The service crawlway adjoining Annex 4 was like stepping into the mouth of a smelting kiln.
Rising heat currents of white-hot air warped the dim lantern light into shimmering waves. Through the narrow hall, the four-foot cast-iron channel of Chimney pipe 07 groaned under heat stress, its bolted pipe rim seams weeping gray ash. At the crawlway threshold, the wall-mounted pressure gauge needle was trembling against the red stop-pin. Four hundred and thirty-five kilopascals.
Arthur moved with deliberate, unrushed discipline.
He had soaked his heavy canvas apron in cold salt water until the stiff fabric was dripping wet. Over his hands he pulled double-layered drake-hide work gauntlets, their leather treated with alum and stone oil to withstand blasting heat. Over his eyes sat heavy-duty quartz safety goggles, the right lens fitted with his Zeiss monocle magnifying glass.
Behind him, Toby stood at the entrance of the crawlway. He held a wooden bucket of cold water in shaking hands.
“Arthur,” Toby shouted over the roar of the choking chimney pipe, “if that pipe rim gives way, the steam blast will strip the skin off your bones!”
“Keep the second bucket ready,” Arthur replied without turning. “And don’t step onto the iron grating.”
He stepped directly into the blasting heat wash. The blistering air struck his face like a physical blow, drying his throat instantly. But the wet salt water in his apron began hissing, releasing a protective cloud of steam around his chest.
Beside him, Grimm followed without pause.
The hound’s dense jet-black bone structure and hardened coat absorbed the heat wave without a flinch. Grimm lowered his head, eyes squinted against the stinging soot, his paws finding steady traction on the hot iron rungs of the upkeep narrow high walkway.
They reached Inspection Hatch 04.
The access opening was an iron port two feet square, bolted into the side of the chimney pipe housing. Through the quartz peephole, the inside was a swirling fire of orange embers and white-hot gas. The cast-iron damper plate—a two-inch slab of solid metal—had dropped diagonally across the chimney pipe seat. Its warped edge jammed was tight into the hard dark metal guide rails, fully sealing the exhaust throat.
And pinned beneath the lower corner of that glowing plate, trapped against the melted rock waste grate, was the tiny, blackened dark shape.
The micro-heart pulse fluttered through Arthur’s sense link. Three hundred and eighty beats per minute, weakening with every passing second.
“Grimm. The wedge,” Arthur commanded.
Arthur took the solid brass naval valve head Grimm had scavenged from the necropsy tiered arena. The eight-two-pound chunk of hard dark metal bronze was impervious to heat. Arthur shoved the curved pipe rim of the valve into the narrow gap between the chimney pipe housing and the guide rail. That created an unbending pivot point.
Next came the four-foot hard dark metal pry bar.
Arthur jammed the chisel tip of the heavy bar into the warped seam beneath Damper Plate 04. He threw his full body weight downward.
The iron shrieked. The metal groaned under hundreds of pounds of heat tension. But the warped plate refused to budge. The friction lock was total.
“Grimm, down!” Arthur barked. “Leverage!”
Grimm didn’t bark. The jet-black hound lunged forward, throwing his forty-eight-two-pound torso directly across the shaft of the pry bar. His dense front limbs locked over the steel. Through his Fenrir bone deep ring, his nearby gravity anchor engaged.
The effective downward force on the lever multiplied fourfold.
SCREEE-CLACK.
With a tearing screech of shearing rust and heated iron, the warped damper plate broke its friction lock. The heavy slab lifted four inches off the seat, exposing the fiery maw of the exhaust throat.
A violent gust of four-hundred-degree sulfur gas and glowing orange cinders erupted through the breach.
Arthur didn’t flinch. His salt water-soaked gauntlet plunged straight into the white-hot gap.
The leather hissed wildly, white steam shooting from the seams as the alum coating blistered. Arthur’s fingers ignored the searing heat streaming through the hide. Guided by the golden aetheric bright light lighting up his Zeiss magnifying glass, his hand reached into the burning melted rock waste grate.
His fingers closed with tiny gentleness around the tiny, fragile bundle trapped beneath the plate lip.
He had it.
Arthur yanked his arm back into the crawlway. “Clear!”
Grimm instantly threw himself backward off the pry bar. Without the hound’s mass anchoring the lever, the balance weights screamed. The heavy cast-iron damper plate crashed down into its seat with a thunderous metal impact that rattled the bedrock foundations.
The clockwork seal locked into posture. The choked burning gases found the upright chimney stack.
With a deep, hollow WHOOSH, the fire draft caught. The roaring backing-up pressure vanished, and through the crawlway wall, the pressure gauge needle dropped like a stone. Tumbling from four hundred and thirty-five kilopascals down to a stable, humming one hundred and eighty.
The fire was saved.
***
In Sub-Basement Annex 4, the air was cool and silent.
Arthur laid his dripping gauntlet onto the center zinc table and carefully opened his soot-blackened fingers.
Garek and the two mechanics, who had crept into the annex behind Toby, crowded around the table with wide, blank eyes.
“By the core,” Garek whispered, taking off his grease cap. “It really was alive.”
Lying on a clean lint towel on the cold zinc was a bird no larger than a common field finch. It weighed scarcely forty-two grams—little more than an empty matchbox.
It was an F-Rank Scorch-Sparrow (Passer Ignis), known in the street markets as an Ember-Finch. In the slums of Mega-City 07, such creatures were sold for three copper bits to factory workers who used their minor fire affinity to light tobacco pipes before tossing them aside.
