Chapter 50: Lift Him Then!
The smaller bell did not ring again.
Fear showed across Lower Ash Bowl through ordinary things: spoons stopping over pots, curtains staying shut, children held behind furnace plates, and bowl hands watching without stepping forward.
The cookfires kept burning. The white-eyed woman kept one hand on her ladle. People crouched behind furnace plates and peered through gaps in their wraps. But no spoon scraped a pot. No child cried loud enough to be heard. The whole basin waited around the dark water channel while Kael held the drain mouth with Vaela and Orrek at his sides.
Renn’s voice carried up from below.
"All fourteen are clear. Della is shaking. Tavin’s shoulder opened again. Old Noll is breathing badly. Miro’s wrist is swelling. We need to move."
Kael glanced at Vaela.
"Route."
She pointed toward the channel beyond the last cookfire.
"Ash Sluice Three. It carries under the basin and drops into a cold run. We get water, distance, and worse things living in the pipes."
Orrek wiped blood from his mouth.
"You always save the cheerful part for last."
Kael looked for Pell.
The clean man had stepped back into the bodies around the far fire. He had not run. Men like Pell did not run when a hook failed. They looked for a larger hook.
The black intake scar in Kael’s palm tightened.
The scar tugged inward, a pull rather than pain.
Something below the furnace brick had felt his blood and learned it had not stopped him.
SCREECH!
A shell split open above the far fire.
The crowd broke apart.
Pell walked down the central aisle with six Soot-Hand captors behind him. They carried a cage-weight walker between them.
Its small size made it worse.
Four black furnace-bone legs held a square frame waist-high. A bronze bowl hung at its center, wide enough to swallow a child’s torso. Chains spilled from the rim like wet hair. Each chain ended in a different piece of taking gear: a wrist cuff, a neck collar, a boot hook, a rib clamp.
The captors set it down.
THOOM!
Its legs spread and dug into the ash.
Vaela went still.
"That is not a cart."
"What is it?" Orrek asked.
"A cage-weight walker. The Soot-Hands use it when somebody makes the bowl too costly to touch by hand."
Pell touched the bronze bowl with two clean fingers.
"You bruised my men. You turned pot-keepers against each other. You made a loud scene in a place where loud scenes get people hungry."
Kael said nothing.
Pell did not need an answer. He nodded to one of the captors.
The man pulled a cord.
The walker moved.
Its front legs lifted and planted one at a time. The bronze bowl swung. The chains dragged through ash with a soft metal whisper.
It walked past Kael.
Past Vaela.
Past Orrek.
It stopped at the drain mouth.
Renn looked up from the dark below.
"Kael?"
The bowl tilted toward him.
A neck collar shot out.
Kael reached for it.
Three Soot-Hand captors kicked the cookfire braces at once.
CLANG!
The nearest pot lurched. Steam exploded over the brick. Children screamed behind the furnace plates. The white-eyed woman threw herself against the pot support. If Kael charged Pell now, the captors would drop the fire on everyone still in the basin.
Pell watched the choice settle.
"The count man," he said. "The one who keeps your wounded from scattering. Break the hand that holds a line and the rest becomes easy."
Renn’s face had gone white.
He did not run.
That hurt Kael more than if he had.
The neck collar caught Renn across the chest and dragged him out of the drain. His back hit the ash. The walker chains snapped around both wrists before he could roll away.
Della screamed from below.
Renn gritted his teeth.
"Fourteen clear," he said.
Pell smiled at that. "There. You can count while it takes you apart."
The bronze bowl began to fill from a pipe in the walker frame. Not water. Grey slurry thick with ground bone and iron filings. It rose around Renn’s knees as the frame folded over him.
The captors pulled the cords one by one.
The wrist chains tightened.
The boot hooks caught his ankles.
Renn’s breath tore loose.
Kael’s unallocated shards stirred under the skin of his mind.
Four.
Enough to make an answer.
He could not spare the opening.
The Soot-Hand captors braced against the cookfire supports again. Vaela saw them. She could cut one rope. Maybe two. Orrek could break a knee. The walker would still close before either reached Renn.
Kael moved.
The cage-weight walker responded by dropping its front bowl brace toward Renn’s ribs.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ HOSTILE PRESSURE DETECTED: Soot-Hand Cage-Weight Walker
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +4
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +4 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Gravity Vector Impact -> 16
- Core Mass Density -> 19
- Velocity Movement Authority -> 14
- Primordial Marrow Layer -> 13
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Direct cage-break response reinforced under mass restraint pressure.
====================================================================
The reserve went to zero.
Kael did not hesitate.
He crossed the ash before the brace reached Renn. His left hand caught the falling furnace-bone bar. The impact drove both his boots through the top crust of the basin floor.
THOOM!
The walker tried to close harder.
Its bowl filled faster. The grey slurry slapped against Renn’s thighs. The wrist chains dragged his arms wide.
Kael held the brace with one hand and struck the front leg with the other.
BANG!
The leg bent.
The walker lurched, but the captors yanked their cords. A rib clamp snapped for Renn’s left side.
Vaela cut the nearest cord.
SNAP!
One cookfire brace swung free. The pot tipped toward a captor instead of the children. Boiling broth hit his apron.
He screamed.
Orrek hit the next man from behind with his chain.
