The dreadnought didn’t bleed men from gangplanks. It fired them from air-powered tubes.
At eight in the evening, through the thick, swirling blanket of sulfur smoke and freezing mountain mist, six heavy iron drop-capsules decoupled from the underbelly of the Vitreous Giant beast. They were cone-shaped projectiles of riveted river-steel, eight feet long, fitted with four spring-loaded braking vanes and trailing thick air-powered guidance wires.
They struck the lower waterworks of Cloud-Rest with the bone-shaking force of falling boulders.
The outer stonework of the pumphouse—a three-hundred-year-old stone arcade built over the castle’s main mountain spring—shattered inward under the moving impact. Before the dust could settle, the high-pressure locking hatches on the capsules blew outward with sharp, explosive pops, venting clouds of sweet, cold bitter pine-resin gas.
Out poured forty Spire shock troopers.
They weren’t the bumbling militia of the lowlands. These were the elite Aether-Jaguars of the Grand Synod. Six-foot veterans clad in form-fitting cuirasses of polished blue-steel, their faces hidden behind silver-filigree breathing masks linked to twin brass oxygen canisters on their backs. They carried six-foot repeating shock-pikes tipped with lightning-crystals and heavy repeating hand-carronades charged with glowing pellets.
They moved with terrifying, clockwork silence, fanning out through the underground arches toward the water tank where the refugees lay sleeping.
