Setting the Table

How many strikes did it take to crack an armored legionary who refused to vacate a cookhouse terrace? Femke Kaatjes vaulted off the lower gorge switchbacks and planted her boots on the rim of Braam-Duin’s high terrace, the four six-foot copper spits she had salvaged rattling against her back sling. Below in the dark rift, the eighty-ton alpha ram was already dragging its armored bulk upward through the cracked bedrock, shaking dust from the cliff face with every heave. If Femke did not sweep the imperial ridge-guard off the upper shelf and seat the Alliance’s six-ton bronze kettle over the primary chimney vent before Gijsbert took the monster by the horns, the clan's entire braise would shatter across bare stone.

Five imperial legionaries held the rim of the terrace. An artillery spotter crew that had scaled the eastern crags behind the earlier scouts, the squad had dragged a heavy iron towing chain across the basalt to anchor a defensive position. At the center stood their corporal, a thick-chested man encased in fluted bronze scale, his short spear leveled toward the trail.

The four men beside him locked their tall rectangular shields together, bronze rims grinding in a tight wall.

"Halt, provincial!" the corporal shouted, his faceplate gleaming in the sulfur light. "The Iron-Braid Empire holds this shelf!"

"You're standing on my prep station," Femke said.

She sprinted four strides across the shale, jammed the iron-shod heel of her ash pole into a basalt fault, and launched her body into the sulfuric updraft. The seasoned wood bowed, held sixty pounds of spring tension, and snapped upright.

Femke flew twelve feet above the gravel, sailing clean over the bronze wall. In midair, her hands slipped to the linen wraps on her forearms, freeing two eighteen-inch iron skewers.

She came down boots-first on the corporal’s shoulders. The bronze pauldrons clattered against his collarbone, driving his knees hard into the pumice. Before the flanking soldiers could wheel inward, Femke swept the butt of her ash pole across the dirt, taking the legs out from under the two men on the left. They hit the rock with the hollow clatter of dropped skillets.

The two on the right lunged with short stabbing swords. Femke did not bother parrying steel against bronze. Heavy armor made imperial infantry clumsy in the hips—shore crabs wrapped in lacquered shell, needing only a wedge in the joint to turn them over.

She slipped inside the first sword thrust, caught the soldier’s wrist, and drove the butt-cap of her pole straight into his breastplate. The blow rang like an iron hammer on an anvil. The man stumbled backward, gasping for breath. The second swordsman slashed across her waist. Femke leaned back half an inch, let the bronze blade whistle through empty air, and hooked her heel behind his ankle. A sharp yank sent him face-first onto the scree.

The corporal scrambled up from his knees, swinging his spear in a wide, desperate chop.

Femke sidestepped the blade. She unslung one of her six-foot cold-forged copper spits, drove the pointed end deep between two basalt slabs beneath the corporal’s boots, and kicked the shaft sideways.

The heavy copper bar acted as a tripwire. The corporal struck it full on the shins, pitched forward, and tumbled headfirst into a dry juniper gully.

"Stay in the scrub," Femke called down to him. "Or I'll use the skewer to fillet your breastplate."

The corporal spat gravel, looked at the twin iron skewers twirling in her knuckles, and stayed flat on his belly. The other four legionaries scrambled across the rocks toward the southern goat path, leaving their shields, their spears, and fifty feet of braided iron towing chain behind them.

Femke did not look after them. A cook did not chase bones when the butcher block was waiting.

She turned toward the center of the terrace.

There sat the pride of the Kettle-Claw lineage: a six-ton bronze kettle, wide as an ox-cart, its round belly darkened by a century of tallow and cedar smoke. The pot rested on pine sled-runners, held fast against the slope by four spruce chock-blocks. Beneath its curved iron base, a bed of cedar embers was already glowing.

Lord-Marshal Reinier Sluishuis stood beside the pot on a wooden footstool. His immaculate silk tunic was soaked with gray broth grease, his sleeves were rolled past his elbows, and his pale aristocratic forearms were speckled with blisters from popping tallow. He held the four-foot ironwood paddle with both hands, dragging it in slow, disciplined circles through the boiling stock.

"Reinier!" Femke shouted, sprinting across the shale. "Step down and pull your paddle!"

The lord-marshal paused, wiping sulfur soot from his eyebrow with the back of an unblemished wrist. "I am skimming!" he shouted back, his patrician voice shrill with indignation. "The fat cap has achieved full emulsion! Gijsbert explicitly threatened my spinal column if I allowed the surface to crust!"

"The alpha is climbing the gorge," Femke said, seizing the heavy iron towing chain the soldiers had left behind. "If that pot stays thirty paces from the drop, Gijsbert can't reach it on the toss. Clear off the stool!"

Reinier glanced over the rim of the terrace toward the rising cloud of black magma smoke. His aristocratic jaw tightened. Without another word of protest, he hauled the grease-dripping ironwood paddle out of the broth, tucked it under his arm, and hopped off the footstool.

Femke ran to the four planar oxen resting near the ridge. "Up, beasts," she grunted, slapping their thick shoulders with the flat of her pole.

The oxen rose, their cloven hooves digging deep into the pumice as Femke hitched the imperial towing chain to their yoke. She looped the middle links through the kettle's massive bronze lifting rings, then drove two of her remaining copper spits into the bedrock behind the runners to serve as guide pins.

"Pull!" she yelled, driving her ash pole under the rear runner as a prybar.

The oxen strained against their leather harness. The spruce chock-blocks creaked under sixty tons of combined load. Femke kicked the front left chock with her heel, knocking it loose with a sharp crack, then threw her entire weight onto the pole.

The six-ton bronze cauldron groaned. The pine sled-runners slid forward on the greased basalt, grinding stone to flour as the oxen leaned into the trace. Inch by inch, the massive pot moved toward the lip of the drop.

At the very edge of the terrace, a natural volcanic chimney vent hissed violently, spewing continuous white-hot gas into the sky.

"Reinier, chock the right runner!" Femke barked.

The lord-marshal dropped his aristocratic pride, kicked a spruce block square beneath the sliding timber, and jumped back as the kettle shuddered to a halt directly over the vent.

The six-ton cauldron dropped two inches into the stone cradle cut around the heat chimney. Instantly, the superheated gas funneled around its bronze belly. The three thousand gallons of stock inside rose to a furious, churning boil, sending up a pillar of steam rich with roasted marrow, wild garlic, and crushed peppercorns.

A seismic roar tore through the gorge.

Gijsbert set down his iron tasting ladle on the terrace parapet, stepped to the outer edge, and dropped forty yards down to the lower shelf in a single ground-shaking landing, planting his heavy boots directly between the rising monster and the camp.

Across the lower plateau, the basalt crust broke apart. Two colossal bronze horns, twice the thickness of beer casks and weeping sulfur slag, rose into the daylight. The eighty-ton alpha ram hauled its mountainous forequarters onto the stone, its amber eyes locked with predatory rage onto Gijsbert van der Meulen.

Gijsbert stood in the center of the lower shelf, hollow-cheeked from three days of starvation, his boots rooted into the volcanic rock. He dropped his hips, opened his massive arms, and smiled.

The monster dropped its horned skull and charged.

On the terrace above, Femke raised her last copper spit. She swung it like a blacksmith's hammer, striking the bronze rim of the six-ton kettle with all the leverage in her shoulders.

A clear, deep gong rolled across the gorge, cutting straight through the monster's roar and the hiss of boiling marrow.

"Pot is hot, Gijsbert!" Femke’s voice rang across the canyon. "Dinner is on the table!"