The impact of Gideon’s landing on the fractured cavern floor sixty paces below sounded like a war-galley’s ram smashing into a stone pier.
The warlord hit the pulverized basalt in a tight, kinetic roll, his boots churning through black gravel, rising instantly to his full height with both five-foot star-iron claymores swinging in twin, horizontal arcs of singing death.
The two nearest Void-Scavengers didn't even have time to reorient their multi-faceted quartz eyes.
Gideon’s right blade sheared through four elongated, spider-like limbs of twisted iron like dry branches, while his left claymore drove straight down through the creature's quartz eye-cluster. The multi-faceted sphere imploded with a sharp acoustic pop, spraying hot, oily purple fluid across the pulverized rock as the construct collapsed into an inert heap of twitching scrap.
"COME ON, YOU CRUSTACEAN BASTARDS!" Gideon bellowed into the vaulted cavern.
His roar tore through the subterranean air, shaking centuries of dust from the ceiling rafters.
The effect on the hive was instantaneous.
Three hundred Scavengers froze in mid-stride. Their white-iron mining drills stopped screaming against the stone walls; their magnetic nets sputtered and died as their quartz eyes flared from dull amethyst to a blinding, erratic ultraviolet.
In unison, three hundred arachnid constructs whipped their segmented torsos toward the lone mortal standing in the center of their trench.
A high, deafening clicking sound—like ten million bone dice rattling in an iron kettle—filled the cavern as the entire swarm abandoned the walls and converged on Gideon in a shrieking, metallic tide.
Sixty feet above, on the narrow eastern stone ledge, Lyra didn't waste half a breath.
"Move!" she hissed to Lady Talia.
Leaving the four Void-dancers to anchor their heavy crossbows along the ledge, Lyra bolted up the narrow dwarven maintenance stairs carved into the vertical rock face, ascending toward the ancient granite aqueduct spanning the cavern roof.
Behind her, Talia’s squad began their butcher's rhythm.
THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.
Phosphorus-tipped dwarven bolts whistled down through the gloom, striking the lead Scavengers as they scrambled over the pulverized basalt. The chemical fire erupted on contact with the constructs' pressurized joint-chambers, detonating three of the machines in blinding flares of white-hot magnesium that illuminated the slaughter below.
Down in the trench, Gideon became an iron threshing machine.
He didn't hold a defensive square; he went on the hunt.
He moved with the terrifying, predatory economy of his Drake bloodline, parrying a descending iron drill with his cross guard, using the momentum to spin on his heel and drive his elbow through the quartz sensor-plate of a second construct. When a nine-foot Scavenger leaped from a boulder to take him at the throat, Gideon caught the beast’s forward leg barehanded, hauled its four-hundred-pound frame off its balance, and slammed it down across his raised knee, snapping the machine’s spinal armature in two with a concussive metallic crunch.
He was bleeding from three shallow cuts across his shins where jagged glass shards had pierced his leather, but the furnace-heat pouring through his true-mate bond burned away the pain before it could touch his marrow.
Every swing of his claymores took another construct down.
"HOLD THE SPUR, LYRA!" Gideon roared over the clicking shriek of the swarm, bisecting two more machines with a brutal, rising cleave. "THEY'RE ALL ON ME!"
One hundred and eighty feet above, Lyra reached the crown of the central aqueduct arch.
The granite masonry of the ancient dwarven water-bridge was massive, three paces thick, damp with condensation, and vibrating with the heavy, hydraulic pressure of eighty million gallons of glacial meltwater held behind the sluice gate three leagues up the shaft.
Lyra sprinted to the center of the arch, directly above the cracked hull of the fallen moon-citadel.
She fell to one knee, her leather combat trousers soaking in the icy water pooling along the channel floor.
She did not reach for her star-iron daggers.
She stripped her wolf-hide gloves, pressing both bare palms flat against the cold, wet granite of the primary keystone.
Her hazel-grey eye squeezed shut.
Her left eye flared into an incandescent furnace of sovereign violet starlight.
True Loom, unthread the mortar!
