The impact against the main gate shook the entire gatehouse tower.
BOOM.
The six-inch squared spruce timbers of the double doors groaned under the terrifying moving blow.
Outside, the seven-foot Frost Alpha clawed at the iron-heavy drop-bars, its crystal-clear horns gouging foot-deep furrows into the wood.
A cloud of supercooled cyan vapor poured from its jaws, freezing the timber transom into brittle rime.
Behind the beast, the surviving fifty frost wolves scrambled along the edge of the ditch, snarling and snapping in a desperate frenzy.
Down in the lower gate passage, the air was bitter cold and thick with flying timber splinters.
Caleb and Bram threw their full weight against the oak shores. Their boots slid in the mud as the outer doors shuddered under the Alpha’s relentless impacts.
“Hold the transom.” Caleb roared, his face purple with hard effort.
“Plant your heels! Don’t let the drop-bars jump their sockets.”
Behind them, five High Timber woodsmen wedged seasoned birch logs under the door frame, using sledgehammers to drive the bracing pins home.
Every blow from the Alpha’s massive head sent blast waves through the timber that rattled their teeth in their jaws.
“Ten seconds more!” Kenneth shouted down through the murder-hole, his sword drawn.
“Keep the shores braced! Giles is opening the water gate.”
Inside the gatehouse, Caleb threw his massive shoulder against the oak bracing beam, his boots digging into the packed clay floor.
“The drop-bars are bending!” Caleb roared, veins bulging along his neck.
“The beast hits like a royal battering ram!
Another blow like that and the hinges will shear.”
The seven-foot Frost Alpha was a nightmare of frozen violence.
Its massive skull was crowned with three-foot sweeping horns of deep sapphire ice, pulsing with cold elemental mana that dropped the local heat ten degrees with every breath.
Its chest was protected by overlapping plates of crystal-clear rime three inches thick, hard as hardened steel.
The beast threw its full eight-hundred-pound weight against the timber doors once more.
BOOM.
The iron drop-bars bowed inward two inches, the heavy spruce timber frames groaning in agony.
Sparks flew from the forged iron pintles as the hinges strained against their stone anchor sockets.
Down in the gatehouse passageway, Bram and four High Timber axemen threw three heavy hemlock shores beneath the lower transom. It hammered wedges to lock them in place.
“She’s cracking the outer planking, Lord Giles!” Bram shouted up through the murder-hole.
“We can’t hold another ramming hit.”
Giles Croft stood on the narrow high walkway directly above the gate transom, his hand resting upon the iron lever of Sluice Box A.
Beside him, Sister Teresa held her high-pressure brass slurry lance, the copper pump handle already racked back under eighty pounds of air pressure.
“Don’t reinforce the hinges, Caleb,” Giles called down through the murder-hole.
“Step back from the inner doorstep.
Clear the drainage water chutes.”
Giles checked the water gauge on the overhead gravity pool.
Four thousand gallons of scalding water, pre-heated by the communal kitchen chimney pipe ducts, stood poised behind the heavy hemlock head-gate.
Directly beneath the gate transom, recessed into the bedrock foundation, lay the four-ton slaking hopper. Packed to the brim with fist-sized boulders of unhydrated calcium oxide.
Kenneth Drake scrambled up the narrow high walkway ladder, his broadsword drawn and his teeth gritted.
“Giles, if that gate goes, fifty beasts flood the inner court.”
“The gate won’t go,” Giles said.
“Crystal-clear ice armor possesses an extremely low heat shock threshold.
When subjected to a sudden heat differential exceeding four hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the multiplier of linear spreading causes instant stress fractures throughout the crystal-clear matrix.
Releasing Sluice Box A now.”
Giles checked the heat probe set into the overhead water chute pipe hub.
“Water chute pool heat is one hundred and ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit,” Giles reported calmly.
“Hydration stoichiometry is optimal.
One ton of calcium oxide needs three hundred and twenty gallons of water to achieve complete slaking into calcium hydroxide.
By delivering four thousand gallons of pre-heated water into four tons of burning lime powder, we supply an eighty-percent water surplus.
The surplus water absorbs the sixty-three point seven kilojoules per mole of reaction heat, instantly flashing into white-hot steam.
Volume spreading ratio is seventeen hundred to one.
When forced through four restricted Laval-profile brass nozzles, discharge speed reaches four hundred and twenty feet per second.”
Giles yanked the counterweighted trip-lever downward.
CLANK-CREAK.
The heavy overhead head-gate swung open with a rush of water.
Four thousand gallons of near-boiling river water plunged down the upright timber water chute, cascading directly into the four tons of dry burning lime powder boulders in the hopper beneath the gate.
What happened next was not a slow chemical reaction.
It was an explosive fiery eruption.
Calcium oxide and water combine in an intensely violent exothermic reaction, generating sixty-three point seven kilojoules per mole.
In an enclosed stone hopper, four tons of lime flashing into calcium hydroxide produced an instant sky spreading of seventeen hundred to one.
WHSSSHHH-ROOOOOAAAR.
An ear-splitting, fiery jet of scalding white bitter-salt steam, high-pressure to twenty-five sea-weights, erupted through the four brass discharge nozzles set into the outer gate threshold.
The four-hundred-degree plume shot thirty feet outward into the freezing night air, fully engulfing the Frost Alpha and its surrounding pack.
