UNDER THE CROSIER’S SHADOW - The Obsidian Gates of No Stars

The hiss of a hot bone-quill against wet sinew made a stench like branding cattle in a closed barn.

Kellan squeezed the brass pincers tighter. Grease hissed off the needle point, bubbling where the minotaur’s shoulder-joint met the iron socket he had hammered into the socket-cup three nights back. The tendon was thick as a wagon-rope, cured in brine and lye until it turned the color of horse-turnip, but it had dried stiff during the march through the wet slate tunnels. He had to scorch it soft to take the stitch.

“Hold the knee, Yvaine,” Kellan grunted. Smoke from the tallow lamp crawled into his nose, taste of burnt hair and mutton fat. “Don’t let the coil slip. If the brass wire bites into the belly of the muscle before the knot sets, the leg will kick when I charge the ring.”

The skeletal scout leaned her weight against the bull’s massive hip. Her limbs were wrapped tight in strips of boiled sackcloth smeared with tallow and white chalk-wax to keep the damp out of her joints, making her look like a bundle of fence-posts bound in dirty rags. She didn’t speak. She just jammed the iron end of her unstrung arc-bow under the kneecap, locking the heavy bone into the soot-blackened socket.

From the top of a wooden pack-frame sitting on a heap of damp shale, a clatter of loose teeth shook inside a ceramic jar.

“Clumsy,” Master Sarix spat, his voice hollowed out by the glazed cobalt stoneware surrounding his jawless cranium. The iron pot-helmet perched on his cranium tilted three degrees to the left as he jostled against his bone-frame bearer. “You’re sewing him like a tailor’s apprentice fixing a drunkard’s trousers, boy. The third node needs a copper wedge, not pig-gut. He’ll walk sideways. He’ll walk like a spavined mule through a cabbage patch.”

“Shut up, Sarix,” Kellan muttered without looking up. He held a brass wire between his teeth, his saliva tasting of copper rust and old salt.

He pulled the bone-quill through the tough outer sheath of the beast’s trapezius. The muscle twitched once, a dry reflex of dead flesh remembering the axe that felled it. Kellan picked up the ring from his leather apron. It was a heavy thing, cast from crude pig-iron he’d scraped off an abandoned ore-cart three miles back, stamped with three cross-hatches across the face.

He pressed the iron signet into the raw pocket he’d cut beneath the beast’s collarbone.

“Jorund,” Kellan said, his breath hitching as he siphoned a thread of cold, gray light from his own throat into the metal. His skin pricked with the familiar needle-stab of exhaustion, the skin around his eyes tightening like dry leather. “Jorund the Breaker. Get up.”

The brute didn’t jump. It rose like a wet hay-bale being pulled out of a ditch by a winch. Iron rivets groaned along the spine. The minotaur’s skull—stripped to the yellowed bone, its horns tipped with broken spade-iron—swung sideways with a wet thud against the granite wall.

“Test the arm,” Kellan rasped, wiping his bloody thumbs on his trousers.

The massive creature lifted its right fist. It was a block of grey muscle and exposed ribbing, three fingers bound with lead wire. The fist slammed straight into the rock face next to Sarix’s urn.

A crack blew through the grey shale, sharp as a musket shot. Chips of wet slate rained down onto the flagstones. A line of fine grit trickled across Kellan’s boot.

“Stupid ox,” Sarix clicked, his pot rattling against his bearer’s rib cage. “He’s got no thumb-sense. He’ll tear his own elbow out before we reach the ditch.”

“He’ll break what I point him at,” Kellan said. He picked up his bag of mortar-dust and his chisel, slinging the leather strap over his shoulder. His left leg was stiff from the damp; the cold underground dampness always got into his knee where an iron bolt had grazed him at the quarry. “Get the lanterns. The draft’s coming down from the shelf.”

They moved into the black.

The road didn’t look like a road. It was a throat cut into the mountain’s belly, three yards wide and low enough that Jorund had to haul his shoulders sideways to keep his shoulder-pegs from scraping the ceiling. The air here was old. It smelled of wet soot, crushed bat-bones, and the thick, iron smell of deep water standing in stagnant sumps.

