The Hammer Unfalls

4.66 Venting Steam

⋅.˳˳.⋅ॱ˙ॱ⋅.˳˳.⋅ॱ˙ॱᐧ.˳˳.⋅

Glim had fallen down the mountain with controlled leaps onto ramps of ice to redirect his momentum. But now the fortress perched uphill from him, and speed was out of the question in such terrain. He could not outrun the crabs.

But his voice could.

Scrambling up the trail, Glim yelled: “Close the gates!”

He’d gotten the attention of the guards, but they clearly could not make out his words. They waved at him and smiled.

The crabs would be upon them in a minute or two. Glim continued to run, and shout, seeing the confusion on the face of the guards. He had to snap them out of it. He stopped and gauged the distance between them. He’d never flung ice that far before. It would take a lot out of him to tap that deeply into aeolia.

He decided to risk it. Before he could second guess himself, he conjured a handful of dense ice chunks and flung them as far as he could.

Glim gasped and sank to his knees as his mind reeled from the strain. He felt the balance inside himself keel sharply, draining him on the spot. He watched the ice shatter against the walls, pelting the gates, and startling the guards. Gulping for breath, he unsheathed his sword and waved it above his head.

At last he heard the sound he’d been hoping for: the warning horns. He watched gratefully as the guards retreated and closed the gates.

Relief filled him. He felt his inner balance tilting slightly back towards normal. A few breaths later, he rose and ran for the walls once more. The ramparts came alive with activity as guards appeared above the walls.

“Snowcrabs!” Glim yelled, and pointed to the direction of the ravine.

The first of the creatures had reached the wall and started climbing. They used each other as ladders, with each wave surging higher than the one before it. Arrows rained down from the ramparts, skittering harmlessly off of the thick armor.

Glim had heard stories of crabs scaling the walls before, but never a swarm of this size. The warm wind that had invigorated him so on his way down the mountain now struck him as ominous. Something must have shifted in the mountains to bring such an army to their doorstep.

No time to ponder it. The creatures would soon overwhelm the ramparts.

Peering up the expanse of wall, he saw nothing to stop them. Their bladepoint legs found purchase in the cracks of the stones. He needed to take that away from them somehow. He sensed the water seeping through the cracks in the stones, and the vapor in the air that the warm winds had brought. Glim closed his eyes to focus, and pictured a sheet of ice coating the walls with a glossy, slick sheen. Warmth suffused him, flowing into his outstretched arms. They seared with pain. Not the pain of plying, of drawing too much heat, but something sharper. Blood welled from his forearms as if a bunch of knives had nicked him.

He looked around for the crab who’d sliced him, but found none. He’d done it to himself. Essentiæ had found its path through his drained body.

The ground trembled and he heard crashes all around him. He leapt against the wall just in time to dodge a falling crab, which landed on its back nearby, legs thrashing in the air, claws snapping angrily. Thwarted by the ice he’d cast, they fell from the wall in droves, stunned by the impact. But recovering fast.

Glim regretted hurling the ice at the guards. He’d asked too much of his essentiae, so the distance had taken too much from him. He’d barely been able to slicken the wall. What did Glim have left? How could he fight the horde skittering to their feet next to him?

His sword rang from its sheath and Glim batted a claw away, grunting with the pain in his slashed arms. Arrows fell around him. Some found chinks in the softer underbellies of upside-down snowcrabs, but most bounced away. Even at his best, Glim could not fight off an entire swarm with one sword. He would fall to them, and quickly.

Think, you clod. What will you do?

He’d recently asked Master Willow the quickest way to kill, and gotten a vague answer. But one concept stuck out in his mind: parsimony. Do the least possible thing.

Drained as he was, he needed that now. Breathing hard, and feeling the weakness at his core, Glim knew he could afford no more grand gestures. He had to strike hard, but strike small. He could sense the water sloshing around inside the crabs. Freezing all of that liquid, in even one crab, would take more resources than he had. Glim knew nothing about crab anatomy. He didn’t know where their heart or lungs were. He didn’t know how to stop them. All he could see of them was hard shells and stabby arms.

Then an image came to his mind. Dewdrops blinking in the snow. He couldn’t freeze their bodies. But he could freeze their eyes.

