The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 124 - Hammered Silence // The Mountains That Breathe Metal

Gael stiffened the moment Arnell said the name. Of course he knew who the Steelborn were—no Bharnish could get away with not knowing who they were—but Maeve blinked between him and the smith like a student caught in the middle of an advanced lecture.

“... Who are the Steelborn again?” she asked.

Naturally, Arnell stared at her as if she’d just confessed she didn’t know what stairs were. “You… don’t know the Steelborn?”

Maeve tilted her head politely. “Should I?”

Gael let out a long, low groan. Fortunately, he was spared from being the explanation man for what would’ve been the tenth or eleventh time this week, because Arnell was here.

“The Steelborn are the strongest gang in Ironwych. Strongest in the east and Umbracross, if you ask me. They’ve ruled the Grand Ironwych Mines for decades—longer than most people have been alive.” Arnell ran a hand over his face. “People say they were originally a company of miners from the Grand Ironwych Mine’s shafts. This was over half a century ago, and back then, the mines were so deep and so narrow even the Mortifera Enforcers refused to go inside. It was too dangerous. Too many collapses and too many… disappearances.”

Gael snorted. “Disappearances, yes. Small word for being dragged off by cave-bugs the size of trains.”

Arnell winced but nodded. “Anyways, the story goes that that company of miners survived a collapse that should’ve killed them. They were trapped underground for nine days without food or water, but even though nobody even thought about launching a rescue operation, they came back up, and they weren’t normal anymore.”

Maeve tilted her head. “Not normal how?”

“They were stronger. Tougher. Like they’d grown shells under their skin. Carapace plates. They could bend metal plates with their bare hands, and they started calling themselves—”

“So dramatic.” Gael waved Arnell’s story away. “The Steelborn just killed the Mortifera Enforcers who were in the mines with them and took their Advanced Beetle Classes. Nothing more. Ever since then, they’ve grown in firepower and claimed full authority over Ironwych. Now they run the Grand Ironwych Mines—every shaft, every tunnel, every furnace. All the metal in the eastern ward comes from them. If you buy a nail in Blightmarch, odds are a Steelborn touched it first.”

Arnell nodded. “They keep the peace. Their peace. If a Myrmur Host goes berserk in public, they crush it first before any local Exorcists can tear up the place. They have… a lot of Beetle Classes. Mostly Rhinoceros Beetle Classes and Ironclad Beetle Classes. Big, tough guys. That’s why they can even handle Myrmurs without the Exorcists’ specialized Wasp Classes.”

Then Gael leaned forward slightly, mask tilting. “But stabilizers,” he said. “That’s new. Last time I was here, Ironwych didn’t have any miracle syringes that kept Myrmurs from manifesting externally, so why the sudden ‘charity’, selling stabilizers for a price people like you can even dream of affording?” He tapped Arnell’s sutured stomach lightly with his cane. “The Steelborn aren’t exactly known for mercy. Or for giving a damn. What’s their game?”

Arnell’s gaze darted toward the far shadows of the forge, as though the deeper corners of Ironwych were watching him even here.

“Well…” he murmured. “There’ve been… rumors.”

Gael perked up. “My favorite kind.”

Maeve looked concerned. “What kind of rumors?”

“Unsavory ones. The Steelborn are always a bit violent, you know? That’s just the norm. But lately… lately it’s been different.”

“Different how?” Gael asked.

In the end, Arnell gave the two of them directions so they could check out the Steelborn’s unusual activities themselves.

Ironwych at night had a different sort of fever.

By day, the ward burned bright and loud, but by night, all of the noise didn’t disappear so much as sink, dropping down into the bones of the district. The clangs of autohammers became distant. The smoke churning from factory chimneys turned thicker and darker. The streetlights narrowed into streaks along gantries, and the sickly glow of furnace-mouths painted everything else in orange wounds and iron bruises.

Gael and Maeve slipped through it all like two misplaced ghosts. Arnell’s directions were, mercifully, better when he wasn’t concussed. They cut across narrow alleys between factory-blocks, climbed rust-slick stairways that clung to walls like barnacles, and passed beneath great, skeletal frames of unfinished cranes that loomed against the dim sky.

