THE BONE AND THE ANVIL - The Plan for Mount Ignis
The tallow stub on
The tallow stub on
Jarek’s lard-barrel had burned down to a greasy grey smear by the time
Kian pushed open the shanty door.The air inside was thick enough to chew—a stale, suffocating miasma of wet wool, cheap gin, and the sour sweat of an old man who hadn’t stepped outside since the spring thaw.
Jarek sat hunched over the brazier, his milky blind eye catching the faint, dying glow of the embers like a polished marble.”You smell like river mud and burnt powder, boy,” Jarek wheezed, not turning his head.
He reached out a trembling, liver-spotted hand, his fingers tapping blindly against the wooden top of the barrel until they found the neck of his green gin bottle. “And you walk like a man who just tried to pick a fight with an ore-cart and lost.”Kian didn’t answer.
He dropped onto the edge of a broken wooden chest near the door, his hands resting heavily between his knees.
His palms were still stinging from the grey silt of the shattered
Shatter-Glass shards, the fine chemical dust ground so deep into his skin that it looked like lead poisoning under the dim light.”The
Shatter-Glass didn’t work,” Kian said.
His voice was flat, devoid of anger now.
The kind of tired that soaked straight through the marrow and settled behind the eyes.Jarek paused, the green bottle halfway to his cracked lips.
He let out a dry, rattling cough that shook his thin shoulders beneath his blanket-rags. “Didn’t work?
What do you mean, didn’t work?
Hegemony’s glass always works.
It either fuses a man’s bones into iron, or it blows his chest open like an over-ripe melon.
There’s no middle ground with refined
Crux.””It blew up,” Kian said softly. “In my hands.
Turned to grey dust before it even reached my elbows.”The old man lowered the bottle slowly, setting it back onto the dirt with a dull thud.
He turned his good eye toward
Kian, the yellowed white of the iris squinting through the gloom.”Ah,” Jarek murmured, a strange, knowing wheeze escaping his throat. “The eastern blood.
Cormac you weren’t shaped out of the same mud as these northern sheep.
Your kind… you’ve got old fires in your veins.
Shatter-Glass is too tame, or too foul, for a soul-forge that hasn’t been scrubbed by the
Hegemony’s alchemists.””Jarek,” Kian interrupted, leaning forward, his dark eyes fixed on the old soldier’s face. “The voice in the pendant… it told me the same thing.
It said my veins were built for spirit-fire, not cooked coal.””Then listen to it,” Jarek spat, though his tone lacked its usual mockery.
He reached into the folds of his filthy blanket and pulled out a rolled scrap of greasy yellow parchment—not a military map, but a hand-drawn sketch of jagged peaks and deep, volcanic rifts, inked with faded iron-gall.
He tossed it onto the barrel.”If processed
Shatter-Glass won’t take, you need the raw stuff,” Jarek said, his voice dropping into a raspy, conspiratorial whisper. “Unrefined
Straight from the heart of the earth.
The stuff they haven’t put through the capital’s refining vats yet.”Kian stared at the parchment.
The ink lines showed a jagged mountain peak with a smoking crown—a place he recognized instantly from the quartermaster’s boundary charts.”Mount
Ignis,” Kian whispered.”The active volcanic crater twenty miles north of the ridge,” Jarek nodded, his blind eye catching the orange flicker of a dying coal. “The
Imperial mining cable’s been abandoned there since the third year of the
Wars because the shafts are too hot and the gas-pockets are too volatile.
But the ore… the raw, pulsating core-stone… it’s still down in those lower tunnels.
Hot as dragon-breath.”Kian’s fingers curled into the rough wool of his trousers. “The
Vanguard marches for the southern front in less than a week.
Wilhelm’s orders.
Every conscript is accounted for at morning muster.””Then you desert, boy,” Jarek said simply, as if he were suggesting a change of socks.
He picked up his gin bottle again, took a long, burning swallow, and wiped his beard with the back of his hand. “Forty-eight hours.
That’s all the time you’ve got before
Ostrander starts checking the tent-rolls for missing numbers.
You take two days, slip past the northern timber line, climb the
Ignis shaft, and bring back a chunk of raw core-stone before the garrison wakes up from their
Sunday ale.””It’s a court-martial,” Kian said, though the thought didn’t frighten him the way it used to.
Hegemony’s army, a deserter was hung from the nearest pine tree within an hour of being caught. “And if the volcano doesn’t get me, the
Otharan patrols on the border will.””And if you stay here?” Jarek snarled, his good eye flaring with a sudden, sharp intensity that made the old man look terrifyingly alive. “You stay here, you march south as an un-tempered grunt, and some
Otharan shock-trooper with a three-thousand-crown broadsword cuts you in half before you even cross the river.
You want to die a shoveler’s death,
Or do you want to see what that wolf-tooth around your neck is actually screaming about?”The small shanty went dead silent.Outside, the wind howled down the narrow canal lane, rattling the zinc roof sheets and sending a shower of fine soot down through the crooked chimney pipe.Kian reached down and picked up the greasy, hand-drawn map of
The paper was cold, smelling of old dust and river damp.
He traced the inked lines of the volcanic shaft with the tip of his scarred thumb.Forty-eight hours.
Two days to step outside the
March, slip past the
Imperial pickets, and descend into a sulfurous crater where the earth itself was boiling.”I’ll need a winch-rope,” Kian said quietly, his voice as steady and cold as the iron floor beneath his boots. “And someone to hold it while
I go down.”Old
Jarek let out a long, wheezing cackle, leaning his head back against the damp log wall.”Don’t look at me, boy,” the old man wheezed, pouring another mouthful of gin down his throat. “Go find that poacher’s son you run with—the one with the nervous teeth and the bird following him around.
If anyone knows how to drop down a hole without breaking his neck, it’s a poacher’s boy.”