Under the Warlord's Eye

How much blood does it take to convince an idiot that metal is heavier than prayer?

Two spearmen dragged Jorund toward the warlord's pavilion by his collar, the boy's heels gouging twin ruts into the volcanic silt. Across the central terrace of Hross-Vault, grease smoke from seventy iron braziers rolled thick enough to sting the throat, but the stink that truly churned my stomach was cheap temple frankincense. Rite-Keeper Varkun was already howling inside the canvas tent, swinging his bronze sickle so close to the roof beams that the pitch-sealed linen hissed with every stroke.

I did not break into a run. Running in a war camp gives sentries permission to plant a javelin between your shoulder blades. Instead, I tucked the heavy burlap sack under my left arm, wiped a smear of black mineral oil across my cheek, and kicked aside the crossed halberds at the entrance.

"Touch the boy again, Varkun," I said, stepping onto the woven reed rugs, "and you can cast the next twenty-ton sound-bow with your bare teeth."

The tent fell dead still.

At the center of the pavilion, Warlord Ravnsk stood over an unrolled campaign hide spread across a split basalt slab. His bronze lamellar cuirass caught the torchlight in sharp yellow crescents. Beside him, Captain Brondar leaned on the pommel of his broadsword, his missing ear puckered like a dried fig beneath a leather arming cap. On the opposite side of the slab, Varkun held Jorund pinned against a cedar pole. The boy's face was chalk-white, the grease-soaked wool plugs still jammed into his ears, trembling under the sickle's curved tip.

"A sentry lies dead at the mule trough," Varkun snarled, spit speckling his beard. "His windpipe was sheared without a cry. Only an unhallowed hand, tampering with the forbidden breath of the well, could summon night-fiends from the deep shaft. The boy was seen near the third wagon an hour before the murder."

"He was fetching slack-water on my orders," I said.

"He carries the stench of the pit!" Varkun stepped forward, his sickle twitching toward Jorund's throat. "The blood of an apprentice on the threshold altar will quiet the angry dead. Ravnsk, give the word."

Ravnsk did not turn his head. His pale eyes remained fixed on the hide map, tracing the dark circle marking the descent to the second well-shaft.

"Three sentries killed in two days," Ravnsk said, his voice grating like sandstone under an iron wheel. "First on the spiral ramp. Then during the crossing. Now inside our own bivouac, fifty paces from my bed-skin. A warlord who cannot keep his perimeter cannot hold an empire. Explain the dead man, founder, or step aside so Varkun can cleanse the camp."

I stepped past Brondar and walked straight to the map slab.

"Your sentries die," I said, "because you set bronze-clad cattle to watch for burrowing wolves."

I swung the burlap bundle off my shoulder and tipped it upside down.

The severed chassis of the mantis drone crashed onto the sheepskin map with an ugly, metallic thump.

Varkun recoiled two paces, lifting his bronze sickle. Brondar drew six inches of iron from his scabbard, the blade rasping in the gloom. Even Ravnsk shifted his balance, heavy fingers tightening on the table edge as the smell of scorched mineral oil and acrid copper washed through the heated air.

The four-legged basalt-and-alloy torso lay sprawled across the boundaries of Hross-Vault. One segmented limb hung limp, its brass ball joint leaking amber fluid onto the hide. At its front, the hollow ocular turret stared blindly at the canvas roof, its quartz lens shattered into cloudy facets.

"That is no fiend," I said, driving the tip of my bronze scrape-knife into the seam between two interlocking plates. I twisted the grip. The casing popped open with a dry click, exposing a dense nest of coiled copper wires, miniature ratchet gears, and twin hydraulic pistons no thicker than a man's thumb. "Does a demon drink refined mineral fat? Does an ancestral ghost require six-toothed gear-rings to flex its knuckles?"

Brondar leaned over the table, his single ear twitching toward the machinery. "What weapon cut the man at the trough?"

