Chapter 48: Fire Callers!
The feeding-house callers entered Lower Ash Bowl like singers.
Three climbed onto a row of cracked ration crates beyond the fires. Their arms were too long for their ribs. Black thread stitched half their eyelids shut. Hooks had grown through the flesh of their forearms and been polished bright with grease. Each wore a strip of red cloth knotted tight around the neck.
The tallest opened its mouth.
"Scarred meat by the first pot," it sang. "Wild sap on skin. Fourteen soft weights. Den bone under cloth. Ash drain ahead."
The other two joined in.
Their voices scraped the inside of Kael’s skull.
"Who pulls the trail? Who pulls the trail?"
The basin shifted without anyone making a clean move. A pot boy slid his ladle behind his back. A woman with an ash mask drew a curtain across a side passage. The copper-masked man disappeared behind a pillar. Mothers caught their children by the neck of the wrap and dragged them out of sight.
The people around the cookfires did not panic.
They made room for whatever had decided to hunt.
Vaela’s crescents appeared in her hands.
"Drain," she said.
Renn had already turned toward the fourteen.
"Same shape. Sair, bundle high. Miro with Old Noll. Della keeps Tavin and the smaller boy. Stay away from any song."
Tavin looked at the callers anyway.
The tallest pointed a hook at him.
"Shoulder blood. Pulse fiber. Little hands."
Della stepped in front of the boy. Orrek stepped in front of Della.
"Bid on me," he said. "I come with free dental work."
The callers giggled.
CLATTER!
Something fell from the ceiling behind Old Noll.
It was a cage collar made of four iron ribs. It struck around the old man’s chest and snapped shut under his arms before he could turn. A chain screamed upward through a pulley hidden in the smoke-dark rafters.
Old Noll cried out as his feet left the ground.
Kael caught the chain.
The links were cold enough to burn. The pulley above was not a mystery. A Soot-Hand captor stood on the roof grate with both boots braced against the winch bar. Two more leaned into the rope behind him.
Kael planted his feet.
The chain pulled.
His wounded shoulder tore open again.
THUD!
His boots sank into ash.
Orrek grabbed the cage rim and hauled downward. Vaela did not cut the chain. She cut the hinge pin beneath Old Noll’s left arm.
SCRAPE!
The pin slid free.
Noll dropped hard on both knees. Della pulled him clear before the collar could close again.
The roof captor cursed and kicked the winch.
A floor panel broke open beneath Sair.
Grey hands reached from the slot, slick with soot and drain water. One caught the salvage bundle. Another hooked Sair’s ankle.
Renn lunged for her. A side hook caught the count strap across his chest and yanked him toward a stall wall.
SNAP!
The first drain hand pulled Sair down to her hip.
Kael moved.
The shard inside him answered the second Soot-Hand hook cutting across his back, the slot trying to swallow Sair, and Renn’s strap drawing tight against his throat.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ HOSTILE PRESSURE DETECTED: Soot-Hand Pulley Snare
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +2
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +2 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Velocity Movement Authority -> 13
- Regenerative Dominion -> 12
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Movement response and wound closure reinforced under active hook pressure.
====================================================================
The new force did not slow the callers, hooks, or hands around the fires.
It made Kael reach the places where it was already breaking.
He crossed the ash between one breath and the next. His shoulder drew itself tight enough to stop pouring heat. His left hand caught Renn’s strap before the hook buried it in the wall. His right hand reached past Sair, closed over the wrist gripping her ankle, and twisted.
CRACK!
The hand went limp.
Kael used it to pull Sair up instead of throwing it away. She came free with black water streaming from one boot. He shoved the salvage bundle against her chest.
"Hold it."
Sair’s face was white. "I am holding it."
"Then run."
Sair did not move at once.
The hand Kael had broken still lay on the ash beside her boot. The fingers twitched around nothing. Black water dripped from the slot at her feet. She looked down at the salvage bundle, then at the wound in Kael’s shoulder, then at the drain where the twins had already vanished.
"I almost dropped it," she said.
"You did not."
"That is not the same as being useful."
A hook scratched across the furnace brick behind them.
Kael shoved her toward the drain.
"Useful is the next thing you do."
She went.
The words stayed with Renn as he dragged Miro past the broken stall. Miro’s injured wrist had swollen past the edge of its wrap. He kept trying to protect it from the basin walls and almost walked into a discarded pot stand.
