The girl on the sick room cot screamed once more, her small body arching against the rough wool, before collapsing into limp silence.
Sister Teresa stood over her, knuckles white around the grip of her brass slurry lance, her chest heaving beneath her habit.
On the canvas wall directly above the cot, a delicate fan of white rime had crystal-hardened across the cloth, glittering cold and sharp in the lantern light.
“A possessed vessel,” Teresa whispered, crossing herself with a trembling hand. “The frost-fiends have marked her flesh with their unholy signet. The chill of the pit breathes through her lungs.”
Giles stepped forward, pulling a brass magnifying lens and a small steel spatula from his coat. He leaned over the girl’s collarbone.
The skin around the four-toed paw mark was swollen, dark violet at the edges, and icy to the touch.
When Giles touched the flesh with the steel spatula, the metal stuck instantly, peeling away with a dry tearing sound like tape on frost.
“It’s not possession, Teresa,” Giles said calmly. “It’s a bare heat transmitter. The hive-mind uses nearby mana deep ring to track mob vector map points.”
Teresa stared at him, confused. “Lord Giles... She spoke with the voice of the mountain demon.”
“She spoke with an audio glitch caused by sub-zero vocal cord constriction,” Giles said, pocketing his lens. “Apply a warm vinegar healing wrap to her neck to stimulate outer breath flow.
Keep her hydrated with boiled willow tea. We have an urgent civil building problem.”
Kenneth Drake stepped through the tent flap, his sallet helmet flecked with gray sleet. “The girl’s words are already spreading through the bunks, Lord Giles.
The High Timber folk are scared. They say the Cold Mother is marching south with five hundred wolves.”
“Then the High Timber folk can channel their panic into physical labor,” Giles replied. He stepped out into the freezing wind. “Fear without productivity is a glitchy mood debuff.”
* * *
At the central storage platform, Lady Millicent Croft was already waiting with her open ledger.
Her steel glasses were pushed up on her forehead. Her ink-pot sat nestled in a bowl of warm coals to prevent the ink from freezing solid.
“Our heat ledger has deteriorated, brother,” Millicent said without greeting. “Eighty colonists eat one hundred and seventy-six thousand calories daily.
Even with strict rationing, our leftover oats and dried peas will be exhausted by the middle of January.”
“What about salted meats?” Giles asked.
“Zero,” Millicent said, tapping the page with her pen. “The royal penal board provided salt pork for fifty men for thirty days.
We have eaten it. Unless we get twenty tons of animal protein, the colony faces scurvy, muscle wasting, and famine collapse before the spring thaw.”
Giles looked down into the gorge.
Two hundred yards below the stockade, the River Skell rushed black and frothing between jagged shelves of gray ice. Foam hissed against the river boulders. He carried the cold mountain runoff down toward the southern lowlands.
“The river freezes in fourteen days,” Giles noted, checking the heat on his pocket vial. “Once the ice caps the gorge, the water is inaccessible.
We have one window to harvest the autumn silver trout run.”
“With fishing poles?” Kenneth asked, his mustache twitching with doubt. “We have eighty people, my lord. Four men with bone hooks won’t catch enough trout to feed a squad of archers.”
“We’re not using poles,” Giles said, unrolling a large sheet of birch bark across Millicent’s table. “Fishing with hooks is an inefficient leisure activity with an atrocious hourly yield.
We’re installing a hydrologic funnel weir.”
Kenneth and Caleb leaned over the drawing.
“A V-shaped river trap,” Giles explained, pointing with his lead pencil. “We drive two converging wings of four-inch spruce wooden support posts into the riverbed, anchored at forty-five-degree angles to the flow.
Between the posts, we weave dense hurdles of green willow fascines.”
Caleb squinted at the lines. “Won’t the current smash the wickerwork?”
“Not at forty-five degrees,” Giles said. “The angled posture deflects the water-flow force rather than absorbing it head-on.
