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Chapter 1271: The Fiery Sky

Jodel pressed his eye to the peephole and studied the Tusk City below.

The abandoned house gave him a narrow slice of view — just the ground outside the city gate, the place where their advance would first need to break. The difference in elevation took the rest. He could see nothing beyond it.

In this operation, the Mojins would go first.

That did not mean Brian thought them expendable. In the Southernmost Region, the law was older than the clans: prove yourself through power, and earn what the victory brings. The Mojins had earned this.

Jodel was born in a small clan on the shrinking Silver Stream Oasis. When the water receded year by year, the future contracted with it — a slow suffocation nobody named aloud. He had taken the gamble of dealing with northerners because there was no other gamble left. Now every clansman lived in the Port of Clearwater, the permanent oasis they had spoken of only in the register of dreams. That was the reward for breaking the Wildwave and Cut Bone clans.

He was here now for the same reason he had always survived: more victory meant more reward, and the math was clean. The enemy didn’t matter. Demons were, if anything, preferable to starving.

He believed most Sand Nationals felt the same.

“Find anything?” came a voice behind him.

“Nothing. The Red Mist is thicker.” Jodel eased the peephole shut and turned. “Can’t see a thing.”

The one who’d asked was Farry — the youngest soldier in the unit, with a gun nearly as tall as he was. A deep scar traversed his face from brow to mouth-corner, cleaving his young face into something older and stranger. During training, Farry had outrun men twice his age, and Jodel had never heard his name in the oasis. A face like that should have made a story somewhere.

“Two weeks we’ve been stuck in here,” Farry said, sliding down the wall. “Hundreds of people. It’s miserable.”

“Sir Brian said the demons have flying Devilbeasts.” Jodel kept his voice flat. “We show ourselves, they see us. You’ve hunted before — half a month waiting on a sandworm isn’t unusual. Be patient.”

The hiding spot had been chosen with precision. Iron Axe had dispersed roughly 2,000 soldiers through the northern part of the Broken Tooth Castle; another 1,000 waited in the south as reserves. The structure looked like rubble from outside. Inside: sleeping quarters, washrooms, supply of water and food. There was an odor, inevitably. It was still more sanitary than any sandworm ambush Jodel had ever sat through.

Farry wasn’t mollified. He stared at the iron barrels stacked against the wall. “What do you think those are for? The demons came and all they’ve done is dig and bury things.”

“No idea. But it’s the chief’s invention.” Jodel had seen enough miracles in the last year that surprise no longer came easily. “I’m not worried.”

“I hope it isn’t another Pill of Madness,” Farry muttered — half to himself, the shape of an old fear in the words.

Jodel was about to ask what he meant when a head surfaced from the floor hatch. “Message from the rear. We’re moving soon. Get ready.”

Farry exhaled, long and deliberate. “Finally.” He was already on his feet.

“What’s the signal?” Jodel asked. “Same as planned?”

“Same as planned,” the messenger confirmed. “When you hear the explosion — advance.”

“It’s time,” Iron Axe said. He set the telescope down and turned. “Connect it to the power.”

“Yes, sir!” Two soldiers from the explosion unit seized the hand cranks and drove them hard. The third soldier rested his palm on the lever.

The Red Mist had swallowed the entire king’s city of the Kingdom of Wolfheart. If the First Army kept retreating, the Broken Tooth Castle would follow. Like Graycastle’s own capital and Silver City, the Tusk City and the Broken Tooth Castle sat adjacent, each the other’s shadow. The old saying held that the king’s city was safe as long as the Broken Tooth Castle stood. That calculus had now been inverted: the castle would be the weapon.

Iron Axe had noted the breathing devices — the burden the demons carried everywhere. The Mad Demons pursuing refugees were the exception; most others moved only within the Red Mist’s reach. They were anchored to it the way a fire is anchored to its fuel.

That was the opening.

“Sir — explosion unit is ready.”

“Ignite the explosives.”

The lever descended.

Above the northern Broken Tooth Castle, more than 500 iron barrels detonated in unison, a wall of dazzling red light punching skyward. Golden flame flooded the city, and the sound — a single tremendous percussion — rang through every chest and bone.

That was only the beginning.

The barrels held Kyle’s rubber worm slimes blended with inflammable oil and aluminum and magnesium powder. Inert as a solid, lethal as a mist: the moment it dispersed into the air, the slimes became combustible vapor, and the fire took them. Temperature climbed toward a thousand degrees in a heartbeat; the expanded air currents fed the fire back into itself and the fire grew.

Then the chain reaction.

What should have rained down instead spread outward, the burning vapor tracing arcs like red lightning, knitting itself into a vast net above the city. The flames moved. They advanced like a thing alive.

Iron Axe felt the shock of it before he understood it — and then he understood. The fiery rain had ignited the Red Mist itself. The red lightning threaded every gap in the air; the net sealed over and became a canopy of fire.

The canopy broke.

A fireball climbed out of it like a hatched bird of flame, climbing and climbing — and the sound that followed was not an explosion but something beneath sound, a concussion that traveled through the stone underfoot and the air overhead and every surface between.

Iron Axe watched the air above the king’s city distort, the way heat bends a horizon.

The earth shook.

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