The Broken Tooth

How many gallons of river water did it take to drown eighty guild draft oxen and forty teamsters trapped in a stone culvert?

The question hammered against my skull in time with the thrum of the foundry flues. Two hours. Cleary Penhaligon had given his scout two hours to open the lower drainage gates, and I was still crawling through four feet of sheet-iron ductwork choked with grease and pine soot. The metal beneath my palms hummed with the slow, four-stroke pulse of the water turbines churning three levels down. Heat came up through the seam rivets in steady, suffocating waves, baking the wool of my traveling coat until every breath tasted like tallow and scorched lime.

I dragged myself forward on elbows and knees, keeping my belly low against the zinc plating. My left wrist burned where the copper wire from my first death had left a faint ring of yellowed bruising, and the fine tremor in my fingers had crept up to the joint of my shoulder. It was an erratic, twitching spasm that made my grip slip against the greasy iron.

Forty leagues of wagon-merchant training had drilled me in grain tariffs, axle weights, and seven different dialects of border law. The guild masters had neglected to include a single lecture on how to crawl out of a ventilation chimney with soot in your teeth and a mercenary contract hanging over your neck.

A sharp metallic click echoed from the ductwork behind me.

I stopped. The intake air whistled through the louvers ten yards ahead, smelling of cool night fog and sulfur from the smelting yards. Behind me, sixty feet back down the dark run of the flue, something scraped against the rivets. A boot toe. The dry, deliberate brush of boiled leather over iron plate.

Corin was not running. He did not need to run. He knew the layout of the ventilation system the way I knew the manifest ledgers of the Five Guilds. He was following the fresh trails my sleeves had scraped through the soot.

I pushed forward, picking up speed, ignoring the raw scrape where the sheet metal tore through the knee of my trousers. The duct angled downward at a twenty-degree slope, opening into the primary exhaust chamber where the flue met the vertical counterweight shafts. If I could reach the outer service gangway above the lower sluice valves, I could drop into the drainage canal and reach the Southern Notch turnpike before his riders reached the gorge.

The zinc plating ended abruptly.

I slid over the rim, caught the edge of a soot-caked support strut with both hands, and dropped six feet onto a suspended iron grating.

The air here was cooler, sharp with the wet stone smell of the river gorge roaring beneath the floorplates. Above me, the ceiling vanished into a tangle of massive copper-toothed gears, grease-slicked drive shafts, and counterweight cables as thick as a man's thigh. This was the escapement junction for the foundry's lower intake: a physical junction box where the rotary motion of the river turbines was stepped down into the slow, tectonic cycles that shifted the Barrow-Mark's bridges.

Every eight seconds, a massive iron pawl dropped into the hub gear directly overhead with a concussive clack-whump that shook the rust from the catwalk railings.

I scrambled to my feet, bracing one hand against the damp masonry of the flue wall to steady my shaking knees. The catwalk ran thirty yards along the shear wall toward an arched service door marked with a red lead seal.

Footsteps hit the grating behind me.

Corin dropped through the ventilation opening with the fluid grace of a cat landing on a butcher's bench. He did not stumble. He did not pause to adjust his footing. His dark courier coat was buttoned tight to the throat, the silver-pinned cipher cylinder bouncing against his ribs as he stood up to his full height between me and the flue.

In the lantern light bleeding from the lower foundry floor, the lower half of his face was covered by a grease-stained scarf, but his gray eyes were perfectly still. In his right hand, loosely looped between leather-gloved knuckles, hung two feet of braided copper garrote wire weighted with lead sinkers.

"Mistress Fletcher," he said. His voice was muffled by the cloth, flat and utterly conversational. "The Chief Engineer prefers that envoys remain in their assigned quarters until the river gates are drawn."

"The Chief Engineer has poor taste in cell locks," I said, backing slowly along the catwalk toward the red-sealed door. My left heel hit a raised iron flange, and I shifted my balance, keeping both hands visible at waist height. "And poorer taste in couriers. Did he tell you what Vance Ironwright will do to you when he finds out you've been using his company as butchery bait?"

