The concrete throat of the Southern Drainage Canal was packed solid from stone retaining wall to stone retaining wall.
Ten thousand hard-shelled swarm entities—mire-hounds, spiny leech-crawlers, and heavy mud-prowlers—surged down the twenty-foot channel in a frenzy of snapping jaws and thrashing tails.
Trapped between the forty-five-degree concrete embankments and unable to scale the zero-drag blue heat-proof glass tiles crowning the dykes, the horde had become an unbroken, writhing carpet of black armor, moving with the rushing current at six feet per second.
Above the slaughter hall, perched within the heavy concrete pillbox of Sluice Tower One, Giles Croft stood beside the master high-pressure release console.
He wore his dark-tinted ironworker’s goggles and his linen snout breathing mask. He held his brass pocket stopwatch in his left hand.
Through the narrow watching slit, he watched the lead wave of monsters pass Sighting Stake Twelve.
“Target thickness is currently sixteen entities per square yard,” Giles reported, his voice flat, steady, and cold and exact.
“Channel volume packing factor has reached ninety-two percent. Flow speed is carrying the mass toward the central starting weir at four point one miles per hour.”
Duchess Rowena Wintermere leaned over the concrete doorstep, her knuckles white on the handle of her drawn broadsword. Her face was pale beneath her steel visor.
“They’re fifty paces from the inner gatehouse, Croft!” Rowena shouted over the ear-splitting clatter of claws. “In two minutes, the weight of their bodies will burst your oak lock-gates!
Drop the drop-gate! Shoot the arrows!”
“Dropping the drop-gate too early would interrupt the inflow vector,” Giles replied, not moving a muscle.
“If we initiate burning before the trailing units enter the channel, forty percent of the swarm will scatter across the marsh margins, requiring six weeks of tedious mop-up operations. We want the entire formation inside the heat envelope.”
Rowena stared at him in utter horror.
To her, the quiet man in the soot-stained coat was standing on the cliff edge of doom, weighing the souls of ten thousand demons upon an invisible, sky scale—calmly waiting for the sins of the horde to reach total, unforgivable measure before releasing the fires of the underworld.
“You’re mad,” Rowena whispered, her breath catching in her throat. “You’re letting them climb into your very throat.”
“I’m optimizing fuel smooth speed,” Giles corrected mildly.
He clicked his stopwatch.
The trailing elements of the swarm—the heavy mud-prowlers and armored claw-crabs—crossed Sighting Stake Eight.
The entire six-hundred-yard concrete water chute was fully soaked.
“Saturation achieved,” Giles said. He looked at Sister Teresa of the Pure Cistern. “Teresa. Trip the fuel channel.”
Sister Teresa’s eyes blazed with holy, world-ending fury behind her goggles.
She grasped the four-foot polished brass master valve lever with both hands, throwing her entire weight forward.
CLANK-HISS.
The master gate valve in the concrete basement slammed open.
Four thousand gallons of high-pressure light peat-tar fire-oil surged out through the one thousand yards of underwater copper piping laid along the canal bed.
Through hundreds of slotted discharge orifices, the volatile amber hydrocarbon erupted upward through two feet of rushing water.
Because the fire-oil had a specific gravity of point-eight-four, it didn’t mix with the cold marsh water.
It surged to the surface in a boiling, bubbling froth, instantly spreading across the entire twenty-foot width of the channel in a slick, floating hydrocarbon blanket four inches deep.
The thousands of swimming mire-hounds and crawlers found themselves paddling through a warm, greasy broth that smelled sharply of pine pitch and sulfur.
Toby Karr stood at the firing embrasure with a heavy composite heavy steel crossbow, nocked with a magnesium-tipped incendiary bolt.
“Starting map points locked on Marker Ten, Lord Giles!” Toby called out, his voice trembling with fight-or-flight rush.
“Loose,” Giles commanded.
Toby pulled the trigger.
TWANG.
The magnesium bolt hissed through the yellow fog, trailing a blinding white ribbon of sparks.
The glowing tip struck the floating fire-oil blanket fifty yards from the water gate.
FWOOOOOOOOOOOSH.
The air in the canal cut didn’t merely ignite.
It blew up.
An ear-splitting, earth-shaking wall of blazing bright orange fire erupted along six hundred yards of the canal hall in less than two seconds.
The flame shot fifty feet into the night sky. A roaring, blinding curtain of fire at two thousand two hundred degrees Fahrenheit that instantly burned up the yellow spore foul fog and lit up the mountains of Highmarch in brilliant, terrifying daylight.
The heat streaming from the open channel was world-ending.
On the high narrow high walkway of Sluice Tower One, thirty feet above the water, Duchess Rowena threw her arm across her face as the heat wave struck her steel armor, instantly warming the plate until it burned through her wool doublet.
Down inside the concrete water chute, the destruction was total.
The floating hydrocarbon fire burned up every molecule of oxygen within five feet of the water surface within three seconds.
The ten thousand swarm entities were trapped inside a six-hundred-yard heavy-duty fire.
The boiling naptha clung to their back shells, seeping into the joints between their hard shell plates and igniting the fat inside their bodies.
Their black armor didn’t protect them. The intense heat shock caused the stone-hardened hard shell to shatter and explode, rupturing the beasts from the inside out with millions of popping detonations that sounded like a forest fire consuming dry bamboo.
