The transition from the lightless subterranean vaults to the open air of the southern interior was a shock of suffocating humidity and bitter, oily smoke.
The Sunken Marches spanned fifty leagues of drowned lowlands between the coastal mountains and the high plateau of Ouros. Once fertile rice-terraces and cedar-shaded river basins, the landscape was now a sprawling, black labyrinth of flooded mangrove swamps, stagnant tidal creeks, and treacherous mudflats. The water was not clear; it was thick, brackish, and stained an inky, bituminous black by the coal seams leaking from the drowned mines of the Iron Ridge.
The locals called it the River of Black Tears.
Down the center of the wide river basin, the water moved with a slow, venomous crawl, thick with floating mats of rot-wood, dead pelicans, and rafts of swollen river-moss.
High above the humid haze, two colossal shadows cut through the copper-colored clouds.
Cinder and the ancient Abyssal Drake flew in echelon formation, their massive wings beating with steady, synchronized power. Cinder’s newly awakened, white-hot celestial core radiated a dry, fierce warmth that parted the humid marsh-fog below, while the elder drake’s four burning eye-pits swept the winding riverbanks with primeval, predatory focus.
On Cinder’s neck-crest, Lyra and Gideon stood braced against the high saddle-arch.
Lyra held a spyglass of cut sea-crystal to her hazel-grey eye, sweeping the river narrows three leagues ahead.
There, where the black river squeezed between two towering bluffs of red clay known as the Dragon’s Teeth, Grand Warlord Malric had built his slaughterhouse.
Five hundred flat-bottomed iron gun-barges were moored in five interlocking, crescent-shaped lines across the water, chained together by heavy, spiked boom-cables that barred the channel from bank to bank. Each barge was armored in overlapping plates of boiled bull-hide and scrap-iron, bristling with heavy star-iron ballistas and iron-spouted siphon-nozzles that connected to massive copper vats of distilled river-pitch.
On the red clay bluffs above the boom, three thousand heavy southern cataphracts stood in rigid, disciplined ranks, their lacquered black armor and crimson horse-plumes gleaming dully beneath the overcast sky.
And arrayed along the water's edge were eight hundred blood-priests of the Salt Covenant, their ceremonial robes dyed the color of dried liver, their bone staffs raised in a continuous, discordant chant that sent oily, violet ripples skittering across the black current.
"Malric’s entire southern reserve," Gideon said, his deep bass vibrating through his leather brigandine. He lowered his binoculars, spitting into the wind. "He knows if we crack this boom, the road to the Dread-Barrow of Ouros is wide open."
"He didn't just fortify the river, Gideon," Lyra said, her voice taut as she lowered her glass.
She focused her violet eye upon the water before the first line of barges.
Beneath the ink-black surface of the river, the water was alive with unnatural, writhing movement. Thousands of needle-thin, translucent shapes were swarming in the shallows—subterranean river-vipers, bred in the sulfur-vats of the Iron Ridge, their fangs dripping with a paralytic coagulant that curdled mortal blood in seconds.
"The mud is mined with pitch-pots," Lyra continued, "and the shallows are seeded with serpent swarms. If Jarek’s twenty dreadnoughts try to force the boom, the vipers will poison the rowing crews through the oar-ports, and the siphon-barges will turn the river into a lake of burning naphtha."
"Then Jarek’s dreadnoughts stay three leagues downriver," Gideon growled, rolling his colossal shoulders until the joints cracked like dry timber.
He unclasped his heavy star-iron claymores from their back-scabbard, checking the edge of the five-foot blades with his thumb.
"We don't need a fleet to crack a timber fence, little bird."
"We need a breach large enough for the infantry to flank the bluffs," Lyra replied, turning to face him.
The wind off the marshes whipped her dark combat braids across her cheeks, her star-iron circlet catching the dull copper light of the storm clouds. Her dual-colored gaze was fierce, unyielding, and ablaze with tactical clarity.
"The blood-priests are maintaining an acoustic barrier across the boom," Lyra said. "It dampens dragon fire. If Cinder breathes directly on the barges, the ward will deflect the flame into the surrounding reeds and incinerate the advance scouts."
Gideon bared his fangs in a slow, savage, terrifying grin.
"Then the lizard stays in the sky to keep their cataphracts off our necks," Gideon said, stepping close, his hand cupping the back of her neck with fierce, grounding possessiveness.
His amber-gold eyes burned with pure, unadulterated butcher's hunger.
"And you and I drop into the mud."
"You want to fight five hundred gun-barges in waist-deep oil?" Lyra asked, her lips curving into a sharp, matching smile that answered the predator in his chest.
