The breach behind Sister Merrow’s kitchen larder didn’t open into ordinary cellar earth. It opened into a forgotten, underground gallery of colonial red brick and glazed clay pot channels, built forty years before the Great Flood to carry the low-pressure drainage of the river bluffs into the deep limestone fissures. For three decades, the gallery had been sealed behind heavy seasoned ash balks and lime plaster, cool and dry as an ancient tomb. But now, it was a choking throat of boiling fog. The air inside didn’t circulate. It hung stale, dense with fifty-two degrees of soaked stone vapor that tasted of baked clay, crushed river silt, and the bitter sulfur salts bleeding from the high college drain tube above. The brick walls cried hot, yellow slime that dripped continuously into the floor drains with the rhythmic clatter of falling gravel.
Before stepping through the opening, Eren Tal had spent twenty minutes on the back kitchen floor preparing his gear. He checked the iron eyelets of his heavy bull-hide boots, greasing the leather with cold sheep fat to keep the bitter-salt water from rotting the stitching. In his tool belt, he tucked a five-pound forged iron sledge, two steel cold-chisels. A wooden-handled drift punch he had turned from cured ash. Sister Merrow had stood by the door with an unlit animal fat dip, warning him in her gravelly voice about the gallery’s history. How the colonial ferrymen had used the vault during the winter sieges seventy years ago to hide sacks of barley from mountain raiders, and how two lock-keepers had suffocated in the dead-end air pockets. Just then, the river backed up through the lower water chutes. Eren had listened without speaking, his face set in the flat, unemotional mask of a man about to enter a dangerous felling cut.
Now, he was kneeling on the sodden brick floor twelve feet beyond the breach, his boots sinking into two inches of scalding gray slurry. Over his canvas work trousers, he wore his heaviest winter wool tunic. Three thick layers of boiled mountain fleece, treated with animal fat and neatsfoot oil, the traditional armor of river carpenters working in wet dockyards during winter gales. He had tied a clean linen kerchief soaked in well-water across his nose and mouth. But within two paces, every breath felt like inhaling soup straight from a bubbling kettle. Sweat poured down his temples, stinging his eyes with salt and stonework grit. At the same time, his breath rasped against the lime-dusted air. His woolen tunic, heavy even when dry, felt as though it had absorbed fifty pounds of lead shot.
Three feet ahead of him in the darkness, the massive six-foot baked-clay trunk was humming like an iron organ pipe. Where the ancient clay pot sleeve met the modern bronze collar bolted into the vault by academy tunnel diggers, a hairline fracture had opened across the mortar line. It wasn’t weeping cold water. It was shrieking—a high, thin sound hiss, eighty cycles to the second, spitting a needle-thin plume of high-pressure steam that hit the curved ceiling bricks and condensed into boiling rain that pattered across his shoulders.
Pella Rook stood just inside the larder breach. She held a hardened carbon-iron lantern with a wire guard. The flame burned pale and sickly yellow in the oxygen-empty air. ‘Don’t lean forward, Eren!’ she shouted through the roar of the pipe. ‘The draft from the river water chute is pulsing! The pressure on the dial gauge jumped two PSI. Just then, the noon water gate opened on the high terrace!’
Eren didn’t lean back. He had to measure the gap between the baked-clay pipe rim and the supporting limestone pier before the heat swelling snapped the mounting bolts. He extended his left arm, his heavy wool sleeve brushing against the damp stonework to steady his measuring tongs. He didn’t touch the steam jet directly. He didn’t have to.
The boiling vapor caught the wool cuff. Traditional boiled fleece was designed to shed cold rain by repelling surface droplets with natural wool-grease. But in fifty-degree soaked steam, the physics reversed entirely. The high-pressure moisture pierced the open weave instantly, saturating the hollow wool fibers with near-boiling cooled water. Within three seconds, the heavy wool absorbed two pints of scalding water. That turned from a protective barrier into a wet, heavy, boiling compress clamped tight against his skin.
Eren let out a sharp, choked gasp of pure body agony. He dropped the iron measuring tongs into the mud and threw himself backward, his heavy carpenter’s boots slipping on the slick brickwork. ‘Out!’ he rasped through his soaked kerchief. ‘Pella—pull!’
