Lord Silas Crane, Chief Trade Envoy of the Imperial Board of Trade and holder of the hereditary title The Tariff Scythe, didn’t care for the frontier.
To Lord Crane, the Northern Marches were an unwashed expanse of peat moss, barbarian frost-blight, and illiterate serfs whose only purpose in the cosmological order was to pay thirty-five percent ad valorem levies into the royal treasury.
His four-wheeled luxury carriage rolled along the southern approach to Grey Crag. Then, Crane held a lace handkerchief soaked in rosewater and southern citrus oil firmly over his powdered nose. He had expected to arrive at a squalid shantytown of turf huts sinking into knee-deep mud. He was surrounded by broken wooden palisades and coughing peasants ripe for office terror.
Instead, the carriage had been rolling for two miles over a spotless, hard-packed avenue of crushed granite that produced not a single jolt in his gold-trimmed springs.
“Sir Cedric,” Crane called out through the carriage window, his voice a pompous, nasal drawl. “What’s this gravel under our wheels? Has the Crown secretly funded a post-road in this terrible ditch?”
Riding alongside in full burnished plate armor, Sir Cedric of the Silver Lance frowned beneath his visor. “No, Lord Clerk. The royal highway ends twenty leagues south. This road... It has drainage gutters carved from solid stone and a raised crown camber. My horse hasn’t stepped in a puddle since the valley marker.”
Crane sniffed contemptuously. “Unlicensed roadwork. Section Ninety-One of the Royal Highway Monopoly Act. Every yard of graded stone laid without a royal charter carries an immediate forfeiture fine of fifty sovereigns. We shall add it to their tab.”
The carriage cleared the crest of the southern pine ridge, and Lord Crane’s thin lips snapped shut.
Spread across the rocky plateau ahead was not a wooden stockade. But a huge, five-pointed star castle of gleaming grey granite cut stone. The castle walls didn’t loom high in the clumsy, upright fashion of country castles. They lay low and sleek, hugging the natural contours of the mountain shelf behind a massive dry ditch. Arrowhead castle walls jutted outward like diamond wedges, their sixty-degree granite noses catching the pale morning light with razor-sharp-angled care.
“What in the Emperor’s name...” Sir Cedric breathed, reining his warhorse to a sudden halt. “Where are the towers? Where are the castle walls?”
“It matters not,” Crane scoffed, adjusting his powdered wig and smoothing the gold lace cuffs of his purple velvet coat. “is Stone, and stone is taxed. Bring the ledgers, the balance weight scales, and the writ of seizure. If this upstart Giles Croft has built a citadel without paying royal quarry royalties, we shall impound the entire castle by sundown!”
The carriage halted fifty yards before the counterscarp of the North Bastion. Footmen in scarlet livery scrambled to lower the folding brass steps.
Crane stepped out onto the crushed-stone floor, his pointed red-heeled court slippers clicking sharply. In his right hand, he carried a gold-tipped ebony cane. Tucked under his left arm was a seven-foot scroll of stiff thick parchment sealed with heavy royal vermilion wax: the Grand Writ of Seizure and Retroactive Tithe Check. Behind him, two clerks hauled his signed name prop. An ornate, seven-fold brass steelyard balance weight beam used to weigh gold bullion and levied stone ores.
At the edge of the stone counterscarp, Giles Croft stood beside a freshly mounted wooden worktable. Giles wore his heavy wool greatcoat, sleeves rolled to the elbows, his fingers smudged with graphite and machine oil. He held a brass fine-scale measuring tongs and a clipboard of town ledger sheets.
Beside Giles stood Captain Kenneth Drake, his hand resting on his pacing pole. Master Borin Bronze-Lung, whose braided beard bristled with dark amusement.
Lord Silas Crane puffed out his chest, raised his cane. Then he cleared his throat with a haughty, high-born rasp.
