The deployment orders crinkled in Danara’s grip. She needed an irrefutable delay, and her only lever lay inside the Iron Spire’s subterranean records vault.
The administrative tier droned with scribes, but the subterranean vaults three levels below held rows of iron-clasped registers in the green tint of caged glow-worms. Her target: the quartermaster’s tallies for siege fuel.
A clatter from behind made her flinch. Tobbaj, grinning, swung a satchel over his shoulder. “Lost your way to the armory, Artillery-Ace? Heard you were looking for some ‘minor discrepancies.’ Thought I’d tag along. Might find some unexploded ordnance down here. Think of the possibilities!” He gestured expansively, nearly knocking over a stack of ancient, mold-stained manifests.
“This isn’t a scavenger hunt, Tobbaj,” Danara snapped, her voice tight. “This is vital. Precision, not chaos, is required.”
“Precision is just chaos in slow motion,” he countered, already rummaging through a shelf, humming off-key. “What are we really looking for? Not just ‘discrepancies,’ are we? Your face has that ‘impending doom’ look it gets right before you do something truly suicidal.”
Danara ignored the barb. His presence was an unwanted variable, but his knack for sniffing out irregularities, however crude, might prove useful. “We’re looking for evidence of deliberate supply chain manipulation. Specifically, gun charges. Any unusual transfers, missing manifests, or… ghost requisitions.”
They worked in silence, the only sounds the rustle of vellum, Tobbaj’s sporadic muttering, and the distant hum of the Spire’s ventilation. Hours bled into each other. Danara’s eyes ached from deciphering faded script, her fingers blackened by ink and dust. Her search focused on the past three months, cross-referencing quartermaster reports with field deployment manifests. Nothing obvious. Too clean.
Then, Tobbaj whistled, low and sharp. He’d dragged a heavy volume from a shadowed alcove. “Look at this. Quarterly audit for the ‘Fayez-class’ mortar charges. Fine sulfur grain. Massive discrepancy. Like, ‘build a small city and level it’ massive.”
Danara snatched the volume and traced the columns. The totals balanced on paper, but the individual requisitions were shaved down—scant grains siphoned off from dozens of legitimate orders over months. Cumulatively, a fortune in propellant. At the seal of approval, Captain Oghuzel’s looping seal pressed red into the parchment. The breath left her lungs in a sharp rasp.
“He’s supplying them,” she whispered, the words tasting like ash. “He’s been feeding the enemy.”
The air grew heavy. A faint scraping sound echoed from deeper within the stacks, not the scurry of desert rats. Footsteps. Slow, deliberate. Too many.
“Someone knows we’re here,” Tobbaj murmured, his jovial demeanor vanishing, replaced by a predatory stillness. He pulled a small, spherical object from his satchel, its brass casing polished to a sinister gleam. “Guess my ‘unexploded ordnance’ theory was more prophetic than I thought.”
Four figures emerged from the gloom, clad in the dark, unmarked uniforms of Oghuzel’s personal guard. Their short, heavy culverins were already raised. Danara slammed the binder shut, clutching it against her breastplate. The paper edges bit through her gloves.
“Danara Arghun. Tobbaj Ghul,” one of the guards stated, his voice flat. “Captain Oghuzel requests your presence. Immediately. And that register.”
“Politely decline,” Tobbaj snarled, twisting the cap off his device. “Tell him we’re busy.” He lobbed the sphere, not at the guards, but at a precarious stack of munitions crates in the corner, labeled “Defective: High-Explosive.”
“No, you fool!” Danara shouted. The storeroom held enough explosive dry-grain to crack the foundation. Tobbaj flashed a grin edged with sudden panic. “Oops.”
The explosion ripped through the subterranean chamber, a concussive wave of heat and shrapnel. Parchment-sheaves and iron clasps turned into lethal projectiles, shelves of records disintegrated into fiery dust. The very ground trembled. Danara threw herself behind a massive, overturned filing cabinet, shielding her head as the world turned into a maelstrom of burning paper and screaming metal. The room, the evidence, everything shattered beneath the concussive blast.
When the ringing in her ears subsided, a choking cloud of acrid smoke filled the air, thick with scorched vellum and saltpeter. The glow-worm lamps had shattered, leaving only ragged yellow flames licking what remained of the shelves. Danara coughed, her throat raw, her eyes watering. Tobbaj, miraculously, was pulling himself out from under a collapsed archway, soot-blackened but intact, a wild, exhilarated look on his face. The guards were nowhere to be seen, likely buried under the rubble or obliterated.
A shadow fell over the burning wreckage, far too tall, far too imposing. The heat of the flames cast an eerie, dancing light on his face. Dastgir. He strode through the smoldering debris, his uniform immaculate despite the chaos, his vanguard-issue gauntlets glinting in the firelight. His pale irises fixed on Danara, stripped of their usual taunting humor.
“Danara Arghun,” his voice was a low growl, cutting through the crackle of flames. “Explain this devastation. Explain your unauthorized raid on sealed logistics files. Explain the dead among Oghuzel’s detail. You have two choices. You will either be arrested for this spectacular display of insubordination and destruction of imperial property, or you will finally tell me why you look at me as if I am the architect of your deepest, most terrifying nightmare.”