Pella seized the collar of his tunic with both hands, throwing her entire weight backward through the breach. Her boots skidded across the broken lath and plaster on the back kitchen floor as she dragged him out into the cool, vinegar-scented air of the larder. Eren collapsed onto his right side, his left arm thrashing against the flat stone slabs as he clawed wildly at his wool sleeve with his bare right hand. ‘Cut it! Cut the bloody wool! It’s cooking the meat!’
Sister Merrow came through the larder doorway without running. But moving with the terrifying smooth speed of an old field surgeon. In her right hand was her ten-inch boning knife, freshly whetted on the kitchen oilstone. She dropped to one knee beside Eren, wedged the flat of the blade beneath the soaked wool cuff, and sliced upward with a single, brutal motion. The heavy boiled wool parted like wet cardboard, releasing a cloud of trapped steam that smelled of scorched wool-grease and hot flesh.
She peeled the sodden cloth away. The skin of Eren’s forearm, from the wrist to four inches above the elbow, was bright, angry scarlet, already weeping clear lymph fluid and rising in thick, water-filled blisters the size of walnuts. The coarse fibers of the wool had stuck to the outer skin. That left grayish threads embedded in the raw skin.
‘Hold his shoulder, Pella,’ Merrow commanded. Her voice dropped into the flat, flat voice rhythm she had used during the siege of the Red Redoubt. She reached into her apron, pulled out a baked-clay jar of cold goose grease blended with crushed wintergreen. Then she scooped a massive handful. ‘Don’t touch it with dry cloth. Dry cloth pulls the blister caps off, and then you get the black flesh-rot. Vinegar first.’
She splashed a bowl of cold vinegar wash over the raw forearm. Eren’s jaw locked tight, his teeth grinding together with a sound like crushing gravel, his knuckles digging into the floor mortar until the joints turned white. He didn’t scream. Men who worked with circular saws and adzes learned early that screaming didn’t put blood back in the veins. He just stared at the kitchen ceiling beams, his chest heaving in short, ragged gasps. Meanwhile, Merrow slathered the thick white grease across the burn and bound it loosely with strips of clean, boiled linen.
Pella sat back against the flour bin, her hands shaking, her palms stained with cold vinegar and soot. She pulled out the Courtesy Bridge slate and logged the incident with a shaking pencil.
‘It’s a deathtrap,’ Eren whispered, his voice raspy from breathing lime vapor. He propped his head against an upturned lard firkin, his burned arm cradled across his chest. ‘You can’t wear wool in there. Wool traps the boiling water and holds it against your skin like a healing wrap. And you can’t wear boiled leather. Leather shrinks when it gets hot. It would strangle your arm like an iron tourniquet. If we don’t have proper gear, Pella, we can’t set foot in that gallery. We can’t brace the vault, we can’t patch the baked-clay, and we can’t take readings. A man can’t work in an oven wearing his Sunday coat.’
‘Then we need clothes designed for steam,’ Pella said, her eyes fixed on the charred, shredded scrap of wool lying in the puddle on the floor. ‘Not clothes for rain. Not clothes for timber yards. We need something that vents the hot gas while shedding boiling droplets, something that doesn’t absorb water and doesn’t stiffen when it cooks.’
Sister Merrow wiped the boning knife on her apron and picked up the vinegar bowl. ‘There isn’t a weaver in Lathmere who makes steam suits, girl. The High Sanctum summoners wear enchanted silk robes that cost fifty gold crowns a yard. The dockmen just stay out of the boilers until they cool.’
‘The dockmen aren’t sitting on a cracking drain tube that will drown them in twenty-four days,’ Pella said, standing up and heading toward the washroom. ‘There is someone who understands seams, tension, and heat. Jo Saye has her tea break in fifteen minutes. I’m opening the arch.’
She stepped into the washroom. There, the brass arch gleamed quietly on its ash sleepers. The air in the cellar felt cool against her hot cheeks, but through the flat stone slabs, the rhythmic pulse of the high drain tube continued its sixteen-cycle beat. Eren’s burned arm had proven what she had feared since the first steam eruption: the tools of the old world couldn’t survive the pressures of the new. If they were to save Lowbank, they would have to invent the craft from the thread up.