“By power of the High Court of the Exchequer, the Imperial Board of Trade. The Crown Monopolies Commission!” Crane bellowed, his voice echoing off the granite stone retaining walls. “I, Lord Silas Crane, Imperial Envoy and Chief Clerk, do hereby serve notice upon the squatter Giles Croft! Under Section Eighty-Four of the Royal Revenue Charter, all granite, timber, coal, and iron ore pulled out within forty leagues of this spirit vein are the sole property of His Royal Majesty! You’re assessed five hundred thousand gold sovereigns in unpermitted resource extraction, plus forty-five percent interest! Pay now, or the punitive legion encamped in the lower valley shall seize this outer edge by force!”
Giles looked up from his clipboard, blinked twice. Then he glanced down at the avenue beneath the fifty barded warhorses.
“Fifty horses,” Giles said calmly, tapping his wooden ruler against his palm. “All shod with steel-rimmed iron horseshoes, carrying heavy armor plating, with zero rubberized air-powered dampening pads. Have you any idea what high-pressure hooved traffic does to a freshly rolled layer of fine granite screening aggregate?”
Crane’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“Stone floor degradation,” Giles explained, his voice entirely flat. “Section Twelve of the Grey Crag Town Transit City law. Iron shoes exert high nearby point-load stresses that dislodge linked angular aggregate. That created micro-ruts that collect rainwater and speed up freeze-thaw flaking off. That’s twenty silver coins per animal in town road-wear checks. That’s a thousand silver pieces you owe to our street upkeep fund, clerk. Will you be paying in coin or signing an office wage-garnishment order?”
Lord Silas Crane’s face turned the violent shade of a bruised plum. His thin hands shook so hard that the gold tassels on his seizure scroll fluttered.
“Insolent, peasant cur!” Crane shrieked, stamping his red-heeled slipper onto the stone. “You dare lecture a Royal Clerk on road wear?! Do you see this seal?! It bears the twin-headed eagle of the Throne! Behind me stand twelve hundred heavy footmen, three siege catapults, and fifty barded knights! I have reduced dukes to beggary with a stroke of my quill! You’re nothing but an outlaw baron playing with mud!”
Sir Cedric drew his broadsword with a ringing rasp. “Shall I take his head, my Lord?”
Giles checked his pocket watch with a sharp sigh. “Kenneth, what’s our current Proving Range clearance status?”
“Target area is cleared, Lord Giles,” Kenneth answered, a cold, hungry grin spreading across his scarred face. “Proving Sector One-Alpha is hot.”
Giles turned toward the low-profile embrasure of Bastion Alpha, twenty yards to their left. “Borin! Did you finish dressing the extractor hook on barrel three?”
From the dark granite casemate, Master Borin Bronze-Lung’s voice boomed like a bass horn: “Polished smooth with diamond paste, Lord Master builder! Fresh hundred-round linen belt seated in the hopper! Steam storage tank pressure holding at eighty pounds!”
“Good,” Giles called out, adjusting his glasses. “The clerk is questioning our materials extraction permits. Let’s show the working smooth speed of our self-running granite-dressing equipment. Cycle twenty rounds into Proving Target Seven.”
Crane sneered, waving his scented handkerchief with dramatic disdain. “A dwarven toy? Some rattling clockwork sieve? Do you think the Crown is intimidated by blacksmith’s tricks—”
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTT!
The Clockwork Rotary Shard-Gatlin erupted.
For two full seconds, the mountain valley was torn apart by an ear-splitting clockwork shriek that sounded like the sky itself being shredded by giant iron gears. Six bronze barrels blurred into a spinning halo of smoke and flame. Twenty faster-than-sound black glass-steel flechettes burst from the muzzles at six hundred and twenty meters per second, ten rounds striking every heartbeat.
Downrange, fifty yards from where Lord Crane stood, Proving Target Seven—a solid, four-ton block of dark mountain granite—was caught in the moving focus.
The result was not a hit. It was a total load-bearing demolition.
The packed flechette impacts punched into the granite with nineteen million foot-pounds of nearby striking force. The stone block didn’t chip—it crumbled. A huge geyser of white powder, crushed stone shards, and glowing sparks erupted thirty feet into the freezing air. Huge chunks of rock were snapped off like butter, exploding into gravel and dust.
The faster-than-sound blast wave blasted outward across the roadbed, a sudden howling gale of displaced air and acrid ozone that hit the royal delegation like a physical wall.
