Chapter 56: Lower Song
The black furnace bone pipe did not carry them downward.
It listened them downward.
Every step touched a ribbed surface that answered with a low tremor. Not loud. Not violent. The kind of sound that slid under skin and made teeth remember they were set in bone.
HUM!
Jaro froze at the front.
His one ear twitched. The other side of his head, where the missing ear had been cut away, showed a pale scar shaped like a bitten coin.
"Stop," he whispered.
Vaela stopped first. Her hand rose without drama. The whole line tightened behind her. Kael stood at the rear with blood cooling down his back and zero unallocated shards inside him.
The number was not fear. It was weather. It shaped every choice. Renn leaned against the pipe wall and tried not to cough.
His throat had turned darker after the black intake probe. His left wrist was swollen enough to make his fingers curl wrong. Still, his mouth moved.
"Fifteen moving. Fourteen workers. Jaro added. Kael rear. Vaela front. Orrek too large for lower pipe."
Orrek grunted. "Say it with respect."
"Respectful blockage."
"Sharper."
Jaro spun on them, eyes wide. "Don’t joke at it."
"At what?" Orrek asked.
The pipe answered before Jaro could.
HUMMMMM!
The sound lengthened. It did not echo from ahead or behind. It came from the walls themselves, from old seams in the furnace bone, from round scars where mouths had once opened or been sealed shut. The survivors pressed closer together.
Tavin swallowed.
GULP!
A round patch of pipe wall beside his shoulder rippled like wet skin.
Kael moved one step.
The ripple stilled.
Jaro pointed at Tavin without touching him. "No swallowing loud. No answering. No singing back. No naming dead people. No saying your mother’s voice if you hear it. No saying yes. No saying no if it asks like family."
Sella stared at him. "That is a lot of rules for a pipe."
"It is not a pipe. It is old mouths wearing a road because bowl hands built over them and pretended they were dead."
Old Noll muttered, "Bowl hands do that with people too." Jaro nodded too fast. "Exactly. Same trick. Worse teeth."
The pipe sang again.
This time it had a voice under the hum. A woman laughing softly. A bowl being stirred. A lullaby with all the words missing except the shape of comfort.
One of the twins, Lira, lifted her head.
"Mama?"
Kael’s hand closed around the back of her shirt before the second syllable finished. The round patch in the pipe wall split open. Not wide. Only enough to show a row of black gums and flat furnace bone teeth.
CLICK!
Lira clamped both hands over her mouth.
The mouth waited.
It had no eyes, yet everyone felt watched. Vaela’s crescents stayed low. She did not strike. Smart. A mouth that opened because someone answered might also close because nobody fed it.
Jaro whispered, "Move by touch. No voices until I say." Renn’s eyes flared.
His whole purpose was voice.
Kael looked at him.
Renn gave one tiny nod, angry at his own fear.
So the line changed.
Vaela tapped Jaro’s shoulder once. Jaro tapped the pipe curve. Della tapped Tavin. Old Noll tapped Miro. Renn put his unhurt hand on Orrek’s belt because Orrek was impossible to miss even in the dark. Orrek reached back and tapped Kael’s forearm.
Kael tapped back once.
The motion traveled forward.
They moved.
DRIP!
Black water fell from the ceiling into shallow grooves. Each drop sounded too much like a tongue clicking. The pipe tried voices in the dark. A child asking for bread.
A dead worker promising a safe side cut. A bowl caller offering clean bowls. None of them got words back. The pipe did not only imitate familiar voices.
It tested useful ones.
A low voice promised a side route with no blood. A tired voice said the bowl hands had stopped hunting them. A woman’s voice said one of the twins had already fallen behind. Each lie arrived wrapped in something almost true: the scrape of a child’s heel, the smell of bowl steam, the rhythm of Renn’s damaged breathing.
This was what made the lower pipe dangerous. It did not invent fear from nothing. It used what the body already carried. Renn clenched his jaw until the muscles jumped in his cheek. Counting in silence was torture to him. His mind kept moving ahead, touching each person by memory, fearing that silence itself would erase them.
Orrek noticed.
The big man shifted his hand and pressed two knuckles lightly against Renn’s back. Once. Twice.
Renn blinked.
Orrek mouthed, Still there. Renn’s throat worked, but no sound escaped. For once, Orrek did not ruin the moment by being proud of it.
The old mouth beside Lira closed slowly.