"Eyes up," Renn said.
"I am looking."
"You are looking at your wrist. The floor cannot bite you from there."
Miro looked at the floor anyway.
Renn caught his shoulder before he could argue, turned him toward the drain, and pointed at the iron grate hanging between them and the callers.
"There. Get there. Then you can hate me."
Miro managed a breathless sound that might have been a laugh.
It gave the people closest to him enough nerve to keep their feet moving.
Above them, the caller with the broken face dragged itself behind a stall leg. One sewn eye had come loose. It swung against its cheek while the creature tried to sing through a mouth full of blood.
"Scarred meat keeps the small ones," it rasped. "Scarred meat makes every bowl hungry."
Della heard it.
Her hand tightened on Tavin’s wrap.
"It is trying to make them hate us," she said.
Vaela ducked under a falling hook and sliced its rope.
"Then do not give it a clean picture. Keep moving."
The hook crashed into the ash between the caller and the pot line.
Kael looked once at the white-eyed bowl keeper. The woman had not stepped forward. Her ladle was still raised. Her eyes were on the cookfire, not him.
It was enough.
She was protecting the pot because the people around it needed it. Kael did not need her to become one more body caught in his fight.
He backed into the drain after the fourteen, carrying the noise with him so the calls and hooks followed his blood instead of the people below.
The roof captor cranked the winch again. The cage collar jerked toward Old Noll.
Kael threw the broken drain hand at the pulley.
SPLAT!
The captor flinched. Kael seized the chain with both hands and pulled.
The rope snapped taut.
The man on the roof grate came over the rail headfirst.
CRASH!
He hit the ash beside the cookfire, lost the breath in his body, and tried to crawl. Orrek’s chain dropped around his wrist.
"You picked the wrong old man," Orrek said.
The captor reached for a knife.
Orrek stomped his hand flat.
CRACK!
The bowl keeper with the white eye swung her ladle between the pot and the struggle.
"Not by my fire," she shouted.
A caller hissed from the crates. "Bowl keeper hides scarred meat."
The woman looked at Old Noll’s shaking hands. Then at the child furnace boy pressed against Della’s hip.
"I hide nobody," she said. "I keep my pot from spilling."
The words did not make her brave. Her ladle shook.
They did make the nearest people hesitate.
Kael heard the change. Hooks stayed in sleeves. Feet stopped edging closer. The feeding-house callers had named prey, but everyone around the cookfires had seen the Soot-Hands pull an old man toward a roof grate.
That mattered.
The tallest caller sprang down from the crates.
Its hooks flashed for Tavin.
Kael stepped into its path.
The caller did not turn aside. It struck for his face with both arms, teeth opening sideways around a tongue black with ash sugar.
Kael caught its wrists.
The hooks dug shallow lines into his palms.
The creature smiled.
Kael drove his forehead into its face.
BANG!
Bone gave before the second impact.
BANG!
The caller folded. Kael kept one wrist, turned, and threw it into the stall wall where Renn’s hook had been fixed.
CRASH!
The wall broke. The caller’s shoulder came apart under its own body weight. It shrieked, flailed, and dragged itself backward with one hooked arm.
The two callers on the crates began to sing faster.
"Scarred meat breaks hands. Scarred meat breaks bowls. Pipe-rot stink grows."
Vaela cut through the rope of a hanging grate. The iron panel dropped between the callers and the fourteen.
CLANG!
"Drain," she said again.
This time, the fourteen moved.
Miro took Old Noll’s elbow. Della shoved Tavin ahead of her. Sair ran bent over the salvage bundle. The furnace boys held each other’s sleeves. Renn stayed at the rear of the wounded line, count strap torn but still around his chest.
Kael backed after them.
A man in a black apron struck the basin bell.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Four shapes appeared in the gap behind the cookfires.
They wore square iron cages over their heads and layered soot aprons stiff with pressure oil. Bronze tag chains swung from their wrists. Each carried a blunt weighing hook designed to catch cloth, wrists, and ankles without ending the body too quickly.
The white-eyed woman saw them and went still.
"Bowl Hands," Vaela said. "They work for whoever keeps the fires fed."
One of the cage-headed figures lifted its hook past Kael and pointed at Renn.
Kael watched the point settle on the man who kept the exits, the wounded, and the names from scattering.
The threat had learned where the shape held.
The ash drain swallowed the first of the fourteen.
Behind them, the Bowl Hands began to walk.