The Weight of Slag

The scalding yellow water reached Vappuinen's armpits before he found the brass pressure-cock behind the conduit sill. If he failed to bleed the steam header before the next surge from the quench pumps, the drowned vault would cook him down to gristle. Clamping the six-pound bronze ingot under his left arm, he worked the notched copper sounding-wire into the seized valve notch.

The metal groaned. Sulfur vapor screamed from the pipe flange, spitting slurry across the basalt blocks.

Above the pool, the air shivered. The quench pumps thumped in the stone ribs of the bastion, three strokes to every pulse of his blood. The water stopped its rise two inches below his chin. Through the roar of the intake pipe came another sound—the scrape of an iron hook against the masonry weir twenty paces downstream.

Kaatunen had not run back to the market quarter. After wedging the vertical chimney from above, the scrap-broker had slipped down the dry lateral siphon to the inspection ledge above the weir, slag hook balanced across scarred knees, waiting for the quench surge to wash Vappuinen's boiled corpse down against the trash-grate.

Vappuinen shoved heavy muck over the submerged ironwood crate until realgar silt hid the eleven remaining ingots. He kept only the single bar tucked inside his wet tunic.

The water blistered his thighs through his trousers, but he stayed low, drawing shallow air through the charcoal sponge until the bitter lime turned sweet with moisture. He gripped the copper sounding-wire with both hands, jammed the flattened tip beneath the relief lever on the quench pipe, and threw all his weight downward.

The bronze spindle sheared with a sharp screech.

A blinding wall of trapped arsenic steam erupted from the blown seam. The cloud blasted along the ceiling vault, rolling over the inspection ledge in a roaring green billow.

Kaatunen screamed, dropping the slag hook and clawing at fogged goggles as emerald vapor scorched the hemp ties of his apron. The broker slipped on wet stone, pitching forward into the shallow weir channel.

Vappuinen surged out of the pool. He drove the square heel of his copper wire into Kaatunen's wrist, pinning the hand against the basalt curb. Drawing his broken bronze scraper, he pressed its chisel-ground edge under the broker's jaw.

The lime wash on Kaatunen's cowl had dissolved into yellow paste. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps.

"The siphon," Vappuinen said, his voice flat inside his filter. "Back up the lateral chute."

Kaatunen clutched at the slimy stone. "The siphon hatch has an iron drop-bar, Vappu. You trip that pipe again and we both boil."

"Then climb first and lift the bar," Vappuinen said. He twisted the scraper until dark blood welled against the bronze. "Or I drop you back into the intake drain and climb over your shoulders."

Kaatunen shuddered and nodded.

They scrambled up the maintenance rungs of the lateral siphon. Kaatunen climbed ahead, coughing wet phlegm into his cowl, his boots slipping on copper slime. At the forty-foot mark, the broker reached the upper hatch, shoved the iron drop-bar aside, and threw back the lid. The heavy hatch creaked open.

Kaatunen hauled himself onto the surface flagstones first. Vappuinen followed, dragging his ribs over the stone rim into the ash-laden breeze of the Foundry Quarter.

Before his boots touched the cobbles, an iron-shod timber slammed across Kaatunen's temple.

The scrap-broker dropped without a cry, collapsing face-down into a heap of cold clinker.

Vappuinen recoiled, reaching for the flue rim to drop back into the dark. A heavy, bull-hide boot crashed down on his fingers, grinding his knuckles against the basalt edge.

"Stay in the light, ditch-rat," a voice grated.

A massive shock-trooper stood over the drain, blocking the daylight. He wore a quilted steppe vest reinforced with bull-hide and held a two-handed copper-shod timber maul against his thigh. Geometric ritual scars ran down his thick jaw.

Tuurelt. Sledge-Leader of Terhenen's foreign auxiliaries.

Around the alley, five steppe mercenaries formed a half-circle with leaf-bladed short swords and horn bows. Behind them, stacked by a furnace buttress, sat four cargo sledges holding the forty four-hundred-pound copper counterweights looted from the Lower Canyon Armory that morning, alongside crates of thirty-pound balancing shims.

