The Glimmer of Primordial Bronze

Would a strip of gossamer silk hold together when dragged through five hundred paces of boiling sulfur?

Chormaqanoglu did not wait for the heat to singe his boot-soles before finding out. With the dead-wind shadow of the slag-barge fracturing beneath him, he kicked clear of the iron catwalk, threw his weight against the flexible bronze foil, and cast his pennant straight into the roaring heart of the thermal flue. The draft struck the cream-colored fabric with the crack of a snapped bullwhip. Where a rigid battle-standard would have buckled or flipped its bearer headlong into the smelting vents, the Wandering Wind silk yielded, curled, and cupped the fiery upwelling into a spiraling vortex of kinetic lift.

Behind him, two distinct concussions rattled the barge's iron deck plates. Mengubek's hollow spear barked as its crimson foil scooped the wider thermal fringe, while Torgantay's nine-ringed halberd let out an indignant brass groan, its bronze-weighted hem groaning like a tethered water buffalo being hauled up a cliff.

"Section Seven dictates a gradual ascent along the outer thermal perimeter!" Torgantay's roar sheared through the rushing air, muffled by his heavy visor.

"Section Seven was written by men with iron in their breeches!" Chormaqanoglu shouted back over the whistling roar.

He tucked his elbows, shifted his grip on the foil's hilt, and narrowed the banner's aperture. The superheated brimstone gas screamed against his leather wraps, scorching the trailing silk fringe to charcoal, but the sheer velocity was intoxicating. The black mass of the iron slag-barge shrank below them, dwindled to an insignificant speck in the glowing fog of the debris field, and then vanished entirely beneath the boiling sulfur floor.

They punched through the roof of the dead-wind pocket into raw, blinding brilliance.

The outer coma of the Golden Comet welcomed them not with stillness, but with a howling tidal race of copper vapor and charged starlight. Millions of amber dust motes scraped against Chormaqanoglu's bronze foil, singing a sharp, metallic chord that resonated up the bones of his forearms. He tilted his wrist three degrees northward. The gossamer weave bit into the fresh cometary gale, shedding the sluggish heat of the furnace and grabbing the true celestial current.

Beneath his boots, the tumbling void yielded to something ancient and monumental.

Rising through the glittering dust like the spine of a sleeping leviathan, the crystalline nucleus of the Golden Comet filled the forward horizon. It was a jagged ridge of compressed celestial ice, five leagues long and banded with veins of raw star-copper that pulsed with pale green illumination. The surface was not smooth; serrated ridges of blue-white crystal formed sharp terraces that caught the cometary gale and carved it into whistling updrafts.

And perched upon the highest prow of that icy spine, gleaming with the dark, untarnished luster of an era before the moonlets fractured, stood the First Heavenly Stele.

It was twelve paces tall, cast from primordial bronze that absorbed the cometary glare without reflection. Deep, fluid grooves scored its surface, cut so sharply that even across fifty paces of open vacuum, the kinetic flow of the incisions pulled at the eye.

Chormaqanoglu checked the gimbaled brass astral compass tucked into his sash. Its internal copper needles spun wildly, then locked their points directly toward the bronze pillar.

"First to the ridge pays no toll!" Chormaqanoglu called into the void.

He peeled his banner out of the climbing draft and flattened his body into a diving tuck. The solar wind tore at his loose cream wraps, threatening to rip the foil from his fingers, but he rode the slipstream downward in a banking spiral, skipping across three turbulent dust eddies before skimming the frosted crest of the nucleus.

His boots met the crystalline crust with a sharp skid. Diamond-bright shards of ice sprayed outward in two parallel arcs as he dug the heels of his leather buskins into the frost. He twirled the bronze foil overhead, snapping the gossamer banner taut behind his shoulders to dump his forward inertia. The silk billowed once, snapped against the cometary breeze, and settled into a gentle, serpentine ripple.

Silence settled over the ridge, broken only by the faint hiss of cometary vapor venting from fissures in the ancient ice.

Chormaqanoglu stood alone at the summit. Behind him, down the long descending slope of the crystalline spine, two streaks of color were still clawing their way through the upper coma: Mengubek's radiant crimson trail tacking aggressively across the dust waves, and Torgantay's steady green wake plowing through the cross-drift like an unswerving plowshare. They were swift, but they were still half a league away.

He turned toward the primordial bronze slab.

Up close, the First Stele did not merely display decorative inscriptions. The markings were kinetic channels, deep grooves hollowed out by ancient banner-masters to capture the flow of passing starlight. They formed the diagram of a martial stance: an open stance angled thirty degrees against the prevailing solar drift, with the rear hand bracing the banner-butt against the hip while the leading wrist feathered the fabric into an oscillating wave.

A prickle of recognition traced Chormaqanoglu's spine. This was the opening form of the lost Celestial Wind-Shear kata.

He shifted his weight onto his left heel, mirroring the posture inscribed in the metal. He settled the butt of his foil against his hip sash, raised his right hand, and let his fingers roll across the grip. As he angled the gossamer banner precisely along the line carved into the ancient bronze, the resistance vanished. The violent drag of the cometary wind suddenly ceased pulling against his shoulders; instead, the silk became weightless, slicing through the oncoming gale and compressing the astral air into a razor-thin pocket of stored tension right along his blade's leading edge.

A flick of his wrist released that stored compression. The gossamer banner cracked, and an invisible crescent of compressed wind tore across the ice, shearing a three-foot trench through the crystal ridge twenty paces away without dulling the fabric.

Chormaqanoglu let out a low whistle. "So that is how the ancients clipped the sky."

Before he could test the second progression, the amber light of the coma darkened.

A harsh, rhythmic clatter of iron ratchets echoed from the upper haze. High above the stele's prow, where the cometary veil met the black vacuum of the outer void, dark shapes broke through the dust clouds.

One after another, blunt-nosed corsair skiffs dropped into the cometary basin. Thirty iron-ribbed hulls descended in a tight crescent formation, their soot-blackened sails rigged to heavy yardarms, their decks bristling with spiked harpoon ballistas and serrated gaff-hooks. At the vanguard rode Ilterish-oglu's command skiff, its jagged hook-banner snapping in the cometary draft as iron chains uncoiled from the bulwarks.

The raiders were not maneuvering for a running chase. They were dropping straight down, aiming to pin the stele under an iron perimeter before the other sect banners could reach the crest.