The screams of the dying swarm rose in a single, ear-splitting screech that was swallowed by the roar of the firestorm.
Thousands of beasts thrashed in the burning water, diving beneath the surface to escape the flames, only to find the boiling river water scalding their gills and cooking their flesh to grey jelly.
The forty-five-degree concrete embankments, clad in the cobalt-blue heat-proof glass glassy enamel, withstood the roaring inferno without a single crack.
The slick blue tiles reflected the roaring orange flames like a mirror of sapphire and gold, directing the huge heat inward, back down upon the thrashing horde.
Within four minutes, the screeching began to die.
The boiling river of fire swept down the channel, carrying a churning, smoking raft of burned up hard shell, melted bone, and floating grey ash toward the downstream silt settling basin.
Ten thousand corrupted swamp abominations were erased from existence.
High upon the central granary watchtower, half a mile behind the levee, Lady Millicent Croft stood with Lady Beatrice of Dunwall.
The night sky over the southern frontier was lit up with blinding, blazing bright orange light that turned the dark granite cliffs into shining amber monuments.
Millicent held her double-entry thick parchment ledger open against the stone rail, her brass pencil moving with swift, unrushed math.
“Four thousand gallons of light peat-tar fire-oil,” Millicent murmured, her voice steady against the howling roar of the firestorm.
“Valued at eighteen gold sovereigns and four silver shillings from our refined chemical reserves. Add four magnesium starting bolts at two silver coins each.”
Lady Beatrice clutched the stone railing with trembling velvet mittens. She stared in total, stone-hard awe at the two-thousand-foot wall of roaring flame that tore through the black bog.
“You’re calculating the cost of the fire while an army burns?” Beatrice gasped, turning to stare at Millicent in disbelieving horror.
“I’m calculating the return on capital investment,” Millicent corrected without lifting her eyes from the columns. “An army of ten thousand swarm beasts would have inflicted one hundred and twenty thousand sovereigns of physical destruction upon our blast fire, dykes, and timberworks.
Eliminating the entire vanguard for eighteen sovereigns represents a cost-benefit ratio of over six thousand to one. In any merchant guild in the world, that is considered an exceptionally profitable afternoon.”
On the low roof wall of Sluice Tower One, Duchess Rowena Wintermere stood frozen, her broadsword hanging limply at her side.
Her steel gauntlets were blistered by the blasting heat.
Her eyes stared down into the glowing, smoking canal. There, six hundred yards of water continued to burn with pale blue ribbons of dying fuel.
“Ten thousand,” Rowena whispered, her voice cracking into a dry, breathless wheeze. “Ten thousand beasts... In four minutes. Not a single man struck a blow. Not an arrow loosed from a bow.”
She slowly turned her gaze toward Giles Croft, who was calmly measuring the cooling rate of the concrete stone retaining wall with a copper sight fire gauge.
Her face was white with holy, superstitious dread.
“You’re not a mortal man, Lord Croft,” Rowena said, her voice shaking. “You’re an archangel of the fire.”
“I’m a town engineer,” Giles replied without looking up from his instrument. “The burning smooth speed was about ninety-four percent. Total fuel burned up: thirty-eight hundred gallons. Well within our working budget.”
Before Rowena could answer, the ground beneath Sluice Tower One wildly heaved.
The foundation piers groaned as a huge blast wave tore through the canal bed.
From the heart of the dying firestorm, fifty yards downstream, the water exploded into a forty-foot geyser of boiling steam and black mud.
ROOOOOOOAR.
An earth-shattering roar of ancient, cosmological fury ripped through the night air. It shook the glass out of every lantern on the levee.
Bursting through the wall of steam, its massive draconic torso scorched black but its three snake-like necks unbending, lunged the Three-Headed Rot-Hydra.
Its emerald mana-shield glowed with blinding, blazing bright intensity, fully untouched by the firestorm.
Its three crested heads reared sixty feet into the moonlight, their snake-like throats swelling with glowing, high-pressure streams of bright green rotting black bile.
Along the levee railway, Master Borin Bronze-Lung and Captain Kenneth Drake stood beside Battery Alpha and Battery Bravo, their goggles down, their hands steady on the cross wheels.
The four fourteen-foot brass launch guides were already tracking the emerging draconic titan through the boiling wall of steam.
“She survived the fire!” Borin bellowed through his tin snout, his copper-braided beard trembling. “The emerald ward held! The green egg took forty gigajoules of flame and didn’t even sweat a drop of dew!”
“The shield is an energetic water-pressure membrane,” Giles Croft called down through the speaking-tube, his voice carrying the cold calm of a mathematician at a chalkboard. “Heat rising heat can’t breach it because heat distributes uniformly across the ball-shaped lattice.
But nearby moving shear doesn’t distribute. Gun crews, align on the left and right neck nodes. We take the heads first.”
Kenneth Drake’s teeth bared in a fierce grin behind his mask.
“You heard the Lord Baron!” Kenneth shouted down the line to the battery layers. “Heavy dark metal sabots in battery! Sights locked on the serpent’s throats!”
Perched atop its central crest, his dragon-bone staff raised high, Hesketh the Rot-Weaver screamed a curse that tore through the smoke like lightning.
The Broodmother was enraged.
And her three heads were aimed directly at Sluice Tower One.