The water passes through the willow weave with minimal head loss, but the migrating trout are deflected toward the center channel.”
“And what happens at the center?” Kenneth asked.
“The apex,” Giles said. “A heavy timber holding crib, twelve feet square, fitted with an inward-tapering funnel throat made of split pine slats.
The trout swim in easily with the downstream current, but once inside the box, the constriction creates a low-speed back-eddy. They can’t navigate backward through the narrow throat. One man with a dip-net can harvest two hundred fish per hour.”
“And how do we keep eighteen hundred pounds of trout from rotting?” Millicent asked, her pen poised above the ledger. “Salt is scarce, and the smoke-pits we used in October burned the fish to mush.”
“A dedicated curing work-yard,” Giles said. “A dry stone smokehouse built on the river bluff ten paces from the weir.
An external firebox with a baffled underground stone chimney pipe. We burn green hickory chips over charcoal embers. Cold smoke at one hundred and twenty degrees cures the meat without rendering out the delicate oils. The fish will keep for four months in sealed firkins.”
Kenneth stroked his scarred chin, looking from the sketch to the roaring river. “The men have never seen river-traps built on this scale. They will think you’re casting a net across the river spirits.”
“The river spirits have no legal standing under town water rights,” Giles said. “Kenneth, take twenty men to the willow thickets. Master Borin, light the forge.”
* * *
For three days, the riverbank sounded like a war zone.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung stood over his roaring charcoal hearth, forging iron pile-shoes with thunderous sledge blows.
Each shoe was a four-sided pyramidal cap of thick sheet iron, punched with two nail holes and fitted to the sharpened tips of four-inch spruce logs.
“Iron-shod tips!” the dwarf shouted, wiping sweat from his bald head. “Drive them through gravel, drive them through shale! You could hammer these posts through a royal castle gate!”
Down in the icy shallows, Bram and fifteen High Timber exiles waded into the freezing current wearing oiled leather waders tied off with hemp ropes.
Two men held each piling plumb while two others swung twenty-pound hickory mauls in steady beat.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The posts sank two feet into the riverbed gravel, standing rigid against the swirling black current.
On the frosted bank, Dob sat comfortably on his wooden stool, his nimble fingers weaving supple willow withes into tight, four-foot hurdles.
“Look at them down there, shivering like wet dogs,” Dob cackled, tossing a finished wicker screen to Toby Karr. “First time in my life being a cripple has kept my boots dry.
Hand me another bundle of withies, boy! Keep the weave tight!”
Toby dragged the wicker screens into the river, lashing them to the wooden support posts with tarred hemp cord.
Each hurdle was secured. Then, the white spray surged against the willow, but the flexible wood bent without breaking. That let the water filter through while closing the river to everything larger than a minnow.
Meanwhile, on the bluff above, Master Duncan’s dwarven quarrymen worked with Giles to erect the smokehouse.
They laid courses of split granite fieldstone without mortar, linked the heavy stones by gravity and friction.
In the floor, Giles laid out an eight-foot underground trench lined with slate slabs. The cooling chimney pipe that connected the outdoor hearth to the inside curing racks.
By the afternoon of the third day, the structure stood six feet high, roofed with split pine shakes and fitted with sixty level hanging poles of peeled birch.
“Weir is sealed!” Caleb shouted from the river crib. “Funnel throat pinned in place!”
Giles climbed down to the riverbank. Then he stood on the crib narrow high walkway beside Kenneth. The river was running fast, swollen by melting sleet from the high peaks.
“Now we wait for the tide,” Kenneth said.
They didn’t have to wait long.
As the sun sank behind the western crags. It cast long blue shadows across the water, the autumn silver trout run reached the narrows.
From the narrow high walkway, Giles saw the river surface begin to boil.
Thousands of thick, fat trout, each two feet long with shimmering violet-silver flanks, were migrating upstream toward the headwater gravel beds. They hit the angled willow hurdles, found their path blocked, and turned toward the center water chute.