The little creature was in total cold and exact condition.
Every main flight feather and contour quill had been burned down to charred, brittle stumps. Its delicate pink skin was blistered and blackened by soot. Its left tarsus—the lower leg bone—was crushed flat, caught beneath the iron edge of the damper, the tiny metatarsal bones splintered into tiny fragments.
Its nares—the tiny nostrils at the base of its beak—were fully plugged with caked sulfur crust. Its tiny chest heaved in violent, spasmodic gasps, its tail-end air-sacs wheezing as it starved for oxygen.
Arthur stripped off his steaming gauntlets, exposing his bare, steady hands.
“Toby. Sterile saline wash, tiny rubber hollow tube, and the micro-metal tongs,” Arthur ordered, his voice slipping into the cold, steady beat of trauma surgery. “Garek, fetch the brass spirit lamp and light it. I need heat, but no open drafts.”
Arthur leaned over the sample, his Zeiss monocle clicking into maximum zoom.
As his fingertips touched the tiny bird’s thorax, the creature stirred.
Its right eye was swollen shut by blistering burns. But slowly, with painful effort, its left eye cracked open.
It was an uncut, crystal-clear ruby facet.
There was no fear in that eye. There was no pathetic whimpering or surrender to the cold approach of death. The tiny pupil squeezed tight, locking onto Arthur’s face with an expression of pure, unbending, feral fury.
With the last tiny reserve of its strength, the singed sparrow twisted its neck. It snapped its blackened, cracked beak downward, pecking viciously at Arthur’s bare index finger.
The strike was pathetically weak—hardly enough to pierce the outer skin—but the tiny beak clamped down with stubborn, desperate defiance.
Arthur didn’t pull his hand away. He let the little bird hold his skin, a faint, rare smile touching the corners of his mouth.
“A fighter,” Arthur murmured. “Good. That makes the anesthesia simpler.”
His thumb gently stroked the unburned skin behind the bird’s crown. Then, a surge of golden light flared behind Arthur’s eyes. The Ancient Type-list Slate resolved in razor-sharp monospace shape:
Nine-Sun Golden Crow.
The ancient solar sovereign. The ancient first-born of sun-hot fire and star-fire fusion, reduced by ten thousand years of epigenetic decay to a dying gutter sparrow trapped in a soot chimney pipe.
Arthur’s hands moved with tiny care.
He took the fine rubber hollow tube, dipping it in warm saline. Then he gently flushed the caked sulfur soot from the bird’s nares. With the micro-metal tongs, he cleared a plug of carbonized thick spit from its tracheal entrance.
The tiny bird shuddered. It drew in a deep, clear gasp of air. The wild three-hundred-and-eighty-beat heartbeat right away smoothed, dropping to a sustainable body pace.
Next came the crushed tarsus.
Arthur couldn’t apply a heavy plaster cast to a forty-two-gram avian limb. The weight would cause blood-starved black rot. Instead, he took an empty goose quill, sliced it longitudinally with his razor knife to create a curved, ultra-light micro-splint. Then he lined up the fractured bone fragments with two pairs of jeweled tweezers. He secured the splint with three loops of sterile silk stitch.
Finally, Arthur prepared the body-energy incubation bath.
In a small baked-clay bowl lined with soft lint, he sprinkled five grams of pure native sulfur powder and two drops of warm potion-made fire-root oil. He placed the bowl directly beside the brass spirit lamp, creating a nearby thirty-eight-degree micro-climate.
Arthur gently lifted the tiny sparrow and nestled it into the warm sulfur nest.
The little bird’s ruby eye softened. The shivering that racked its tiny body subsided as the sulfur vapor seeped into its starved air-sacs. It soothed the friction burns along its lung tubes. It tucked its blackened beak under its stump of a wing, letting out a single, faint, raspy sound:
Peep.
A second later, the bird was deep in healing medicine body-energy sleep.
Grimm trotted to the edge of the zinc table. The hound stood on his hind legs, resting his massive black paws against the metal frame, his snout hovering two inches above the baked-clay bowl.
He sniffed the sleeping bundle. The pungent smell of sulfur soot tickled the hound’s dark nostrils.
Grimm sneezed—a loud, explosive SNORT that blew a cloud of white lint across the table.
The hound right away shrank back, ears pinning flat in comical guilt. He looked at Arthur, saw the warning glance. Then he quickly pulled back to the corner of the room, jamming his black nose rigidly into the ninety-degree stone angle between the pillar and the wall, standing fully motionless in deep corner-shame.
Garek let out a low chuckle, wiping soot from his brow.
“Look at that brute,” Garek said warmly. “Broke an iron damper with his jaw, and now he’s hiding from a baby bird.”
“He knows the patient needs rest,” Arthur said, cleaning his instruments in alcohol.
He walked over to the corner, resting his hand on Grimm’s broad rump. “At ease, Grimm. Corner-shame dismissed.”
Grimm turned around slowly, his tail giving two tentative thumps against the floor before he trotted over to the zinc table and laid his heavy body across Arthur’s boots, resting his chin on his paws to guard the incubator.
Arthur looked down at the tiny, sleeping ball of soot and fire resting beneath the lamp.
“Welcome to the squad, Pip,” Arthur whispered.
The second seat of the Divine Pentagon had been claimed.