The descent from the converted star tower into the southern freight yard took them through a covered stone gallery that ran along the spine of the citadel’s outer castle wall.
The gallery was narrow, cold, and unlit, thirty arm-lengths above the lower drainage ditches. The only light came from narrow arrow slits pierced through the five-foot dark rock stonework every ten paces, through which the freezing mountain wind whistled with a shrill, piping whine. The air that blew through the embrasures was choking. It carried the thick, oily stench of low-grade lignite burning, boiled machine oil. The clear, sweetish reek of burnt bone meal drifting from the fertilizer furnaces of the Orchard Ward.
Behind them marched the two senior court guards. Their iron-shod boots struck the wet flags in a heavy, timed together rhythm that sounded like an iron clockwork gearwork ticking down an unsafe man’s minutes.
The ramp gallery dropped along the southern curtain wall in a series of steep, switchback terraces paved with dark flat stone slabs. Where the stonework met the outer rock face of the promontory, water drops had seeped through the mortar joints and frozen into thick, ridged sheets of black ice that gleamed like polished hard coal under the dim copper lanterns.
Len shifted his balance point backward, Surefoot engaging through the soles of his heavy northern boots. The rawhide laces groaned under the sudden tension as his heels dug into the mortar lines. It held the eighty-five-pound handcart from runaway driving force on the eleven-percent downgrade. Long Breath controlled his heart rate. That kept his pulse at an unrushed, clockwork rhythm, ensuring that his thigh muscles didn’t tremble under the brutal quirky load.
Below them, forty arm-lengths down in the darkness of the lower rail cuts, the heavy-duty machinery of the Gate Ward was screaming in the mist.
Len heard the rhythmic, air-powered thud of an automatic coal-dumping tipple. It was followed by the ear-splitting roar of thirty tons of raw hard coal cascading into the boiler hoppers of the central pumping station. The shaking traveled up through the living granite foundations. It shook through the ash wood of his cart handles into his radius and forearm bone. Above the clockwork thunder came the shrill, mournful whistles of small shunting locomotives moving empty flatcars through the sulfur gloom.
Bram Ash walked beside Len’s left wheel, his breathing heavy, congested, and rattling in his windpipe. The veteran court guard kept his right hand resting lightly on the ash cart frame. He used his own weight to help steady the barrow as they navigated the steep stone ramps and drainage angles. Every forty paces, Bram’s hip would catch on a snapped flat stone slab. His right boot dragged with that telltale, scraping limp.
‘You’re a fool, Vey,’ Bram muttered under his breath. His voice barely rose above the screech of the iron axles and the howling wind. ‘A stubborn, suicidal northern fool. You could have handed Malan that blue envelope, taken your thirty silver coins. Then he walked out through the canopy gate before the street lamps finished lighting. Now you’ve made Malan look like an idiot in front of sixty clerks, and you’ve forced his hand.’
‘Malan was going to burn that dispatch in the nearest coal fire bowl the second my back was turned, Guard,’ Len replied quietly, his eyes fixed on the wet flat stone slabs ahead. ‘Edren Bale is dead, isn’t he?’
Bram didn’t answer right away. He stopped his stride at a broad stone embrasure where an iron hoisting crane hung over the lower ditch, the wind roaring through the opening with enough bone-shaking force to whip their coat hems around their shins. The noise of the gale effectively drowned their voices from the trailing guards four paces behind.
Bram leaned against the granite embrasure, his face gray and hollow in the dim greenish light reflecting from the lower searchlights.
‘Bale died four winters ago,’ Bram whispered, his teeth grinding together. ‘Lobar pneumonia tightened while inspecting the lower drainage channels beneath the River weir. He spent three days standing in freezing mud with water up to his thighs, trying to measure the high-pressure head on the turbine bypasses. When his lungs filled up with fluid, the Survey Office brought him to the citadel sick room, locked the door, and never filed the death notice.’
Bram looked back over his shoulder to verify that the guards were keeping their distance, then spat a glob of thick spit through the arrow slit into the deep pit below.
