The Broken Bell

The three cartel enforcers were trying to jimmy a live compression manifold with a cold iron chisel, which meant Tivian had about twenty seconds before they either sheared sixty sovereigns worth of rolled brass or blew their own palms into the grease-slick water of the Lower Sluice.

He crouched behind a stack of tarred spruce pilings at the edge of the slipway, smelling the familiar stink of the canal—rotting marsh grass, burnt petroleum, and the copper tang of stagnant chemical silt. Below him, rocking against the timber fender, was the Vöcsök, his family’s six-oar pump-skiff. Straddling the stern coaming was Szabol Kengyel, a thick-necked brute who wore a greasy leather butcher’s apron over wool and answered to the Red Channel Dredging Syndicate.

"Hit it again, Jani," Szabol grunted, his heavy boots grinding grit into the skiff’s cedar ribs. "The housing’s only pinned on the starboard lug. Pop the flange and we’ll lift the whole block onto the barge."

"If you hit that flange with a cold chisel, you half-witted ox," Tivian called down, stepping onto the slime-slick edge of the quay, "the secondary vapor chamber will rupture, vent four hundred pounds of superheated tallow gas into your groin, and leave your widow haggling for your boots."

Szabol spun around, the skiff rocking under his weight. He was a bull of a man with yellowed eyes and a jagged scar splitting his left earlobe, but he knew enough canal law to know that words on a wharf were just the bell before the bell-rope snapped. He spat into the bilges.

"Tivian Lánczy," Szabol sneered, hooking an iron pinch-bar into his belt. "Wondered when you’d crawl out of the bilge. Your uncle’s behind on the tract toll for the sluice cut. Three weeks behind. That makes this skiff cartel property by sunset."

"The sluice cut is open water under the municipal charter," Tivian said, keeping his right hand loose near the heavy steel spanner tucked through his tool belt. "You don’t own the current, Szabol. You just sit on it like a bloated toad and tax the drift."

"We own the pumps that keep the lower district from choking on poison mud," Szabol said, grinning with stained teeth. "Which means we own whatever floats on top of it. Step down here and say your piece, little fixer, or watch me drop this engine in the silt."

Tivian didn't wait for him to finish the sentence. He dropped off the dock, boots hitting the Vöcsök’s fore-deck with a hollow thud that rocked the narrow boat.

The thug holding the chisel—a wiry deckhand named Jani with grease smeared across his forehead—lunged forward with the pointed steel bar. Tivian didn't bother drawing the short skinning blade at his hip. Steel against bone was messy; leverage was clean. He ducked under the clumsy thrust, stepped into Jani's guard, and drove the heavy heel of his boot onto the boy’s lead toe. As Jani gasped, Tivian caught the wrist holding the chisel, twisted the joint outward until the tendon snapped like green birch, and yanked the iron bar free.

"Rule one of the machinery," Tivian muttered, tossing the chisel over his shoulder into the black water. "Respect the pressure."

The second thug, a slab of dock muscle wielding a heavy mooring oar, swung wide from the midship bench. The oar whistled through the damp air. Tivian threw himself flat against the floorboards; the spruce paddle splintered against the oak gunwale right above his ear, showering his collar with sharp wood chips. Before the man could recover the stroke, Tivian came up off his knees, drew his eight-inch brass spanner from his belt, and cracked the heavy square head into the side of the man’s knee.

The brute bellowed, the oar clattering into the bilges as his leg gave out, pitching him sideways over the low rail. The canal took him with a foul, bubbling splash.

That left Szabol.

The cartel enforcer didn't rush. He pulled the heavy iron pinch-bar from his belt, two feet of forged crowbar that could punch through hull plating. He advanced down the narrow center gangway of the skiff, his weight making the cedar planking groan.

"You’re clever with the spanners, boy," Szabol growled. "Let’s see how you reassemble your ribs."

Szabol swung the iron bar in a vicious horizontal sweep meant to take Tivian’s head off. Tivian dropped back against the engine housing. The iron struck the iron crash-cage around the boiler with a deafening ring, throwing yellow sparks into the gloom.

The blow rattled the mounting bolts, but Tivian wasn't looking at Szabol’s eyes—he was looking at the bypass petcock beside Szabol’s left thigh.

The engine was hot; the cartel goons had tried to crank the starter spindle without opening the cold-water jacket, and the copper pressure gauge was quivering deep in the red zone. The needle buzzed against the limiter peg.

"You really don't know how these things breathe, do you?" Tivian said.

He hooked the claw of his spanner under the brass relief valve and yanked it ninety degrees counterclockwise.

A hiss like a startled nest of vipers tore through the canal slip. A jet of scalding, sulfur-scented alchemical vapor screamed from the bypass vent, blasting straight into Szabol’s shins and groin.

The enforcer shrieked, dropping the iron bar as the blistering steam cooked through his wool trousers. He stumbled backward, flailing for balance on the slick gunwale. Tivian stepped inside the cloud of vapor, holding his breath against the sulfur bite, and drove the butt of his spanner hard into the center of Szabol’s jaw.

The crack echoed off the brick embankment. Szabol went rigid, eyes rolling back into his head, and tumbled over the stern into the greasy wake of the canal, his apron dragging him under before he surfaced five yards away, coughing black foam and flailing for the pier pilings.

"Get him out of the water, Jani," Tivian said without turning around, his knuckles stinging from the impact. "The bottom silt eats wool in ten minutes and hides in twenty. If you leave him down there, you’ll be pulling up a skeleton with boots."

Jani, clutching his broken wrist against his belly, scrambled over the gunwale and hauled himself up the dock ladder without looking back.

Tivian stood alone on the rocking skiff, chest heaving in the sulfurous quiet of the canal cut. The water lapped against the hull, thick and iridescent with chemical runoff. He shook out his right hand, wiping grease from his brow with the back of a scarred sleeve.

The skiff was taking on water through a cracked seam near the stern where Szabol’s boots had wrenched the timber, but the engine was what mattered.

It was a compact, three-cylinder Mark IV Silt-Engine, cast in solid brass with forged bronze pistons and an alchemical vaporizer block that his uncle had hand-tuned over three winters. If the Red Channel boys had managed to unbolt it and drag it to their scrap-barge, the Lánczy family’s lighter-craft would have been dead in the water.

Tivian set his spanner to work.