The air inside the abandoned water tank drainage tunnel was so thick with sulfur dust, damp lime, and cold sweat that it tasted like wet copper pennies.
Ren crawled on his hands and knees through the four-foot-high limestone channel. His knees scraped against jagged gravel, his lambskin apron soaking up greasy ditch-water. In his right hand, he clutched his carved mammoth-bone awl. Its silver tip glowed with a faint, violet soft glow that threw dancing shadows across the ancient, weeping stone ribs of the vault.
Directly behind him crawled Lord Ren, the Emperor’s blackened plate cuirass groaning against the low ceiling as he hauled his broad shoulders through the narrow passage. Behind the Emperor came Kael and three oath-bound draymen. Their boots were locked in rhythmic, promise-anchored balance as they dragged four fifty-pound iron-hooped kegs of damp black powder across the wet shale.
From fifty paces ahead down the dark, dropping gallery came the sharp, metal rhythm of sixty royal tunnel diggers at work:
CLANG. THUD. CLANG.
Captain Krell’s shock-mining squad had reached the western castle wall piers.
Through the gloom, Ren could see the flickering orange light of their pitch-torches. Sixty men in soot-blackened scale mail were feverishly wedging twelve heavy, iron-banded casks of potion-made fire-powder directly beneath the main load-bearing dark rock pillar that supported sixty feet of Fort Karst’s western curtain wall. If those casks ignited, a four-thousand-degree fire-powder inferno would melt the dark rock piers into liquid melted rock waste in sixty seconds. It dropped the…
