Chapter 281 -274: Ignition
The engine woke, and for one glorious moment, it was the best sound Gruzzik had ever heard.
Not the cough and rattle of a mortal machine, but a deep, rising note felt in the teeth and through the floor as the bound spirit in the housing understood it had been given permission and began to pull. Dust jumped off the gantry rails. Somewhere at the back of the hall, an apprentice cheered and was immediately hit by three other apprentices.
Up in the gallery, forty siege officers stopped writing.
"There," Arkhul said to every Lord. "Listen to it."
Gruzzik allowed himself, for four whole seconds, to be happy.
Then the note kept rising.
An engine settles—that was the one law Gruzzik would have staked his name on. You wake it, it climbs, it finds its working voice, and it sits there. This one climbed and kept climbing, past its working voice, past anything he’d heard on a test bench, up into a register that made the hair on his arms lift.
"Crew chief," Gruzzik said. "Ease it."
"I have eased it!"
"Ease it more."
"I’ve eased it to the stop, foreman! It’s still—" the crew chief’s voice cracked upward, "it’s still going!"
Beside Gruzzik, the scholar spoke without any particular emphasis, which somehow made it worse.
"There is no governor."
"There’s a spirit."
"Yes. You told me a spirit could be shouted at."
"It can!"
"Then shout at it," the scholar said, "and let us all learn together whether it is currently in a listening mood."
The crew chief shouted at it.
The bound spirit in the housing was four hundred years old, freshly awake, and given a Demon Lord’s own fire to drink—did not appear to consider a crew chief’s opinion binding. The note went up another half-step. The hull began to sing along with it, a thin metallic whine coming off the plate, and the gun in its mantlet started to shiver in a way that Gruzzik felt in his back teeth.
"Foreman," the scholar said again. "The cooling."
"I know."
"The cooling was sized from the drawing. The drawing’s engine was geared down through four stages and governed. Yours is neither."
"I know."
"I’m not scolding you. I’m establishing the sequence, so that when I am asked about it later, I can say when each thing happened."
Gruzzik turned to look at him. "You’re taking notes. Now."
"I am the only person in this hall whose job improves as this gets worse."
Up on the gantry, Malgrath had leaned forward again. Not with the tight, unwilling admiration of ten minutes ago. He now had the expression of a man watching a bridge, on which he had privately made a wager, at the exact moment the wager came due.
"My lord," Gruzzik called up to Arkhul, making himself say it. "The engine’s running away. Recommend we shut it down and walk it through the fault."
Arkhul did not look at him. He was watching the gallery, and the gallery was watching him, and four Demon Lords and a clerk with a wax tablet were witnessing the moment the Furnace Tyrant’s machine either moved or did not.
"It is not running away," Arkhul said. "It is running strong. Take it forward."
"My lord—"
"Forward, foreman."
The Warhound moved.
That was the tragedy of it, Gruzzik thought afterward. It moved, and for a few dozen yards, it was magnificent. Sixty-odd tons of sloped ashen-iron rolling across the swept floor of the casting hall, the ground shaking, the light dying against that hull, the sound of it filling the space like something out of a bad prophecy. Two of Malgrath’s officers stood up without noticing they’d done it.
Then it turned.
A track turn is a simple, brutal act—you brake one side, you drive the other, and the machine pivots. Every link on the braked side takes the load at once, in the same instant, with the same force.
Four hundred and nine links took that load. Four hundred and six of them slipped a little, sharing the weight among them.
Three of them gripped.
Brakh’s three. Heavier at the tooth. Cut with a better bite. The finest track links ever forged on continent, and every one of them held exactly where its neighbors let go—so the whole force that should have been spread across the run of the track arrived all at once in three places.
The sound was not loud. That was the strange part. A single flat crack, like a rock splitting in frost, almost lost under the engine’s scream.
Then the track came off like a whip uncoils from the front, the broken run leaping up and out with sixty tons of pent movement behind it. Gruzzik had time to think get off the floor and no time at all to say it.
Brakh was still on the forward hull. He had stayed there through the start, one boot on the glacis, because his links were being demonstrated and he intended to be near them when the officers understood.
The freed track caught him across the chest and took him off the machine, thirty feet down the hall, and put him into the base of a casting pillar. He was dead before he arrived.
The link that hit him had a name cut into it.(Surprise)
The engine was still screaming.
"Shut it down!" Gruzzik was already running. "Shut it down, shut it—"
"I can’t!" The crew chief was hanging out of the hatch, blood on his face from something. "It won’t take the lever! The spirit’s got the fire and it won’t—foreman, it’s pulling harder!"
