An Unyielding Footing on Slag

Could an armful of gossamer silk snap three iron winch-cables before the dead air of a furnace barge choked off all retreat?

Chormaqanoglu shook the slack folds of his banner along the flat of his foil, testing the stillness. Here behind the armored bulk of the slag-barge, the solar gale had vanished into an oily calm. Cold soot settled over the pitted catwalks like sifted coal. Twenty paces ahead, heavy boots clattered over corrugated plating as six corsairs rounded a venting pipe, barbed harpoon-cranks cocked across their forearms. Behind Chormaqanoglu, Torgantay planted his boots wide, nine brass rings on his halberd ringing against the rim of his shield, while Mengubek swung his twelve-foot spear in a tight figure eight to keep his grip warm.

"Keep your boots rooted, fencer," Mengubek muttered, his crimson silk hanging limp as dead kelp. "Without solar drift to lift your heels, you weigh as much as any cobbler."

"A cobbler with exceptional arches, spear-brother," Chormaqanoglu murmured. His pale cream wraps fluttered only from the movement of his own arms. "And far better taste in footwear than these coal-heavers."

At the front of the boarding party stood a hulking brute in grease-stained harness, a notched boarding axe in one fist and a gimbaled brass sphere hanging from a chain at his belt. An astral compass, its needle floating in luminous mercury. The glass face caught the distant amber light of the Golden Comet, pulsing true north toward the core. Chormaqanoglu adjusted his stance on the rusted rivets. The compass would show the clear lanes through the dust storm ahead, and its brass casing looked remarkably well polished for a brigand's belt.

"Citadel lapdogs and League show-ponies," the quartermaster spat, his voice rattling inside an iron jaw-guard. "Captain Ilterish-oglu pays ten ingots per banner-head, skin intact. Drop the poles or we bolt you to the hull."

"Article Fourteen of the Cometary Accords," Torgantay boomed, stepping forward until his green lamellar scales rasped against the bulkhead. "Privateers operating without moonlet charter upon unbonded iron possess no legal authority of seizure. Lay down your cranks and submit to Citadel impoundment."

The quartermaster barked a laugh. "Shoot the loud one in the throat."

Three ratchets clicked.

Chormaqanoglu did not wait for the bolts. He dropped low, his slippers skimming across the rusted slag as he launched himself along the narrow catwalk. Without solar wind, his gossamer banner possessed no astral lift, but it remained forty square cubits of fine bronze-threaded silk, light as spiderspun thread and tougher than boiled bull-hide. As the three harpooners squeezed their release levers, coiled steel cables sang across the deck, heavy barbed heads whistling toward Torgantay's breastplate.

Chormaqanoglu flicked his wrist. His flexible bronze foil snapped outward, catching the lead cable right behind its barb. With a smooth circular flourish born of ten thousand hours on the training terraces of the Wandering Wind Order, he whipped the blade around the second line, then the third, rolling the gossamer silk behind the bronze tip like a closing fan.

The three cables gathered into the silk fold. The sudden kinetic pull threatened to drag him over the railing into the starry abyss, but Chormaqanoglu did not fight the tension. He dropped his center of gravity, jammed his left heel into a rusted expansion seam, and spun with the force of the winch-fire.

The gossamer banner wrapped tight around the braided cables, binding them into a single twisted cord.

"Your wrist alignment is atrocious, my friends," Chormaqanoglu called out, teeth flashing in the gloom. "When you fire a spread, you must never give an acrobat a common pivot."

He reversed his hips, using the catwalk's iron stanchion as a fulcrum, and levered the butt of his foil against the deck. The winch engines on the corsairs' belts had locked their gears to reel in their catch, but with all three lines snarled around a single point, their own motor-spools bucked backward.

The recoil slammed through the cables. Three corsairs were yanked off their boots in a flurry of flailing limbs and clattering armor. They skittered across the grease-slick plating, collided with the rusted safety chain, and flipped cleanly over the lip of the barge, shrieking into the soundless vacuum as their tow-lines dragged them into the void.

