Gem-Breaker

The Gem-Breaker is the muster-roll designation for the Meroveil Empire's sapper-corps heavy — the man sent to a gate that will not open — and the current named bearer of the title in the southern campaign is Master-Breaker Halvard Rusk, age thirty-nine, quarry-born in the Hedra granite pits and sixteen years on the corps. The corps has tabled two retirement-eligibility reviews on the grounds that his gauntlets have never been fitted to a second pair of hands and the armourers are not confident they can be. Halvard has not commented on either review. He has not, the corps notes, been in a hurry about anything in sixteen years, and the corps has stopped expecting him to start.

His combat-grant is the piston-plant: the oversized gauntlets run on mana vials the size of wine bottles, one at each shoulder, and each strike is a piston-stroke driven by the vial rather than by the arm, which is why a man of his patience can bring down a wall a man of anyone else's strength cannot. The vials run hot. The plate he wears is thick enough to shed the heat and heavy enough that the corps issues him a second mule, and it is engraved, every inch of it, with roses — his own work, cut by hand in the slow mornings the corps has learned to leave him, one rose for every wall he has brought down. There are one hundred and six. The quartermaster stopped asking why the plate kept getting heavier at forty; the corps has begun, quietly, to count the roses after each engagement rather than to ask.

He stands the imperial line under General Thalia Crowe's southern-army authority and is on measured, argumentative terms with Reach-Sergeant Hallorin of the Vanguard when the formations are co-deployed; the two have disputed the correct gap between a gauntlet and a wall across three engagements and Halvard has, in his own words, 'let the lad keep his inch.' Renzo Callix has challenged him to a strongman contest three times and has been declined three times, courteously, on the grounds that the gauntlets would be cheating and the arms without them would be a disappointment to everyone. The one hundred and seventh rose has been sketched on the inside of his left vambrace in chalk. He has not said which gate it is for. The corps has an idea.