Chapter 46: Bowl Trap!
Lower Ash Bowl had no gate.
It was the Furnace Sink’s low feeding basin: three cookfires sunk into furnace brick, food counters made from old grates, ash drains underfoot, hook posts at the side lanes, and bowl hands who could turn a meal into a trap before the steam cooled. Every path that reached the basin passed close enough to smell what simmered over the fires.
Boiled fungus. Bone meal. Grey strips of something that had once had skin. The steam carried salt, smoke, and the sharp metal stink of water pulled through old pipes. It caught in Kael’s throat before he saw the people packed around the fires.
Hundreds of bodies moved between broken pillars and low stalls made from furnace grates. Some carried chipped bowls tight to their chests. Some crouched over coals with strips of fungus drying on wire. Some stood at the edges with hooks hidden in sleeves, watching every hand that shook too badly to hold a meal.
CLATTER!
A bowl struck stone near the middle fire.
Nobody lunged for it.
It was worse than a scramble. The people nearest the spill had trained themselves not to notice dropped food until the woman at the pot had decided who would bleed for it. The woman had one eye filmed white and both forearms scarred with old burn rings. A bone ladle rested across her shoulder like a club.
Vaela stopped at the lip of the black channel.
"Nobody goes straight to a fire," she said.
Orrek looked at the steam. "I have been smelling that pot for ten minutes. My body has already gone there. The rest of me is just catching up."
"Then make your body wait."
Renn pressed the count strap against his chest. His lips moved once before sound came out.
"Fourteen. Kael. Vaela. Orrek. Me. Sair has the salvage. Two skins. One drag line. Tavin’s shoulder is leaking again."
Tavin put his uninjured hand over the torn wrap as if that could make the blood disappear.
Della leaned close to him. "You are still walking. That is enough today."
The boy tried to nod and winced instead.
Kael watched the basin. A copper-masked man sat on a pillar near the far fire. His shirt hung open over ribs sharp enough to cut cloth. Bronze tags clinked from a length of wire wound around his wrist. Two women with blackened teeth stood near him, their palms buried in their sleeves.
They were not wardens.
Worse in a different way.
They did not need a uniform. They had hungry people around them and enough hooks to turn hunger into a trap.
A bell rang above the nearest pot.
CLANG!
The woman with the white eye lifted her ladle.
"First pot," she called. "Blades stay low. Hands stay where I see them. Anybody spills blood by my fire gets fed to the drain."
The answer came through movement. Three men in soot-dark wraps moved along the rim with iron ladles and short cudgels. The one with a split lower lip kicked a knife away from a kneeling boy, then shoved the boy’s face toward the hot brick until he cried.
There was the enforcement.
The rule lived in men with burned knuckles and heavy sticks, not in words carved on a wall.
Kael stepped from the channel.
Black water ran from his clothes. The den sap on his arms had dried into red flakes. His shoulder wrap was dark with fresh blood. The black intake scar in his palm showed as a black split under the skin.
The basin noticed him by degrees.
A child with a shaved scalp pointed. The child’s mother pulled the hand down so hard the child nearly fell.
The copper-masked man stopped tapping his tags.
The white-eyed woman looked from Kael to the fourteen behind him. Her gaze settled on Sair’s bundle.
"Fresh walkers," she said. "You brought the wild with you."
"It tried," Kael said.
Her mouth twitched. "Everything tries."
Vaela stayed at his left. Orrek stayed one pace behind, chain wrapped around his forearms. Renn kept the wounded between the fighters and the cookfires without making a show of it.
Kael liked that.
No speeches. No questions about who led. Renn saw an opening and put bodies where the opening needed bodies.
"We need water," Kael said. "Food. Binding cloth."
The woman tapped her ladle against the pot rim.
"Everybody needs something. What do you put down?"
Kael took a furnace-bone shard from Sair’s bundle. It was no longer than his palm, black at the center and amber along the edges. Even wrapped in old cloth, it hummed faintly against his fingers.
The woman stopped breathing for half a beat.
So did the people nearest her fire.
RUSTLE!
Hands shifted under rags. A hook tip appeared beneath a stall. Somebody gave a dry, hungry laugh and swallowed it when Kael looked over.
