Sealing the Casks

How many seconds does it take for four inches of seasoned highland oak to turn into kindling?

Three blows.

The first blow fractures the iron framing. The second shatters the internal cross-beams. The third blow drives three hundred pounds of oak and pig iron straight into the brewhouse, scattering iron splinters across the wet copper tiles like canister shot.

The heavy door collapsed inward with an ear-splitting crash.

Through the splintered opening charged five men who were no longer men.

Fjalar led them. The massive warlord was drenched in his own men's blood, foam dripping from his yellow beard, his eyes rolled back so far the whites showed pink under the torchlight. Behind him came four surviving enforcers, their skin mottled with dark purple hives, their jaws slack, hacking at the empty air with cleavers and rusty iron bills.

They were running on pure neuro-glycopenic psychosis. Their brains had consumed their last reserve of blood glucose fifteen minutes ago; now their adrenal glands were firing blind, flooding their muscles with hysterical strength while their minds unraveled.

"Kill the bitch!" Fjalar bellowed. The sound was a wet, ragged tear in his throat. "Drown her in the mash!"

Beside me, Vargun moved.

He didn't hesitate, but his body betrayed him. The metabolic crash had turned his shoulders to rusted iron. When he stepped forward to intercept Fjalar, his right knee buckled half an inch, the heavy broadsword wavering in his trembling grip.

I didn't wait for him to die for me.

While the five attackers funneled through the narrow, buckled doorway, I grabbed the iron wheel of the boiler's bottom purge line.

Every brewer knows that high-pressure steam does not forgive. When sixty gallons of alkaline wash sit under four atmospheres of trapped pressure at two hundred and twenty degrees, opening the bottom purge valve is suicide unless you point the discharge nozzle where you want things to stop existing.

I jammed my copper spanner into the valve lever and threw my entire weight against the handle.

HISSSSSSS.

The cast-iron blow-off pipe beneath the door threshold ruptured in a blinding, deafening eruption of superheated alkaline steam.

A wall of white, scalding vapor blasted straight into the breach.

Three of the enforcers took the jet full in the face. Their screams were instantaneous and shrill. The boiling lye vapor stripped the skin off their foreheads, dissolved the surface of their corneas in seconds, and filled their lungs with scorching alkaline moisture.

They dropped their weapons, clutching their ruined faces, and collided with the timber frame in a tangled heap. The fourth man stumbled back against the brick wall beneath the malt mill, choking on the vapor.

"Down!" I yelled at Vargun.

Vargun didn't ask questions. He dropped beneath the steam cloud, sliding across the wet copper floor on his left hip. His broadsword whipped out in a savage, low horizontal sweep that caught the two lead enforcers at the threshold.

The heavy steel edge sheared clean through bone and sinew. One man collapsed with a wet scream, his torso plunging directly into the pool of scalding caustic runoff near the floor drain; the other crashed onto the copper plates, bleeding out in seconds from a severed femoral artery.

Fjalar had thrown his thick forearm over his eyes to shield against the blast. The boiling steam turned the hair on his arms to ash and blistered his neck, but the brute kept coming.

His five-foot felling axe came down in an overhead cleave meant to split Vargun from collar to groin.

Vargun rolled across the flagstones, the axe blade burying itself three inches deep into the copper-plated timber floor where his head had rested a heartbeat earlier.

The impact sent a shockwave through the floorboards that rattled my teeth.

Before Fjalar could wrench the steel out of the wood, I stepped out from behind the copper mash tun.

Siege etiquette in Hrafnsker had always been lacking. When an uninvited brute breaks your door, you do not offer him a seat at the hearth; you remove his mobility.

I held the eight-inch cold chisel in my left hand and the heavy wooden bung mallet in my right.

I stepped onto the back of Fjalar's pinned axe-head, planted my boot to keep the timber levered down, and drove the sharp point of the iron chisel straight down through the laces of his right boot.

CRACK.

I hit the chisel head with the mallet like I was seating a stubborn oak bung into a forty-gallon cask.

The steel point punched clean through the leather, through the tarsal bones of his foot, and bit deep into the oak floorboard beneath the copper plate.

Fjalar let out an ear-splitting howl.

The sound rattled the copper kettles on their iron racks. The giant released the axe handle and reached for my throat with two massive, grease-stained hands. His fingers were thick as sausages, the nails torn to the quick, his breath reeking of raw bile and burnt molasses.

He was six inches from my windpipe when Vargun came up from the floor.

