Chapter 57: Question Lock
Jaro had lied about knowing the lower pipe.
He knew it too well.
That became clear when the first pipe lock grew teeth from the floor and he cursed before it finished rising. The passage narrowed into a round intake tunnel where six bone ribs crossed like a closed hand. Each rib carried a mouth seal. Each seal had old knife marks around it, the kind workers left when they tried to open a route with panic and died proving panic was not a key.
Jaro crouched by the first rib.
"Bad," he whispered.
Vaela leaned beside him. "Useful word. Add more."
"This is a question lock."
Orrek’s face twisted. "A lock that asks questions. I liked gates better. They had manners."
"Gates eat fingers."
"Honest work."
The lock did not only squeeze bodies.
It squeezed choices.
A worker with room to think could be brave for a breath. A worker pinned shoulder to shoulder in a question lock had no room for clean courage. Every rib that closed made the mind smaller. Every scrape of bone against stone asked the same ugly question: who would you push aside if space ran out?
Kael watched that question move through them. Tavin looked at Della. Della looked at Old Noll. Old Noll looked at the twins and then at his own hands, as if trying to decide whether old fingers were worth less than small throats. Kael hit the pipe wall once with two knuckles.
THUD!
He kept the blow light enough not to wake more mouths and hard enough to pull eyes back to him.
He shook his head.
No choosing.
The line steadied.
Vaela saw it and said nothing, but her mouth tightened in that way that meant she had filed the moment away for later. She did that with dangerous things. Routes. Captors.
People. Jaro ignored him and touched the rib with two fingers. The bone warmed. He did not look brave doing it.
That made the act cleaner somehow. Brave people in stories stepped forward with shining eyes. Jaro touched the old lock with shaking fingers because the alternative was everyone being squeezed flat in the dark.
Vaela watched the shake, then watched him do it anyway. Her suspicion did not leave. It gained respect beside it.
The bone warmed.
HUM!
A mouth seal opened on the second rib.
"Who walks under Third Bell?"
Every survivor held breath.
Jaro shut his eyes.
Vaela caught his collar. "Don’t answer if it owns the answer."
"If nobody answers, it counts us as thief weight and squeezes."
"Then lie."
"That is what I am doing."
"You said that like you practice."
Jaro gave her a fast, frightened smile. "Only professionally."
Kael watched from the rear, one hand on the pipe wall. Zero shards. No buffer. The lock pressure had not touched flesh yet, but the ribs were closing by hair widths. Slow harm was still harm when fourteen injured bodies stood inside it.
Jaro cleared his throat.
GULP!
The mouth twitched toward the sound.
He flinched, then spoke in a strange bowl rhythm, half chant and half complaint.
"Wash water spill. Left trough cracked. Fifteen bodies moving through the drain. Keep your heads down. Do not call names."
The mouth rotated inside its seal.
"Lie detected."
Jaro’s face fell. Orrek sighed. "Short career." Jaro snapped, "Quiet, heroic blockage."
Renn almost smiled.
The rib lock squeezed.
SCRAPE!
The sound ran through the floor into Kael’s feet. This time it was pressure. The pipe was not only listening. It was crushing the route around them.
The Sovereign Root opened.
The command stayed inside his skull. Kael pushed the new pressure into THREAT PERCEPTION INSTINCT, letting the surge answer through bone instead of speech.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: LOWER PIPE LOCK COMPRESSION
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +1 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Threat Perception Instinct -> 11
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Immediate allocation completed. Unallocated Existential Shards: 0.
====================================================================
The new perception did not give Kael answers. It showed him which lie had almost worked. The lock had rejected the broken trough part. Not because it was false. Because it was too true and too fresh. Old mouths trusted stale lies more than bleeding facts. Kael tapped Orrek once. Then pointed to Jaro.
Orrek understood badly but fast.
"Boy. Lie older."
Jaro blinked.
Vaela’s eyes narrowed. "He is right. Make it sound like a wash run nobody wants to touch."
"I hate that both of you make sense."
The ribs squeezed again.
One survivor whimpered. The mouth seal smiled.
Jaro slapped the rib with his palm.
THUD!
"Correction," he said, louder. "Old wash run. Dead ash transfer. Third Bowl rot. Fifteen wet weights dragged through the stink before my mother’s mother lost her teeth."
The mouth paused.
Renn’s bruised throat worked around the words.
"That is nonsense."
Jaro whispered sideways, "Old bowl talk mostly is."
The mouth seal turned inward, chewing the lie.
CLICK! CLICK!