“Left at the dead boiler,” Gael muttered, reading off the scribbled notes Arnell had scrawled for them. “Straight past the slag heaps, then under the waterworks bridge. If we hit a chasm full of molten metal, we’ve gone too far.”

“Can’t we already see our destination?” Maeve muttered, lifting her chin slightly. “I mean, I can literally see them on the horizon.”

“How far away do they look to you?”

“Maybe a few dozen more blocks off? About an hour away?”

“That’s if we’re able to walk towards them in a straight line. Unfortunately, this shit-ass place is a labyrinth, and we can’t exactly fly.”

They reached the waterworks bridge a few minutes later. It was a thick, humped artery of iron that carried water pipes overhead and sewage pipes beneath. Water hammered through the enclosed conduits, a constant trembling rush above their heads, while from below, the sewage lines breathed out a faint, rotten damp that still somehow smelled cleaner than parts of Blightmarch.

It’s the metallic smell.

It’s quite… comforting…

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Gael slowed.

His head tilted—like a hound catching a scent—because he smelled not blood, not Myrmurs, but opportunity. Turning his head to look, he spotted thin trickles of overflow dribbling from one of the pipes into a cracked runnel along the wall, forming staggered pools of cloudy water beside him. From the edges of those puddles, thin green blossoms had forced their way up through rust and grime.

He recognized these flowers at first glance.

“Oh hello,” he murmured.

Before Maeve could notice, he crouched, reached into the damp run-off, and plucked two of the flowers, shaking off droplets. The blossoms looked terribly out of place in his gloved fingers, but before they could resist, he stuffed them into an inner pocket of his coat.

Maeve glanced over her shoulder when she caught him lagging behind. “What’d you just do?”

Gael straightened, grinning under his mask. “Nothing.”

She opened her mouth. Closed it again. They had other things to do tonight, so they moved on.

The metalworking landscape grew harsher and harsher as they headed further east. The buildings dropped away by degrees, the factories thinned out until the ward broke open at its farthest edge, and eventually, the cluttered eastern city gave way to the looming black wall that stretched from one end of the horizon to another.

The Grand Ironwych Mountains.

They rose straight up out of the ground like a line of knives that’d been dropped from the skies. No gentle slopes, no forgiving foothills. They were sheer, treacherous stone stacked into jagged teeth, soaring high enough that the faint stars seemed to get snagged on their edges. The shortest mountain had to be at least three hundred meters tall, while the tallest was… well, Gael couldn’t tell. It was dark, and there weren’t any lights pulled up to the peak. It had to be at least a thousand meters tall, though.

Now, the faces of the mountains were pockmarked with hundreds of mine entrances all cut into the rock at varying heights. Some were at ground level, but others were carved hundred of meters up. Massive pulley systems and hanging lifts crisscrossed the mountains. Thick chains and cables ran from ground-level capstans to platforms welded out of scrap metal. Iron cages dangled in the air, many resting empty, some swinging sluggishly in the mountain breeze, while a cluttered mess of wooden scaffolds clung to the rock in defiance of gravity and good sense, linking the various mine entrances with precarious walkways.

A few miners still moved about even at this hour. Lanterns bobbed along the lower levels as men and women in half-armor trudged in and out of mines, shoulders hunched, faces hidden behind metal masks. The sound of distant pickaxes echoed from the mountains as well, but Gael could get used to this over the incessant autohammers in the Furnace Warrens.

Maeve stopped and stared, her mouth half-opened as she took in the awe-inspiring sight. “What… architecture.”

“Bharnish gotta make a living somehow.” Gael followed Arnell’s notes up the mountains with his eyes. “The smith said, according to a friend of a friend of a friend, what we’re looking for might be found in E77. Help me find it.”

Glowing oil-painted markings had been scrawled next to most mine entrances. Mostly crooked letters and numbers, some smeared, some crossed out and replaced. All were written in the same pretty cursive, though, so his eyes flitted across most of them quickly.

