Three miles downwind across the white alkali flats, General Dravus coughed up another mouthful of black grease.
Tired imperial sappers drove iron stakes into the salt crust, pitching a modest gray canvas tent far away from the smoking canyon rim. The grand purple pavilion was gone, reduced to charred rags and greasy soot.
Dravus wiped his watering eyes with a damp linen cloth. The cloth came away coal-black.
Around him, thirty war-wagons stood scorched and peeling. The heavy bronze pumps were choked with their own crystallized sludge, their copper pistons warped from subterranean backpressure.
“We lost eighteen cauldrons, General,” his chief adjutant reported quietly. The officer’s eyebrows were singed off, and his voice sounded like crushed gravel. “The draft pulled the fire back down the intake tubes. If we try pumping pitch again, the furnaces will explode in our faces.”
Dravus stared at the distant limestone bluffs with venomous hatred.
“Call off the tunnel sappers,” Dravus rasped, resting his iron gauntlet on the hilt of his broadsword. “Every fissure in that ridge has become a death trap. If we send more men into those holes, the Vance dog will only cook them with our own fire.”
“Do we prepare the heavy siege rams?” the adjutant asked.
