General Cracked Hammer's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

They reached the seal at midmorning. Cracked Hammer swung down from his mount and stood at the lip of the clearing, letting Elletrix ride past him to the working ground. The soil there was old and packed hard, ringed by a low stone lip he had walked a thousand times in his head. He said nothing. He had brought her this far on a signed page and a closed mouth, and he meant to keep both. Elletrix guided her mare to a brass hitching rig planted at the edge of the clearing. The rig's arm unfolded on its own, gears turning under a small glass gauge, and clamped soft around the mare's rein. She unbuckled the saddlebags and set them out in a careful row. Ink tubes. A folding plate. A rolled chart of the seal's face. She pulled her goggles down and knelt at the stone lip. Cracked Hammer sat on a flat rock ten paces back and watched her work. The hours went easy. She traced the outer glyph in green ink, then the inner in orange, calling small notes to herself under her breath. Cracked Hammer let his mind drift, which he almost never did. He thought of the anvil under the soil. He thought of the shape the metal would take once the seal cracked and the descent opened. He caught himself naming it in his head and cut the thought off. Bad craft. He had made that rule long ago and broken it now, sitting on a rock in the sun while a stranger did his work for him. Elletrix stopped. She sat back on her heels and tilted her head at a seam near the seal's north edge. She reached into her satchel for a slim probe and set the tip against the seam, slow, the way a good hand tests a hot line. Cracked Hammer stood. He opened his mouth to call her back. He did not get the word out. The ground split. A column of black ichor punched up through the red clay, steaming, throwing shards of stone into the air. It struck Elletrix full in the chest and washed over her before she could rise. She screamed once. The sound bent. Her small frame buckled inside the sludge and came up wrong: shoulders hunched high, jaw stretched, eyes gone yellow in a slick black face. Gears at her belt still turned. The thing that had been Elletrix stood in a pool of oily sludge and stared at him with a mouth full of teeth. Cracked Hammer did not curse. He did not call on any god. He set his hand on the haft at his hip and remembered the Sulfur Parson at the chapel door, the priest's voice soft on the word viable, and the smile that had followed him out. Derelict Salvo had known where he would go. Derelict Salvo had gotten there first. Cracked Hammer took one step forward and set his stance. The seal was still sealed. His artificer was gone. The work had just gotten harder, and he meant to do it anyway.