Sigrun looked up from the last of the satchels, brow fraught and lips worried. The bullet had torn through the delicate gears of her prosthetic limb like a fencing blade through parchment. Her entire left arm had little use beyond deadweight. But neither the pain of her wrenched shoulder nor the frustration of her unfruitful search could compare to the urgency of the warning her sixth sense screamed at her.
Her eyes travelled not to the pile of tablet-like stones she had pulled from the Alerian hoard. Her nose reached beyond the acrid stench of gunpowder, nearly drowned beneath the heady petrichor and wafting corruption. Her ears skipped past Obahyurur’s metallic groans as sharpshooter and bladedancer fought it to a standstill. She concentrated on the roiling clouds above, heedless of the slick rain leaving oily streaks upon her face. Something approached through the mirky skies, something neither beast nor monster... something...
Only she caught the faint flash of fire in the dark, far over the sharpshooter’s head. Only she picked out the thundercrack of the report, louder than any chime of falchion upon iron hide. Only she had the sense to throw herself into cover, leaving the last of the precious artefacts exposed to the wind and the rain and the wrath of what had just come.
By Freyja’s right pap, she swore to herself as the world erupted in bright lights and flying shrapnel. No wonder they camped here long enough for us to catch up!
The skyship parted the clouds like a valkyrie calling the dawn, two hundred feet of sleek oak hull suspended from spidersilk sacs inflated with buoyant deadgas. An Alerian frigate, swift as the west wind and as powerful as any behemoth to fly the skies of the Dagger Peaks. Fifty trained elves manned their battle stations: boarding marines, bombardier gunners, and arcanotech engineers. No doubt, like all frigate crews, they shared a hunger to make a name for themselves and secure promotion to a ship-of-the-line or even a dreadnought. It was a sign of dark elven military superiority that they would risk it, unescorted, deep in enemy territory to retrieve a stranded team of specialists.
Port and starboard swivel guns, mounted in the keel of the vessel with unrestricted fields of fire upon ground targets, opened up anew with lances of flame. Curtains of steam rose where they gouged great craters in the sodden earth. The Blackcloaks retreated behind the veil as rappel lines let loose from the frigate’s under-hatches.
“Oby! Sham Abram!” she bellowed at the top of her lungs. She had to hope that her voice would reach the golem over the deafening thrum of the skyship’s engines and the unrelenting hammering of heavy rain upon earth.
She had lost. There was not a chance in the underearth that she could go up against even the least of Alerian war-machines and hope to survive.
The Blackcloaks would retrieve their artefacts and disappear. She would remain behind with a broken arm, a half-destroyed golem, and the unimportant ingredients of a useless recipe.
The elves and that accursed taleweaver had outwitted her completely, unless...
Unless...
Shards of splintered stone skimmed her metal limbs as the bombardiers on board the Alerian vessel methodically reduced the Raiaeran temple to rubble. Light leather footfalls in churned mud heralded the arrival of the frigate’s complement of marines to bolster the Blackcloaks.
But Sigrun’s eyes narrowed in dawning realisation and, following a moment’s reflection, deathly malice.
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