Gathering the Addicts

An altered soldier does not die from poison. He dies from hope.

If you pour hemlock into his cup, his modified tongue detects the alkaloid bitterness before the liquid passes his teeth. He will spit it across your floor and cleave your collarbone with a billhook. If you lace his mash with white arsenic, the gastric lining of his stomach rejects the heavy metal in a violent heave of bile.

To kill thirty starving killers without swinging a blade, you do not feed them death.

You feed them sugar.

I stood over five three-gallon oak pins lined along the racking bench in the lower brewhouse. The air around the copper pipes smelled of scorching molasses, bruised caraway seed, and hot iron. My throat and collarbone burned beneath the fresh sheep tallow and coarse linen wrap, a tight, pulsing heat that reminded me of every breath I drew.

Vargun leaned against the cast-iron stanchion five feet away.

He had not washed. The dried blood of the two dead saboteurs darkened the leather of his right sleeve. The metabolic tremor in his forearms was a steady, rhythmic twitch now, making his heavy silver signet ring tap against the iron girder behind his hip. Clink. Clink. Clink.

He watched me with dilated, obsidian pupils.

"They have thirty men in the Great Refectory," Vargun said. His voice was dry, like gravel dragged across slate. "Fjalar did not die when my watch hung him by his wrists from the gatehouse beam. His loyalists cut him down during the midday riot and rallied in the north gallery. If they do not get their rations within the hour, they break through the lower buttery."

"They won't break anything," I said.

I hauled a thirty-pound copper kettle off the side-hearth. Inside, three gallons of unfermented wort simmered at a dense, syrupy boil. I had loaded it with dark molasses, scorched sugar beet syrup, and three handfuls of crushed caraway oil.

It smelled rich. It smelled potent. It smelled like the heaviest, most restorative winter Maltar Hrokkr had ever drawn from the deep vats.

It contained zero stabilizing enzyme.

Not a single drop of my blood. Not a scrap of active krov-root fungus.

"Explain it to me," Vargun murmured. He took one step toward me, his boots silent on the wet flagstones. "Tell me how fifteen gallons of sugar stops thirty broadswords."

I poured the boiling dark syrup through a copper funnel straight into the bung-hole of the first oak pin. Steam billowed in thick, fragrant clouds between us, carrying the heavy scent of anise and burnt treacle.

"Their bodies have gone fifty hours without a stabilizing dose," I said, not looking up from the funnel. "Their blood sugar is already scraping the floor of their skulls. Their livers have dumped every spare molecule of glycogen into their muscle tissue to keep them standing."

I lifted a wooden bung and drove it home with three sharp strikes of my wooden mallet. Thud. Thud. Thud.

"You give them pure, rapid-burning sugar masked behind heavy caraway," I continued. "The tongue tastes the sweetness. The stomach opens the floodgates. The pancreas dumps an ocean of insulin into the bloodstream to process the sudden mountain of dextrose."

I moved to the second oak pin and seated the funnel.

"And then?" Vargun asked.

"And then the blood sugar crashes into a cellar with no floor," I said. "Without the active enzyme to lock the metabolic gate, the sudden drop triggers an acute neuro-glycopenic crisis within twenty minutes. Hallucinations. Rage. Convulsions. The brain runs out of fuel while the adrenaline surges at triple strength."

I poured the next kettle. The dark syrup hissed against the oak staves.

"They will look at Fjalar," I said, "and they will see a side of roast pork holding an iron cleaver. They will tear him apart with their teeth to get at the marrow."

A slow, feral smile touched the corner of Vargun's mouth. "A slaughter in a dining hall."

"A calculation of chemistry," I corrected, setting the empty copper pot on the stones. "Your father taught me that men are just meat and water heated to ninety-nine degrees. If you know the boiling point of their blood, you do not need an army."

Vargun reached out. His fingers were hot, trembling from his own creeping starvation, but when his palm settled against the nape of my neck, the pressure was absolute. He pulled me half an inch forward, until I could smell the woodsmoke and raw iron on his breath.

"You are a terrifying creature, Thjora," he whispered.

"I am a brewer trying to keep her vats clean," I replied, staring directly into his gray eyes. "And right now, your hands are shaking so hard you couldn't hit a cask with an axe."

He didn't deny it. His thumb brushed the linen wrap along my jawline, right where the tallow met my skin.

"Then we had better feed the dogs," he said.

·  ·  ·

We used four chained grain runners and Captain Styr to move the timber.

The grain runners were gray-faced, trembling men from the middle dormitories whose metabolic clocks were six hours behind the garrison's combat tier. They pushed two heavy four-wheeled iron barrows through the torchlit corridor, each cart carrying two bunged oak pins. Styr rolled the fifth pin on an ash-wood skid behind them, his iron halberd slung across his back.

Vargun and I walked twenty paces behind the procession.

The corridor leading to the Great Refectory was thirty yards of arched basalt masonry. In Hrokkr's day, this hall had seen feasts of roasted boar and spiced mead whenever a southern merchant paid his tribute in gold coin. Now, the air smelled of stale grease, urine, and the sour, acidic tang of thirty men sweating out their own nervous systems.

Through the heavy oak double doors of the refectory came the sound of iron clattering against timber. Shouting. The rhythmic, impatient slamming of tankards against the long pine tables.