CRACK!
The second brace rope went slack.
Kael drove his shoulder into the bowl.
The bronze rim rang. Grey slurry splashed across his chest. Faces moved in the surface for one blink: Della’s sister, Old Noll’s daughter, a small boy in blue cloth behind inward bars.
The images were bait. Pell’s bowl rig had been fed names, wounds, and scraps of people until it knew which faces could make hands shake.
Pell saw Kael look at it.
"Break it," he said softly. "See where the black thread reaches next."
Kael saw the chain-lung tube running from the bowl through the walker spine and into the furnace floor.
There was the body.
The tube was its only open connection.
He did not punch the bowl first.
He caught the tube with both hands.
It fought like wet muscle. Ridges under its skin flexed around his fingers. Black breath pulsed through it toward a buried pipe-lung below.
Renn gasped as the walker tightened.
Kael pulled.
The tube stretched.
The captors shouted.
Pell stepped back for the first time.
Kael planted one foot on the walker’s bent leg, twisted the living tube around his forearm, and tore it out of the furnace floor.
RIP!
Black breath burst across the basin.
The walker convulsed. Its chains loosened. The bowl lost its pull on the faces inside it. Grey slurry slopped over Renn’s knees.
Kael kicked the furnace-bone leg.
CRACK!
The walker folded sideways.
The bronze bowl struck the ash.
Kael caught Renn under the arm and dragged him clear before the other legs came down.
THOOM!
The cage-weight walker collapsed over its own chains.
Renn hit the ash hard enough to lose the breath he had been holding. The loose neck collar lay across his chest. Grey slurry ran from his hair into his eyes.
Kael dropped to one knee beside him.
"Hands."
Renn lifted them.
Both wrists were red and swelling, but the fingers moved.
"Ankles."
Renn flexed one foot, then the other. His face twisted.
"They hurt."
"They work."
"That is a very Kael answer."
The breath of a laugh escaped Orrek before he could stop it. It came out ugly, broken by pain, but it changed the air around them. Della heard it from the drain and made a frightened sound that turned into one too.
Then Tavin started crying.
Tavin tried to swallow the sound. He pressed both hands over his mouth as if he was ashamed the noise had found him. Della climbed out of the drain far enough to pull him against her shoulder.
"You did not go in the cage," she told him.
"Renn did."
"And he came out."
Renn sat up slowly. He wiped grey slurry from his face with the back of his wrist, saw the colour of it, and grimaced.
"I prefer counting names to being one of the things counted."
"Then keep your strap," Kael said.
The torn count strap lay three feet away, half buried under the walker’s chains. Renn crawled for it despite the pain in his wrists. He picked it up, tied the ripped end around his palm, and looked down the drain.
"Miro. Sair. Jessa. Old Noll. Tavin. Brek. Halra. Della. The furnace boys. The press women. The twins. Orrek. Vaela. Me."
He swallowed.
"Fourteen."
The white-eyed bowl keeper lowered her ladle at last. Her arms trembled from holding the pot up against the captors’ ropes. A child came out from behind the furnace plates and took her free hand.
Pell saw it.
So did every person who had kept their head down while the cage-weight walker closed around Renn.
The basin did not rush to Kael’s side, and danger did not vanish.
Pell’s hooks found no gap in the basin.
The Soot-Hand captors let go of their cords.
The cords slipped in uneven beats.
One stared at the torn chain-lung tube in Kael’s hand. Another looked at the white-eyed bowl keeper, who still held her ladle in both burned hands. The captor whose apron had taken broth was on his knees, skin peeling from his shoulder.
Pell stood alone in the open aisle.
Kael dropped the torn tube at his feet.
It wriggled once.
Pell did not look down.
"You have made this place worse," he said.
Kael’s chest rose and fell. He had no unallocated shards left. Blood ran from his palms. The scar in his hand burned hot enough to make his fingers shake.
"It was already worse."
Pell’s smile came back in pieces.
"Then carry your wounded into the pipes."
He turned away.
The black panel behind the far fire split open.
Inside it sat a corpse mouth set into the brick. It had no eyes. Black thread pulled its lips wide around a speaker stone. The stone clicked as the torn tube in the ash twitched toward it.
CLICK!
The mouth drew one long breath.
The black intake scar in Kael’s palm answered.
It answered without speech.
The pull ran so deep he felt it behind his teeth.
Something far below had tasted the torn tube, the broken walker, the blood on his hands, and Renn’s breath beside him.
It had found a new direction to grow.
Kael closed his fist over the scar.
Renn coughed grey slurry onto the ash, then looked up.
"Fourteen alive," he said.
Kael looked down the drain where Della held Tavin close, where Miro kept Old Noll upright, where the furnace boys clung to Sair’s wrap, where Vaela and Orrek were already turning toward the next dark route.
Zero shards waited behind his eyes.
His body did not feel weaker for spending them.
It felt heavier.
Built for the next thing that tried to close around his people.
Kael lifted Renn by the elbow.
"Count while we move."
Renn nodded once.
Behind them, nobody in Lower Ash Bowl cheered. Bowl hands, callers, pot keepers, and hungry watchers stared at the broken walker leaking black breath into the ash. By the time Kael reached the drain, every hook hand near the fires understood that lifting him again would cost flesh.