They surged through the funnel throat like silver arrows.
Within ten minutes, the twelve-foot timber crib was churning with hundreds of thrashing fish, their tails slapping the water into frothing foam.
“They’re in the box!” Toby yelled from the narrow high walkway, his face flushed with triumph. “Hundreds of them! They’re leaping over each other!”
Kenneth Drake plunged a wide wicker landing net into the holding pen and hoisted it out with a grunt of effort.
The net came up dripping and bulging with six massive silver trout, each weighing eight to ten pounds. He dumped them onto the sorting table, where they flapped furiously in the snow.
The High Timber exiles gathered along the bluff in total silence.
Several older men fell to their knees in the frozen gravel, raising their calloused hands toward the gray clouds.
“A miracle of the waters,” an old timber-cutter whispered, tears leaking down his windburned cheeks. “The River Father has yielded his herd. The Lord Master builder spoke to the deep, and the deep opened its gates.”
“The deep obeyed fluid mechanics,” Giles muttered under his breath, clicking his pocket watch. “Kenneth, rotate the netting squads every thirty minutes.
Sister Teresa, assemble the gutting line. Every fish must be cleaned, soaked in four-percent salt water, and hung before the frost stiffens the flesh.”
* * *
The curing shed operated without interruption for two days.
Inside the dark granite smokehouse, sixty rows of pink, salted trout fillets hung from the birch poles like fragrant roof tiles.
Down in the external firebox, green hickory chips smoldered over clean charcoal. It sent thick, sweet, pine-scented white smoke curling through the underground stone chimney pipe.
The smoke entered the curing room cool and dry, exactly at one hundred and eighteen degrees.
Teresa oversaw the brining barrels, her hands stained red with fish blood and white with coarse salt.
She moved between the tables like an officer inspecting a supply depot, ensuring every fillet was rubbed clean and drained.
“No rot shall enter this safe hall,” Teresa declared, hanging a plump fillet onto a birch hook. “Salt and smoke are the shields of the righteous.”
Lady Millicent stood outside by the weighing tripod, her pen scratching across the thick parchment with brisk satisfaction.
“Eighteen hundred and forty pounds of cured fillets,” Millicent announced, showing the ledger to Giles. “Sealed in twenty fir firkins with clean animal fat.
At standard rationing, this extends our winter protein buffer by sixty full days for the swelled population of eighty souls.”
Giles nodded, running a finger along the smooth wood of a sealed firkin. “Good. We have mitigated the nutritional hazard. Now our main vulnerability is equipment degradation.”
Kenneth Drake walked up the river path, his face unusually pale. He stopped beside Giles, glancing back toward the sick room tent.
“Lord Giles,” Kenneth said quietly. “The girl. Lyra.”
“Did her fever return?” Giles asked.
“No,” Kenneth replied. “Her skin is cold as well-water, but she is fully awake.
She sat up on her cot and drank half a cup of warm broth. But she asked to see the commander of the fort.”
“I’m the town administrator,” Giles said. “What did she say?”
Kenneth lowered his voice so the nearby workers couldn’t hear.
“She says she remembers the night High Timber fell.
She says the wolves didn’t just attack the stockade. They were led by a beast as tall as a royal warhorse, with horns of pure cerulean crystal that burned without fire.”
Kenneth swallowed hard, looking toward the dark northern peaks.
“She says the beast stood on the ridge above her village, watching the huts burn.
And she says that when Borin’s clamp breathed its first smoke three days ago, the beast turned its head toward Rustgate.”
“Heat detection,” Giles noted calmly, closing his notebook. “A large living entity with mana-augmented infrared tracking. That means our open-air forge and smokehouse will act as a pathfinding bright light.”
Kenneth stared at him. “My lord, the monster is hunting us.”
“Then we had better make sure our tools can dig deep enough to stop it,” Giles said. “Come. Borin is waiting at the scrap pile.”