Bilge and Bone

Canal mud smelled of rotten marrow and dead kelp when the heat churned it up. Ta'ani shoved the twenty-pound firing lever into the waistband of his boiled-leather breeches, pulled the cinching cord tight against his ribs, and pushed off from the charred pontoon.

The brine here ran five fathoms deep and hot enough to peel the blisters off an ungreased wrist. Beneath the oily surface scum, gray light filtered down through clouds of drifting coal silt and flaked boiler iron. The dredge barge lay on its starboard flank across a basalt ledge, its keel broken like an eel under a mallet. Bubbles climbed in thin, frantic strings from the crew cuddy near the rudder post.

Ta'ani kicked downward, his burned boot heel dragging through the scalding current. A pale figure moved against the drowned companionway. Moana worked with one foot jammed into an iron ringbolt, both hands gripping the handle of her heavy filleting knife. The knife blade was wedged into the gap of a swollen timber hatch, bending until the steel complained. Through the bull's-eye glass in the door frame, two small, soot-ringed eyes peered out through a trapped bubble of gray air. Boy Tane pounded a clenched fist against the thick pane, each blow weaker than the last.

Ta'ani caught the door coaming, planting his left hand against the blistered hull planks to brace his torn shoulder. He reached down, clamped his thumb over the iron pry-pin that locked the emergency drop-bar, and drove the heel of his good hand against the latch dog. The pin yielded with a dull scrape. Moana threw her lean weight against the knife haft. The swollen oak groaned, parted with a wet sucking gasp, and tore free.

A foul belch of trapped coal smoke and stale breath rushed into the brine. Ta'ani reached into the flooded cuddy, grabbed the collar of Tane's grease-soaked wool smock, and yanked the boy out into the open current.

Tane thrashed once, swallowing hot brine, until Moana clamped an arm across the boy's chest. She hooked her bare toes into the companionway ladder, pushed off hard toward the surface, and kicked upward. Ta'ani followed their wake through the churn of floating ash, breaking the waterline with a ragged cough that tore his raw throat.

Ten yards away, Cook Kele clung to an overturned timber raft, spitting greasy water and coughing until his jowls shook. His boiled-leather cowl was torn at the brim, exposing his greasy, bald scalp to the void wind.

"Rotting dogfish guts!" Kele wheezed, wiping a streak of black sludge from his lip with a three-fingered hand. "I had eight tubs of pickled roe wedged under the flour bin. Eight tubs! Floating out toward the void gate while you dive for river mud!"

Moana hauled Tane onto the timber raft. The boy retched canal brine over the logs, shivering so hard his teeth clicked like loose washers in a valve chamber.

"Shut your fat mouth, Kele," Moana spat, running a corded, grease-stained arm across her bleeding brow. A jagged splinter of boiler casing had furrowed her left temple down to the cheekbone. "If you loved that roe, you should have drowned in the pantry. Hand me the lashing line."

"I paid three copper groats for the salt on that roe," Kele muttered, but he fumbled at the raft's iron cleat and threw a coil of tarred hemp to her feet.

Ta'ani dragged his upper body onto the raft logs. The weight of the iron firing lever at his ribs pressed hard against his scalded skin, leaving a dull ache across his ribs. He gripped the rough pine planks, staring down into the yellow-gray boil where the dredge's bow had vanished into the silt.

"The breech is still down there," Ta'ani said. His voice was a flat rasp, scraped dry by smoke and salt.

Moana wrung oily water from her braided hair. "The deck collapsed forward. The whole gun carriage tipped into the ballast trench. You cannot lift forty pounds of lunar iron out of that mud before the tide draws."

"We do not lift it," Ta'ani said. "We lever it."

He looked toward the ruined stone canal bank twenty yards north. An ancient timber derrick stood half-toppled near a maintenance pontoon, its rusted iron chain hanging slack over a rotting crane spar. If the winch drum was not jammed with slag, the mechanical purchase could take the strain.