Corin took three measured paces forward. The copper wire swung in a tight, lazy pendulum between his fingers. "Captain Ironwright is a contracted asset. Assets fulfill their parameters or they are liquidated under breach clauses. You talk a great deal, envoy. The guild masters should have sent an engineer instead of a clerk."

"An engineer would have tried to pick your locks with a file," I said, watching his shoulders. "A clerk reads the maintenance timetables."

He sprang.

He did not waste breath on a shout or give away his movement with a wind-up. He closed the ten-foot gap across the wet grating in two explosive strides, the copper wire snapping taut between his gloved fists as he drove straight for my throat.

I did not jump back. On a narrow catwalk suspended forty feet above a churning turbine sump, backing away was suicide.

Instead, I dropped straight to my knees on the cold iron mesh.

The wire whistled through the empty space where my neck had been half a heartbeat earlier, the lead sinkers clipping the wool collar of my coat with enough force to tear the stitching. Corin's momentum carried him over me, his hip brushing my shoulder as he overshot his mark.

My right hand shot out and clamped around the trip-lever of the secondary counterweight damper bolted to the catwalk rail.

I had watched the mechanism from the flue louvers for forty seconds while I was crawling. Four-stroke cycle. Turbine pulse. Escapement drop. On every second rotation of the primary escapement wheel, the counterweight cradle swung through the central vertical channel to balance the intake torque.

Three. Two. One.

I hauled back on the release pin with every ounce of weight in my shoulders.

The shear pin snapped with a dry, ear-splitting crack. Overhead, a four-hundred-pound slab of pig iron broke free from its guide rail and plummeted down the counterweight shaft like a falling anvil.

Corin was already spinning back toward me, the garrote recoiling in his hands, his blade clearing his boot sheath in the same fluid motion. He was terrifyingly fast, faster than any city guard I had ever watched in the guild plazas.

The falling counterweight caught him across the left shoulder and upper arm.

The impact sounded like a wet log splitting under a heavy maul. The iron slab crushed his collarbone, sheared through the iron railing in a shower of rusted sparks, and plummeted into the churning turbine sump forty feet below. Corin let out a short, choked gasp, knocked to his knees by the kinetic shock as his dagger clattered through the mesh grating and vanished into the dark.

I scrambled up, lunging for the service door five yards away. My fingers clawed at the heavy brass latch.

A gloved hand slammed into the back of my hair.

Pain exploded across my scalp as my head was jerked violently backward. Corin had not collapsed. Even with his left collarbone shattered and his arm hanging limp at his side, his right arm was free, his face pale with shock behind the scarf, his eyes wide and bloodshot with adrenaline.

He did not try to reach for his dropped blade. He used his remaining hand and the heavy brass cylinder of the cipher case to hammer across the side of my jaw.

The blow sent me crashing sideways against the stone wall. The world fractured into a blinding smear of copper light and ringing iron. My teeth clicked together, blood bursting hot and salty across my tongue as I slid down the rough masonry.

Before I could draw breath to scream, the loop of braided copper wire whipped around my throat.

Corin braced his good knee against my sternum, driving the air from my lungs in a ragged gasp. He did not have the leverage to use both hands, but he did not need it; he wrapped the free end of the wire around the brass railing stanchion and threw his entire body weight backward, using the lever to cinch the copper braid directly into the soft flesh of my windpipe.

"A clerk," he hissed through his teeth, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth beneath the scarf. "Just a clerk."

I clawed at the wire. My fingernails tore against the cold, jagged metal strands, gouging my own skin as I tried to force a single finger beneath the loop. The pressure was absolute, terrifying, crushing the cartilage of my throat until the sound of the roaring water became a deafening hum inside my ears.

My heels drummed helplessly against the iron floorplates. Dark spots bloomed across my vision, spreading like black ink spilled over parchment. The air in my chest burned, hot and dry and entirely out of reach.

Above us, the massive Brass Wheel continued its steady, uncaring rotation.

Clack-whump.

The floor vibrated. The smell of grease, hot iron, and my own blood filled my senses. My hands went slack, slipping away from the wire as the strength drained from my arms like water through a broken sluice.

The dark spots converged into solid black.

Then came the drop.