D13, G31, H09, E52…

They tracked the ‘E’ mines upwards until they found it: E77, painted in thick, glossy strokes beside a broad tunnel opening about fifty meters up the cliff face. Its entrance was wider than most and framed by reinforced beams. No miners were going in or out of that one.

Maeve followed Gael’s gaze, then squinted at the inactive pulley lines and raised lifts beneath it. “You can’t be serious. Are we supposed to operate those things ourselves to get up there?” She pointed at a set of winches the size of small houses. “I don’t even know which lever goes where. I’ll kill you and myself in one go.”

But Gael had already started walking, and not towards the winches.

He went towards the cliff itself.

At the base of the near-vertical cliff, he lifted one foot and placed it against the stone.

Then he shifted his weight back—and simply kept going, walking straight up the mountain as the tiny hooks of his ‘Basic Setae’ mutation pushed through his specially-crafted boots and latched onto the stone.

Maeve watched him reach three meters up before her brain kicked in, and she remembered she had the same mutation.

With one hand grabbing the brim of his hat to keep it from falling—and the other holding onto his cane—he trudged up and up towards mine E77. The higher they went, the more Ironwych unspooled beneath them: a sprawl of dark roofs, dull-orange smears of forges, and thin lines of lantern light tracing streets and rails.

“You’d think they’d have guards posted on every level,” Maeve said quietly as they climbed past another tunnel mouth, dark and unattended.

“Most miners aren’t working nights,” Gael replied. “Less shifts, less supervision. If the Steelborn cared about every tunnel, we’d have been shot three times by now. E77’s the one that should have the teeth.”

And that proved to be true enough. As they neared the E77 entrance, they spotted two silhouettes standing at the edge, clad in thick metal plates and resting rifles in their hands. Gael grabbed Maeve and angled them under one of the hanging elevator cages, using it as cover.

“Bingo,” Gael murmured. “Right one’s yours. I’ll take the left.”

She nodded, and they dashed out from the elevator’s underside at the same time. By the time the guards even registered movement beneath them, it was too late. The two of them leaped onto the lip of the entrance and punched their respective guards—simple and direct—to drop the two men like sacks of ores.

“... You didn’t kill him, right?” Gael asked, shaking his fist as he frowned at Maeve’s unconscious man.

“Did you?” Maeve shot back, glaring at his unconscious man.

“I don’t think so.”

“You better not have killed them.”

They each grabbed a limp guard by the collar and dragged the bodies just inside the tunnel entrance, depositing them behind a jut of rock. Gael gave the one he’d hit a brief pulse-check with two fingers against the neck.

Still breathing. Nice.

With the two guards out of commission, they stepped into mine E77.

The air changed almost instantly. Outside, the wind still carried the baked-metal smell of the mountainside. Inside, the tunnel swallowed the breeze and replaced it with stale earth, old stone, and an underlying tang of iron and bronze dust that dried the tongue. Oil-lamps hung at intervals along the walls, their small flames hissing in wire cages. Chains and rails ran underfoot, tracing deep into the darkness. Gael couldn’t say he’d spent much time in underground mines, either, but he still preferred this over the Furnace Warren’s incessant noise.

From somewhere further ahead, a steady rhythm drifted back to them. Not the sharp, ringing strikes of pickaxes on stone, but heavier, meatier impacts. Wet, almost.

Something hitting ore.

Something that wasn’t metal tools.

Every now and then, voices echoed around a bend, so they had to duck into side alcoves and flatten themselves behind jutting support pillars to hide from patrolling guards. It was evident the Steelborn valued this mine enough to keep it guarded even in the dead of night, but… what?

What is that noise?

Maeve wrinkled her nose beneath her mask the deeper they went. Gael’s nose was starting to itch too, the same way it sometimes did whenever he was getting close to a strong Myrmur… or multiple Myrmurs in close proximity.

And now he was starting to put the puzzle pieces together.

A few minutes later, their tunnel opened into a broad cavern with waist-high railings surrounding the elevated platform in front of them. They crept up to the railings in tandem, crouching low. The smell of rotten flesh and metal hit harder here, all swirling together in the rising heat, so they didn’t waste any time.

They peered over the railings to scan the rest of the cavern beneath them, and now they were better at scowling in sync.