UNDER THE CROSIER’S SHADOW - Subterranean Sulfur and the Anchor-Axe

Rope creaked under four hundred pounds of dead iron and wet hemp. The fiber groaned, a high, splitting sound that vibrated straight through Kellan’s leather gloves into his wrists. Down below, nothing showed except a dull, sour smudge of phosphorescent blue, like rotted grease smeared across an open grave.

“Mind the third strand from the left,” Master Sarix shouted from inside his blue ceramic urn. The urn wobbled violently in its iron cradle, strapped across the rib cage of a skeletal bearer whose rust-pitted pot helmet kept clattering against the vessel’s rim. “It’s frayed to the core! Two more feet and we all smash on the sump-stones! Not that I have legs to break, mind you, but this jar was fired in the third century by master potters, and I’ll be damned if I let yellow soup crack the glaze!”

“Shut your pot, Sarix,” Kellan muttered.

His boots slipped on a wet rung. His knee slammed hard into the basalt rock face, sending a shower of loose shale and crusted salt rattling down the dark drop. The air here didn’t feel like air. It tasted of yellow sulfur, scorched rendered mutton fat, and wet limestone powder, thick enough to coat the back of his tongue with a film like cold mutton grease.

Above him, Yvaine climbed down with silent, mechanical precision. Her skeletal fingers, thick with white animal fat-wax to keep the damp from rotting her knuckles, found every cleft in the stone without a sound. Sackcloth hung loose over her rib cage, dyed grey with coal-dust to swallow the pale sheen of her bare bone. Attached to her spine by rusted wire, her longbow swung with every kick of her boots, the seasoned yew wood scraped raw down to the dark heartwood.

“Hold fast,” Kellan said, his voice grating against his teeth. “The ladder ends.”

“It doesn’t end,” Sarix shrieked as his bearer took another step down. “It rotted! Big difference! Big, wet, structural difference!”

Ten feet below Kellan’s hanging boots, a draft skeleton—the thin one with the broken pelvic bone tied together with copper wire—lost its grip. The salt-crated rope gave a dry pop. The construct didn’t scream. It just dropped out of the pale luminescence, its white ribs flashing once against the damp basalt before it struck the sulfur trench far below.

A heavy plop echoed up the shaft, followed instantly by a violent white-yellow hiss. The smell of boiling marrow and melted lime-crust rolled up the rock wall like a slap across the eyes. Steam hissed off the sulfur pool, thick and yellow, smelling of rotted guts and burnt copper.

“Gone,” Yvaine rasped. Her voice sounded like two dry roof tiles sliding over each other. She didn’t look down. She just jammed her wax-caked fingers into a cold seam in the basalt, holding her weight while the ladder swung into the blue mist.

“Rot’s teeth,” Kellan spat, blinking away the stinging dampness that gathered on his eyelashes. “Watch the bottom rungs. The steam has eaten the hemp through.”

He let go of the rope five feet up, dropping blind into the pale green muck that covered the floor. His knees buckled under the weight of his gear, his boots sinking six inches into wet, lime-heavy sediment that hissed around his leather gaiters. The cold of the ground burned through his soles, but beneath the cold ran a strange, sickly heat—the deep pulse of the earth boiling its own grease in the dark.

Yvaine dropped beside him, landing without a splash, her lightweight frame barely denting the gray sludge. Behind her came the bearer, its iron pot helmet ringing like a dull bell as its boots hit a submerged slab of brass.

They stood in a rift that carved through the bedrock like an old wound. The walls weren’t just stone. Deep inside the black basalt ran thick, twisted arteries of brass plating, green with verdigris and weeping yellow moisture. Massive brass rivets, some as wide as a dinner plate, held ancient drainage plates against the rock, though half of them had been sheared off by centuries of rock-shift and acidic steam.

“The Labyrinth of Brass,” Sarix clucked, his skull rattling against the interior wall of the blue urn as the bearer straightened up. “Or what’s left of the lower sump-line. The dwarf-smiths didn’t build this to live in, boy. They built it to pump the sulfur out of the deep iron mines before the mountain drowned them in yellow rot. Smells like a tanner’s gut-bucket, doesn’t it?”

“Worse,” Kellan said.

He pulled his bone knife from his belt and wiped a layer of yellow slime off the brass panel nearest his elbow. Beneath the slime, the metal was stamped with tight, geometric scriptorium runes—not the smooth, floating curves of high sorcery, but the crude, blocky teeth of pressure-valves and weight-levers.

Kellan reached inward, checking the bone plates fused along his ribs beneath his skin Glamour. The siphoned energy he had gathered earlier throbbed steadily under his sternum, a cold, hard knot of stolen vitality keeping his flesh looking supple while his insides remained a cage of calcified iron-hard bone. The skin over his ribs felt tight, stretched like wet drumhead leather over the extra marrow-plates he’d built to protect his organs.

“Which way?” Yvaine asked, her socketed eyes staring into the dark tunnel where the brass floor tilted downward into yellow fog. She drew an arrow from her quivering hip-quiver—a long shaft tipped with heavy Sun-Refinement bone, polished white and notched with precision.

