Chapter 53: Fourteen Tally!!
Copper smoke did not move like smoke.
The ash drain narrowed around Renn while bowl hands above worked the bell pipes and grate vents. Bruises, weak knees, and bad footing became useful before any hand reached him.
GULP!
Nobody mistook the pause for peace. In Lower Ash Bowl, peace had never smelled like ash drains, bone teeth, apron scraps, sour bowls, and knife-marked counters. The smoke had weight now, enough to bend thin puddles away from it as it crawled.
It crawled.
A bitter copper thread slid through the ash drain, thin as a vein and meaner than fire. It kept low to the water first, testing the channel, licking stone, tasting the sweat on knees and palms. Then it rose one finger at a time.
HISS!
Tavin gagged.
GULP!
Old Noll pressed his sleeve over the boy’s mouth.
"Quiet breath," he whispered. "Little ones. Don’t swallow the air whole."
"It burns," Tavin said.
"Everything here burns. Pick a smaller complaint."
That got one weak laugh from Sella. It died fast when the smoke found her eyes. Kael raised his hand and the line stopped. Fourteen survivors hunched in the channel, pressed together between wet ash, ribbed stone, and bowl hands that had learned to hunt without running.
The drain was too narrow for a clean fight. Too low for Orrek to swing. Too crooked for Vaela to sprint ahead. Too crowded for panic.
Perfect for a trap.
Third Bell had sent bowl hands, grate vents, and copper smoke into the drain. Now the smoke came for the line. Renn breathed through his teeth. His throat had swollen worse since the weighing jaw. Every count cost him air now.
Purple flesh climbed both sides of his neck. His left wrist had wrapped itself in heat and tremor. Still, he lifted two fingers and pointed down the line.
"Fourteen," he rasped.
Vaela looked back. "Not now."
"Now most."
"Your throat sounds like it lost a fight with a hook."
"It did. Still counting."
Orrek crouched beside him, too large for the drain and angry about every stone touching his shoulder. "If you pass out, I am counting you as luggage."
Renn blinked slowly.
"Heavy luggage?"
"Annoying luggage."
"Accurate."
The exchange steadied the line more than comfort would have. Comfort lied too often. A bad joke told the truth and left room to breathe around it.
The smoke thickened.
HISS! HISS!
A dark shape formed inside it above the water. Not a body. Not fully. A black copper ribbon, hooked and jointed like a centipede. It turned in the air and opened along its middle.
Vaela’s crescents came up.
"Hook-mark," she said. "Don’t let it touch skin. It follows warmth."
"On who?" Della asked.
The mark slid past Vaela.
Past Orrek.
Past Kael.
It aimed for Renn.
Of course it did.
Renn’s count made him dangerous. If the bowl hands took the boy naming every body, they could scatter the line in the dark. Renn saw it coming and tried to crawl backward.
His wrist failed.
SCRAPE!
His shoulder hit stone. His mouth opened. No sound came out.
Kael moved.
There was no shard behind the movement. No reserve flashed. No hidden burst waited under his ribs. He had body, pain, timing, and the narrow truth of the drain. He drove his left forearm between Renn and the floating mark.
The script bit him.
SIZZLE!
Black letters sank into his skin and dragged toward the bone, looking for a living pulse. The black intake scar in his palm pulsed once. The copper hook-mark tightened around his forearm like hot wire. Pain climbed hard enough to whiten his sight.
The Sovereign Root woke.
The command stayed inside his skull. Kael pushed the new pressure into REGENERATIVE DOMINION, letting the surge answer through bone instead of speech.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: LOWER ASH HOOK-MARK PRESSURE
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +1 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Regenerative Dominion -> 13
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Hostile hook damage redirected into active recovery tissue.
====================================================================
Regeneration did not make the pain kind.
It made the damage usable.
Kael closed his fist on the hook-mark.
The script tried to pull away.
Too late.
CRACK!
His fingers crushed the air around it. Not because script had bones. Because the mark needed pressure shape to exist, and Kael’s grip broke that shape against the reinforced meat of his own palm.
Black ash burst between his knuckles.
PFFT!
Renn stared.
"You... let it write you."
"It wanted you."
"Bad trade."
"I chose it. That makes it mine."
Vaela’s eyes flicked to Kael’s forearm. The black letters had not fully vanished. A few black hooks remained under the skin, twitching as his regeneration burned them down.
"That’s not a clean burn," she said.
"It will be."
"You say that like your body is a furnace with opinions."
Orrek leaned closer. "Isn’t it?"
"Keep moving," Kael said.
