Drawing the Hounds

The boiler pressure gauge climbed past twenty-four pounds per square inch before the sulfur crust began to scream beneath the six iron wheels.

István braced his heels against the ribbed footplates of the cab, feeling the violent chatter shudder up through the soles of his boots, through his shins, and straight into his jaw. A thick plume of black tallow smoke poured from the crawler’s cracked exhaust stack behind the cab roof, oily and suffocating, staining the pale desert sky like wet soot smeared across sheepskin. It rose seventy cubits into the windless morning air, an unmistakable beacon visible from twenty miles away across the flat alkali plains of the Gyarmath Basin.

If Vica Révész’s outriders had scouts along the northern ridges, they had seen that smoke five minutes after dawn.

Beside his left knee, the brass sight-glass rattled inside its cage. Less than four inches of cloudy water remained in the siphon feed, churning in violent, muddy bubbles against the mica window. The water was heavy with bottom-tank silt, scraped from the lowest sumps of the Halász reserve before the great well collapsed into the deep earth, and every mile of hard draft was baking a crust of alkali scale onto the boiler tubes. He was burning three pints of irreplaceable distillate for every quarter-hour of maximum draft. He did not ease the throttle. He had promised Gábor an undeniable decoy, and a decoy that crept through the washes like an old mule invited suspicion instead of pursuit.

Behind him, three miles to the south across the white salt beds, the dust rose in a wide, sweeping wall.

István adjusted his smoked-glass goggles, squinting into the vibration of the exterior iron mirror bolted to the cab pillar. The pursuer was not a pair of light scout-runners. It was an eight-wheeled Syndicate stalker—a heavy ironclad combat rig with sloped deck-plates, twin vertical boiler stacks, and a low, predatory silhouette designed to crush light freight wagons. Its twin chimneys vomited dense gray lignite smoke, its spiked iron rims throwing plumes of dry alkali forty paces wide as it chewed through the gypsum flats.

It was moving at twelve miles an hour, closing the distance at more than half a league every twenty minutes.

"Too heavy for the crust," István muttered aloud, his voice sandpaper-rough against his dry teeth. "Come on, then. Come take the kill."

He hauled back on the left steering lever with both hands, throwing the heavy six-wheeler into a sharp northwesterly arc. The drive chains groaned under the sudden torque, the iron track-lugs biting deep into a brittle yellow ridge.

The ground here was not the hard-packed gravel of the Aszály trade road. It was the outer shelf of the Sárga-Szem—the Yellow Eyes—a vast, treacherous expanse of geothermal vents where subterranean boiling aquifers had forced their way through tectonic fractures over centuries, leaving behind a brittle, calcified skin of sulfur, lime, and salt. To an untrained eye, the yellow plains looked solid, flat, and inviting. But beneath that three-inch mineral skin lay vast cavernous hollows filled with boiling black slurry and pressurized sulfur steam hot enough to flay a bull in four breaths.

No freighter captain with a payload of salt or wool ever brought his rigs within five miles of its borders.

István reached down with his right hand, pressing his fingers against the inside of his left forearm. Beneath his leather duster and salt-stiffened sleeve, the copper-leaf master schematic lay flat against his skin, cold and rigid, sealed inside double-waxed pigskin. On his right hip rested the heavy cleaver-knife; tucked securely into the shaft of his left boot was the tempered Soltvadkert flensing knife he had taken from the dead Hound four hours before the dawn. In his vest pocket, resting against his ribs, sat his single remaining glass ampoule of anti-spore tincture and the lead transit token stamped with Farkas’s hydra mark.

A sharp, metallic shriek split the roar of the crawler's engine.

István jerked his head around. The eight-wheeled stalker had closed to within four hundred paces, its heavy iron prow plowing a blinding spray of white salt dust. On its reinforced upper platform, an iron ring-mount swiveled toward him. Two crewmen wearing grease-blackened leather aprons and heavy wire-mesh face guards were working the twin ratchets of a torsion harpoon, their shoulders straining as they wound the steel-laminated bowstaves back against the release blocks.

The weapon fired.

The five-foot iron bolt tore through the air with a hollow, ripping roar. It passed fifty paces wide of István’s starboard flank, plunging cleanly through the brittle mineral crust.