"I fought four hundred wolves in a snowdrift with one broken arm, Queen of mine," Gideon rumbled against her temple, his lips brushing her skin in a searing, breathless promise. "A few fat southern lords on flat boats won't even warm my blood."
Lyra reached down, drawing her twin star-iron daggers.
"Take the center barge, General Drake," she whispered. "I'll take the boom-chains."
Gideon didn't give a signal to Cinder; the ancient drake felt the intent through the bond before the thought had fully formed.
With an earth-shattering roar that shook the clay bluffs three leagues away, Cinder folded his sixty-foot obsidian wings, tucking his talons tight against his belly, and plummeted straight down through the copper clouds like a falling black star.
Beside him, the ancient Abyssal Drake followed, its four cobalt-violet eye-pits blazing as its massive bulk displaced a hurricane of screaming wind.
Down on the river, the horns of the southern fleet sounded in frantic, discordant alarm.
"AIR ATTACK! BRING UP THE BALLISTAS!"
A volley of three hundred heavy iron-headed ballista bolts shrieked into the sky, their barbed shafts trailing smoke as they converged on the descending drakes.
Cinder didn't dodge.
Ten paces above the river, the volcanic drake opened his wings, the concussive backdraft of his obsidian leather swatting twenty ballista bolts out of the air like dry twigs.
And from his neck-crest, two figures leaped into the black water.
Lyra and Gideon hit the center of the River of Black Tears like two falling artillery shells.
The splash was not water; it was an explosion of displaced black silt, boiling oil, and celestial violet starlight that threw twenty river-vipers sixty feet onto the muddy banks.
Before the southern crews on the center barge could reload their siphons, Gideon broke the surface.
The northern warlord stood waist-deep in the black mud, his massive torso glistening with oil and starlight, his star-iron claymores drawn and humming with apocalyptic, violet fury.
He didn't speak. He didn't issue a challenge.
With an explosive lunge that pulverized the riverbed beneath his boots, Gideon vaulted six feet out of the mud, landing squarely on the forecastle of the flagship barge with a concussive crash that cracked the iron deck-timbers from bow to stern.
His five-foot claymore whipped around in a blinding horizontal scythe.
Four ballista-engineers were sheared clean in half before their hands could touch their daggers, their severed torsos flying into the copper vats of pitch behind them.
"WHO'S NEXT?" Gideon’s feral roar tore through the fleet like an iron cleaver.
Twenty paces away, Lyra moved across the water like an avenging specter of starlight.
She didn't wade; she skipped across the surface of the black river upon thin, floating pads of concentrated celestial Weave-Aura, her boots barely rippling the oily film.
Her daggers flashed.
Two blood-priests on the starboard gunwale were struck through their throats before they could complete their incantations, their bone staffs slipping into the dark current.
Lyra didn't slow down. She drove both of her star-iron blades straight into the main hinge of the spiked boom-cable that anchored the center line of barges.
"Break!" Lyra commanded.
She poured the unyielding, primal starlight of the Ash Cleft into the iron.
The three-inch star-iron boom-cable didn't merely snap; it detonated under the thermal shock, sending severed links of white-hot iron whipping across the river like lethal shrapnel, slicing through three adjacent barges and tearing their steering oars away.
The center of the southern line buckled.
Deprived of their anchor cables, thirty iron barges were caught in the sudden surge of the river current, spinning out of control and colliding with one another in a screaming tangle of crushed timbers and overturned pitch-vats.
High on the red clay bluffs, Grand Warlord Malric stared down in stunned, paralyzed fury at the two lone figures tearing his five-hundred-ship blockade to pieces in the middle of a swamp.
"Sound the charge!" Malric screamed, drawing his massive broadsword. "CATAPHRACTS! INTO THE RIVER! TRAMPLE THEM IN THE MUD!"
Three thousand heavy southern horsemen spurred their mounts down the steep clay slopes, their iron hooves thundering like an earthquake toward the flooded riverbanks.
Gideon looked up from the blood-soaked deck of the flagship, wiping the black oil from his brow with the back of his bloody forearm.
His amber-gold eyes locked onto the three thousand descending horsemen, a terrifying, savage laugh rumbling from his chest.
"Lyra!" Gideon shouted across the churning water, his claymores held high. "They're coming down the hill!"
Lyra vaulted onto the shattered prow of the boom-barge, her violet eye blazing with incandescent, sovereign fire as she looked toward the sky.
"Cinder!" Lyra called out, her voice ringing clear over the clash of steel.
"THE BLUFFS ARE OPEN!"
From the copper clouds above, the two ancient drakes dove.
The River of Black Tears was about to boil.