"Nothing cut him," I said. "This thing crushed him. These front claws are balance shears, designed to sever basalt slag and core cables when the shaft flues overheat. Your guard stood beside the water trough wearing forty pounds of loose bronze plates, clattering like a sack of kitchen pots. To this machine's acoustic receptors, his brass buckles sounded like a vibrating exhaust obstruction. It crawled down from the drainage flues, caught him by the neck to clear the vent, and dropped him in the mud."

I reached into my pocket and set down the fist-sized silver guidance core I had extracted under the quenching tub. The metal stayed cold to the touch, heavy as solid lead, completely free of tool marks.

"These things are not spirits," I told Ravnsk. "They are vault vermin. Automatic maintenance spiders built by whoever carved these shafts. They do not care about your conquest. They do not care about your ancestors. They react to noise, vibration, and heat. Every time your spearmen bang their pikes on the terrace stones, you invite fifty more down the flues."

Varkun's voice turned shrill. "Blasphemy! He mocks the holy wardens of the threshold!"

"Then take your sickle and go hunt them yourself, priest," I snapped. "Take twenty acolytes with your little bronze bells and walk up the northern sulfur flue. When four of these spiders drop out of the ceiling to shear your ribs off your spine, see if your hymns change the pitch of their ratchets."

Varkun choked on his own breath, lowering the sickle an inch.

Ravnsk reached out with one broad thumb and pressed it against the severed drone limb, feeling the greasy amber film on the alloy joint. Then his gaze lifted to mine. There was no terror in his face; there was only the cold, calculating hunger of a predator measuring a new obstacle.

"Can you kill them?" Ravnsk asked.

"I caught this one with a tuning fork, an oak tub, and a pair of tongs," I said. "Your warriors tried to stab it with iron spears. The spearhead bent; the sentry died. If you want the foundry wagons to stay whole, I need three things before dawn."

"Name them," Ravnsk said.

"First, keep the priest fifty paces back from the wagons. If he touches Jorund, I drop my hammers and you can steer the next bell with your knuckles."

Varkun hissed, but Ravnsk raised a single finger, cutting off the protest.

"Second," I continued, "I take command of the foundry trench perimeter. No patrols through the ash ditches without my chalk marks on their greaves. Spearmen walk on wood chips or wool rags, not bare basalt. Third, I want five tons of clean copper ingots and six crates of block tin from the reserve wagons dumped into my smelting pit by mid-morning. If I am to forge perimeter traps that ring these spiders to pieces, I need metal, not prayers."

Ravnsk looked down at the twisted brass joints on the table. A slow, thin smile crept across his bearded mouth.

"The perimeter is yours," the warlord said. "Brondar will post six veteran spearmen to your trench, bound to your chalk lines. Varkun will confine his rites to the upper terrace."

Varkun opened his mouth to object, but Ravnsk slammed his palm down on the basalt slab. The severed drone bounced, its broken lens rolling against an empty copper bowl.

"However," Ravnsk said, the smile vanishing as he drew a heavy bronze dagger from his belt, "you will not spend that copper on traps alone."

With a sudden, violent thrust, Ravnsk drove the dagger through the thick sheepskin map. The blade bit deep into the basalt beneath with a sharp, ringing crack that sent a shudder through the table legs. The point pinned the map right over the dark circle of the next Gate-Well.

"The scouts report the shaft mouth three miles south is already warming," Ravnsk said, leaning forward until the stink of bear grease on his collar filled the air. "The third bell must be cast, tuned, and mounted on the timber A-frame within three days. Not four. Not five. Three days, founder. If that bell does not open the gate when my chariot wheels hit the threshold, I will nail you and your apprentice to the bell's sound-bow, and ring the gate open with your skulls."

He did not pull the dagger free. The bronze blade stood upright in the stone, vibrating with a dull, sickening thrum.

I met his stare, swallowed the copper taste in my mouth, and jerked my chin toward Jorund.

"Jorund," I said. "Get the sack. We have molds to dig."

The boy lunged forward, seized the burlap bag, and followed me out of the tent into the sulfur-choked night. Behind us, the dagger continued to hum in the stone, marking the start of three days to forge an instrument that would either crack the next world or kill us where we stood.