Sir Cedric’s heavy warhorse reared on its hind legs with a blood-curdling shriek of panic, threw the iron-clad knight onto the crushed stone with a bone-jarring clatter. Then it bolted down the avenue in blind terror. Half the cavalry horses plunged into the gravel ditch, throwing their riders into the weeds.
Lord Silas Crane’s powdered wig was ripped from his head by the sonic back-draft, sailing twenty yards down the road into a mud puddle. His bergamot-scented handkerchief was torn from his fingers and shredded against the counterscarp stone.
The heavy brass steelyard balance weight beam slipped from the trembling hands of his clerks, crashing to the stone floor with a shrill, ringing clang.
Lord Silas Crane collapsed onto both knees atop the macadam.
His high-born sneer was fully gone. His mouth hung open in a silent, numbed scream. His eyes bulged as he stared at the smoking, empty crater where a four-ton granite boulder had sat two seconds prior. All that remained was a four-foot crater filled with fine, crushed gravel.
A thin trickle of white stone dust drifted down from the sky, dusting his bald, shivering scalp like flour.
“Ten... Ten strikes...” Crane whimpered, his teeth chattering so wildly he nearly bit his own tongue. “In two seconds... A mountain of stone... Turned to sand... By the Divine Throne... What manner of demon engine...”
A golden system pane snapped open before Giles’s eyes, displaying the audit result with dry clockwork clarity.
Giles stepped forward, his cowhide boots clicking softly against the macadam. He bent down, picked up Crane’s fallen brass steelyard balance, inspected the notched beam with an engineer’s eye. Then he handed it back to the shivering clerk.
“Your balance weight pivot has a one-sixteenth-inch zero-point fine-tuning error, Lord Crane,” Giles said mildly. “It over-reads weight by four percent. That violates town weights-and-measures regulations. However, as you can see, our self-running aggregate dresser is functioning within acceptable tolerances. It reduced four tons of quarry overburden to three-quarter-inch sub-base gravel in two-point-one seconds.”
Crane looked up at Giles with hollow, bloodshot eyes. It shook so wildly that his velvet coat rattled against his ribs.
“Now then,” Giles continued. He unhooked a blank parchment from his clipboard and extending an ink quill. “Regarding your tax writ. Grey Crag operates as an unincorporated town public works cooperative. Under standard developmental grace periods, frontier public works are exempt from country revenue levies until main drainage and blood paving are complete. If you sign this Special Municipal Enterprise Charter, we’ll waive your thousand-silver road damage check and provide your escort with hot rations. If you refuse, we still have sixty boulders that need aggregate dressing.”
Crane snatched the quill with trembling fingers. Without reading a single syllable, he stamped the parchment with his heavy gold signet ring, crying out in a cracked, pleading squeak:
“Signed! Sealed! Exempt! Special Autonomous Enterprise Zone of the Northern Marches! The Board of Trade recognizes all charter rights! Just... By the mercy of Heaven, don’t point that brass snout at my carriage!”
Giles took the signed parchment, blew dry the ink, and nodded with satisfaction. “Pleasure doing business with the Board of Trade, Lord Crane. Toby, escort his Lordship’s clerks to the visitor mess for barley bread and tea.”
Before Crane could scramble back into his carriage, a piercing, unearthly screech echoed from the high mountain crags above.
A sudden, freezing squall swept down from the northern glaciers. The air heat plummeted twenty degrees in the space of three breaths. A sheet of white frost rime rushed across the granite stone retaining walls, coating the brass barrels of the rotary gun in glistening ice.
Down in the lower district beneath the citadel, a loud, metal BANG echoed through the rock. It was followed by the hiss of escaping vapor.
Toby came running back, eyes wide. “Lord Giles! The district supply mains! The frost is freezing the underground water bed channels solid! The water pipes are bursting beneath the insulae!”
Giles looked up at the darkening, slate-gray sky as sleet began to fall in level sheets.
His expression hardened.
“Sub-zero cryo-inversion,” Giles muttered, checking his system HUD. “Surface heating isn’t enough. If we don’t tap a main heat pool within twelve hours, the entire town grid freezes solid. Borin, Kenneth—to the deep shafts. We’re breaking out the diamond core drills.”