Every ten paces, the stone changed. Above, near the surface, the rock had been gray slate that flaked off in greasy shingles under their boots. Here, it was root-stone—black, heavy, pulled taut by the weight of three miles of granite overhead until it looked like petrified thick grease. Great black veins, thick as a man’s thigh, ran through the rock like frozen tree roots, slick with a slow, salty sweat that dripped into the puddles with a dull tink-tink-tink.

Yvaine went first. Her bare bone feet made no sound against the wet flags, only the dry chiff of her sackcloth wrappings dragging across the gravel. Her socket-holes were turned toward the darkness, her left hand hovering near the notch of her heavy pine bow.

“How far down?” Kellan asked, his voice swallowed immediately by the stone walls.

“Three hundred yards,” Sarix said from his bearer’s back. The bearer—a lean, five-foot skeleton with an arm replaced by a sharpened larch-wood stake—waddled through the mud with a rhythmic click-clack. “Maybe four. Depends on whether the old road sank during the high waters forty years back. The scholars in the Crosier’s cellar used to say the whole shelf slid half a rod to the west when the lower tunnels flooded.”

“They were lying,” Kellan said.

“Of course they were lying,” Sarix sneered. “They were priests. They lied about the turnip yield, they lied about the bishop’s leg-gout, and they lied about what was down here so no one would come looking for the lead pipes. Look at that wall.”

Kellan swung his wax lamp closer.

The black stone had been carved. Not with hammers—the strokes were too wide, too smooth, like someone had dragged a red-hot iron scoop through soft suet. Shallow channels ran along the rock at waist height, plugged here and there with grey limestone powder-crust and dried lichen that looked like scabbed skin.

“Carapace work,” Sarix muttered. The chatter in his teeth died down to a dry scraping sound. “The old diggers. The ones before the first timber was laid at Garrowford. They didn’t have iron spade-bits. They used grease and sulfur to split the quartz, then dragged the spoil out on ox-hides.”

“It’s wide,” Kellan said, touching the rim of a channel. The stone was smooth as ice, cold enough to make his fingernails ache. “Wider than the road at the gatehouse.”

“It wasn’t a road for carts, boy. It was a drain.”

They turned a long, leaning bend where the ceiling dipped so low Kellan had to crouch, his iron-bound pack scraping against the jagged root-stone overhead. Sparks jumped off his shoulder-blade iron, smelling of ozone and wet flint. Then the wall on the left simply vanished.

The air blew wide and cold against Kellan’s face. It carried no mountain smell—no pine-needles, no wet sheep-wool, no chimney smoke. It was the air of a dry cellar that had been sealed while the bacon was still hanging on the hook.

He raised the lamp.

The light died ten feet out. Beyond the edge of the ledge, there was nothing but a vast, silent drop. Down in the floor of the gulf, two hundred yards below, shapes loomed out of the dark like broken teeth sticking up through mud.

An obsidian city.

It didn’t have streets like Garrowford or the low towns near the river. There were no timber frames, no tiled roofs, no pig-sties or dung-heaps. The houses were monoliths—huge, square blocks of dense black volcanic glass, cut directly out of the floor of the cavern. Some were fifty feet tall, their tops square and flat like butcher-blocks; others had collapsed inward, their walls split into huge, razor-sharp shards that reflected the dim yellow flicker of Kellan’s grease-wick.

“No stars,” Yvaine’s mouth didn’t move, but the low, dry rattle in her ribs vibrated through the damp air. She pointed her pine bow down toward the dark center of the basin.

“No,” Kellan agreed, his voice small. “No stars down here.”

“A thousand families,” Sarix murmured. The tongue-less jaw clicked twice against the stoneware floor of his pot. “Before the Great Rot came through the valley. Before the Crosier built the big stone wall around the granary. They lived down here in the dark like field-mice under a barn floor. No fires. They didn’t use wood—wood rots down here in three months. They burned grease-oil from the deep wells.”

“Where are they?” Kellan scanned the dark gaps between the black blocks. Nothing moved. The silence was heavy, thick as wool-grease, broken only by the dull drop of water from the ceiling far above.

