Counting the Silence

He takes two steps toward the raised platform.

Then his knees buckle.

He hits the stone floor with a bone-jarring smack. His knife clatters across the flagstones into the dark.

His hands claw at his throat. His mouth opens wide, gasping for air that does not contain a single molecule of oxygen. His chest heaves in violent, spastic jerks, pulling pure, invisible carbon dioxide into his lungs.

The second man drops the oilcloth sack.

The bundle lands with a muffled thud against the dry cedar timber of the grain hopper, the tight hemp binding holding the caustic white powder safely sealed inside.

He falls beside his partner, thrashing like a landed cod.

Carbon dioxide does not give you time to fight. At seventy percent concentration, the brain shuts down in fifteen seconds. At ninety percent, the nervous system freezes instantly.

I stand on the raised platform, six inches above the gas line.

The air around my shoulders is warm, sweet with the scent of roasted barley.

Three feet below my boots, the two infiltrators are drowning in invisible ice.

The knife-man tries to drag himself toward the stone steps. His fingernails scrape against the granite, tearing the flesh from his fingertips. His eyes bulge in their sockets, blood vessels bursting across the whites as his brain suffocates.

He looks up at me through the dim firelight.

His lips move, shaping silent words in the dark.

Please.

I do not move.

I stand on the platform with my arms crossed over my leather apron, watching the second hand on my brass wall clock tick forward.

Ten seconds.

Twenty seconds.

The thrashing slows.

The second man goes limp first, his forehead resting against the cold flagstones. His legs give one final, pathetic twitch before settling into absolute stillness.

The knife-man lasts five seconds longer.

His hand reaches for the hem of my apron, his bleeding fingers stopping three inches short of my boot sole.

His jaw slackens. His chest collapses.

Silence returns to the brewhouse.

The boiler groans behind me, its iron pipes ticking as steam courses toward the mash pre-heater.

I wait thirty slow heartbeats, counting the silence.

Dead.

Killing men with carbon dioxide is infinitely cleaner than using a spanner. No arterial spray across the copper kettles. No blood dripping into the open mash tun to contaminate the yeast culture. Just two sacks of dead meat waiting for the waste chute.

I reach behind the boiler manifold and pull the secondary exhaust lever.

The lower floor flues snap open with a dull scrape.

The heavy, suffocating gas drains through the iron floor grates, sucked down into the river caverns below Hrafnsker. Fresh air pulls in from the upper louvers, washing cool mountain draft across my heated brow.

I step down into the trench.

The air is thin, tasting of sour yeast and cold stone, but my lungs take it without burning.

I walk over to the first corpse.

I kick the knife-man's shoulder with the steel toe of my boot. His head rolls to the side, his slate-gray eyes staring at nothing.

I kneel in the damp malt dust beside his chest.

My fingers work through his filthy wool tunic with clinical detachment.

Two heavy iron cold chisels. A tied bundle containing four pounds of dry quicklime powder. A coil of waxed hemp twine. A leather pouch containing six dry sulfur matches and a small brass oil flask.

Useful tools. In a fortress under siege, iron, sulfur, and caustic quicklime are weapons waiting for an owner.

I slip the iron chisels into my leather belt, secure the sealed quicklime bundle against the wall, and shove the matches into my apron pocket alongside Hrokkr's master brass key-token.

Then I pick up the trench knife.

The blade is eight inches of forged iron, notched along the spine and sharpened to a razor edge. Heavy. Well-balanced.

I wipe the grease from the blade against the dead man's sleeve and slide the knife into my waistband.

"Impressive."

The voice comes from twenty feet above my head.

My hand snaps to the hilt of the trench knife before my mind finishes processing the sound.

I spin toward the upper gallery.

Vargun is sitting on the massive pine ceiling timber directly above the grain elevator.

His heavy iron brigandine sits unbuckled on the floor beside the grain hoist where he dropped it after hauling the barley, leaving him in a sleeveless black wool tunic that reveals the corded muscle of his shoulders and the silver tracks of ten-year-old whip scars. He holds a short iron-tipped javelin balanced casually across his knees.

His dark eyes gleam in the boiler firelight.

He did not just arrive.

He has been sitting in the rafters the entire time.

A hot spike of fury tears through my chest, hotter than the steam venting from the mash tun.

"You were up there," I say, my voice trembling with suppressed rage. "You sat on a rafter and watched two men climb through the flue with quicklime."

Vargun slides off the beam.

He drops twenty feet to the flagstones, landing on the raised platform without a sound, his knees flexing to absorb the impact like a mountain cat.

He stands up, towering over me in the amber gloom.

He smells of pine pitch, cold sweat, and the sharp, coppery tang of metabolic fever.

"I saw them enter the kitchen chute ten minutes ago," he says calmly.

He steps off the platform into the trench, his heavy boots crushing a dry barley hull with a sharp snap.

"You could have stopped them before they reached the vats," I snap, refusing to step back. "If one ounce of that lime had fallen into the hopper, three hundred gallons of Maltar would have turned to poisonous sludge."

"I could have," Vargun agrees.

He stops two feet from me.

His proximity is suffocating. The heat radiating from his chest hits my skin like an open furnace door. The metabolic tremor in his forearms is worse than it was in the cellar—a fine, persistent twitch running through the tendons of his wrists.

He is burning through his last reserves of glycogen.

"Why didn't you?" I demand.

Vargun looks down at the two corpses sprawled across the granite floor.

His dark eyes trace the lack of blood, the blue tint around their slack lips, the frost of dried gas around the exhaust nozzles.

His mouth curves into a slow, vicious smile.

"Because I wanted to see how my brewer handles an invasion," he says, his voice a low, gravelly rasp against the boiler noise. "A tradeswoman screams for guards. A queen kills her enemies with the air they breathe."

"I am not your queen, Vargun."

"Not yet."

He reaches out.

His bare hand closes around my right wrist, his callused fingers locking over my pulse. His skin is scalding hot, his grip tight enough to bruise.

He pulls my hand up between our chests.

My fingers are stained with grain dust and black boiler grease.

"Look at your hands, Thjora," he murmurs, his dark gaze pinning mine. "You didn't hesitate. You didn't shake. You suffocated two men while timing a starch conversion to the exact second."

"I protected my brew."

"You protected my fortress."

He steps closer, forcing me back until the copper rim of the secondary fermentation vat presses against my spine.

"Fjalar's men are dead," he whispers, his breath hot and bitter against my cheek. "His cousins are broken. But my captains are trembling in the courtyard. The garrison knows the noon ration was short. They are watching the brewhouse chimney, waiting to see if I bring them Maltar or their own execution warrants."

"Then let me finish the boil," I say, my voice steady despite the hammer of my blood.

Vargun leans down, his face inches from mine.

"You have thirty hours left, Thjora," he rasps, his fingers tightening on my wrist until the bone aches. "When the midnight bell tolls, you will pour three hundred gallons into the distribution cistern. And then you and I are going to have a very long conversation about who rules this rock."

I meet his burning eyes without blinking.

"Bring more coal, Vargun," I tell him coldly. "Or rule an empty graveyard."

He stares at me for two long heartbeats, the predator behind his eyes assessing every inch of my defiance.

Then he lets go of my wrist.

He grabs the dead knife-man by the collar with one hand and heaves the body toward the waste chute.

"Stir the mash, Thjora," Vargun says over his shoulder. "The coal is on the hoist."