Another seal opened.
"Name to bite."
Jaro’s face emptied.
Vaela saw it before anyone else.
"He doesn’t know."
"I know many," Jaro whispered. "Not that one."
The ribs pressed harder.
Kael moved through the line. Bodies shifted aside. The pipe was too narrow, but fear made space where stone would not.
He stopped beside Jaro.
"Can it taste a name?"
Jaro nodded.
"If it is dead, yes. If it is living, worse."
Kael looked at the mouth.
"Use Pell Tarrow."
Jaro stared.
"He is alive."
"Necessary."
Vaela’s mouth twitched. "That is cruel."
"He bought the bell. Let it bite him."
Orrek grinned. "Now that is bowl education."
Jaro swallowed again, then faced the seal.
"Bite name: Pell Tarrow. Clean robe bowl boss. Third Bell bell-ringer. Fresh blood on his hands."
The mouth bit the air.
CHOMP!
Far above, somewhere in Lower Ash Bowl, a man probably felt his name get licked by something older than his hook rack.
The living name changed the air.
Mouths preferred the dead because dead names did not fight back. Pell’s name was warm, wrapped in fresh humiliation, and tied to Third Bell by thumb blood. The old pipe tasted all of that and became greedy in a new direction. The rib nearest Jaro clicked open half an inch.
Jaro’s eyes widened.
"It likes him."
"Most things with teeth do," Vaela said.
"No, I mean it knows his smell. He pushed his bell-scent into the lower pipe. That is stupid. Very stupid."
Orrek looked delighted. "Can we send it more of him?"
"Names are not meat," Jaro said.
Old hooks, tar slates, wet ash, dirty bowls, and hands ready to trade blood for breathing room touched the back of the tongue. Hunger, metal, old heat. The exact flavor of a place asking for more bodies.
"They are handles."
Renn whispered, "And he gave us his." Nobody laughed at that. Pell had tried to make the bowl hands remember Kael. Now the lower pipe had begun remembering Pell.
The pipe lock relaxed.
Only partly. Enough for the ribs to open a crawl gap. The gap scraped skin from everyone. Nobody passed clean. The gap stripped something from every body. The pipe took cloth, blood, pride, breath. Jaro whispered each body through with small corrections and smaller lies.
"Left hip first. Don’t touch the wet seam. Old man, tuck the bad knee. Twins, one at a time. No, not brave together. Brave separately."
Sella glared at him while sliding through.
"You talk too much for a boy with one ear."
"I hear enough with one to know you are mean."
"Useful mean."
"Best kind," Jaro said, and then looked surprised that he had meant it.
The crawl gap was mean.
Orrek had to turn sideways and drag his ruined shoulder through first. His face went gray, but he made no sound. New. Not because pain had left him. Because the pipe loved sound more than he loved complaining, and Orrek hated being useful to something he wanted to break.
Renn noticed the effort.
He touched Orrek’s belt twice.
Orrek glanced back.
Renn mouthed, Heroic blockage. Orrek’s grin came back small and ugly. Then he shoved himself through the gap with blood on his teeth and kept the line moving.
Jaro sagged.
Vaela caught him before his knees hit the floor.
"You knew about name taste," she said.
"Everyone who grows near sluices knows."
"You did not tell us."
"I was busy not dying."
"That excuse works once."
Jaro looked at Kael, then at the survivors pushing through the gap.
"I know lower pipes. I know mouths. I know which songs mean bite and which mean bargain. I also know if Pell catches me, he will hang my remaining ear from a bowl hook. So forgive me for being selective."
Renn crawled past him, breathing hard.
"Selective is a polite word for slippery."
"I like polite words. They make ugly things cheaper."
"You will fit in terribly."
Jaro barked one scared laugh.
"Ha. I am not fitting in. I am passing through."
Nobody argued.
Temporary people still bled when the road narrowed. Temporary people still needed someone to hold the line. The pipe did not care what any of them called themselves, and that made the words feel smaller than the hands keeping bodies upright. Their shape had become this: passing through, all of them, until the narrowing road showed who had become more than temporary.
The last rib lifted.
Kael waited until every survivor crossed. The mouth seal followed him with a wet turn.
"Pell Tarrow," it whispered, tasting the name again.
Above, Third Bell rang once, sharp and wrong.
CLANG!
Vaela glanced back.
"You just gave Pell’s following hands to an old mouth."
Kael stepped through the opened lock.
"He sent the bell below."
The lock closed behind him.
SCRAPE!
"Now something below can answer."