Unsleeping Patron - Cattle Outside the Gate

Flat and continuous, the roar outside the eastern ditch had long ceased to sound human. It had condensed into a flat, continuous roar a vibration that rattled the wooden pegs in the timber palisade and made the cold tea in Gideon’s tin cup ripple in steady, concentric rings.Gideon stood on the wooden watch-platform, his heavy coat buttoned to his throat against the sulfurous draft. His thumbs were tucked into his leather belt, right near the wooden hilt of his iron knife. Below him, past the sharpened pine stakes, the earth was covered in people.They had arrived in three violent waves over the last thirty-six hours. Nearly one hundred and fifty thousand of them, spat out of the void across twenty square miles of barren shale. They wore silk ties, torn fleece jackets, hospital gowns, and mud-caked denim. Women clutched toddlers wrapped in car-blankets; men in wingtip shoes stumbled over the sharp slate, their heels split and bleeding into the grey dust.The Relic had responded. The Slate of Names in the central stone vault was humming so loud the ground beneath Brierhold vibrated like the deck of a river barge. Driven by the sheer volume of human panic, the golden dome had expanded, pushing the Miasma back five miles.It wasn’t enough. Half the crowd was still stuck in the grey gloom outside the golden aegis, choking on coal dust and sulfur.”Captain,” Samuel Wu whispered from the ladder behind him. His face was green, his hands shaking so hard he could barely hold his ash pole. “They’re… they’re doing it again on the north ridge.”Gideon didn’t turn his head. “I see it.”Four hundred yards out, where the amber light faded into the grey fog, a line of steam-pipes hissed in unison.General Wei’s Fel-Cat legion moved through the crowd with the mechanical efficiency of threshing machines in a wheat field. Three hundred soldiers in iron-mesh vests, their long feline ears pinned back against their skulls, advanced in a tight three-deep wall. They didn’t fire bows or throw spears. They carried eight-foot iron pikes connected by copper hoses to brass boilers strapped to their backs.Pfft-shhh.A jet of scalding, white-hot steam erupted from the tip of the lead pike, hitting a cluster of four men in suit jackets who were trying to climb a shale ledge. The skin on their faces turned grey and sloughed off before they hit the dirt.A wave of screaming surged through the crowd, thousands of people surging backward, trampling those behind them as they tried to claw their way into the golden light of Brierhold’s perimeter.”Why?” Wu choked out, a thin string of bile leaking from the corner of his mouth. “We offered them the tuber yield! Gold offered them fifty iron spades! Why are they slaughtering people who haven’t even found a stone to sit on?””They aren’t trying to clear the field, Samuel,” a voice rasped from the ladder.Gideon turned his head.Silas was standing on the platform. He had dropped out of the sky three minutes ago, his bare feet landing silently on the pine planks. The ten-meter crimson wings were gone, pulled back beneath the two pale scars on his spine, but his presence was heavy enough to make the watch-tower timbers creak. He wore a simple canvas tunic, his bald head catching the pale amber light, his pupils two tight, glowing points of liquid gold and crimson.Gideon looked at Silas’s clear, unblemished skin, then back out at the massacre in the shale.”You saw them from above,” Gideon said, his voice flat, stripped of all emotion by three days without sleep.”I saw the perimeter,” Silas replied, stepping to the railing. His amber eyes swept over the sea of shiver-racked transmigrators, then locked onto General Wei, who sat atop his horned stag at the crest of the hill, calmly watching his officers drive a line of screaming refugees back into the Miasma. “Wei isn’t trying to exterminate them, Gideon. Look at the pike line.”Gideon narrowed his eyes, forcing his blurred vision to focus on the iron-mesh armor four hundred yards out.The Fel-Cat soldiers weren’t advancing. They had set up a horseshoe perimeter. Whenever the human crowd tried to scatter into the open wilderness where the air was clear, the pike line drove them back toward the edge of the fog. Whenever a group tried to push through the Brierhold ditch into the timber cabins, Wei’s steam-gunners fired a burst into the dirt, killing ten or twelve to freeze the rest in terror.They were herding them.”It’s a harvest,” Gideon said, the words tasting like lead on his tongue. He spat into the ditch below. “I talked to one of Sharis’s scouts before you landed. The girl with the deer horns.”Silas didn’t turn his head. “What did she say?””She didn’t have to say much. She drew it in the slate dust with a stick,” Gideon rasped, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the wooden railing until the pine bark groaned. “Our Relic… the Slate of Eleven Names. It doesn’t run on stone or river water, Silas. It runs on Sanctuary Faith. Panic. Desperation. The absolute, soul-tearing terror of a human being realizing he’s three seconds away from being eaten by the fog.”Wu gasped, taking a step back on the ladder. “That’s… that’s why the barrier grew?””When those hundred and fifty thousand people dropped into the waste yesterday, they nearly went mad,” Gideon said, pointing a calloused finger at the screaming sea of humanity. “Their terror flared through the void like a bonfire. The Slate drank it. The Slate took that fear and converted it into golden aegis light, pushing the Miasma back five miles.”Silas’s jaw tightened, the amber light beneath his cheekbones throbbing at a slow, thirty-six-beat rhythm. “And Wei?””Wei’s city the Fel-Coven Citadel doesn’t have a real Relic,” Gideon said, his voice dropping into a hollow, jagged whisper. “They have a secondary anchor. A leech-stone hooked into our Slate’s aura. If our people calm down, if we build timber houses for them, give them boiled tubers, and make them feel safe… the panic dies. The Sanctuary Faith drops. Their boilers go cold, and the Miasma creeps three miles into their lower city.”Silas stared at General Wei’s mounted figure on the hill. “So Wei keeps them in the dirt.””He keeps them starving,” Gideon said bitterly. “He slaughters three hundred a day right at the boundary line just enough to keep the other hundred and forty-nine thousand screaming, praying, and staring at the Relic’s light in absolute, helpless horror. He isn’t trying to kill the cattle, Silas. He’s keeping the herd in a permanent deficit so the milk never stops running.”Silence settled over the watchtower, heavy and cold despite the heat radiating from Silas’s bare arms.Below them, a woman’s shriek cut through the dull roar as a Fel-Cat pike team dragged three men out of the shale ditch and threw them into the grey Miasma wall. The crowd surged back toward Brierhold’s fence, thousands of pale hands reaching upward into the golden light, begging for a shelter that had no room left for them.Silas reached down to his waist. He unslung the indestructible, green willow hawser of the Ancient Treant, letting the heavy, hundred-meter coil drop onto the timber planks with a dull thud.”Where is Wei’s mansion in the Citadel?” Silas asked.Gideon turned his head slowly, looking at the two pale scars between Silas’s shoulder blades. “The upper terrace. Above the steam foundries. Why?”Silas’s pupils shifted, the amber fading entirely as the abyssal crimson of the Blood-Wing took over his irises.”Because a farmer doesn’t stop harvesting,” Silas said, his voice ringing with a cold, metallic vibration that made the iron pikes on the hill hum in resonance. “Not until someone burns his barn.”