The Double-Boiled

For the first ten minutes, the Great Refectory sounded like a victorious feast.

Fjalar's men laughed, banged their cleavers against the timber tables, and bragged about how they would butcher Vargun's captains before morning. Fjalar himself sat at the center table, drinking from a silver flagon he had filled from the second pin, his huge belly rising and falling in deep, satisfied gulps.

The massive burst of unrefined sugar had hit their bloodstreams like a torch thrown into dry hay. Their bodies, starved of glucose for over fifty hours, absorbed the sweetness instantly. For several minutes, their nervous systems were tricked into absolute euphoria.

And then the pancreas answered.

To process twenty pounds of raw molasses and caramelized dextrose, thirty human bodies simultaneously flooded their veins with an unprecedented surge of insulin.

The insulin stripped every remaining molecule of glucose out of their blood, driving it into muscle cells that could not use it without the missing enzyme.

The cellar floor dropped out.

The first sign was Brand.

The scar-faced enforcer who had taken the first drink was leaning against the stone fireplace. Suddenly, his wooden tankard slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the flagstones.

His knees buckled. He caught himself on the timber mantelpiece, his fingers digging into the soot. His breath began coming in fast, whistling gasps, like a man drowning in shallow water.

"Fjalar..." Brand gasped. His voice sounded thin, choked. "Something's... something's cold."

Fjalar looked up from his silver cup, frowning. "What are you whining about? Drink more."

"Can't... see," Brand choked.

The enforcer's eyes rolled upward into his skull. His entire upper body went rigid. His spine arched backward in a violent, tetanic convulsion, slamming the back of his head against the stone chimney with a wet crack.

He slid to the floor, his limbs thrashing against the rushes like a fish on a dry dock.

Across the room, another man dropped his broadaxe.

"Hot," the man screamed, tearing at the laces of his leather doublet with bleeding fingernails. "Gods, my blood is boiling!"

He ripped his shirt open, exposing a chest covered in bright red, blotchy hives. He threw himself onto the table, overturning flagons and trenchers, his mouth foaming with white, frothy spit.

Panic rippled through the hall, but it wasn't the panic of rational men.

When the human brain is entirely starved of blood glucose while saturated with adrenaline, the frontal lobes go dark. The primal limbic core takes the wheel. Fear turns instantly into murderous, psychotic rage.

"Poison!" a bearded brute near the door shrieked, drawing a notched falchion. He turned on the man sitting next to him. "You poisoned the pin, you dog!"

"I didn't touch it!" the second man screamed, his face gray, his eyes wild with hallucination. "Get away from me! Your face is melting!"

The second man drove a heavy skinning knife straight through the bearded brute's throat.

Blood erupted across the pine table, hot and dark, splashing into the overturned syrup.

The Great Refectory detonated.

Through the narrow stone inspection slit, I watched thirty chemically destabilized killers tear each other to pieces.

They did not fight like soldiers. They fought like rabid dogs trapped in a pit. Men tackled each other off benches, biting at ears and cheeks, stabbing blindly with knives, broken timber, and shattered pottery. One man took an iron fire-poker from the hearth and smashed his own brother's skull into the masonry, screaming that the rafters were filled with spiders.

The noise was deafening—a roar of screaming, retching, bone snapping, and the wet, rhythmic thud of steel hacking into flesh.

Beside me, Vargun watched the massacre through the narrow slit. His hand on the stone wall tightened until his knuckles went dead white.

"Furious," he murmured. There was no pity in his voice, only the cold, clinical appreciation of a predator watching a rival pack destroy itself. "They're tearing their own throats out."

"Their brains think they are starving to death in three seconds," I said, my voice steady despite the bile rising in my throat. "The survival reflex has turned inward. They see every living thing around them as a threat to their last breath."

Below us, Fjalar stood in the center of the carnage.