"Kele, keep the boy breathing," Ta'ani said. "Moana, take the winch wire. Loop it through the dredge's midship ring. I will set the fulcrum."

"If that iron touches boiling water too long without a carriage," Moana said, her dark eyes narrowing with bitter caution, "it will drink the heat right out of our lungs."

"Then do not drink with it," Ta'ani said.

He slipped back over the raft edge into the scalding brine, Moana diving beside him without another word. The water swallowed them in murky green-brown silence.

Down at the fractured gun deck, the forward hold was a tangle of crushed oak ribs and severed winch cables. The heavy sulfur-iron breech lay pinned beneath a six-inch deck beam, half-buried in the sucking bottom silt. The dark metal had an oily, unreflective sheen, cold enough that tiny, shivering currents of dense water crept toward its fluted barrel shroud.

Ta'ani took hold of a six-foot severed pontoon spar drifting near the shattered bulwark. He drove the chisel end of the timber under the gun carriage mounting, bracing the middle of the beam against a granite ballast stone lodged in the floor frame. He planted both bare heels on the splintered deck beam, grabbed the free end of the timber lever, and threw his entire body downward.

The timber flexed. Mud sucked at the heavy iron with a sound like tearing leather. The breech lifted an inch, then two.

Moana darted through the cloud of stirred silt like an eel. Her hands moved with deft, cold precision, threading the rusted iron crane chain under the weapon's trunnions. She caught the running end with an iron toggle-pin, hammered the pin home with the pommel of her knife, and gave the chain two sharp tugs.

Ta'ani kicked off the fulcrum and shot toward the light.

He broke the surface beside the maintenance pontoon. Kele had already scrambled onto the stone quay, hauling on the crane's hand winch with his good right arm while Boy Tane braced the ratcheting pawl with a rusted iron spike. The winch drum groaned, shedding flakes of red rust as the gears engaged with a harsh, uneven clatter.

"Heave!" Ta'ani barked, lunging onto the pontoon deck. He grabbed the chain with both hands, ignoring the fire of salt inside his torn shoulder muscles, and threw his weight backward against the pull.

Beneath the bubbling surface, the chain tightened until water sprayed from its iron links. The ancient crane spar bent like a drawn bow. From the depths of the canal bed, the forty-pound sulfur-iron harpoon breech tore free of the bottom silt with a heavy, sucking thud that sent a shock wave through the mooring pontoon.

"Ratcheting!" Tane yelled, driving the spike into the gear teeth to hold the gain. "It holds!"

With one final, agonized groan of rusted iron, the weapon cleared the waterline.

The breech was four feet of black, forged sulfur-iron, thick-walled and ribbed like the carapace of a deep-trench crawler. Water cascaded off its fluted heat baffles in steaming sheets. Ta'ani and Moana seized the iron carriage ears, guiding the dead weight as Kele swung the crane boom over the pontoon's timber deck. With a hollow crash that shook loose caulking from the deck seams, the weapon landed on the wet planks.

Ta'ani fell to one knee beside the prize. His chest heaved, hot brine dripping from his beard onto the cold metal casing. He pulled the twenty-pound firing lever from his waist and held the squared hinge pin against the weapon's empty toggle socket. The machining was true; the two halves of the gun matched to the hair of a scraper's blade.

Then he saw the water around the gun's muzzle.

The brine coating the iron was not boiling. It was turning cloudy and still. Tiny, crystalline needles of white frost were branching across the fluted muzzle ring, drinking the scalding heat directly out of the puddle on the deck. A faint, venomous clicking came from inside the thermodynamic absorption chamber.

"It is leaking," Moana whispered, backing away two steps, her hand dropping to her knife haft. "The thermal seal took a hit when the barge broke. It is drawing heat right now."

Before Ta'ani could reach for a tallow rag to plug the vent, a long, piercing blast of a steam whistle cut through the fog from the downstream channel.

The sound was heavy, sharp, and military, rolling across the boiling trough like iron wheels on basalt. The High Fire cutter had turned around, and its prow was cutting the mist.