Glim spun and backed himself against the wall. A crab jerked its way to him, claws at the ready. He looked it right in the eye. A sensation like hot wax spattering onto his palm, just a couple tiny drops, and the crab’s eyes turned white with a sickening tinkle of ice. It turned away, thrashing at the air.

As if he were popping soap bubbles in a bucket, Glim sought the eyes of every crab nearby. His palm flickered with tiny pops of heat as he blinded the onrushing swarm. More cuts appeared on his arms.

But something was wrong, for the creatures did not abandon their hunt. They merely seemed stunned for a moment.

“They hunt by scent, boy!”

Master Willow looked down at him from a rampart. A wall of ice fell between Glim and the creatures seeking his flesh. Through it, he heard the sharp sound of cracking, like dry branches popping in a fire. Through the glossy ice he saw the crabs shudder on the ground.

“It’s all right now,” his tutor called out. Glim slipped around the end of the ice wall. Sensing the danger, most of the swarm had turned around and headed back to the ravine, hastened by a rain of dagger-like hail that pelted their retreating backs.

All around him, Glim saw twitching legs and the slow pinching and unpinching of claws. The gate opened and guards poured out, brandishing pikes.

Glim stopped and picked up a crab, who lethargically snapped at him. He carried it through the archway into town, nodding to the guards and gathered townspeople as he walked in holding the crab aloft.

Gyda broke away from the crowd and stared at him with some mixture of relief and irony he had a hard time deciphering. She produced an embroidered linen square from somewhere inside her tunic and dabbed at his arms, then sighed in relief when she saw the shallow nicks. “Why can’t you ever enter town without making a scene?” she asked with a hint of a smile.

Glim smiled back, feeling his drain retreat. “Who’s hungry?” he shouted.

--------------- ~~~ *** ~~~ ---------------

Garrick and the guards eyed the pile of twitching crabs skeptically as Glim tossed the last one into the vent chamber in the fortress basement.

“Yer sure about this, lad?”

“It’s going to work. Trust me. I’ve done this before.”

Garrick nearly panicked when the steam valve hissed. Glim laughed and punched the button at the door. A half hour later, a parade of guards in leather gauntlets carried the steaming pinkish-orange crabs to the wooden dining tables at the market square. The gathered crowd stared at the creatures in horror. But the scent was already converting some of the skeptics. Glim could tell by their hungry gazes.

You have no idea what’s coming.

“Here’s how this works,” he called out so everyone could hear. “You start at the ends. Crack them apart like this—” he demonstrated, ripping a segment off with gusto, “—and you pound them open with the mallet like so.” With only a bit of shrapnel involved, Glim thwacked the meat out of the shell and gratefully wolfed it down, uncaring of his watching audience.

The townspeople looked at the pile with trepidation, but set to work. The ensuing carnage went down as one of the strangest feasts in Wohn-Grab’s long and storied history. By the time the meal had finished, merchant and guard alike were covered in pink flecks of shell, bonding with an exuberance that can only come from the novelty of stomachs satisfied without guilt. Casks of ale had somehow appeared, and bread as well. The conversation ebbed and flowed, with fits of laughter and boasting. Some children had decided to swordfight with the empty claws in a mock battle that had tears of laughter streaming down the faces of their mothers.

The afternoon sun became evening’s light, and no one had yet summoned up the inertia to leave the market square. Pockets of conversation, song, and even snoring filled the air with a gentle commotion.

The first to slip away were Gyda and Glim. She’d watched with shining eyes as Glim explained the mechanics of eating crab to the town. He’d felt her eyes on him almost as clearly as the heat of plying against his skin.

“Shall I help you clean up?” she murmured into his ear as she took his hand. Something about her tone tickled his ear and fluttered its way into his stomach.

“That might take awhile,” Glim said, his voice low.

“The longer the better.” She pulled him away from the crowd, behind one of the market stalls, and pinned him against it. Tilting her head up, she kissed him, letting her lips hover near his as she whispered: “I missed you.”

Those were the last words either of them spoke to each other that day. Glim started to say he missed her too, or that he had all sorts of observations to share with her, or that she looked nice today, but the words never formed. Their bodies had apparently decided to stop using words, and communicate through kisses instead. Glim didn’t even know what was happening anymore; only that her lips and his demanded time together and would not be denied.