When Jon Hale shoved open the iron cellar hatch into the alley behind the bakehouse, the sky above Harth had turned the color of bruised iron.
The air smelled of burning rye thatch, pulverized lime, and boiling pine resin. From the high limestone ridge two miles to the northeast, the Ash Host’s heavy torsion engines were hurling sixty-pound river stones into the crowded streets of the river quarter. Every thirty seconds, a low, wet whistling ripped through the clouds, ending in a thunderous concussion that shook the chimneys down to their hearthstones.
A river boulder struck the roof of the cooperage across the lane.
The impact was deafeningly physical, a raw shearing of dry timbers and splitting cedar rafters that showered the cobbles with a razor hail of dark grey slate. Shards the size of meat cleavers whistled through the smoke, skipping across the flagstones, lodging two inches deep in the oak doorposts. A woman screamed from an upper window, her cry cut short by the roar of another chimney collapsing into an alley hearth.
“Cover your heads!” shouted Dunstan Harl from the bakehouse doorway.
The master baker stood knee-deep in gray rubble, his white linen apron blackened with soot and river mud. He held an iron flour shovel over his head like a buckler, deflecting a spray of falling slate chips while he hauled a sobbing apprentice girl by her smock into the safety of the stone archway.