Vargun didn't use his sword; there was no room for a swing. He drove his armored left shoulder straight into Fjalar's cracked ribs with the force of a battering ram. The impact knocked the giant backward, tearing his pinned foot against the chisel and spraying dark venous blood across the white lime dust.

Fjalar stumbled, his balance shattered.

Vargun closed the distance in half a stride. His hands were shaking violently—the metabolic tremor seizing his wrists in rapid, jerky spasms—but his intent was cold and absolute.

He gripped his broadsword two-handed by the leather hilt, stepped inside Fjalar's wild left hook, and drove the three-foot steel blade upward under the giant's sternum.

The steel slid through leather, gristle, and muscle with a dense, sickening slide.

Fjalar's eyes bulged. A fountain of black, deoxygenated blood erupted from his mouth, spilling over his yellow beard and splashing across Vargun's cheek.

The warlord's massive hands clamped onto Vargun's forearms, trying to crush the bone through the leather bracers, but the strength was draining out of him like wort from an open valve.

"Thjora..." Fjalar gurgled, his pale eyes fixing on me through the drifting steam. "The... the old man's blood... you won't... keep it..."

Vargun twisted the broadsword ninety degrees.

The steel ground against bone inside the giant's chest.

"She keeps whatever she takes," Vargun rasped, his voice raw as iron scrap.

He ripped the blade out horizontally.

Fjalar collapsed onto the copper floor with a heavy, dead thud. He didn't twitch. The blood pooling around his massive frame was thick, dark, and sweet—saturated with the undigested molasses from the Great Refectory.

·  ·  ·

The silence that followed was heavy enough to suffocate a fire.

Steam still rose from the floor drains in thin, curling tendrils, smelling of boiled barley, caustic lye, and copper.

In the far corner by the grain chutes, Captain Styr stood with his halberd raised, his chest heaving, his face pale as lard. The four chained grain runners were huddled behind a stack of kiln-dried malt sacks, their eyes wide with terror, their teeth chattering in the cold draft blowing through the shattered doorway.

The two dead enforcers at the threshold were already cooling. One lay motionless in the scalding drain runoff; the other had bled out from the severed femoral artery. A third corpse lay tangled in the splintered door frame where the steam jet had broken him.

Only one man was still breathing on the floor.

It was the fourth fanatic—a lean, scarred raider named Hadd who had taken a face full of alkaline steam. He was dragged against the brick wall beneath the malt mill, his chest rattling with shallow, fluid-filled gasps, his blind, milky eyes staring toward the ceiling.

Vargun stood over Fjalar's corpse.

He tried to wipe his broadsword on his leather thigh, but his hands failed him. The metabolic crash was peaking. His fingers locked in a rigid, spastic claw, and the heavy broadsword slipped from his grip, clattering loudly against the copper floor tiles.

He swayed. His knees gave out.

He caught himself on the edge of the three-hundred-gallon copper kettle, his knuckles turning white as he fought to keep his feet. His skin had taken on a gray, chalky pallor. Cold sweat drenched his black hair, plastering it against his temples.

His obsidian eyes locked onto mine.

A cold, predatory hunger burned in them, sharper and far more dangerous than the madness that had broken Fjalar's men. It was the possessive, unyielding will of a wolf that would rather tear its own leg out of an iron trap than let another predator touch its kill.

"The batch," Vargun whispered, his jaw trembling so hard his teeth clicked together. "Is it... ready?"

I walked past Fjalar's body. My boots left sticky, red-rimmed prints on the copper plating. The caustic burn across my collarbone pulled tight, reminding me of the exact price of every breath I drew in this room.

"The mash hit one hundred and fifty-two degrees twenty minutes ago," I said, my voice steady in the quiet room. "The conversion is complete. Three hundred gallons of pure, high-gravity wort are sitting in that kettle."

I stopped two paces from him.

"And the stabilizer?" Vargun asked, his gaze dropping to my throat, to the fresh linen wrap stained with tallow and dried vinegar. "Did you add it?"

"Not yet," I said.

He pushed himself off the copper rim, taking a ragged, uneven step toward me. The distance between us closed until I could smell the hot blood on his collar and the sharp, metallic tang of his failing nervous system.

"You're playing with the blade, Thjora," he murmured, his voice dropping into that dark, intimate register that made my skin prickle beneath the linen. "If I collapse, Styr cannot hold Tier Four. In six hours, ninety-four altered men will tear the iron gates off their hinges and butcher every living soul in this valley."

"Then you had better listen to my terms before your heart stops," I replied.