‘Chancellor Morn needed Bale’s signed name,’ Bram continued, his voice tight with bitter disgust. ‘Under the country charter, the quarterly boundary tracking data reports sent to Oakhaven have to carry the personal side seal of the Chief Land-mapper. If Oakhaven knew Bale was dead, the royal postal board would have dispatched an external boundary commission to verify the lines. Morn couldn’t afford an outside land-mapper walking these roads. So Malan locked Bale’s nameplate in his bottom drawer, learned how to copy the old man’s handwriting, and has been signing the tracking data reports ever since.’
Len tightened his hands on the cart handles, the rawhide breast-strap biting into his collarbone. ‘And my father? Deren Vey?’
Bram turned his gaze toward Len, his bloodshot eyes lingering on the small brass bell pinned beneath Len’s coat collar.
‘Your father carried a dispatch addressed to Bale, too,’ Bram said. His voice dropped into a solemn, heavy rasp. ‘Seven years ago. Deren stood at that exact same intake counter, looked at that exact same clerk. Then he demanded to see Bale in the flesh. Deren was smarter than you, boy. He had already mapped the outer circuit of the seven wards before he ever crossed the canopy. He knew the sky shield was a fraud. He knew the war engine was dead.’
‘Where is he buried, Bram?’ Len asked, the words catching in his throat like dry lime.
Bram closed his eyes for a moment, the wrinkles around his temples deepening into jagged trenches of tiredness.
‘Deren isn’t buried in a churchyard, Len,’ Bram whispered. ‘He died in the lens chamber at the top of the Star tower. He discovered that the exact models Ansett Rill had used to design the broken-sun discharge brake were fatally flawed. Deren sabotaged the release governor with an iron crowbar to prevent an uncontrolled explosion from wiping out the Tram Ward. He held the service hatch while the retreat was sounded. He never came down the ridge.’
Bram pulled his woolen coat tighter across his broad chest. His breath rose in thick, gray clouds that smelled of the bitter willow-bark tea he chewed for his hip pain.
‘Your father knew Ansett Rill’s counts were rotten because Deren was a field land-mapper, not a desk clerk,’ Bram muttered. His voice dropped into the roaring draft of the embrasure. ‘Rill sat in his warm study in the capital and designed the broken-sun discharge governor on fine parchment, assuming that the Quarry heat sink would absorb four million heat units at a uniform rate. But Deren had crawled through the Quarry drain pits with an eight-foot sounding rod. Deren knew the limestone down there had pockets of trapped groundwater and porous white spar-stone veins. If you dumped twelve years of tightly packed sky-high solar star-fire into the drain pits at the rate Rill specified, the water in the porous veins would flash into white-hot steam within four seconds. The entire western shelf of the valley would have blown out like an over-pressured boiler.’
Bram’s scarred knuckles tightened on his staff until the wood creaked.
‘Deren told Morn. Deren laid out the counts on the High judge’s private dining table. And Morn told him that the schedule was fixed. That the country council had already promised the recovery set to the trade ring investors. So your father did the only thing an honest engineer could do. He climbed into the governor enclosure at midnight, drove a steel pry-bar into the main timing gears. Then he took the keys down with him into the discharge chute.’
Len looked down into the swirling gray mist of the lower yard, the small brass bell cold against his ribs.
His father had not died in a tragic accident. Deren Vey had died committing an act of total, heroic sabotage to save twelve thousand refugees from being boiled alive by their own government’s incompetence.
Bram reached out with his gloved hand and tapped the cracked brass bell on Len’s chest.
‘That bell was on his harness when he walked past my gate seven years ago,’ Bram said. ‘I saw him walk in. I saw his report sealed in purple wax. Don’t make me watch you go down the same chute, boy. You can’t fight this machine with an eight-pound sounding pole.’
‘I’m not trying to fight an army, Guard,’ Len said. His Long Breath kept his voice calm and clear. ‘I’m trying to deliver eighty-five pounds of fever bark to twelve hundred people who are dying in the dark.’
Bram stared at the boy, then shook his head in slow, reluctant resignation. He turned away from the embrasure, planting his iron staff into the flags.
‘Come on, then,’ Bram growled, his limp returning as he led the way down the ramp. ‘Let’s go see what Quartermaster Vane has done with your medicine.’