Maps in the Silt

The needle on the brass dial of Tivian’s chest plate trembled toward the red tick-mark, five minutes of reserve air measured in thin, shallow sips.

Behind the heavy quartz visor of his helmet, every breath came cold and dry, tainted with the sharp tang of mineral tallow and stale compressor grease. Outside the glass, the companionway of the scuttled transport Kormorán lay under forty fathoms of black, caustic trench water. Corrosive silt swirled through the flooded passageway like suspended soot, biting at the vulcanized seals of his canvas sleeves.

At the end of the narrow corridor, the exit hatch remained dead shut.

The second diver had dogged the outer wheel from the companionway landing. Through the murky water, Tivian could see the shadow of the man’s heavy lead-soled boots braced against the deck plating. The diver was holding the exterior iron toggle bar across the dogs, waiting for Tivian’s reserve cylinder to bleed dry in the dark.

Tivian did not waste breath shouting inside the copper dome. The iron courier coffer bounced against his ribs, strapped tight to his harness by four turns of tarred hemp. His primary umbilical hung in two limp, ragged rubber ribbons from his shoulder manifold, chopped clean by the diver’s shears.

Five minutes was not enough time to cut through two inches of reinforced oak and bronze plate with a diver’s knife. It was barely enough time to die.

He planted his boots against the warped iron grating of the deck and took stock of his rig.

The primary air feed was dead, but the ballast reserve mounted across his lower lumbar still held twelve hundred pounds of pressurized displacement vapor—compressed alchemical gas meant to blow the suit’s flotation bladders for rapid emergency surfacing. If he blew the bladders inside this enclosed iron corridor, the expansion would pin him against the ceiling beams and crush his copper breastplate like a discarded tin can.

Unless he pointed the charge somewhere else.

Tivian worked his heavy three-fingered leather gloves over the emergency bypass valve beneath his left armpit. His fingers were stiff with the bone-deep chill of the Deep-Drifts, but muscle memory took over. He unthreaded the copper bypass line, disconnected the brass nozzle from the suit’s left buoyancy bladder, and jammed the bare hose end directly into the drainage weep-hole drilled through the bottom flange of the hatch frame.

The fit was loose by a fraction of an inch. Tivian reached into his tool pouch, pulled out a thick plug of cold caulking tallow, and mashed it around the brass nozzle, sealing the gap with the greasy gray wax.

Through the quartz port, he saw the shadow outside shift. The diver had felt the vibration against the iron plate and leaned his full weight onto the dog-bar.

"Hold on to it, then," Tivian muttered into the damp copper of his helmet.

He gripped his heavy brass spanner in his right hand, braced his boots against an iron bulkhead brace, and ripped open the secondary ballast throttle with his left.

The twelve-hundred-pound vapor charge did not merely vent; it detonated through the narrow drain channel in a violent, expanding roar of alchemical froth.

The trapped pressure in the doorframe had nowhere to go. The iron toggle bar outside sheared with an ear-splitting crack that reverberated through the flooded hull. The heavy hatch blew outward off its lower hinge, catching the syndicate diver squarely in the chest. A cloud of churned river silt, white vapor bubbles, and pulverized rust exploded into the black water.

Tivian did not wait for the plume to settle.

He kicked hard off the bulkhead, using the last burst of escaping ballast gas to propel his heavy lead boots through the shattered doorway.

The second diver was tumbling backward into the trench, disoriented and thrashing. His suit’s copper helmet had taken the brunt of the flying iron dog, the viewing glass starred with webbed fractures. In the churned murk, the man scrambled desperately for the safety rail of his own descent line.

Tivian caught the man by the brass manifold on his shoulder. With one brutal wrench of his spanner, he hammered the diver’s secondary weight pouch free, sending twenty pounds of cast-lead ballast dropping away into the abyss. The sudden loss of weight caught the man in an uncontrollable, buoyant drift, rocketing him toward the upper surface like a cork bobbing in a boiling kettle.

He would survive, but the rapid decompression would leave his joints locked in agony for weeks.

Tivian checked his chest dial.

Two minutes.

