Chapter 63: Soot Signal
Pell Tarrow did not shout after his black bowl cracked.
Lower Ash Bowl read that silence correctly: the humiliation had gone deep. A loud man losing face hired fists, knives, and loud promises. Pell went quiet instead.
Quiet men made other people check the locks on their own doors.
CLINK!
The cracked bowl lay on a butcher block above Third Bell. Red furnace light moved across the split in its rim. Pell stood over it with his sleeves rolled past his wrists, watching the black glaze shed flakes onto the wood.
Across from him, two Soot-Hand cutters kept their heads down. Their soot aprons had been scrubbed clean enough to show the old bloodstains beneath. One held a brass hook. The other held a length of shoulder strap stiff with dried blood.
Neither liked being in the room with Pell when he was clean.
"That came off the boy?" Pell asked.
The woman with the hook nodded. "Tavin. Feeding-house carrier. He tore loose from the balance frame when Kael Vorr broke the sluice."
"He ran below with the others."
"Yes."
Pell pressed one finger against the crack in his bowl.
"And this?"
The second cutter lifted a sliver of old mouth enamel. It was wet, pale, and lined with tiny black teeth.
"Taken from the broken mouth under Ash Sluice Three. It still twitches when a pipe breathes."
Pell looked through the narrow window slit. Lower Ash Bowl spilled below him in smoke, hanging pots, furnace troughs, and bodies pressed close around food they could not afford to drop. People moved differently now. They kept glancing at the lower vents. They kept looking for a tall, battered boy with blood on his hands.
Fear had changed the flow of the bowl.
Fear of Kael.
Fear of what Pell would do because Kael had made him look small.
Pell turned back to the cutters.
"Put the strap on the pipe-lung."
The woman stopped breathing for a beat. "That lung has not been fed since the collapse."
"Then wake it."
"It may call anything carrying the boy’s blood."
Pell’s mouth barely moved. "Not for them. It is useful for us."
The cutter swallowed.
They went through the iron door into the room below.
It had once been a store cellar. Now a swollen pipe organ sat in its center. It had no keys. Wet black tubes rose from a pit in the floor and joined around a sack of muscle the size of a sleeping ox. Chain rings had been nailed through the muscle. Each ring pulled one mouth in the far lower routes open or shut.
Pell called the buried extraction organism the Hollow Throat. It woke only for meat, breath, and something it had touched before. The name frightened him because the body under it was real.
The old mouth enamel clicked inside the woman’s palm.
CLICK!
The pipe-lung flexed.
The second cutter drew his knife and sliced a fresh strip from Tavin’s strap. Old blood cracked. The smell reached Pell even from the doorway: sweat, fever, rope fibers, and the copper bite of someone who had been caught once and kept moving anyway.
He remembered the carrier now. Narrow shoulders. Bad luck. The kind of survivor who kept looking over his shoulder because he had learned too early that a hook could come from any direction.
Pell hated Kael more for carrying him out.
"Feed it," he said.
The cutter laid the strip across the pipe-lung.
The wet tubes snapped tight.
THWIP!
Muscle folded around the strap. The old blood disappeared beneath a skin of moving black pulp. Every pipe in the cellar gave a small, ugly breath.
HAAAH!
Above them, bells began to knock against their frames.
DONG!
It was a pulse.
Pell felt it travel through the floorboards and into his heels.
The woman with the hook stared at the lung. "It has his trail."
"No," Pell said. "It has his wound. There is a difference."
He stepped close enough to rest his hand on the slick pipe skin. It was warm. It shivered under his palm like an animal trying not to bite.
"Let the lower mouths smell him. Let the gates tighten when he leans on them. Let every old scar in his shoulder remember the hook that made it."
The second cutter looked up despite himself. "And Kael Vorr?"
Pell removed his hand.
"Kael will stand between the boy and the thing hunting him."
"If he does not?"
"Then the extractor takes one more frightened body."
The woman did not answer. She had carried cages for Soot-Hand crews long enough to know the honest shape of a threat.
Pell left the cellar as the first pipe cough rolled down through the furnace stone.
Below the bowl, the survivors felt it as a bell inside their knees.
DONG!