“Down,” Kellan said. “The air is moving that way. Means there’s an exhaust vent or a broken vault.”

“Or something big breathing,” Sarix piped up. “Don’t forget the breathing. Miners back in the fourth age swore the deep sump had a mouth.”

“Hold your tongue,” Kellan barked.

They moved down the narrow gangway. The floor was made of interlocking brass grates, slick with warm lard-like scum and green copper rot. Beneath the grates, yellow sulfur water churned in narrow channels, gurgling like a dying horse. Every ten paces, a steam pipe rusted out at the seam would blow a loud, wet shhhh-hiss, filling the tunnel with clouds of blinding white smoke that smelled of brimstone and burnt hair.

Kellan kept his hand on the hilt of his short sword, his boots crunching on loose brass rivets that had popped out of the walls. The air grew hotter. The phosphorescent fungus that clung to the damp basalt turned from dull blue to a feverish, sickly yellow, illuminating massive gear-wheels embedded in the rock—wheels six men tall, their teeth choked with calcified bone and iron sludge.

Yvaine froze. Her hand went out, her wax-dusted ribs locking tight as she pressed her back against a curved brass bulkhead.

“What?” Kellan whispered, dropping low.

“Iron,” she rasped. “Moving iron.”

Kellan listened. Over the steady shhh-hiss of the sulfur vents and the churn of the yellow water beneath the grates, he heard it. A drag. A heavy, wet, scraping sound that rattled the floorboards under his boots.

Shhh-clack. Shhh-clack.

It wasn’t the rhythmic click of clockwork. It was uneven. One step heavy, plunging four inches into the grates; the next step dragging a dead weight behind it.

“Ah,” Sarix squeaked from the urn, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “That would be Jorund. Or what’s left of him. I told the quartermaster back in ’42 that you can’t stitch an ox-head to a sea-captain’s torso without extra iron wire around the neck-joint, but did he listen? No. ‘Sarix,’ he said, ‘the thick grease will hold it.’ Fat! As if grease ever stopped sulfur-rot!”

“Is it undead?” Kellan asked, pulling his glyph-chisel from his leather sleeve.

“Undead?” Sarix snorted. “Boy, it’s a construct built out of five dead bargemen, three bull carcass parts, and four hundred weight of scrap anchor-iron. It doesn’t die because it was never proper alive to begin with. It just… works. Like a bad pump.”

The steam vent to their left burst with a deafening screech of boiling water. Out of the yellow smog pushed a shape that filled the entire eight-foot width of the brass gangway.

It stood nearly nine feet tall, its head a massive, skinned bull’s skull stripped down to yellow horn and grey bone, mounted backward on a shoulders wide as an ox-cart. Its upper torso was a patchwork of black, water-logged flesh stitched with greasy hemp cord and reinforced with thick bands of corroded iron plate bolted straight into the collarbones. Red sulfur liquid wept from every seam in its hide, running down a belly that had been replaced with an iron stove-grate to hold its rotting entrails inside.

In its right hand, the thing dragged its weapon: a twin anchor-axe.

The shaft was a seven-foot length of wet larch wood, thick as a fence post, capped on both ends by heavy, fluked iron ship-anchors. The forward flukes had been beaten flat with a sledgehammer, ground down on stone until the iron edges were jagged, three-inch-thick cutting blades dripping with brown grease and ancient hair.

“Shatter it,” Kellan spat, stepping back as the creature raised the massive double anchor-axe.

The construct—Jorund—didn’t roar. It had no lungs left for a chest-shout. Instead, the iron stove-grate in its belly rattled violently as steam forced its way out of its stitched gullet, producing a sound like an iron kettle boiling over on a cold hearth.

The anchor-axe came down.

Kellan lunged to the right, his shoulder slamming into the brass-plated wall. The heavy iron fluke hit the floor where he had been standing an instant before. The brass grates tore like rotten paper. Cast iron floor-beams snapped with a sharp crack, and a fountain of yellow sulfur water blasted ten feet into the air, scalding the ceiling.

Yvaine had already moved. She didn’t leap; she simply dropped into a low, spider-like crouch beneath the swing, her longbow pulling back to her jaw in one fluid motion.

Twang.

The Sun-Refinement bone arrow buried itself four inches into Jorund’s left knee-joint—a mass of iron bolts and rotting bull-tendon. A pale, cold spark of siphon-light burst where the arrow struck, freezing the yellow fluid inside the joint into white frost.

The giant stumbled, its dragged left leg locking up with a loud crunch of ice and rust. But its inertia was terrifying. The sheer mass of eight hundred pounds of iron and wet meat swung the rear fluke of the anchor-axe in a low, horizontal arc that swept through the yellow mist.

“Down!” Kellan yelled.

He dropped flat into the greasy muck on the remaining brass floorboards. The fluke whistled over his head, missing his ear by two inches. The air displacement slammed into him like a wooden plank, smelling of raw iron rot and sea-salt. The axe head struck a massive brass pillar on the far side of the corridor.

