Bolted to the charred oak floor of the wagon bed sat a six-sided holding vessel the size of a four-bushel wine tun, banded in heavy ribs of cast iron and packed at every joint with grey fire-clay. Seyun had seen the outside of this exact casing four times during the week before Ash Reed’s winter check, when it had stood draped in ritual red silk at the center of the inner check pavilion.
There was no red silk on it now. The upper right collar-socket—where a thumb-thick bronze baffle needle should have sat pinned by a cotter key—gaped fully empty. Around the lip of that empty socket, deep gouges in the iron rim showed where someone had taken a heavy pair of forge-tongs after Joren’s collapse and wrenched the bent extraction tube straight out of the casing without cooling the clay first. White-hot stone melted rock waste cried from the torn hole like molten glass, dripping down onto the right axle housing and eating through the oak planks.
Worse still, before loading the vessel onto the Oran convoy, a storehouse artificer had tried to hide the missing baffle needle by hammering a flat iron shipping plate over the central chimney vent. That crude lid trapped every cubic inch of escaping heat inside the upper dome.
Through the narrow mica sight-slit in the front face of the hexagon, Seyun caught a glimpse of the passenger inside. The young fire spirit was no larger than a yearling hill-fox, curled tight upon a bed of cracked grey clinker. Its body looked as though it had been blown from layered amber and dark fiery glass, with six short, clawless limbs tucked beneath its belly and two broad, bellows-like lung chambers pulsing behind its ribs. Every time an arrow struck the wagon or a horse screamed outside, the young creature convulsed against the iron walls. Its torn upper-right lung seam spat a shower of blinding white sparks against the mica window.
With the upper baffle torn out and the main chimney shutter hammered shut by the storehouse clerks to hide the steam on the road, every breath out had nowhere to go except back into the spirit’s own scorched chest or down through the floor seam. The lower iron retaining bands were already bowing outward by half an inch, groaning with the high, tinny ping of metal approaching its shear limit.
Seyun knelt on the burning floorboards, tucked the hem of his coat between his knees. Then he drew a single, measured Coal breath into his lower belly. He didn’t push the breath out past his skin—he knew that even a harmless thread of human training touching the open baffle hole would make the panicked creature thrash harder. Instead, he used the internal warmth of the first Ash Reed base form solely to steady his own pulse and keep his fingers from trembling as the blasting heat blistered the bare skin of his forearms.
“Easy,” he whispered. He leaned his chest within a foot of the glowing iron collar. Meanwhile, the heat singed the eyebrows on his forehead. “Halen’s manual says to hammer a lead plug into a leaking socket. That’s why it’s tearing you open. You don’t need a plug. You need a bypass.”
He treated the six-sided iron-and-clay tun the exact way Mina treated an abscessed chest channel. Just then, the main spirit vein was swollen shut. You never forced the blockage directly. You opened the collateral seams two inches to the side so the trapped heat could bleed off without rupturing the wall.
At Ash Reed, when the healing spring vats over-high-pressure during the winter boil, the junior students had always run for cold water or iron clamps, and twice Seyun had watched a cast-iron lid split across the rivets from heat shock. Only Elder Hesh had known how to bleed a stone collar through its mortar joints with soft copper pins that swelled at the same rate as the escaping steam.
Seyun took the first of Elder Hesh’s three copper test needles between his right thumb and forefinger. He located the hair-thin backup relief seam where the upper clay collar met the left-hand iron rib. Copper conducted heat four times faster than the cast-iron bands and was softer than the fired fine china liner. Because of that, the needle point didn’t crack the brittle seal when he pressed it in at a shallow thirty-degree oblique angle. He rotated the ribbed handle three half-turns clockwise until he felt the rounded tip kiss the inner vapor pocket, then left an inch of the shaft protruding.
A thin, high-pitched jet of clear steam whistled right away out of the needle’s spiral groove. He carried a streak of orange stone ash harmlessly up through the parted roof canvas.
Inside the mica sight-slit, the curled creature froze for half a beat. Its ember-glass head turned toward the left collar seam where the crushing pressure on its ribs had suddenly eased by a fraction.
Seyun’s right forearm brushed the hot iron rim of the wagon rail as he reached across to the rear side of the collar, raising a long red welt of blistered skin from wrist to elbow. He ignored the sting, braced his left thumb against the cooler clay below the pipe rim. Then he slid the second copper needle into the rear relief seam at the matching shallow angle, followed five seconds later by the third needle on the forward left facet.
The copper handles grew too hot to hold bare-fingered the instant the vapor hit their grooves, searing small white crescents into the pads of his thumb and index finger before he released them. Yet all three pins held firm in the softened fire-clay, their spiral channels singing in a three-part chord as they bled off the lethal squeezing.
“That’s three,” Seyun breathed through cracked lips. He wiped a trickle of sweat from his chin with his shoulder so it wouldn’t drip onto the hot clay. “Breathe out through the left side now. Don’t fight the iron.”
Three needle-thin plumes of scalding steam hissed upward all at once. It formed a balanced three-sided vent around the collar that drew the back-pressure away from the torn right baffle socket.
The effect inside the six-sided vessel was immediate. The trapped heat bled skyward through the copper shafts instead of rebounding into the casing. Then, the cherry-red glare along the lower iron brackets faded back to dull plum, then to black iron. Inside the sight-slit, the young spirit’s wild, tearing double-spasms slowed. First to a ragged five-count, then to a deeper, sustainable six-beat breath that no longer sprayed molten melted rock waste across its own ribs.
For the first time since the caravan had left Oran’s eastern gate at dawn, the floorboards beneath Seyun’s knees stopped shuddering. The spirit was still wounded—nothing could heal the torn baffle scar inside its upper right chamber short of weeks in an earth-heat stone bed—but it was no longer cooking itself to death inside a sealed pot.
Seyun pulled his leather Account Book half an inch out of his lapel pocket with his unblistered left knuckles, checking that the stone tablet beneath his shirt had not shifted. Meanwhile, he leaned across the hot iron ribs. If he had possessed ten quiet minutes and a bucket of sifted reed-ash, he could have packed a temporary clay collar around the torn right socket to keep the cold valley wind from chilling the exposed melted rock waste. On an active ambush road with arrows still whistling across the ditch, the three copper bypass needles were the best margin he could buy the creature.
Seyun pressed his blistered wrists against his ribs. He leaned down until his eyes were level with the mica window. On the other side of the scorched glass, the young spirit uncurled its neck and looked straight at the grey-and-white Ash Reed foundation knot on his lapel. It didn’t recoil, hiss, or throw itself against the bars as Halen had claimed. It simply rested its chin on the cooling clinker, blinked its semi-clear stone lids. Then it watched him with wide, exhausted eyes the color of banked embers.
“Stay down on the clinker,” Seyun told it quietly, adjusting the middle needle by a hair’s breadth so the escaping steam angled away from the canvas roof-bow. “Whatever happens outside the boards, don’t draw above the fourth rib.”
Outside in the road, a reed-horn blew two short notes—the raiders’ signal to disengage—and Seyun raised his head above the torn roof canvas to see how Ilyra had fared at the rear.
What he saw froze the breath in his throat. Seyun looked out through the vented steam as the horsemen wheeled away from the rear barley carts. He saw that three riders spurring up the center lane were not reaching for the grain sacks at all. They were hurling lit oil-flasks and pitch torches straight at the clerk’s manifest wagon hitched ahead of him.