Between the rear tailboard of the burning clerk’s cart and the front tongue of the third wagon, the air was a churning fire of black fire-oil soot and showering pine sparks. The lead mule that had taken an arrow in the throat lay collapsed across the left trace-pole. Its eight-hundred-pound carcass pulled the heavy iron coupling chain taut as a bowstring between the two frames. Worse still, one of the raiders’ clay flasks had shattered directly against the iron draw-bar, spilling half a gallon of stone lamp-oil over the clevis and the thick iron cotter pin that locked the third wagon’s tongue into place.
Blue-yellow flames danced three inches high along the grease-coated chain links. Every time the wind gusted from the east, the sheet of fire folded backward under the front axle of the fire-spirit carriage, licking at the tarred canvas flaps and the dry cedar slats only four feet above the road.
Behind Seyun’s shoulders, the young fire spirit felt the external blaze encroaching on its prison. Inside the third wagon, the double-beat pulse sped up into a wild, hammering thrum that shook the floorboards like a trapped animal throwing itself against iron bars. Through the soles of his boots, Seyun heard a harsh, grinding metal groan from the bottom of the bronze-inlaid crate. The intense blasting heat pouring off the burning clerk’s cart was heating the forward face of the holding box unevenly, causing the lower level bronze sealing rod to expand and warp against its iron corner brackets.
He knew the tolerances of Court holding lattices from the winter damage reports he had copied in Oran. Those bronze rods were cast with less than a tenth of an inch of heat play. If that lower bronze rod bowed another quarter-inch under the heat of the fire-oil fire, it would pinch the third vent-slot shut and shear off the bottom copper needle he had just pushed in. Once the lower vent closed, the white-hot lung-ash would rupture the front cedar panel straight into the burning oil.
Seyun didn’t waste precious seconds trying to drag the dead mule off the left pole. Even two wagon drivers with a lever couldn’t shift a dead draft animal wedged between iron trace-chains in less than a minute. He didn’t have a minute. He had to release the cotter pin under full tension.
He crouched low in the gravel directly beside the flaming clevis. He planted his boots shoulder-width apart in the oily mud and sank his hips into the twelfth base stance of Ash Reed Hall.
In the outer courtyard of Oran, instructors taught the twelfth stance—Rooted Reed Bears the River-Ice—as a static endurance punishment for first-year boys. That made them hold clay bricks at arm’s length until their thighs trembled and sweat ran into their eyes. Most outer-hall students hated the stance. That was because it held no flashy stepping pattern and no offensive strike. Seyun had practiced it for eleven winters with a different purpose. Learning how to align ankle, knee, hip, and lower spine so that every pound of upward leverage came straight from the earth through the heels without straining the small of the back.
His Coal breath flow surged down into his legs and out along his forearms as he reached his burlap-wrapped right hand into the blue fire-oil flames and clamped the jaws of the heavy iron wrench onto the head of the jammed cotter pin.
The wet burlap hissed wildly the instant it entered the fire. It sent up a scalding cloud of dirty steam around his wrist. Through the steaming hemp, the blasting heat bit into his knuckles and the scarred skin of his left palm like a handful of red-hot needles. He locked his jaw, kept his breathing slow and shallow through his nose so he wouldn’t inhale a lungful of white-hot pitch smoke. Then he struck upward against the handle of the wrench with the heel of his left hand.
The cotter pin didn’t budge. The dead mule’s weight on the left pole had wedged the narrowed iron shaft sideways inside the clevis eye, binding iron against iron in a vise grip.
Above his head, the burning canvas roof of the clerk’s cart split apart with a loud crack, dumping a shower of blazing waybill fragments and charred cedar splinters across the shoulders of his gray wool coat. One glowing brand landed squarely in the crease of his left elbow. He flicked it off with a jerk of his forearm without letting go of the wrench.
In the third wagon behind him, the lower bronze rod gave a second, louder shriek as a brass rivet popped loose from the forward corner bracket and pinged against the floorboards. The bottom copper needle tilted five degrees downward as the cedar seam began to pinch.
Seyun didn’t look back. Shifting his left boot three inches forward in the gravel to alter the angle of his hip leverage, he slipped the narrowed pry-claw of the iron wrench beneath the upper ring of the cotter pin. He used the curved lip of the draw-bar itself as a pivot point. He braced his left forearm across his thigh in the twelfth stance, drew the last reserve of Coal heat from his chest bone into his shoulders. Then he drove his whole body upward from the heels in a single, unrushed heave.
Along his back and ribs, his internal breath burned hot and steady. He held his spine rigid as a seasoned oak timber under the crushing load. For two heartbeats nothing moved except the veins standing out along his throat and wrists. Then iron shrieked against iron. A curl of blackened axle-grease smoked out of the clevis hole. The narrowed pin slid upward half an inch, breaking the friction lock.
Before the dead mule’s weight could twist the clevis and bind the shaft again, Seyun whipped the wrench out from under the ring, reversed the heavy head in a practiced quarter-turn, and hammered upward against the bottom tip of the cotter pin with three rapid, ringing blows.
Clang. Clang. Clang!
On the third strike, the red-hot cotter pin shot upward out of the clevis eye like a popped cork and splashed into the muddy ditch water three feet away. It sent up a brief hiss of steam.
Freed from the pin, the heavy iron coupling chain whipped loose from the forward draw-bar with a sound like a struck temple bell. He dropped the front tongue of the third wagon down into the gravel ruts with a bone-jarring thud.
Uncoupling the chain was only half the task. The front wheels of the third wagon were still standing in the outer edge of the spreading fire-oil pool. Still crouching in the twelfth stance before the collapsing wall of fire, Seyun dropped the wrench, hooked both blistered hands under the iron-shod tip of the wagon tongue. He set his bruised right shoulder squarely against the wooden cross-bar, and heaved backward with every ounce of strength in his thighs and calves.
For a moment the heavy four-wheeled carriage resisted on the slight incline of the road. Down in the southern ditch, Pel saw Seyun straining against the tongue through the smoke, leaped up the gravel bank without a word of prompting. Then he threw his broad shoulder against the rear left wheel-spokes to help turn the rim.
The freshly greased spare axle they had fitted ten minutes earlier turned smoothly in its iron boxes. Slowly at first, then gathering driving force, the heavy central wagon rolled backward four full paces down the crown of the road. He opened a twelve-foot gap of clean wet gravel between the spirit’s crate and the blazing wreck of the clerk’s cart.
Inside the wagon bed, the groaning lower bronze rod cooled by several degrees as it cleared the radiant fire of the fire. The pinched cedar seam relaxed by a hair’s breadth. The three copper needles resumed their steady, timed together whistling.
Pel dropped a heavy three-sided chock-stone behind the rear wheel to hold the carriage in place, then ducked back down the embankment to finish shielding the barley sacks. Seyun let the wagon tongue settle onto its iron rest-prop, beat out two smoldering embers on the sleeve of his coat with his steaming burlap rag. Then he straightened his aching back.
Unwrapping the charred, smoking strip of hemp from his right hand, he bent his fingers once to make sure the tendons moved cleanly. Two long water-blisters had risen across the base of his knuckles where the blasting heat of the fire-oil had pierced the wet cloth, and his eyebrows smelled of singed hair. But the twelve-foot firebreak between the vehicles held firm. The burning clerk’s cart could now collapse into its own ashes without igniting the cedar slats of the third wagon or boiling the fire spirit in its casing.
Through the drifting smoke ahead of the wagon tongue, however, Custodian Halen came scrambling out from behind the lead water cask, his plump face twisted into a mask of ash-smeared fury and panic.