The brass didn’t just dent; it ruptured. The pillar split with a scream of tearing metal, and the basalt wall behind it exploded under the blunt force, throwing a hail of sharp, black rock shards into the wet air.

“Kellan!” Sarix yelled as his skeletal bearer was hurled backward by a flying piece of brass pipe. The urn tilted dangerously, slamming against a rock face. “The joint! Hit the hip-plate! The rendered mutton fat is frozen on the left!”

Kellan didn’t waste breath answering. He shoved his bone knife into his belt and pressed his right palm flat against the wet floor.

He channeled his siphon-force straight through his forearm into the brass floorboards. Cold glyph-fire—a harsh, blue-white rim of frost—spread outward across the greasy metal in a jagged circle six feet wide. The sulfur water running beneath the grates instantly froze, expanding with a violent crack that buckled the floor plates upward.

Jorund tried to shift his weight to strike again. His right boot—a massive block of iron-shod timber bolted through his heel-bone—hit the freshly glaciated brass.

The monster slipped.

Its nine-foot frame tipped sideways, the heavy twin anchor-axe dragging it off balance. But as the construct fell, its bull-skull swung toward Kellan. The yellowed horns, capped with rusted iron spikes, whipped through the steam.

Kellan tried to roll clear, but the floor was a sheet of slick, blue-white ice. His left boot skidded.

The trailing fluke of the anchor-axe—a five-hundred-pound wedge of solid iron and jagged basalt splinters— hit the side of his chest while he was still half-erect.

The impact was like being hit by a runaway ore-cart.

Kellan’s Glamour skin burst instantly, tearing open like dry paper. Beneath his flesh, the calcified bone plates he had built around his ribs took the brunt of the blow, but they couldn’t absorb the sheer mass of the iron fluke.

CRACK.

The sound echoed inside Kellan’s own skull—a wet, splintering crunch as three of his outer marrow-plates shattered into fragments. The force threw him fifteen feet back down the corridor. He hit the basalt wall hard, his breath exploding from his lungs in a red spray that hit the wet rock and hissed.

He slid down into the gray sulfur muck, his vision going black around the edges.

“Kellan!” Sarix’s voice sounded muffled, like he was calling from the bottom of a dry well.

Through the fog of pain, Kellan saw Yvaine move. She wasn’t running; she was gliding over the iced brass floorboards like a ghost over a frozen pond. She notched a second Sun-Refinement arrow, drew the string until the dark yew wood groaned, and drove the shaft straight into the ox-skull’s empty eye socket from point-blank range.

The arrow went deep. The pale, cold siphon-energy bound inside the bone-tip discharged straight into the construct’s dead brain-pan.

Jorund froze mid-scramble. The yellow steam stopped rising from its iron belly-grate. The stitched hide along its neck shivered once, then locked solid as frost bloomed out of its eye sockets, mouth, and iron joints, turning the nine-foot terror into a grey, motionless statue of rot and frozen lard.

The heavy anchor-axe dropped from its iron-gloved fingers, striking the floor with a final, dead clunk.

Silence returned to the tunnel, broken only by the steady, wet shhh-hiss of a broken steam pipe fifty paces back.

Kellan lay on his side in the cold, greasy sulfur sludge. His head throbbed in time with his heart, every pulse sending a sharp, white-hot needle of pain through his left flank. He couldn’t draw a full breath; every attempt to expand his chest felt like a handful of crushed glass twisting inside his ribs.

“Still breathing?” Yvaine was standing over him now. Her wax-dusted skeletal face showed no emotion—it couldn’t—but her longbow was lowered, the tip resting on the frozen brass floor.

“Barely,” Kellan grunted. He spat a mouthful of dark blood into the yellow foam bubbling around his knees. “Rot’s teeth… that hurt.”

“You’re open,” she rasped, pointing a white finger at his side.

Kellan looked down. His leather tunic was shredded, soaked in a mixture of dark blood, yellow sulfur water, and the white calcified dust of his own broken bone-armor. His skin Glamour had peeled back like old bark, exposing the gray, fused marrow-plates underneath.

One of the plates had snapped clean in half.

Sticking out of the center of the fracture, wedged three inches deep between his fifth and sixth ribs, was a jagged fragment of black basalt—a sharp, hand-sized shard blown off the wall by the axe’s impact. The stone was still hot from the deep earth’s friction, white steam rising off its razor-thin edge as it cooked the torn meat of his side.

Sarix’s bearer shuffled over, the blue ceramic urn clattering softly.

“Don’t pull it out yet, boy,” Sarix warned, his skull tilting to peek over the rim of the jar. “That rock is the only thing keeping your lung from filling up with yellow soup. Hold your breath while I see if we have any candle stub left to plug the gap.”

Kellan lay back against the wet basalt wall, his teeth gritted so hard he could taste enamel. He didn’t touch the stone. He just watched the thin wisp of sulfur steam curl upward from the hot black shard embedded deep in his chest.