“Where do you think?” Sarix grunted. “They’re in the walls. They’re under the flags. Some of ’em are in my old ledgers, if the rats haven’t chewed the corners off.”

Kellan signaled to Jorund. The big brute stepped up to the edge of the shelf, his heavy iron toes making a sharp clink against the shale. His chest didn’t heave; his ribs were locked in place by three turns of brass wire, but the small gray spark behind his eye-sockets flared brightly against the blackness of the abyss.

“Down,” Kellan said, pointing to a narrow, notched staircase cut into the rim of the gulf. The steps were shallow and worn down in the center like old horse-troughs. “Keep your feet close to the wall. The outer edge has dropped three inches.”

They descended in single file.

The stair spiraled down the black rock face like a scar. Kellan kept his hand on the damp stone, feeling the faint, rhythmic shudder of the mountain far above. The cold worked its way through his salt-stained wool coat, settling into his ribs until every breath tasted like wet iron.

At the bottom of the stair, the floor was covered in three inches of dry, grey silt—not dirt, but pulverised slate and old soot that blew up in soft clouds around their boots. It smelled of old lime-crust and sulfur.

Kellan stopped before the main gate of the inner city wall.

The wall was forty feet of solid, black basalt, but the gate itself was iron. Not thin pig-iron like Kellan’s signet, but three-inch plates of forged iron, dark with salt-rust and grease, bolted onto beams of black larch-wood that had turned as hard as flint.

Fixed to the face of the doors were heavy plates of brown, chitinous armor—the peeled shells of deep-crawlers, broad as barn doors, held in place with square-headed iron spikes.

Inscribed across the chitin were lines of Primordial Carapace runes. They weren’t cut with an iron chisel; they were scorched into the horn-like plates with acid, the broad, jagged strokes forming angular zig-zags that looked like the legs of dead beetles.

“Look at that,” Sarix whispered, his jaw scraping the pot. “The fourth mark. That’s the sign of the Third Gate-Master. The one who had three fingers cut off for selling fat-grease to the lower miners.”

Kellan stepped closer, his lamp held shoulder-high. The flame sputtered as a thin draught whistled through the gap between the two doors. “What’s it say?”

“It says ‘Keep out, you greedy bastard,'” Sarix snapped. “Or words to that effect. It’s an accounting mark, Kellan. It lists the weight of iron pulled out of the low shaft during the year of the Great Frost. Sixteen tons of rough pig-iron, forty barrels of oil, three crates of salt-pork.”

“It’s not an account,” Kellan said, his thumb tracing a low groove in the bottom plate. The groove was packed with a yellow-grey powder that felt like fine sand between his fingers. He pulled his hand back, sniffing his skin. “Saltpetre. And dry lime.”

He looked down at the threshold.

The basalt flags beneath the gate were clean of silt. No grey dust had settled here. A wire—fine as a horse-tail hair, forged from dark, cold-drawn brass—stretches three inches above the flagstones, pinned to the wall by a rusted iron peg no larger than a carpentry tack.

“Hold,” Kellan said, his hand snapping out to catch Jorund’s heavy thigh before the beast could take another step.

The minotaur froze, its massive iron-shod foot hovering two inches above the wire.

“Trap?” Yvaine asked, her skull tilting sideways.

“Petrification spring,” Kellan said. He got down on his knees, his pants soaking up the cold grease-water on the stone. He held the grease lamp low, scanning the dark shadow beneath the iron gate-skirt.

Behind the brass wire, hidden in the dark seam between two flags, was a copper nozzle three inches wide. It was turned upward toward the door-frame, choked with years of salt-crust, but the bronze spring behind the hinge was still bright, ungreased, and pulled tight as a crossbow string.

“Old work,” Sarix observed, leaning over the edge of his urn as his skeletal carrier bent forward. “The third rector had those set after the miners tried to burn the oil-house in seventy-two. They used crushed chalk and bone-ash mixed with vitriol water. Get a puff of that in your throat, and your lungs turn to hard plaster before you can spit.”