"Open the hatch!" a voice roared from inside—thick, rasping, and ragged with withdrawal. "Bring the brew or we burn the timber off the walls!"

Styr halted the barrows five paces from the arched entrance. He looked back over his shoulder at Vargun.

Vargun gave a single, curt nod.

Styr unlatched the heavy iron service wicket set into the middle of the oak doors. The iron hinges shrieked in the damp chill.

The smell that blasted out through the opening was foul. It was the stench of an overcrowded kennel at midsummer. Inside sat thirty armed enforcers, stripped to their leather jerkins, broadaxes and cleavers laid across the greasy tables. At the head of the center bench sat Fjalar.

Fjalar had not shrunk. He was six feet four inches of thick, slab-like muscle, his neck as wide as an oak keg, a ragged gray beard stained yellow around his mouth. Both of his wrists were heavily bandaged in blood-stiffened linen where the gatehouse ropes had flayed his skin to the tendon. Across his lap rested a five-foot double-bitted felling axe. His pale blue eyes were bloodshot, the veins in his temples throbbing in visible, rhythmic pulses.

"Styr," Fjalar spat, slamming his massive fist onto the table. The pewter trenchers jumped. "You bring the bitch's piss, or do I take your skin off for a saddle blanket?"

"Five pins," Styr called out through the wicket, his voice steady despite the sweat running down his neck. "Double-strength winter wort. Spiced with caraway and dark molasses. Enough for thirty rations."

Fjalar narrowed his eyes. He stood up slowly, the bench groaning under his weight.

"Why five?" Fjalar rumbled, stepping toward the iron wicket. "The bastard Vargun usually sends three and tells us to drink water."

"Vargun is locked in the high tower," Styr lied smoothly, reciting the words I had given him ten minutes ago. "His hands have gone to water. He knows if the refectory starves, you'll take the brewhouse by midnight. He's trying to buy his throat."

Fjalar reached the door. His massive, scarred face filled the grated opening. He sniffed the air deeply, drawing in the rich, heavy draft of scorched molasses and sharp caraway wafting from the oak pins on the barrows.

His tongue flicked over his dry, cracked lips. The hunger in his eyes was almost pathetic, a ravenous, biological desperation that no amount of pride could mask.

"Roll them in," Fjalar growled. "Through the service trap. One at a time."

The iron service trap at the base of the doors was an iron-lined slide used for sliding beef quarters into the larder. The chained grain runners unhooked the pins from the barrows and rolled them down the chute.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

Five oak pins rolled onto the greasy rushes of the refectory floor.

Fjalar did not immediately order his men to drink. He hesitated, his bloodshot gaze raking over the wood. The brute had survived ten years under Hrokkr's boot; a man does not live that long in Hrafnsker without learning how a trap smells.

"Brand," Fjalar barked.

A wiry, scar-faced enforcer with a notched sword stepped forward from the side table. His hands were trembling so violently he could barely hold his wooden cup.

"Tap the center pin," Fjalar commanded. "Drink half a pint."

Brand didn't hesitate. He took an iron tap-iron from his belt, drove it into the soft spruce bung of the third pin with the heel of his hand, and opened the spigot.

A thick, dark stream of syrup poured into the cup. It was nearly black, dense and steaming, throwing a powerful aroma of caraway, roasted malt, and rich molasses into the crowded hall.

Brand brought the rim to his mouth. He swallowed once. Twice. Three times.

The entire refectory went dead silent. Thirty armed men watched the enforcer's throat work, their eyes wide, their breath hitching in collective starvation.

Brand lowered the cup. A thick mustache of dark foam coated his upper lip.

A long shudder rippled through his shoulders. His pupils, which had been pinched into tiny dots from metabolic strain, dilated slightly as the massive burst of sugar hit his tongue.

"Gods above," Brand breathed, wiping his mouth with the back of his dirty sleeve. "It's thick as marrow. Sweet enough to rot your teeth. Hits the chest like hot rum."

"No bitterness?" Fjalar demanded. "No sulfur?"

"None," Brand said, his face relaxing into a blissful, drunken grin. "It's the old man's private stock. The double-boiled."

Fjalar let out a harsh, barking laugh that echoed against the vaulted ceiling. He kicked the nearest pine bench so hard the joint cracked.

"Tap the rest!" Fjalar roared to his men. "Drink until your guts split! When we're full, we take the upper tower and hang the bastard from his own parapet!"

The roar that erupted from thirty throats shook the stone walls.

Men surged forward from the benches like starving wolves hitting a dead carcass. They shoved each other, curses and laughter flying, slamming their wooden tankards and iron horns under the five spigots. Dark syrup splashed across the rushes. Men shoved their faces directly under the running taps, gulping the rich, scalding liquid until it ran down their chins and soaked their leather collars.

Styr slammed the iron service wicket shut and dropped the double slide-bolt into place.

Vargun stepped out from the shadow of the arched buttress. He pulled me up beside him to the high inspection grille—a narrow, six-inch iron slit cut into the masonry five feet above the door, hidden behind an ornate stone corbel.

"Now we wait," I whispered.

Vargun stood so close his chest brushed my shoulder with every heavy breath. His jaw was set like an iron vise.

"Twenty minutes?" he asked.

"Fifteen," I said, watching the feeding frenzy below. "They're drinking it faster than cold water."

·  ·  ·