Renn pushed up too quickly and almost folded.
Kael caught the back of his shirt again.
"Middle."
"I can walk."
"You can count. That is what we need."
Renn’s jaw tightened. Pride looked strange on a man that frightened, but it was there. Small. Ugly. There.
"Fourteen," he said.
"Names," Kael replied.
Renn swallowed, coughed, and began again.
"Tavin. Della. Old Noll. Miro. Sair. Brak. Sella. The twins, Lio and Lira. Jass. Venn. Cora. Me. Kael rear. Vaela forward. Orrek too large for any sensible drain."
"You counted Orrek wrong," Vaela said.
"How?"
"He’s a blockage."
Orrek grinned. "A heroic blockage."
"A loud one."
The line moved again.
Above them, bowl-hand footsteps followed through grates and side cuts. Not many. Just enough. Pell was not wasting bodies. He was steering them through pipes already threaded with hooks.
SCRAPE! SCRAPE!
A hook dragged above the grate.
A voice called down, sing song and false sweet.
"Boy who counts. We have throat oil, wrist wraps, one clean bowl. Say the names into the smoke and crawl out with both hands."
Renn flinched because pain made any offer sound useful.
Kael looked up through the grate.
A caller crouched there, face hidden behind a stitched feeding mask. One eye watched the drain. One hand held a brass cup with oil shining inside.
"He is hurt," the caller said. "You make him crawl. We can make him useful without pain."
Orrek muttered, "I can break the grate."
"Too narrow," Vaela said. "You break it, half the roof comes down and we become boiled sludge."
"I hate correct answers."
Kael kept moving until he stood under the grate.
The caller smiled behind the mask.
"Protection man. You have no room to swing, and your black pressure has gone thin. I watched your face when it quieted. Bowl hands can smell a wounded bluff."
Renn’s breath hitched.
The line heard it.
Kael did too.
He looked at the caller through the grate.
"Then smell this."
He punched upward.
The grate was the wrong place to watch.
At the stone socket holding it.
THUD!
The socket cracked. The grate did not fall. The caller did. His chin slammed into the iron lip from above.
CRACK!
Teeth spat through the gap and clicked into the drain water.
CLATTER!
The caller screamed, but the grate stayed mostly fixed. Kael had broken the support enough to hurt the man, not enough to bury the line. Clean violence. Controlled in a space that punished wild swings.
Vaela gave him one sharp nod.
"Sharper."
"Than?"
"Than bringing the ceiling down because someone annoyed you."
"I learn."
"Slowly."
Renn made the thin broken laugh again.
Then he counted the teeth before he could stop himself.
"Six. No. Seven. One went under."
Everyone stared at him.
Renn blinked.
"Sorry. Habit."
Orrek shook his head. "Never apologize for being ruined in a useful way."
The words landed heavier than he probably meant.
Renn looked down.
Nobody mocked the silence that followed.
They crawled through copper smoke until their eyes streamed and their mouths tasted metal. The black hooks under Kael’s forearm finally burned away, leaving blackened pin tracks and a hot ache under the skin. The burn kept crawling under Kael’s skin even after the mark broke. Thin black lines tried to regroup around the small veins in his forearm.
Regenerative Dominion worked like a hard hand inside the wound, closing tissue around each hook of hostile script and squeezing until the ash came out through the pores.
It was ugly healing.
Useful healing.
Renn watched too closely.
"Does it hurt?"
Kael looked at him.
Renn flinched. "Stupid question."
"Yes."
"To which part?"
"Both."
That got a crooked breath from Renn that almost became a laugh. Almost. His throat stole the rest.
Vaela checked the ceiling line, then the floor grooves. "Pain is not the issue. Delay is. If that mark slowed his grip by half a blink, the next hook gets somebody small."
"I heard that," Tavin whispered.
"Right," Vaela said. "Be harder to hook."
Della glared at her.
Vaela did not apologize. She did step closer to Tavin’s side when the next smoke thread crawled over the water. Ahead, the drain widened enough for two people to stand crooked.
A round door waited at the end.
Three grooves cut through it like a mouth full of flat teeth. Beside the door, scratched into stone by many hands, were three words.
BLOOD FEEDS WATER.
Vaela crouched, read the scratches, and exhaled.
"Ash Sluice Three is close."
Renn lifted his shaking hand.
"Fourteen. Still fourteen."
Kael looked at the tooth door.
Above, Third Bell rang once more.
CLANG!
The door opened a slot and pushed out a slow wet breath.
HUUUHHH!
Then the black intake scar in Kael’s palm opened like an eye under his skin.