"Insolent insect!" the quartermaster roared, lunging forward with his boarding axe raised high.

Behind him, two remaining raiders leveled reserve crossbows. A heavy bronze blade whistled past Chormaqanoglu's shoulder as Torgantay's nine-ringed halberd cleaved through the iron floorplates between them, sending a shower of orange sparks across the brigands' visors and forcing them to scramble back. Mengubek's hollow spear darted like a striking adder, the butt-cap catching the nearest crossbowman beneath the chin with a dry crack that dropped him flat.

That left the quartermaster.

The brute swung his broad axe downward in a cleaving arc that would have split an anvil. Chormaqanoglu did not parry steel with bronze. He stepped inside the man's reach, allowing the flat of the axe head to glance off his padded shoulder guard. His left hand dipped down like a foraging heron. His thumb popped the brass swivel of the astral compass, unhooking the heavy chain from the leather loop in a single, fluid pluck.

At the same instant, Chormaqanoglu drove the flexible tip of his foil straight into the quartermaster's iron gorget. The spring-tempered bronze bowed, stored the brute's rushing momentum, and snapped straight with a sharp chime.

The shock threw the quartermaster three paces back into the vent stack, his breath bursting from his lips in a cloud of white condensation. He slumped against the pipe, clutching his bruised throat.

Chormaqanoglu spun the brass compass on his index finger, catching the heavy sphere in his palm. The luminous needle within swung toward the cometary wake, untroubled by iron or slag.

"Superb craftsmanship," Chormaqanoglu said, tucking the instrument into his cream silk sash. "Though the owner was entirely unworthy of the metal."

"A petty theft," Torgantay rumbled, resting his halberd across his broad shoulder while checking the corridor with narrowed eyes. "Though the Section Ten doctrine permits temporary seizure of navigation aids aboard hostile craft during active boarding operations."

"Do not strain your conscience on my account, Pillar," Chormaqanoglu smiled, flicking a soot smudge from his sleeve. "I consider it an administrative fee for teaching them basic physics."

Mengubek stepped up beside them, his jaw tight as he peered toward the towering superstructure of the slag-barge. "Save the self-congratulation, flag-dancer. We are still trapped in the barge's lee. Look up."

Above them, on the high furnace gallery sixty paces overhead, an iron hatch slammed open against the armored stack.

A tall figure leaned over the gantry railing, wrapped in a mantle trimmed with jagged copper scales. One eye gleamed beneath a scarred brow, reflecting the amber glare of the Golden Comet. Corsair captain Ilterish-oglu stood with his boots planted on the catwalk grate, a three-foot bronze striker held high in his right hand.

"Sect vermin," Ilterish-oglu's voice rasped across the void through the ship's bronze acoustic horns. "You think you can skip across my lines like water-striders? Qutlugh-tay paid for five thousand tons of celestial ice, and he gave me iron enough to boil this entire ditch!"

The captain drove the striker down into the open vent collar.

Deep within the slag-barge's belly, a deafening thump shook the hull plates beneath their boots. A gout of yellow-green brimstone fire erupted from the central furnace flue, surging skyward like a pillar of molten glass. The sudden release of superheated gas tore through the dead-wind shadow, blasting outward into the vacuum and churning the stagnant soot into a wild, spiraling vortex of thermal lift.

The searing draft scorched the fringes of Chormaqanoglu's gossamer banner, snapping the light silk straight out into the void.

To any cautious cultivator, the roaring column was an incinerator of roaring brimstone. But to a wind-fencer who had spent his youth chasing thermal squalls across the fractured moonlets, the vertical geyser was something else entirely: a violent, thundering bridge straight through the barge's dead zone and back into the Golden Comet's tail.

Chormaqanoglu gripped his foil, his boots shifting toward the edge of the catwalk as the heat rippled against his cheek.

"Gentlemen," Chormaqanoglu laughed, his cream robes billowing in the rising gale. "Our host was generous enough to build us a ladder."