SCRAPE!
The sound crawled along the pipe, disappointed. Kael kept his breathing shallow. He could feel the pipe testing rhythm. Fast hearts.
Hurt lungs. Swallowed grief. Every body carried a sound, and the lower pipe carried each one differently through its vents. A truth came with the hum: silence was not peace in the pit.
Sometimes silence was the only weapon poor people had left when every spoken name could draw a hook.
A little ahead, Jaro stopped again.
He held up three fingers.
Three sealed mouths waited in the pipe wall, each smeared with old bowl tar. The center seal had cracked. Something wet moved behind it.
HUM!
The song changed into Pell Tarrow’s voice.
"Warm bodies walk below. Speak, and I open the easy way."
Orrek’s back tightened. Kael saw the trap. Pell was only a borrowed voice. The old mouth had heard enough bowl-hook talk through the pipes to wear the voice badly. Too smooth. Too hungry.
Jaro mouthed a word.
Fake.
Vaela nodded.
Then the pipe spoke in Renn’s voice.
"Fourteen. Still fourteen."
Renn went white.
The survivors shifted.
The mouth had learned the count.
Kael stepped forward until his shoulder brushed Orrek’s back. Orrek felt him and held still. The old mouth repeated Renn’s voice, softer.
"Kael rear. Sluice broken."
The line went colder because the mouth had said it like bait.
Kael did not answer.
The Sovereign Root stayed silent. The song was hostile, but not yet pressure. It had not bitten breath, bone, mind, or flesh. No shard came. No false reward. Let that stand. The next stretch forced them past hanging strips of old black cloth nailed into the pipe. The cloth moved though no wind touched it.
RUSTLE!
Jaro held up one hand.
He pointed to the strips, then to his mouth, then made a cutting gesture across his own tongue.
Vaela frowned.
Jaro mouthed, They repeat last words. Kael looked at the survivors. One by one, they tightened lips, jaws, hands. Even Orrek went still, which made him look like a statue designed by someone angry at corners. The cloth brushed Tavin’s cheek as he passed.
RUSTLE!
It whispered in Della’s voice, almost perfect.
"Tavin, answer me."
The boy shook so hard Della had to wrap one arm around his chest and drag him forward. Her own eyes burned, but she did not speak. She pressed her forehead to the back of his head for one step, two steps, three. The pipe allowed no more comfort than that. Kael waited until they cleared the cloth, then passed last. A strip brushed his shoulder and whispered in Garron Voss’s old sneer.
"Kneel."
Kael did not slow.
The cloth tore on the rough edge of his wound and fluttered behind him, mute. Renn saw that and understood something without saying it. The pipe could borrow voices, but it still needed fear to carry them. If the line kept moving, even haunted cloth became cloth again.
The center seal bulged. When the center seal bulged, the air changed temperature. Not much. Enough for Kael to feel it on the wet cuts along his back.
The old mouth was not merely opening. It was measuring breath. The colder the air became, the more the survivors wanted to inhale sharply. The more they wanted to inhale, the more the pipe waited to catch the sound.
Kael lowered two fingers.
Hold.
The line held breath.
Sella’s eyes watered. Tavin trembled. Old Noll’s chest jerked once, but Della gripped his sleeve and he forced the cough down until his face darkened.
Jaro stared at them like they were mad.
Then he stared at Kael like he was worse. A man who could make starving people hold breath in a hungry pipe was not only strong. He was dangerous in the places markets rarely bothered to measure.
Jaro gestured left.
Vaela followed. The line moved around the three sealed mouths one body at a time. Lio almost slipped. Della caught him before his hand struck the wall.
The pipe hummed harder.
HUM! HUM! HUM!
Kael waited until the last survivor passed, then moved backward for three steps without looking away from the seals.
The center mouth opened.
"Protection man," it sang in the voice of the child from the grate. "Hungry people behind you. Hungry people ahead. How many names can your back carry?"
Kael stopped.
The mouth smiled with flat teeth.
Vaela’s eyes snapped to him from ahead. Do not answer, her face said.
Kael did not.
He lifted one hand and pressed two fingers to his own throat.
Then he pointed forward.
Move.
The line obeyed.
The mouth laughed without sound.
Behind them, far above, Third Bell rang through the bowl pipes.
CLANG!
The old mouths listened.
Then the lower pipe began to sing in harmony with the bell.