Of course it was. Half the track was gone. The engine had been fighting sixty tons of resistance, and now one side of that resistance had walked away. The bound spirit in the housing did what it had been made to do, giving everything it had against whatever was left in its way.
The remaining track drove. The machine slewed hard, ground round on its own broken side, and went into a pillar shoulder-first with a noise that emptied every gantry along the north wall.
"Off the floor!" Gruzzik roared at his people. "Everyone off the floor! Now!"
They went. Most of them. Two apprentices froze and were dragged by a third, and Gruzzik would remember to be grateful about that later, when he had capacity for it.
Behind him, the turret decided to join in.
It had been cast oversize because Arkhul had been standing on the gantry that day and nobody casts a turret in sections in front of the Furnace Tyrant. It weighed a great deal more than the ring beneath it had been drawn to carry—a ring drawn, on a mortal’s paper, for a mortal turret. With the hull ground round hard against a stone pillar and the whole mass of the turret torquing on a bearing that had never been asked for this.
Then the turret settled by a hand’s width and jammed. The long, heavy gun in its humming mantlet came down as it settled—down and round—until it was pointing, at rest, directly into the north gantry, at about the height of a Demon Lord’s chest.
Nobody moved for a moment.
"It isn’t loaded," Gruzzik said into the noise, to nobody, mostly to himself. "It isn’t loaded. There’s no shell in it. It isn’t loaded."
"They can’t tell that from up there," the scholar said, arriving at his shoulder, satchel still clutched to his chest. "Foreman. Look at the hull."
Gruzzik looked at the hull.
Where the machine had gone shoulder-first into the pillar—a stone pillar—the emberglass facing it simply broke apart.
It had cracked. A long, clean split ran up from the sponson. Inside the split, the blackbone behind it showed pale, unbroken, and entirely the wrong shape to be carrying anything.
Sixty officers of a siege legion looked down at that crack, all together, and forty of them started writing.
The engine ran for another two minutes as nobody could reach the housing.
It ran until the cooling—sized on a drawing for an engine that had been geared down four times and governed—stopped pretending, and something in the aft deck let go with a bang that flattened everyone within ten feet. Then the great voice in the housing fell away into a sort of hot, exhausted muttering and finally silence.
In the silence afterward, Gruzzik could hear his own breathing, one apprentice being sick, and, from somewhere up on the gantry, the small, dry sound of a stylus moving on wax.
The Warhound sat in the middle of the swept floor with one track laid out behind it, its turret cocked and jammed, its gun aimed politely at the north gallery, one flank split open to show the pale bone underneath, and the whole of it ticking as it cooled.
It had traveled, from the start of its run to the pillar, ninety-one paces.
Lord Malgrath rose from the rail, slowly, and he did not look at the machine at all. He looked at Arkhul.
"A third heavier," he said. "Every ounce of it armor and gun."
Arkhul said nothing.
"I am no scholar," Malgrath went on, "but I have taken more fortresses than any creature in this hall, and I have watched a great many machines come to pieces. That one came to pieces in ninety-one paces, indoors, on a flat floor, with nobody shooting at it." He let it hang there. "The mortals fight in mud, I’m told."
One of the lesser lords laughed—a short bark, cut off the instant Arkhul’s head turned.
Kharvoss, from the highest seat, had not moved, had not spoken, and did not now.
Down on the floor, three smiths were lifting what was left of Brakh away from the base of the pillar. Someone had already pried the link out of him. They didn’t know what else to do with it, so they set it on the ground beside him, name upward, where anyone walking past could read it.
"Foreman," Arkhul said.
Gruzzik straightened. "Mmmmyyyy lord."
"You will be in my hall within the hour, and you will explain to me—precisely, and at length—how a whisper became this."
He turned and left the gantry. The four Lords went after him, the officers followed the Lords, and the clerk with the wax tablet went last of all, writing as he walked.
Gruzzik stood in the wreckage of the finest thing his clan had ever made and found that his hands were not entirely steady.
Beside him, the Obsidian Spire scholar closed his satchel.
"For what it may be worth," he said, "I did not enjoy that."
"You’ve been waiting eleven weeks for that."
"I have been dreading it for eleven weeks. Those aren’t the same, and a man is dead." He looked at the link lying beside Brakh, and at the name cut into it. "There is a lesson in this hall today, foreman, and it is not that your smiths are poor. It is that the mortals’ secret was never the drawing. But that is a thing I will be explaining to a Demon Lord within the hour, and I find that I would very much like to have been wrong."