The lower passage had narrowed to a crawl. Black dust coated the floor. Dead marks stared down from the stone ceiling with their mouths sewn shut by old salt.
Vaela stopped first.
"Something above is pushing air into the pipes."
Jaro pressed his bad ear against the wall. The color drained from his face.
"Not air. A pipe-lung."
Orrek grunted behind Kael. "Is that bad?"
Jaro looked at him.
"It is always bad when I know the name of it."
Renn tried to laugh. The sound died before it left his throat.
Tavin was three bodies back in the touch chain. He had one hand clamped over the torn strap at his shoulder. The old hook scar beneath it had started to burn.
He kept quiet at first.
Then his knees buckled.
Kael caught him before his face struck the dust.
"Where?" Kael asked.
Tavin’s fingers shook against his shoulder. "The old cut. It feels like somebody put a hook through it again."
No answer came from the Sovereign Root.
Kael did not need one.
He smelled the change next: wet iron moving through a dry tunnel, far too fresh to belong there. The vents along the walls began to open one by one. Each showed a narrow row of tiny black teeth.
CLICK!
CLICK!
CLICK!
Vaela’s blade came free. "They fed the pipes something."
Jaro stared at Tavin’s shoulder. "Something of his."
Tavin’s face folded inward. "They can do that?"
"They can try," Kael said.
The first vent spat a thread of black mucus. It hit the dust beside Tavin’s knee and pulled toward him like a worm catching scent.
Orrek brought his boot down on it.
SQUELCH!
The thread burst. Three more slid out of the next vent.
The smaller furnace boy tried to scramble backward and struck his skull against the low stone. Della caught him by the collar before panic could send him into the next vent. Her own face had gone grey, but her grip stayed mean and steady. She shoved him forward instead of back.
"Eyes ahead," she mouthed.
He nodded too hard and crawled with tears running silently through the ash on his cheeks.
"Move," Kael said.
They moved.
There was no room to run. They crawled faster, elbows grinding through ash, shoulders clipping stone, breath caught behind their teeth. Kael stayed at Tavin’s side with one hand at the back of the boy’s neck. The other remained free.
DONG!
The bell hit again.
Every dead mark overhead opened its eyes.
Jaro flinched. "Do not speak. The lung uses sound to find the fresh line."
Orrek pressed his lips together so hard the scar at the corner of his mouth went white.
Renn looked at Kael. His swollen throat worked around a warning he did not dare give.
Tavin’s shoulder jerked.
The vents all hissed at once.
HISS!
Kael flattened his palm over the old hook scar through the strap. His hand came away wet. The wound had opened, a thin crescent of red in the dust-caked skin.
He closed his fingers around the strap and ripped it free.
Tavin gasped without sound.
The strip of old cloth writhed in Kael’s fist.
There.
The thing in the pipes wanted the blood in the strap, not the boy’s soul, not some invisible right to his name. A tool had found a scent. Tools could be fooled.
Kael wrapped the strap around a loose black stone, bit the stone free from the tunnel wall, and threw it down the side passage.
THUNK!
The vents snapped toward the sound.
Black threads poured after it.
The crawl passage shook.
Vaela stared at him.
"That bought us breaths, not distance," Kael said.
Jaro nodded once, terrified and grateful. "Then use them."
They used them badly at first. Noll’s knee struck a buried pin. Sair’s bundle scraped the ceiling and spilled two strips of dried root into the dust. Renn caught one strip with his teeth because both hands were busy holding the line together. Orrek wanted to curse and could not, so his face did the work for him.
The silence made every mistake louder.
SCRAPE!
A shoulder hit stone.
CLACK!
The count cord knocked against a dead mark and Renn froze until the mark stayed shut.
Kael felt the whole line learning how to move without sound. It was ugly. It was slow. It was alive.
They went forward again.
The passage bent beneath a rib of dead gate stone. A pale mark had been nailed into it with three bone pins. When Tavin crawled beneath, the mark peeled open and whispered through the rock.
It sounded like a hook dragging across a wound.
Tavin froze.
Kael got both hands under his ribs and pulled him through.
The mark split wider.
Behind them, all the dead eyes in the crawl opened at once.