Lyra’s starlight didn't strike the granite like an explosive; it seeped into the microscopic fractures of the four-hundred-year-old stone, seeking out the mineral bonds that held the colossal blocks together.
With a savage, sovereign wrench of her will, she inverted the crystalline structure of the mortar.
CRACK.
A hairline fracture raced across the top of the granite arch.
Then another.
Then twenty more, webbing across the underside of the stone span with the acoustic violence of a thousand muskets firing in a cellar.
Deep inside the broken hull of the moon-citadel sixty paces below, the living amber chrysalis recognized the danger.
The subterranean heartbeat of the Void-Matron surged into a frantic, staccato panic:
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.
The four colossal wings of star-iron inside the cocoon began to thrash against the translucent membrane, sending violent waves of boiling, milky light sloshing against the glass walls. Fifty Scavengers broke away from the meat-grinder around Gideon, scrambling frantically up the western pillars to intercept the Queen on the roof.
"TOO LATE, BUG!" Gideon bellowed from the blood-slick basalt.
The warlord unhooked the short-handled boarding axe from his belt, leaned his massive frame back, and hurled the three-pound steel head straight up into the underbelly of the cracking arch.
The iron axe struck the center fracture line with the force of an artillery shot.
The keystone gave way.
The entire four-hundred-ton central arch of the dwarven aqueduct collapsed downward in an avalanche of colossal granite blocks.
And behind the stone came the flood.
A wall of black, freezing glacial meltwater twenty paces wide—eighty million gallons of pressurized sub-zero fury—burst through the broken mountain artery.
The roar was so deafening it blew the air from the cavern in a howling, supersonic draft that extinguished the phosphorus fires and threw the climbing Scavengers off the walls like autumn leaves.
Talia lunged forward along the upper ledge, grabbing the collar of Lyra’s tunic with both hands and hauling her Queen backward into the mouth of the ventilation shaft just as the water ripped through the space where she had been kneeling.
Down in the trench, the deluge struck the fallen moon-citadel with the kinetic violence of a falling mountain.
The impact of eighty million gallons of ice-water against the pressurized, boiling-hot petrified moon-rock was catastrophic.
The thermal shock shattered the hull into ten million floating fragments in a fraction of a second.
The living amber chrysalis inside took the full brunt of the freezing torrent.
The translucent glass of the cocoon flashed from gold to brittle white, screamed with an acoustic shriek that cracked the teeth in Gideon’s jaw, and detonated into powdered sand under the crushing hydraulic weight.
The Void-Matron never hatched.
The surviving three hundred Scavengers were swept away like twigs in a millrace, their twisted iron limbs and quartz sensors smashed to scrap against the cavern walls as the roaring torrent filled the trench, rising twenty feet in five seconds, scouring the basalt clean of every trace of the alien hive.
Gideon had vaulted onto the high base of the central dwarven pillar just before the wall of water hit.
He stood ten feet above the churning, white-capped foam of the subterranean river, water drenching his dark hair and soaked tunic, his massive chest heaving with ragged breaths as he wiped a mixture of icy water and black void-ichor from his brow.
He looked down at the empty, scoured trench.
The petrified moon-citadel was gone.
The chrysalis was dissolved.
The torrent was already draining away through the lower overflow shafts, carrying the crushed remnants of the Upper Void ten leagues deep into the lightless mantle of the earth, where the fires of the core would melt them into harmless slag.
Up in the ventilation shaft, Lyra pulled herself to the edge of the stone sill.
She looked down through the rising mist, her violet eye catching the fierce, unyielding amber gaze of her warlord looking up at her from the pillar.
Gideon grinned—a broad, feral, unapologetic flash of white teeth in the dark.
He raised his claymore in a slow, triumphant salute toward the shaft.
"That's one less bug in the cellar, Queen of mine," Gideon rumbled, his deep bass carrying clearly over the dying roar of the water.
Lyra let out a breathless, joyful laugh that echoed through the wet darkness of the cavern, leaning against Talia’s shoulder as the cool, clean mountain draft began to purge the stale air of the deep.
The roots of the North were clean.