Tuurelt grabbed the neck of Vappuinen's cowl and yanked him from the vent.

The six-pound ingot slipped from Vappuinen's tunic, striking the cobbles with a heavy, ringing chime.

Clang.

The acoustic resonance hummed through the alley, vibrating against the basalt walls of the Great Crucible Bastion fifty paces away. Two archers lowered their bows, staring at the iridescent turquoise bar on the dirt.

Captain Terhenen stepped from the colonnade shadows.

He walked with the loose, balanced stride of a plains hunter, his bull-hide harness worn thin at the straps and his bronze leaf-sword hanging from a rope belt. Ignoring Kaatunen bleeding in the clinker, he nudged the fallen ingot with the tip of his dagger.

"Pick it up, Tuurelt," Terhenen said.

The sledge-leader scooped up the bar, turning it in his palm. "Heavy. Too light for pure lead, too dense for brass."

"Wipe the ash off the heel," Terhenen said.

Tuurelt rubbed the thick end of the bar. The twin curved horns of the Fourth Dynasty double-ox mark gleamed pale green in the afternoon light.

Terhenen took the bar, weighing it with three quick bounces of his wrist. "Ten parts arsenic. Two parts meteoric iron. Poured before the canyon mines caved in forty winters back." He looked down at Vappuinen. "Where did a gutter scraper find pre-blockade war-bronze?"

Vappuinen knelt on the cold stone, his knuckles throbbing. If he named the drowned vault, the mercenaries would strip the eleven remaining ingots and slit his throat.

"The runoff siphon under the West Sump," Vappuinen said. "Blast slag broke a conduit three days ago. One bar washed down with the clinker. Only one."

Terhenen crouched until his gray eyes were level with Vappuinen's goggles. A scent of dried mutton and steppe salt rose from his leathers.

"You lie well for a starving boy," Terhenen said softly. "A single bar does not sit in a wash-channel without a crate to keep water off the bitumen. But I do not care about your little mud holes today." He tapped the flat of the bronze bar against Vappuinen's cheek. "Look at my sledges."

Vappuinen shifted his gaze toward the forty massive blocks of cold-hammered copper.

"Matriarch Annukalt dropped her ram-gates at dawn," Terhenen said. "The surface avenues to the Great Crucible are blocked by thirty-ton portcullises and Joukalt's pikes. But the foundations of the High Basalt Bridge rest on the drainage piers. You know the dry inspection flues large enough to slide a copper weight without tripping quench floats."

"The flues are choked with arsenic scale," Vappuinen rasped. "Two breaths without charcoal and your lungs turn to jelly."

"We have charcoal," Terhenen said. "And we have you." He slid the double-ox ingot through his sword-belt. "Swear on your dead sister's bones that the culverts under the bridge pier are dry enough for four hundred men."

Vappuinen stiffened. "Niila died in the casting cellars. Her bones are in the common pit."

"Then swear on the pit," Terhenen said.

"The culverts under the fifth pier are dry," Vappuinen said, the words sour as sulfur. "The overflow only runs when the high furnaces tap."

Tuurelt gave a raspy bark of laughter, spitting into the clinker. "A dead gutter-rat weighs less to drag, Captain, but the live ones smell marginally better than cold mutton."

"Lash him," Terhenen commanded.

Two steppe shock-troopers hauled Vappuinen up. They dragged a thirty-pound cold-hammered copper block from the nearest sledge, hoisting the rectangular metal against his spine. With coarse bull-hide ropes, they lashed the counterweight tight across his chest and shoulders, pulling until the dense copper drove the breath from his ribs.

The weight bowed his spine, forcing his knees to bend as the straps cut into the chemical burns on his neck.

"If you run, the copper stays on your back," Terhenen said, gesturing toward the open drainage trap. "If you lead us into a boiling weir, Tuurelt drops you down the intake shaft first."

The captain signaled the file forward.

Vappuinen took his first step, boots sliding through furnace ash, the thirty pounds of stolen copper bearing down on his vertebrae as the mercenaries vanished one by one into the mouth of the basalt flue.