The woman covered the shard with her hand.
"Where did you take that?"
"From a den trying to eat us."
"You killed a den for soup?"
"We killed it to leave. Soup is what comes after."
Her white eye did not change. Her clear one did.
"Fourteen bowls," she said. "Thin. No meat."
"Thicker."
A few people near the fire smiled into their sleeves. Orrek made a sound that might have been approval.
The woman stared at Kael’s bare hands. At the split skin on his palm. At the blood that had stiffened his shirt to his ribs.
Then she added a second scoop to the first bowl.
"Fourteen fair bowls. Put the children at the wall. If one of them falls into my fire, I keep the shard and you carry the screaming."
"Done."
Renn exhaled through his nose.
Vaela leaned close enough for Kael alone to hear. "That fragment could have bought more than soup."
"It bought their eyes on someone else for a minute."
"A minute is not a shelter."
"It is enough to swallow."
The cookfire line formed badly at first. Old Noll tried to stand behind Tavin. Tavin tried to push the twins ahead. One of the furnace boys crept toward the steam before Renn caught the back of his wrap.
"Old Noll first," Renn said. "Then Tavin. Then the twins. Nobody drinks until I smell it."
The smaller furnace boy frowned at him. "You know what poison smells like?"
"No. But I know what moving root hair smells like, and I would rather not find out whether it likes soup."
The boy’s face went pale.
"Cruel," Della said.
"It worked," Renn answered.
Vaela’s smile flashed and disappeared.
The first bowl reached Old Noll. Steam wet his lashes. He held it with both hands for so long that Kael thought the old man had forgotten how to eat.
Then Noll brought it to his mouth.
GULP!
His throat worked once. Twice. His shoulders fell an inch.
The relief in that tiny movement hit Kael harder than the sight of a blade would have.
Tavin burned his tongue, made a strangled noise, and tried to hide it.
Orrek looked down at him. "If you die fighting soup, I will be furious."
The boy coughed into his bowl.
"I am not dying."
"Then live. I hate wasting anger."
The words landed rough, but Tavin’s shoulders stopped climbing toward his ears. He lowered the bowl, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and took the next swallow slower. Around him, two of the younger survivors copied him without being told.
Della took half a mouthful, then passed her bowl to the smaller furnace boy before he could pretend he was not still starving. He stared at her.
"You need it."
"So do you."
"I have teeth. I will find more later."
The boy did not smile, but he took the bowl.
At the far rim, a man in a black apron lifted a shell to his ear. The shell was yellowed and ridged like a severed ear. He whispered into its opening.
The shell pulsed red.
Vaela saw it at the same moment Kael did.
"Feeding-house signal," she said.
Kael took the next bowl and put it in Tavin’s hands.
"Let him send it."
Renn looked up. "Why?"
"Because now we know which pipe opens first."
The bell above the pot rang again.
CLANG!
This time, the white-eyed woman did not call out. She only looked toward the black-aproned man, then toward the copper mask.
The basin changed around the sound.
The people near the fires made room without moving their feet. Curtains fell across two side lanes. A mother lifted her child and carried him behind a stack of furnace plates. The soot-dark men stopped patrolling and watched Kael’s wounded line instead.
Renn noticed the movement.
"Ash drain," he murmured. "Red lamp. Soup pillar. If we split, those are the places."
The fourteen repeated the words back in low voices.
Kael looked at Renn.
The man had been a frightened laborer with a count strap and a habit of naming the missing. Now he was putting exits into exhausted heads before fear could erase them.
Someone near the copper-masked man laughed softly.
Then Pell Tarrow stepped away from the pillar.
He was clean enough to look diseased in the ash basin. His collar was grey silk. His hands were washed. Around his neck hung a shallow bronze bowl polished bright as fresh blood.
He did not reach for a weapon.
He did not need to.
Four Soot-Hand captors followed him with open hooks, a low cage cart, and the calm faces of men who expected somebody weaker to make the first mistake.
Pell smiled at Della before he smiled at Kael.
"Fourteen fair bowls," he said. "A generous beginning."
Kael watched the cage cart’s wheels leave grooves in the ash.
"You brought something for the end."