General Cracked Hammer's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Cracked Hammer rode the dark road south until the buffalo slowed on its own. The trail thinned. Grass gave out to gray dust. He passed a fox skull picked clean, then a heap of feathers with no bird beneath. No birdsong. No wind. Only the hoof-drag through powder and the smell of old smoke. He crested a low rise and saw the chapel squatting alone at the bottom of a dead field. It was a stone hut leaning under its own weight. Blood streaked the shingles. Bones hung from the eaves on cord. A red banner sagged over the door, painted with a mark he did not know and did not want to learn. He reined in twenty paces out and did not dismount. He had come to hear a man who could read nether-tone in ore. He had not come to pray. The door opened before he called. A small skeletal figure stepped out in torn priest's robes, a black serpent coiled on one arm, a stone spike driven flat into his skull like a nail set by a god. His eyes burned red in the sockets. "Come, come," the priest said. He waved a bone hand. "I know what you seek. The Cursed Anvil. For work of such sinister bearing, a high cost is asked. A sacrifice." He laughed low in his throat and stepped aside from the doorway. Behind him, on a squat altar, sat a tall urn ringed in spikes and chain, a snarling face worked into its belly. The priest tipped his chin at it. "Fill the vessel," he said. "A living thing of weight and will. Yours to choose. Mine to burn." He lifted a small cross of carved stone with a shallow bowl at its heart and turned it in the lamplight. "Then I read your ore. Then I name your road." Cracked Hammer looked at the urn. He looked at the buffalo under him, warm and breathing. He looked at his own hands. He weighed the sample in his coat against the price on the altar and found the scale would not tip. "Nay, twisted thing," he said. "I shall seek assistance elsewhere." He turned the buffalo's head without haste. He did not spur it. He rode out the way he came, back through the dust and the picked bones, and set his course southeast for the Guild. Behind him the priest's voice came thin on a wind that had not been blowing a moment before. "Safe travels, war-monger. Surely it is the most viable option." The word viable sat wrong. It sat like the priest had already seen the ledger at the Guild's door. Cracked Hammer rode two days and a night. On the third dawn he came to a two-story guild house with dragon-headed chimneys smoking orange and violet, stables at its flank and a garden crowning the roof. Artificers moved in the yard in leather aprons. He tied the buffalo at the post, drew the ore from his coat, and walked to the door with the priest's word still ringing in his ear.