“There’s three of them,” Kellan muttered. He traced the wire with the tip of his bone-needle. It ran along the base of the left door, disappeared into a grease-hole in the stone jamb, then looped across to the right wall. “No… four. The last one’s bound to the latch.”

“Can you cut it?”

“If I cut it, the counter-weight drops inside the wall,” Kellan said. His fingers were stiff with cold, his knuckles red and raw where the skin had cracked. “The wire’s under tension. If it goes slack, the trigger pin releases the bronze spring.”

He reached into his leather pouch and pulled out a small wooden plug and a hammer with a copper head. “I have to wedge the pin first.”

He crawled closer, his chest flat against the cold basalt flags. The air beneath the gate smelled intensely of wet chalk and rotten eggs. He brought the animal fat lamp within two inches of the copper nozzle.

“Steady,” he whispered to himself.

His needle tip nudged the edge of the bronze pin. The metal gave a small, dry tick.

A floor-flag three feet to his right dropped half an inch.

“Kellan!” Yvaine’s dry scream was like two shingles sliding across each other.

She reached out with her sackcloth-wrapped arm, her skeletal hand grabbing Kellan’s collar and hauling him back with a violent jerk of her shoulder-joints.

CLACK-WHISH.

A sudden, sharp blast of compressed air hissed out of the wall sockets.

It wasn’t smoke. It was a dense, grey cloud of petrification aerosol, blowing out from six hidden vents along the door frame like steam from a broken boiler. The cloud rolled across the threshold in a thick, rolling wave, smelling of scorching lime-dust, dry chalk, and burnt bone-grit.

Two of Kellan’s forward skeleton runners—simple things he’d wired together from old chapel-yard bones back in the upper valley to carry the spare iron pins—were standing four feet from the gate.

The grey dust hit them broadside.

The transformation wasn’t quick like fire; it was a violent, heavy calcification that moved through the bone like ink through dry paper.

The front runner’s ribcage—yellowed, cracked, held together with thin copper wire—turned stark, chalk-white in the half-second it took the cloud to cover it. The wet marrow inside the leg-bones dried instantly into hard gypsum, expanding with a wet crack that split the shins from knee to ankle. The skull snapped sideways as the jaw locked solid against the neck-vertebrae, the bone turning into a single, seamless block of heavy grey limestone powder.

The second runner didn’t even drop its pack. The dust caked over its sackcloth shoulder-straps, stiffening the linen until it looked like cast iron. Its arm, half-lifted to shield its face, froze in mid-air.

“Back!” Kellan yelled, coughing as a stray whiff of the grey dust hit his throat. He tasted hot lye and dry plaster. His tongue felt thick, dry as salt-pork, his throat tightening until he had to spit a red smear of blood onto his sleeve.

Jorund stepped back three paces, his heavy iron joints clattering against his ribs as he pulled the wooden pack-frame out of the drifting grey fog.

The aerosol cloud settled slowly, heavy as lead-dust, coating the black basalt flags in a three-inch layer of dry, grey silt that looked like flour in a miller’s bin.

The two runner skeletons didn’t fall over. They stood locked in place for three breaths, white as altar candles, their joints fused into solid blocks of chalky stone.

Then the weight of their iron pack-frames pulled them down.

The left runner’s knee snapped with a dry clack. The leg didn’t bend—it shattered like a dry earthenware pitcher dropped on a cobble. The entire leg burst into a dozen white, powdery chunks that rolled into the silt.

The rest of the frame followed. As the torso hit the ground, the spine didn’t break into bones; it exploded into a cloud of fine, grey, pulverized dust that rose two feet into the still air before settling back onto the flagstones.

The second skeleton collapsed a second later, its skull dropping off its shoulders and disintegrating into a heap of white flour as it struck the iron threshold.

Silence returned to the vault.

The draft from the upper shelf blew through the keyhole of the obsidian gate, whistling a thin, flat note that made the candle stub flame flicker and die down to a red ember on the wick.

Kellan lay on his side in the cold scree, his chest heaving, his fingers digging into the salt-crusted stone of the threshold. He wiped his mouth with his thumb, leaving a dry, grey streak of lime-crust across his chin.

Beside his boot lay a gray pile of pulverized bone dust.