice boomed through an imperial brass horn from the forward rail. The harsh, clipped vowels belonged without question to Sub-Praetor Vrolijk, an unimaginative artillery clerk whose only tactic in twenty years of border pacification had been the liberal application of pitch. "Ground is compromised by hostile heavy infantry. Clear the terrace for salvage hooks. Load sulfur pots."

Reinier stiffened. A cold prickle spread across his neck, entirely separate from the scalding steam drifting off the kettle behind him.

Sulfur pots. Third-tier alchemical brimstone, blended with crude seal oil to cling to volcanic stone. The mixture burned at nine hundred paces a second, leaving behind a crust of yellow slag that took three rainy seasons to wash clean.

Down on the lower ledge, the sub-centurion Gijsbert had tossed into the shale earlier had crawled behind a split boulder. The scout was striking an iron baton against a lead cylinder, fanning a flare-box that coughed dense plumes of violet smoke straight up into the draft of the scow's port paddles. That violet column was the artillery's optical tether. The gunners did not aim at men; they aligned their copper sights to the smoke and let gravity dump three barrels of liquid fire onto whatever stood within forty strides of the beacon.

The flare-box sat exactly nine paces from the bronze cauldron.

Reinier looked from the violet smoke to the steaming surface of the kettle. The fat cap had just begun to turn a delicate, pale gold, releasing an aroma so rich and dense it cut straight through the alkaline reek of the canyon. Beside the fire-trench, the hindquarters of the eight-ton mountain ram hung from iron braces, the crimson flesh patterned with exquisite ribbons of white fat that had taken half a century of high-altitude lichen grazing to form.

If three barrels of imperial naphtha struck that terrace, the ram would not merely burn. The sulfur would fuse with the rendered tallow, polymerizing the delicate collagen into bitter, inedible pitch. The broth, nurtured with sixty pounds of mountain alliums and four bushels of dried juniper, would sour into caustic brine before Gijsbert even had the chance to skim the scum.

The barbarity of it seized Reinier by the ribs. To spend forty million copper guilders constructing an aerial dreadnought simply to douse prime planar veal in military kerosene was an offense against every civilized principle the empire claimed to export.

"Vrolijk, you illiterate provincial clod," Reinier hissed under his breath.

He took two quick strides away from the shadow of the cauldron. The ironwood paddle felt awkwardly balanced, its flat blade four inches wide and dense as river slate. Gijsbert had used it to scrape the bottom of the vat, but the handle was straight-grain white-ash, four feet of unbroken fiber hardened over peat fires.

Reinier did not call out. Shouting against the roar of the lift-paddles would only draw a crossbow volley from the marines lining the scow's gunwales. The firing cadence of the Gilded Halberd followed strict imperial drill: four turns of the rack to draw the iron bowstrings, three breaths to prime the fuse cups, one horn blast to drop the catch.

The first clack of the winch dogs echoed down the basalt chimney. Four turns.

Reinier scrambled across the shale ridge, keeping low behind the sulfur vents that crisscrossed the camp terrace. His silk robe snagged on a thorn-bush, tearing at the hem, but he did not pause to untangle it. He reached the narrow rock shelf three yards above the scout's flare-box just as the winch pawls ceased their rhythmic rattle.

Three breaths.

Below him, the injured scout knelt over the bronze cylinder, blowing through a reed to whip the violet phosphorus into a steady, pillar-like torch. Above them, the scow's forward catapult creaked as its counterweight swung outboard.

Directly beside Reinier's knees lay a detached slab of basalt, sheared clean by frost and balanced precariously on a lip of chalky limestone. It weighed perhaps four hundred pounds, far beyond what any imperial magistrate had ever been expected to lift. But the slab rested on a fulcrum no thicker than a man's wrist.

Reinier did not hesitate. He jammed the chiseled tip of the ironwood paddle under the slab's rear seam, set his hip against the ash shaft, and threw the entire weight of his patrician frame into the leverage.

The wood bowed. Fibers groaned against his ribs. For an agonizing second, the stone refused to yield, held by a pinch of dried clay.

The horn on the scow blew its warning blast.

Reinier bared his teeth, planted his boots against the basalt, and shoved with every ounce of momentum in his legs.

The limestone fulcrum cracked. The basalt slab tilted, lost its grip on the ridge, and slid forward in a tumbling avalanche of dust and broken shale.

The slab struck the scout's ledge with a hollow thud that shook the terrace. It landed squarely across the bronze flare-box, flattening the cylinder like a dried turnip and driving the entire iron assembly deep into the soft sulfur scree. The violet smoke column died instantly, pinched off beneath four hundred pounds of solid volcanic rock. A foul burp of trapped phosphorus hissed harmlessly through the gravel, smothered before it could rise ten feet.

Up on the belly of the Gilded Halberd, the targeting mirrors swung blind.

"Lost the beacon!" a spotter screamed through the speaking tube, his voice carrying clearly on the downdraft. "The marker is gone! Elevation slipping!"

A clumsy hand released the trigger lanyard anyway.

Three barrels of burning naphtha tumbled from the bronze cradle, shrieking through the air as they arced wide of the basalt terrace. They cleared the outer ledge by thirty yards, plunging straight into the bottomless ravine below. A dull, muffled roar rolled up from the abyss as the sulfur slick ignited against the dry bedrock hundreds of feet beneath the camp, sending up a harmless gout of orange flame that barely stirred the hems of the drying clothes.

The heavy transport scow, caught in the sudden updraft from the canyon fire, shuddered and yawed hard to port. Her iron keel scraped against the upper crag, showering the path with sparks before her helmsman engaged the emergency lift-vanes, hauling the clumsy ship back into the high clouds to reset her approach.

Silence returned to the shelf, broken only by the steady simmer of the bronze pot.

Reinier remained on his knees in the scree, gasping for thin mountain air, the splintered ironwood paddle still locked in his shaking fists. A thick smudge of gray sulfur ash coated his left sleeve, ruining what was left of his embroidery. Across the ledge, Gijsbert turned slowly from the anchor cable, a wooden tasting bowl balanced on one immense palm, his small dark eyes fixing directly on the collapsed slab and the nobleman crouching behind it.

Reinier did not drop the paddle. He stood up, brushed a single flake of soot from his lapel, and set the blade back into the simmering fat cap without a word.