The brute had a higher body mass and had consumed less syrup than his men, but the metabolic crash was hitting him now. His massive frame swayed on his feet. Sweat poured off his gray forehead in greasy sheets. His breath rattled like dry leaves in his throat.

Two of his own enforcers, their faces covered in blood and foam, lunged at him with meat cleavers, shrieking unintelligible madness.

Fjalar roared—a deep, guttural bellow of pure animal fury.

He swung his five-foot felling axe in a brutal, horizontal arc.

The heavy steel blade cleaved through the first man's ribs, biting clean to the spine, and hurled the second man across the room into the shattered timber of the benches.

Blood soaked Fjalar's arms to the elbows. He stood among twenty-five twitching corpses, his chest heaving, his bloodshot eyes darting around the red-smeared hall.

He looked at the five overturned pins. He looked at the thick, black syrup pooling around the dead men's boots.

His gaze snapped up to the iron service wicket.

"Thjora!" Fjalar howled, his voice breaking into a ragged, bloody shriek of comprehension. "The brewer bitch!"

He kicked a dying man out of his path. He swung his heavy felling axe into the skull of the last twitching enforcer who tried to crawl toward him, clearing his footing with brutal efficiency.

Four men in the far corner of the hall were still on their feet. They were the ones who had arrived late, having drunk only a mouthful from the fifth pin. Their hands shook violently, their eyes wild with terror, but they could still hold weapons.

"To me!" Fjalar bellowed, spitting a mouthful of bloody foam onto the floor. "The brewhouse! We take the master vats or we die in the hall!"

Fjalar grabbed a six-foot oak ceiling strut that had been torn down during the brawl. It was banded with four-inch iron straps, a brutal, fifty-pound timber ram.

"Break the doors!" Fjalar roared.

He and his four surviving fanatics charged the reinforced oak double doors of the refectory from the inside.

BOOM.

The heavy oak timbers groaned. The iron slide-bolts shivered in their stone sockets.

·  ·  ·

"Move!" Vargun snapped.

He grabbed my elbow and shoved me back down the arched corridor toward the brewhouse.

We didn't look back. Captain Styr and the four terrified grain runners were already sprinting ahead of us, their boots hammering against the flagstones in a desperate stampede.

Behind us, the oak doors of the refectory shrieked as Fjalar hit them a second time.

CRACK.

The sound of iron bolts shearing off masonry echoed down the hallway like a thunderclap.

"Into the brewhouse!" I shouted, sprinting past the grain chutes.

My lungs burned. The caustic blisters on my collarbone rubbed raw against the rough linen of my tunic, sending sharp needles of agony through my neck with every stride, but I didn't slow down.

We reached the heavy iron-plated brewhouse threshold.

Styr and the runners tumbled inside first, collapsing against the malt sacks, gasping for air.

I slid through the door, my boots skidding across the wet copper plating of the floor. Vargun came through right behind me, turning instantly to grab the heavy four-inch oak door.

"Help me with the drop-bars!" Vargun shouted, his voice strained as his shaking hands caught the iron bracing.

I grabbed the left handle. Together, we threw our combined weight against the timber, slamming the massive oak slab into its granite frame.

Vargun reached for the primary drop-bar—a solid three-inch iron billet that dropped across the center brackets.

Before the iron bar could seat into its stone sleeve, the corridor outside erupted.

A deafening, bone-rattling roar tore through the hall.

THOOM.

The iron-banded timber ram struck the outside of the door like a falling boulder.

The oak shuddered. The heavy iron hinges screamed as they took the impact, spitting flakes of rusted metal across the copper floor. The shockwave blew through the door, throwing Vargun and me back half a pace into the steam of the mash tun.

Through the two-inch iron viewport in the center of the wood, Fjalar's bloodshot, rabid face appeared.

He was bleeding from his nose and ears, his teeth bared in a feral snarl, his massive arms lifting the timber ram for another blow.

The lock groaned. The iron framing began to buckle.

I gripped the cold steel chisel in my apron, stepped beside Vargun, and waited for the timber to split.