Dust Clouds over the Gap of Horns

How many leagues of solid mountain could a three-legged colossus crush before its metal guts cooked the passenger clinging to its belly? Dag Flintrow crouched in the octagonal maintenance cradle four hundred feet above the jagged floor of the Gap of Horns, pressing his grease-stained sleeve against his face to keep his eyelashes from singing off. What he wanted above all things was twenty feet of cool, dry granite where the air did not scald his throat, but Cairn Nine had squeezed into the narrowing canyon, and its starboard exhaust louver was jammed shut by an avalanche of northern scree.

Every three seconds, white vapor whistled through the bronze seams around Dag's head with the shriek of an infuriated boar. The heat came in pulses, thick with the smell of boiled copper and sulfur. If he stayed huddled behind the hip joint for another five strides, the accumulation of trapped steam would boil him like a turnip in a winter pot.

Two miles behind them, the open tundra had yielded to vertical walls of red shale and gray hornblende. Cairn Nine did not slow its cadence for the pinch. Its three massive basalt pylons swung forward in steady sixty-pace arcs, grinding along the canyon floor like tectonic pestles. Whenever the outer flank of the left knee struck a projecting buttress of the cliff, a shudder ran through the iron struts, shaking down tons of shattered slate and permafrost that burst into fine gray powder against the pylon’s bronze ribbing.

Dag spat a mouthful of stone dust over the railing. Two days ago, he had believed scraping rancid tallow from frozen mammoth hides under Chief Hunter Hobb's crooked glare was the absolute nadir of human misery. That had been an amateur assessment. At least Hobb’s cleaver never blew pressurized steam into a man's trousers, and the tundra gravel did not sway sixty paces through the sky every time an iron knee locked into place.

Deep in the machine's pelvic vault, the harmonic chime resonated through the stone floorplates.

Ding. Dong.

"Warning," said the cheerful, melodious voice echoing through the acoustic flues. The ancient proto-speech rolled out smooth and sweet, untroubled by the shower of boulders shearing off the canyon wall. "Tectonic clearance along transit corridor seven falls beneath regional grading specifications. Auxiliary bypass engaged. Please maintain clear perimeter around primary discharge vents."

"I am trying, you singing pile of gravel," Dag snarled into the flue, though the metal grate gave him only a blast of hot vapor in reply.

He wiped sweat and soot from his brow with the back of his hand, scanning the undercarriage. The source of his immediate doom was mounted thirty paces forward, along the secondary hydraulic trunk. A heavy bronze flap, roughly the size of a clan war-sled, hung crooked on its pivot pin. Instead of swinging outward to vent the building steam into the open chasm, the flap remained wedged at a thirty-degree angle. A wedge of fractured chert, dislodged when the machine first clipped the northern bluff, had jammed hard beneath the hinge counterweight. Behind the stuck gate, the copper relief pipes glowed a dull, angry cherry red.

If the relief valve failed to release, the high-pressure head would burst through the expansion gasket right beside his cradle.

He touched the pouch at his belt. The honey-tinted quartz sliver he had knocked loose on the first day rattled against his curved antler pry and a handful of smooth, river-rolled granite stones gathered from the last stream bed Cairn Nine had stridden across. Climbing along the external struts was impossible; the machine was traversing a sixty-foot drop between two river benches, and the lateral whip of the gait would snap a man's grip like dry willow.

He would have to trip the hinge from here.

Dag unlooped the braided caribou-sinew sling from his left hip. The leather pouch was rubbed supple from years of rabbit coursing across the northern moraines, but the target ahead was no stationary hare. The pylon rose and dipped in a violent elliptical roll. With each stride, the central drive-shaft plunged downward four paces, creating a buffeting downdraft that tore at his tunic and threatened to pluck the leather strips from his fingers.

He chose a dark river pebble the size of a gull's egg. He nested the stone into the pocket, testing the tension of the twin thongs.

The pylon swung its lead leg forward. The entire pelvic housing tilted twelve degrees to the left as sixty thousand tons of basalt caught the canyon floor with a crash that rattled the bones in Dag's jaw. The counterweight arm on the jammed exhaust flap dipped, rose, and shuddered against the trapped rock.

Dag waited through two full strides, tracking the arc of the vibration. The pattern was regular: stride, impact, counter-twist, recoil. On the third stride, just as the left knee struck the shale bench and before the recoil snapped the cradle skyward, there was a fraction of a breath where the struts hung suspended in equilibrium.

He rose onto the balls of his feet, hooked his index finger through the leather loop, and swung the pocket twice overhead in a tight, humming circle.

He released.

The stone whistled through the cross-draft, clearing thirty feet of churning steam and shuddering bronze rods. It struck the wedged chert flake with a sharp, dry crack. The brittle rock sheared in half.

For a heartbeat, the bronze flap remained motionless. Then the counterweight clunked downward under the pressure of the manifold.

The relief flap blasted wide open.

A deafening roar erupted as tons of pent-up steam shot horizontally into the canyon wall, cutting through a band of ancient river clay like a butcher's knife through fat. The scalding cloud billowed outward into the chasm, carrying the blistering heat harmlessly into the open sky.

Inside the undercarriage, the temperature plunged instantly from an oven bake to the brisk autumn chill of the mountain air.

Dag let out his breath in a long whistle and dropped his forehead against the cold iron handrail. His knuckles still trembled from the tension, but the cherry glow on the copper pipes had already begun to fade into dull gray.

Better still, behind the cleared exhaust duct, the shift of the counterweight had exposed a deep, sheltered recess in the pelvic housing. It was a narrow maintenance platform lined with thick sheets of leaded cork, completely roofed against falling scree and situated ten feet above the draft line of the vents. It offered dry footholds, an intact grab-rail, and enough room to stretch his legs without courting death.

He did not hesitate. Shoving his sling back into his belt, Dag scrambled across the connecting catwalk before the pylon could pitch through its next cycle, throwing himself into the recess.

The platform was dry, insulated, and astonishingly quiet compared to the wind-whipped cradle. He leaned his back against the cork wall, running a hand through his matted hair. For the first time in two days, he was not in immediate danger of being crushed by tumbling shale or boiled alive by whistling pipes.

Then the machine cleared the narrowest neck of the Gap of Horns, and the chasm opened out into the broad river gorge.

Dag leaned over the platform's protective lip, looking down past the colossal joint of the descending starboard knee.

The steam had thinned, drifting off in pale shreds across the rushing gray water of the mountain torrent. Five hundred feet below, on the gravel flats flanking the northern landing of the ferry, stood several hundred figures formed in rigid, glittering squares.

Dag blinked through the grit in his eyes. They were not northern hunters in gray wolf-fells. They wore stiff crimson tabards that gleamed like wet blood in the midday sun, topped with round bronze caps and long river-pikes planted upright in the gravel. Ahead of the spearmen, fluttering against the canyon breeze, three enormous silk banners depicted the coiled serpent of the Southern Conclave.

Directly in the center of the gravel spit, an elaborate ceremonial litter rested beside five commandeered skiffs. Standing before the litter was a solitary figure in high white robes and a shining pearl gorget, holding a gilded scroll case raised toward the sky as if greeting an honored guest.

Directly above them, Cairn Nine's sixty-pace basalt foot began its downward arc, plunging straight for the center of the red line.