Unsleeping Patron - Clash of Iron and Shale

Cold iron and wet turnip rot saturated the basin air.Silas lay flat on a shelf of shale twenty feet above the depression, his cheek pressed into a trough of frozen grit. The Blood-Lantern rested near his shoulder, its bone-and-rib frame wrapped in his flannel coat to keep the crimson glare from spilling over the lip of the ridge. Through a narrow gap between two slate slabs, he looked down into the hollow.Eight of them moved through the low grey drift.The Asharto didn’t look like cattle from any field Silas had ever seen. Their hides were the color of wet river slate, thick and hairless, folded in heavy, rubbery plates across their shoulders. But it was the horns that made the shale beneath them groan. Rising from between their flat, leathery brows were twin curved pillars of solid, dull-grey iron four feet long, thick as a man’s thigh at the base, and pitted with rust where the damp air had eaten into the metal. When they lowered their heads to scrape at the frozen lichen, the iron tips struck the rock with heavy, bell-like clangs that echoed up the ridge.Silas reached down, touching his ribs through his coat. The necrotic rot inside his belly throbbed twice, a cold, sickening tug that pulled a string of dark spit into his teeth. He turned his head and spit it into the gravel.He couldn’t run fifty paces, let alone wrestle an eight-hundred-pound beast clad in iron plate. If he stepped into that hollow with his scythe-dagger, the nearest bull would turn him into a wet red smear before he could raise a boot.He unwrapped the coat from the lantern.The crimson light flared, catching the damp edges of his sleeves. Silas didn’t lift the bone frame. He gripped the iron ring at the top, his fingers catching the slick grease where his own black blood had dried into the metal, and tilted the lantern’s brass cowl three inches to the left.The Blood-Lantern didn’t just cast light; it threw shadows that moved against the draft.On the valley floor below, a narrow, blood-red beam cut through the Miasma, striking the lead bull a massive, scarred beast standing in the center of the herd. The light didn’t hit the animal’s flank. Silas narrowed his eyes, adjusting the tilt of the ribs until the scarlet beam focused entirely on the inner curve of the bull’s left horn.Where the red light hit the rust-pitted iron, a shadow began to sway.It wasn’t the shadow of the horn itself. It was a flickering, jagged silhouette that looked like a long, skinless arm, reaching out from the metal and twitching back and forth in a frantic, teasing rhythm.The lead bull stopped chewing. Its leathery ears flared outward, twitching toward the red pulse on its own head.The bull standing three yards away a younger, broader-shouldered male turned its flat snout. The leathery mounds above its nostrils quivered. It didn’t see the crimson light, but it saw the dark, twitching shape dancing across its neighbor’s skull, a target redder than fresh meat.The younger bull lowered its head. A low, wet rumble started in its chest, shaking the loose slate under its hooves.Silas held his breath, his knuckles turning white around the bone handle. He twitched his wrist, making the red shadow leap three inches sideways across the iron horn.The younger bull charged.It didn’t roar. It moved with the terrifying, silent momentum of a locomotive slipping off its rails. Four hundred pounds of muscle and iron-sheathed bone slammed straight into the lead bull’s head.The impact tore through the valley like a cannon shot.CLANG.A shower of orange sparks exploded into the grey fog as iron struck iron. The lead bull groaned, its back legs caving into the mud under the force of the blow, but before it could recover, the rest of the herd erupted into a frenzy. Driven wild by the sharp scent of scraped metal and the frantic, dancing crimson shadow, two more bulls dropped their brows and lunged into the fray.The hollow became a thrashing, deafening mess of slate and metal.Bulls slammed into each other’s flanks, their iron horns locking, twisting, and grinding with a sound that made Silas’s back teeth ache. The lead bull was shoved sideways against the shale cliff, its head pinned as two younger males rammed it repeatedly from the flank.CRACK.It wasn’t the dull thud of bone breaking. It was the sharp, brittle snap of cast iron giving way under a sledgehammer.The lead bull screamed a terrifying, brassy blare and collapsed onto its knees, dark grease spilling from its snout. A heavy, four-foot iron horn, snapped clean off two inches above the skull, spun through the air and slammed into the shale five yards from the commotion.The herd didn’t stop. Panicked by the smell of hot iron and the dying blare of their leader, the remaining seven bulls wheeled around, their heavy hooves pounding a frantic rhythm into the gravel as they thundered out of the hollow, vanishing into the northern fog.Silas waited.He lay in the dirt for five long minutes, his heart hammering against his rotting ribs, listening to the dying echoes of the herd’s retreat. Down in the hollow, the lead bull twitched twice, groaned, and lay still, its broken head resting in a pool of dark, sluggish blood.Silas pulled himself over the ridge and slid down the scree, his boots churning up a cloud of grey dust.The severed horn lay near a heap of crushed slate. It was immensely heavy, cold to the touch, and coated in a layer of dark, metallic scale.Silas didn’t try to lift it. He set the Blood-Lantern down beside the broken base and opened the front cowl.”Burn,” he rasped, his voice barely a whisper.He guided the cold, crimson flame out of the lantern frame, wrapping the red fire around the jagged iron stub. The metal didn’t melt like copper or turn red like blacksmith’s iron. Under the Lantern’s cold fire, the iron horn began to blister. The metal scale turned grey, then white, flaking off in thin, dry sheets that crumbled into a fine, pitch-black powder as they hit the stone.Silas pulled a square piece of silk from his jacket a neck-scarf he’d taken from one of the dead transmigrators back at the river and spread it beneath the horn.For twenty minutes, he knelt in the dark, watching the cold red fire eat away at the iron, his hands shaking as he scraped the white flakes into the cloth.When the metal stopped crumbling, he gathered the corners of the silk and lifted it.The pouch was heavy, warm, and filled with a dark, metallic dust that smelled of rain and ancient anvils.Exactly one hundred and fifty grams.Silas tied the silk tightly with a strip of leather, shoved it deep into his inner coat pocket next to his cold sheepskin parchment, and picked up his lantern. He didn’t look back at the dead bull in the mud. He turned his face back toward the south, his boots crunching slowly into the grey path home.