A single compressed impact from under the iron frame, conducted through its four settled legs into the fitted block, the corridor walls returning it once before the echo died. His weight went flat on both soles without consulting him. The floor thumped again, faster, then a third time faster still, the interval collapsing toward a fixed target.
On the fourth beat, the sound that came up through the alcove stone was a shriek.
Metal against metal under full rotational load, ancient iron joints finding their opposing faces for the first time in two hundred years, the oxide fracturing along its contact bonds before the turning could complete. High and sustained, past the point where stone should have absorbed it, the close-cut alcove walls driving it into the corridor at full volume. His forearm went across his ear a full second late.
The spike array was moving.
The first spike retracted from its seated position in a short, twitching pull as the joint beneath found its arc. A second drew back from the far end of the frame. Then the central section together, the whole upper face opening along joint axes that had been invisible while the mechanism was locked, and what the opening revealed was not the flat backing of a frame.
[ ALERT: CONSTRUCT - WAKING ]
[ IRON-MAW: WAKING ]
WE SHOULD HAVE FLAGGED THIS EARLIER. WE KNOW.
The four legs he'd seen were only the ones it had been standing on. Four more had been folded flat against the frame's underside, each articulated section compressed into the body at angles that read as bracework while nothing was driving them. The nearest dropped below the frame's lower margin: three hinged sections extending in sequence, something old forcing black ichor through the channels at each joint. The whole limb went from folded to braced in a grinding four-second sequence. The stone floor took a point load it hadn't been asked to accept in living memory. The second hidden leg found the stone on the far side, then the rear pair, and the original four lifted clear and re-angled into the same jointed stance, the body rising off the alcove floor in one slow, committed climb while old magic forced its shriek through every new joint.
The arcane magic arcs announced itself through the corridor stone before the motion showed. Then the upper body rotated on its pivot, shedding rust in long, slow curtains through the sigil-light, and the reconfigured spike array swept the corridor's length, came around to Cell 6's door frame, and locked.
[ IRON-MAW CONSTRUCT: ONLINE ]
[ PLATING: IMPERVIOUS - STANDARD WEAPONS ]
[ STATUS: HUNTING ]
YOUR SWORD WILL NOT PIERCE THAT PLATING. NEITHER WILL THE DAGGER. THE PRYBAR IS ALSO USELESS. WE RECOMMEND MOVING. ALSO: SORRY ABOUT THE ALCOVE.
Eight legs on fitted stone at full committed speed, each jagged tip punching into the surface at the stride's deepest point, stone chips scattering at every contact. The shriek of it hit the corridor walls and came back without losing its edge, filling the cross-section of the passage, the construct's eight-legged shadow thrown down the corridor at a size the corridor couldn't contain.
He went back into the cell before the thought finished.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The locked knee fired through its bad angle on the first push and gave him half the distance the stride needed. Four feet of buckled flagstone. He went down flat at the rack with his arms ahead and the shriek closing behind him, each of its strides covering three of his.
[ IRON-MAW: CHARGING ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: FASTER. WE ARE AWARE OF YOUR KNEE.
The construct hit the Cell 6 threshold.
The sigil-light behind it laid the geometry out in flat, precise detail: the hanging door torn off its last hinge and flung into the cell, then the first pair of legs entering the door mouth, three others driving into the door-post faces at once. The near post split from floor to ceiling along the mortar course in one fracture, a block of dressed stone dropping inward across the flagstones. Another leg found the widened gap and punched through. The second post fractured at its base, mortar dust coming down through the white in a long, even fall.
[ CONSTRUCT: FORCING ENTRY ]
[ CELL WALL: FAILING ]
He was already in the gap, the scabbard hugged to his forearm. The prybar jammed sidelong against the frame and he twisted it parallel before a spike found his coat at the shoulder blade and stripped a long section free. The main bar found the fractured rib a second time, and the break sent a peak signal that held for every remaining inch.
He came out the far side in a forward pitch and dropped the thirty inches onto the offset passage floor. Behind him, Cell 6's upper door course collapsed with a boom that traveled through the stone and reached his palms half a second after the sound.
[ CELL WALL: BREACHED ]
[ CONSTRUCT: INSIDE CELL ]
WE CAN HEAR THAT.
He got upright with the passage wall at his back. He hooked the scabbard back on his belt. The tome's whispering held its low cycle in the inner pocket. The block shuddered against the cartographer's disc. The lantern still burned where he'd hooked it on his belt with the shutter cracked, its orange gone thin and pointless against the white coming through the rack.
Through the tangle of bars, the construct stood at full extension inside Cell 6: eight legs reset on the buckled stone, the central body turned on its axle toward him, its bulk filling the four-foot cell from wall to wall. The eighteen-inch gap he'd come through was a man's width. It was not a construct's.
[ IRON-MAW: REORIENTING ]
[ OBSTACLE: DETECTED ]
THE RACK IS BETWEEN YOU AND IT. WE HAVE SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT HOW LONG IRON HOLDS AGAINST IRON.
He went north along the passage, his left hand reading the stone. The wire spool was still in the coat's inner lining where it had been since the Sump-Blight, and he pressed two fingers against the wool to judge what was left on it: twenty feet at a guess, enough to string across a narrowing in the passage if there was one.
The fitted block ran straight and even for forty feet without a narrowing, and he kept going with the spool untouched.
The first blow landed on the rack behind him. The passage returned it from both walls at once: a flat, driven knock of metal on metal, none of the charge-shriek in it. The echo died and left the passage quiet. Through the breach the white still blazed down the inscribed corridor, every chisel mark in every count band throwing its lateral shadow, a sanctum built to run this way and now running it again.
Where the fitted block gave way to rough-cut stone, Vane stopped and put his back to the wall. North, through the cavern arch, the chains held their two wrong notes over the drop. South, the construct was working on the rack. His chest moved at the depth the fracture allowed. The rack was one unknown and the walkway beyond the arch was another, and the thing behind the rack had been built for exactly this place, and wasn't going to care how long either of them took.
Somewhere above all of it was a room with the bar on the inside of the door. He hadn't come this far to die short of it.