The moment the iron point punched through the shelf, the ground exploded. A twenty-foot geyser of boiling white brine and sulfur vapor erupted into the sunlight, hissing with the ferocity of a ruptured boiler. Scalding spray rained down across the flats, turning the surrounding salt into a steaming morass of yellow mud.

István did not flinch. He watched the boiling column collapse back into the fracture, noting the speed at which the surrounding shelf subsided. The crust was far thinner and more fragile than it had been two seasons ago. The catastrophic collapse of the Halász aquifer forty miles south had drained the subterranean balance, leaving the steam vaults beneath the Sárga-Szem hollow, pressurized, and ready to cave under the slightest impact.

A seven-ton Syndicate combat rig had no business on this shelf. But the mercenaries driving it were northern outriders, trained on the solid limestone highways of the Révész heartland. They saw only an unhitched, smoking freight crawler fleeing in panic across open ground.

A second harpoon bolt screamed through the air, shearing through the upper iron stay-wire of István's cracked exhaust stack. The severed cable whipped across the cab roof with a deafening clang, and the iron chimney tilted sideways, dumping a cloud of oily sulfur soot directly across the cab’s intake grates. István coughed violently, dragging his oiled mouth-rag tight across his nose and mouth, his eyes stinging behind the smoked glass of his goggles.

Ahead of him, two hundred paces through the shifting heat haze, rose the Black Spine—a jagged dike of solid volcanic basalt that jutted out of the sulfur flats like the vertebrae of a buried leviathan.

The basalt spine was twenty paces wide, three hundred paces long, and firmly anchored in deep bedrock. On either side of it, the mineral crust sagged into wide, shallow depressions coated in pale yellow sulfur bloom. The western depression was particularly smooth, looking for all the world like a flat, sun-baked salt pan. But along its northern margin, four small fumaroles hissed steadily, venting continuous wisps of pale blue sulfur gas—the telltale signature of an enormous subterranean steam dome sitting barely inches below the crust.

István eased the right throttle lever forward, deliberately cutting fuel to the pre-heater.

The crawler’s engine sputtered, the drive chain slackening and clattering loudly against the iron frame. The rig slowed from nine miles an hour to a stumbling crawl, rocking unevenly over the gypsum ridges as if its drive axle were about to seize.

In the side mirror, István saw the stalker’s driver take the bait.

Seeing the quarry lose speed, the Syndicate commander chose not to follow in the crawler's narrow wake along the rough basalt spine. Instead, he swung the eight-wheeled rig wide to the west, aiming to cut across the smooth yellow depression at full speed, flank István’s rig, and ram its left wheel assemblies before it could reach the safety of the northern escarpment.

"Take the smooth road," István whispered, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the iron boiler bypass lever. "Take the flat road, you arrogant dogs."

The stalker’s eight spiked wheels slammed onto the yellow crust at eighteen miles an hour.

For thirty yards, the sheer speed and momentum of the heavy war rig carried it across the surface. Then, with a catastrophic crack that sounded like fifty heavy crossbows discharging at once, the white lime shelf gave way.

The stalker’s front starboard wheels plunged through the crust. The iron nose of the rig struck the boiling slurry beneath, burying itself to the headlights in black, boiling mud. The sudden deceleration threw the crew on the open roof platform forward; the torsion harpoon tore free from its mounting ring with a shriek of ripping iron, sliding across the deck and crushing one loader against the forward cab rail.

Steam erupted from the shattered crater in a deafening, continuous blast.

The stalker’s driver locked the rear differential, throwing all eight drive wheels into reverse in a desperate attempt to haul the rig out of the pit. The massive iron spikes on the tires spun frantically, ripping the brittle mineral crust into thousands of floating fragments. The entire steam dome collapsed in a forty-pace circle, dropping the seven-ton combat rig down to its gunwales in a cauldron of bubbling sulfur brine.

Yet the stalker was not entirely finished. Its heavy steel hull held, and its rear boiler was still roaring under full draft. The driver threw the steering hard, trying to use the remaining rear wheels to climb the crumbling basalt lip.

István did not give them time to find solid stone.