He reached out through the silt, found the thick hemp core of his own ascent guide-rope, and clipped his safety shackle to the line. With the ballast bladders drained, he had no buoyant lift. He had to haul himself up forty fathoms of dead vertical rope using nothing but his shoulders and his legs, dragging forty pounds of waterlogged diving canvas and the deadweight iron coffer strapped to his chest.

Hand over hand, his gloves scraped against the slimy hemp.

The caustic trench water gnawed at the rubber cuffs around his wrists, burning his skin like hot vinegar. His lungs burned hotter. The reserve cylinder on his spine hissed with an increasingly hollow, raspy wheeze, delivering thin gulps of stale, copper-flavored air that left his temples pounding behind his eyes.

Ten fathoms. Twenty fathoms.

The suffocating black of the deep trench gave way to the murky, olive-brown soup of the middle canal. The current caught him here, the vicious drag of the Thresher Tides trying to whip his boots sideways and pull him away from the guide-rope. He clamped his knees around the hemp, hauling with everything left in his forearms.

Thirty fathoms. The silhouette of a flat-bottomed wooden hull appeared above him through the brown water, its tarred planks haloed by the pale, cold morning light.

The Holló.

Tivian gave three sharp tugs on the recovery line.

Above, the line snapped taut. The steam winch on the scow groaned, the cable trembling as Uncle Oszkár engaged the iron gears. Tivian stopped climbing and let the mechanical hoist drag his aching limbs the final ten feet through the foam.

His helmet broke the surface of the canal in a shower of spray and greasy froth.

The sweet, cold air of the upper world hit his ears as a muffled roar through the copper helmet. Strong, calloused hands seized his brass collar ring. A heavy gaff hooked into his harness d-ring, and Oszkár heaved with a low, ragged grunt, dragging Tivian up the roller ramp and onto the timber deck of the Holló.

Tivian collapsed onto his back against the coil of recovery cable, chest heaving inside the rigid armor.

"Easy, boy! Keep still before you strip the thread!" Oszkár barked.

The old man dropped to his knees on the wet deck, his scarred, silt-blind eyes squinting against the morning glare as his heavy fingers worked the wing nuts around the helmet collar. With four quick twists and a sharp clatter of iron, Oszkár lifted the heavy copper dome from Tivian’s shoulders.

Tivian drew in a lungful of cold canal air. It smelled of sulfur, rotting cabbage, and coal smoke from the nearby distilleries, but to his screaming chest, it was sweeter than vintage wine. He coughed violently, spitting a mouthful of bitter, alkaline bile onto the scrubbed deck planks.

"Look at this," Oszkár grumbled, his raspy voice shaking with furious relief as he inspected the severed umbilical line trailing from Tivian’s shoulder. "Cut with ten-inch bolt shears. The rubber core’s ruined, the brass collar is stripped, and that vulcanized tallow gasket cost me six silver florins in the Kettle Market. You’ve been down there fifteen minutes and you already owe me a week’s profit in salvage tubing."

Tivian wiped his mouth with the back of his sodden leather sleeve, letting out a dry, rasping laugh. "Good to see you too, Uncle."

"Did you find the box or did you just go down there to pick a fight with the river bed?" Oszkár asked, though his hands were already checking Tivian’s neck and collarbones for crushing trauma or pressure fractures.

Tivian unbuckled the harness buckles on his breastplate. The heavy iron courier coffer fell against the timber deck with a dull, resonant thud that rattled the loose wrenches in Oszkár’s toolbox.

Oszkár froze. His weathered fingers hovered over the dark, slime-crusted metal. "By the high sluice... you actually pulled it out of the hull."

"The Kormorán was an Upper Arsenal courier, just like the registry said," Tivian said, rolling onto his knees and peeling off his lead-weighted boots. The relief of shedding sixty pounds of brass and iron made him feel as if he were floating off the deck. "And Szabol’s dogs were waiting inside the companionway. They had an umbilical rig running off a steam barge two channels over."

Oszkár’s jaw tightened, the lines around his blind eye deepening into hard ridges. "Szabol knew the coordinates. That means the Red Channel Syndicate had eyes on Lady Várady before she ever set foot in our yard."

"Or she told them herself," Tivian said coldly. He picked up his heavy brass spanner from the deck, using the flat of the handle to scrape away the thick coat of river sludge clinging to the coffer’s lid. "Or Szabol isn’t working for the syndicate at all."