The beast’s triumphant roar transformed into a high-pitched, agonized shriek of pure torment.
The heat shock was total.
The Alpha’s body was wrapped in crystal-clear frost armor at twenty-six degrees below zero.
The sudden, brutal impact of four-hundred-degree bitter-salt steam created an instant heat slope of over four hundred and twenty-five degrees.
CRACKLE-CRACK.
The sound was like thousands of crystal goblets being smashed against an anvil.
The Alpha’s iron-hard azure ice back shell didn’t melt gradually.
It shattered wildly into billions of tiny, harmless fragments that hissed and dissolved into boiling water.
Its crystal-clear horns cracked and snapped off at the skull, falling into the boiling slush below.
The skin-burning calcium hydroxide vapor, carrying a pH of twelve point four, seared the beast’s exposed eyes, burning away its sapphire mana sight in a split second.
Blinded, scalded, and stripped of its armor, the massive Alpha staggered backward into the snow, thrashing wildly with its front paws.
The fifty wolves behind it were engulfed in the boiling white fog. Their fur boiled, their eyes blinded, they broke ranks and fled in blind terror, tumbling into the frozen river gorge.
* * *
Sister Teresa leaned over the embrasure. Her gray eyes burned with righteous fervor. She watched the scalding steam envelope the gate approach.
“The holy lye scours the darkness!” Teresa chanted, her hands gripping the brass valves of her slurry rig.
“Calcium oxide for the bones of the earth, scalding water for the spirit of deliverance!
No unholy flesh can endure the scouring heat of truth.”
The young refugee women beside her worked the backup hand pumps with furious rhythm. They maintained eighty pounds of air-powered pressure in the slurry reservoirs.
The skin-burning whitewash hissed in the copper pipes, waiting for the backup purge command.
Sister Teresa stepped onto the narrow high walkway embrasure. Her gray eyes burned with righteous fervor.
She gripped the brass handles of her high-pressure slurry lance, aiming the long copper nozzle directly down at the thrashing Alpha.
“Taste the scouring lye of deliverance, monster.” Teresa shouted, her voice soaring over the hiss of steam.
She pulled the brass trigger valve.
SQUIRT-HSSSS.
A thick, roping jet of scalding, boiling burning lime powder slurry shot from the nozzle, striking the Alpha directly in its open, roaring maw.
The skin-burning whitewash coated its throat and tongue, neutralizing its ice-cold breath in a violent burst of bitter-salt foam.
The monster collapsed onto its front knees, choking, blinded, its fearsome armor reduced to boiling mud and gray flesh.
Caleb stepped to the murder-hole, peering out through the clearing steam.
“The wood held,” Caleb whispered, running his hand over the gate transom.
“Not a scorched timber. The beast is boiling in its own hide.”
Sister Teresa leaned over the embrasure, her gray hair whipping wild in the scalding updraft.
She pumped the brass air-charging lever of her slurry lance three times, building pressure until the needle on the brass gauge touched the red stop-pin.
“Breathe the scouring fire of truth, demon!” Teresa cried.
She racked the copper trigger bar wide open.
A second jet of boiling whitewash, hissing at three hundred and eighty degrees, shot twenty feet downward, striking the thrashing Alpha across its eyes and snout.
The skin-burning calcium hydroxide, carrying an extreme bitter-salt pH of twelve point four, attacked the beast’s wet inner skin and organic tissues with devastating fury.
The monster thrashed in total agony, its sapphire mana sight burned away forever.
Behind it, the surviving fifty frost wolves broke ranks fully.
Scared by the roaring volcano of boiling steam and blinding white dust, the pack turned tail and fled down the slope, tumbling into the freezing river rapids in their desperate panic to escape.
Up in the gatehouse control loft, Douglas and Barnaby manned the backup water chute cutoff winches.
“Water pressure is holding steady at twenty-two pounds of pressure,” Douglas called out, checking the animal fat-greased leather float gauge.
“The head tank is draining evenly down both water chute chutes.
The brass Laval nozzles are scouring the entire approach threshold with high-speed steam.”
Barnaby watched through the floor gratings with a fierce grimace of satisfaction.
“Look at that burning lime powder slake,” Barnaby grunted, wiping sweat from his eyes.
“It’s boiling the frozen mud right off the cobblestones.
The whole gate threshold looks like the mouth of a smelting fire.
No beast born of cold can cross forty feet of boiling lye.”
Giles nodded, checking the exhaust draft through the upper timber angled slats.
“The upward heat rising heat is drawing fresh air in through the lower courtyard gates, preventing skin-burning steam from backing up into the living quarters,” Giles explained.
“Proper air-flow design ensures our defenders remain safe while the outer edge environment remains fully uninhabitable to hostiles.”
Kenneth Drake stood beside Giles, his scarred face glowing in the reflected light of the steam cloud.
He unslung his ten-foot iron-shod measuring rod from his shoulder, stepping down toward the wicket gate.
“The armor is gone,” Kenneth said in a low, deadly growl.
“The Alpha is blind and crippled.
Open the wicket gate, Caleb.
It’s time to execute the survey.”
Giles pulled his brass sighting scope from its case, adjusting the leveling screws on the narrow high walkway railing.
“Proceed, Captain,” Giles said calmly.
“Pin the target to the bedrock.
We must record the final mana core map points before the settlement status screen initiates.”