"Answers," she spat, refusing to cower beneath the burning coal-pits of his gaze. "Because if this rotting pile of stone tumbles, my neck breaks along with it. And I intend to walk out of here alive, Stellan." Vorlag’s rocky jaw opened to grind out a retort, but the words died as the mountain itself groaned. A thundering boom cracked through the foundations of Grieze Spire. The flagstones lurched violently beneath their boots. Overhead, three crystal chandeliers swung in wild arcs, scattering shards of glass across the dust-caked floor. From the high ceilings, mortar rained down like gray snow. Vorlag pulled back, his talons gouging deep trenches into the mahogany shelf. "Iron-plated shot," he rasped, his voice scraping like grinding millstones. "Below the outer barbican." "Your welcoming committee has bad manners," Zivena said, already reaching for the hilt of the steel practice saber she had strapped to her hip that morning. Her instincts flared, clean and sharp. A duel in a ballroom was theater; an assault on high stone was survival. "Stay in the vaults," Vorlag ordered. "A broken duelist is baggage on a battlefield." "Call me baggage after you watch me parry, monster." She surged past his massive frame before he could block the doorway, skirts hitching over her knees as she took the spiral staircase three steps at a time. Behind her, his heavy, thudding gait rattled the stone risers, a relentless avalanche trailing her heels. They burst through the heavy oak portal onto the North Bastion. The mountain wind whipped cold and biting, smelling of wet slate, ozone, and sulfur. Five hundred paces below, in the craggy gorge known as the Devil’s Gullet, an army was choking the pass. Two thousand men-at-arms in polished steel were arrayed in rigid, insectile squares. Banners of vermilion silk—emblazoned with the serrated split-shield of the Order of the Iron Brand—snapped in the gale. At the head of the siege train stood Commander Boras atop a black-lacquered war wagon. Boras was a silhouette of ruthless precision. He wore plate of fluted silver, unmarred by rust, and an iron gorget cinched high beneath a clean-shaven, severe chin. He held a brass signal trumpet to his lips, barking sharp notes that set the trench lines into motion. He never glanced at the sky, studying the fortress walls with the cool calculation of a surveyor appraising lumber to be felled. "He’s wasting shot," Zivena yelled over the whistling gale. "Those masonry balls can't punch through pre-cataclysm wards. Even the academy texts taught us that much." "The wards were whole when those texts were penned," Vorlag said, leaning over the parapet. His dark, living silhouette flared, smoke curling off his craggy shoulders. "Look closer, girl." Zivena peered down through the embrasure. The shimmering dome of indigo force that cloaked Grieze Spire was not solid. It flickered like wet tallow. Along the eastern arc, the blue light had turned a dead, calcified ash-color—the unmistakable rot of the Creeping Grey. The blight had infected the ancient defensive matrices. "Boras knows," she whispered, realization turning bitter on her tongue. "Someone fed him the Spire's weakness." "He doesn't need a spy," Vorlag growled. "He only needs eyes. My weakness rots in plain sight." Down in the basin, Boras lowered his arm. A battery of four heavy torsion catapults groaned, their counterweights dropping like falling anvils. Four iron projectiles arced through the pale sky, trailing ribbons of black alchemical smoke. Three struck the intact indigo barrier, bursting into brilliant sprays of violet sparks that dissipated harmlessly against the void. The fourth struck the dead grey patch directly beneath the North Bastion. There was no magical hiss. There was only the sickening thud of iron shattering diseased stone. The parapet beneath Zivena's boots disintegrated. A spiderweb of cracks ripped through the balustrade. The stone dissolved into powdery ash in an instant, robbed of all structural magic by the creeping blight. The flagstones dropped out from under her. Zivena lunged forward, her fingers clawing for purchase, but the granite crumbled to chalk beneath her palms. The sheer drop—two thousand feet of sheared slate cliffs—opened beneath her like an empty mouth. The wind tore the sound from her lungs before she could shout. A massive hand seized her wrist. The jerk stopped her fall with bone-rattling force. She dangled in the freezing air, her boots kicking uselessly at empty space, the vast abyss churning below. Her shoulder burned as if pulled from its socket. Above her, Vorlag anchored himself against an iron-braced crenel, his talons sunk six inches into solid granite. "Hold!" he roared against the gale. His grip was immovable, iron-hard and burning hot despite the cold wind. He used only one hand, holding her entire weight as the sinew strained beneath craggy plates of obsidian hide. Slowly, deliberately, he hauled her upward through the howling wind. He dragged her over the broken lip of the parapet, tumbling her onto the solid floorstones behind him. She scrambled back on her hands and knees, her chest heaving, the bitter alpine air searing her throat. Her knuckles were skinned and bleeding from the broken rock. Vorlag crouched over her, his chest rising and falling in harsh bellows. From his right shoulder, a dense trickle of gray dust fell, joining the debris on the terrace. The exertion had torn at his own blighted flesh. "You should have stayed below," he rasped, smoke venting from his nostrils. Zivena stared up at the monstrous mask of his face. His glowing embers of eyes held none of the sneering arrogance of Stellan the champion. They held only an exhausted, savage grief. For a fleeting second, the sheer proximity stripped away the horror of his shell; she could see the precise tilt of his brow, the stubborn line of a jaw she had spent three years wanting to crack with a pommel strike. Her hand remained clamped around his wrist, feeling the steady thrum through his monstrous veins. He hadn't let her fall. A calculating rival would have let gravity settle the score and save the trouble. She ripped her hand away, shame flaring hot under her collar at her own trembling limbs. "I didn't ask for a rescue." "I didn't offer one," Vorlag snarled, pushing himself upright. "You die on my stone, Eliska will pester me until the end of the age about manners. Stand up, Blade-Dancer. They aren't done." Zivena forced herself to her feet, locking her knees to hide the tremor running through them. She stepped back toward the edge, careful to plant her weight only where the masonry remained dark and unmarred by the grey rot. In the valley below, Boras was no longer watching the catapults. The commander had dismounted his wagon and walked toward the center of his battle line. He raised a gloved hand, snapping his fingers in a slow, theatrical signal. From the rear ranks, four teams of armored dray-beasts—shaggy, six-legged oxen bred for the northern salt wastes—dragged a massive iron carriage forward. It was covered in a heavy tarpaulin of leaded canvas. At Boras’s nod, six squires seized the ropes and yanked the cover away. Resting upon the carriage was a siege ram unlike anything forged in the baronies. Its core was a thirty-foot shaft of pale, petrified white timber, carved from end to end with barbed abyssal runes that burned with a cold, sickly viridian light. At its prow sat the forged head of a horned serpent, its open maw weeping drops of liquid corruption that hissed and melted the snow wherever it dripped. "The Witch-Borer," Vorlag whispered, the stone plates along his neck rattling together. For the first time since she had arrived at the Spire, his voice lacked fury. It carried only cold, hollow dread. "What is it?" Zivena demanded, her grip tightening on the hilt of her sword. "A weapon forged specifically to eat ley-lines," Vorlag said. "One strike against the lower sally port, and the blight won't creep anymore. It will swallow this fortress whole within an hour." Down below, Boras looked up at the bastion. Through the freezing air, his gaze locked onto the high terrace, finding the silhouette of the monster and the disgraced duelist beside him. Boras drew his broadsword, raised it toward the peak in a mocking salute, and pointed the tip straight at the gates.

The First Salvo