The sound began as a low, wet baying that traveled through the hollow stonework of the chimney breast.
It wasn’t the natural howl of mastiffs or wolf-hounds. It was an artificial, air-powered rasp. The sound of brass valves opening and closing in sync with wet, leather-wrapped bellows. Chancellery Bloodhounds. Beasts forged from heavy ash timber, boiled bull-hide, and iron clockwork, their smell reservoirs charged with distilled burning acid and sensitized to the unique chemical deep ring of illicit inks. In the narrow alleys three stories below, their iron paws struck the cobbles with the heavy, rhythmic clatter of falling hammers.
Ren scrambled to his feet, his joints popping with cold stiffness. He shoved the ivory awl and the horn inkpot into his satchel, his fingers flying through the straps.
“They’re in the street,” Ren whispered. His heart hammered against his bruised ribs like an engine with a broken piston. “Thorne brought the tracking pack from the Third District Barracks. Four hounds and a full crushing weight squad.”
Across the attic, Vane was already on his feet, slipping his velvet frock coat over his waistcoat and buttoning it with calm, terrifying economy of motion. His gold-headed cane rested under his left arm like an officer’s baton.
“Ink-hounds,” Vane said, his voice clipped and analytical as if he were reviewing a routine shipping loss. “Model Four Chancellery Harriers. Each one carries a sense bulb tuned to iron-gall acidity and lampblack carbon. The lapis lazuli wash you just scribed on Mira’s neck is practically a bright light fire to their pressure plates. The moment they cross the canal bridge, they will trace the vapor straight to this chimney pipe.”
“We can’t carry her down the main stairs,” Ren said. He crossed the room to help Mira sit upright. “The stairwell opens onto the street. They’ll have two hounds at the front entrance and three covering the rear coal chute.”
“We’re not going down,” Vane said. He pointed the gold head of his cane toward the ceiling. “We’re going up.”
“The roof?” Ren stared at him, incredulous. “Mira has fourteen pounds of solid smoky quartz in her right shoulder! If she slips on the frozen slate, the impact will shatter her lattice! A fractured collarbone will drive quartz splinters into her lungs before we reach the street!”
“She won’t slip,” Vane said, walking over to the pallet. The older man looked down at Mira. His grey eyes locked onto hers with a power that left no room for panic or pause. “Can you climb three rungs of an iron fire ladder with your left hand, Mira?”
Mira looked at the older brother who had abandoned her in another life. She pulled her charcoal shawl tight around her frozen right arm. She tucked the heavy wool fringe securely beneath her armpit so the many-sided stone wouldn’t catch on the ladder rungs. Her chin lifted with that stubborn, unbending pride that was the only inheritance the Vale family had ever possessed.
“I climbed the grain silos when I was nine, Vane,” she said quietly. “And I didn’t need your permission then either.”
A ghost of a smile touched Vane’s mustache. “Good girl. Keep your left hand on Ren’s belt. Don’t look at the street.”
Downstairs, the heavy oak entrance door of Tenement Forty-Two splintered with a thunderous crash that shook the attic floorboards. The metal, wet barking of the hounds erupted into the stairwell, with the heavy, clanking strides of Guard-Captain Corvus Thorne’s iron cavalry boots.
“Vale!” Thorne’s roar echoed up the narrow stairs, magnified by the hollow walls. “Come down with your hands empty, or I loose the dogs into the rafters! We have warrants for your marrow, scribe!”
Ren hoisted Mira with his left arm. She took the bulk of her dense stone weight onto his own hip. Her right side was cold as ice, the dense smoky quartz pressing hard against his ribs like a block of carved granite. Together, they scrambled toward the rear of the attic. There, a rusted iron fire ladder led up to the roof scuttle.
Vane reached into his oilcloth smock. He pulled out two small glass vials he had taken from Harker’s pawnshop counter during their midnight visit.
“What are those?” Ren asked, shoving the roof hatch open against the howling gale. A swirl of fine alpine snow blasted into the attic, instantly coating the rafters in white frost.
“Ox-gall solvent cut with thirty percent strong etching acid and powdered sulfur,” Vane said, unscrewing the lead caps with his thumb. “A simple chemical counter-measure. When mixed with the birch ash from the stove, it produces a volatile ammonium vapor that saturates iron-gall specks.”
Vane dumped both vials directly into the dying embers of the hearth.
FZZZZZZT.
A thick, blinding plume of yellow-green chemical smoke erupted from the stove, billowing through the attic like an expanding wall of sulfuric fog. It smelled wildly of burnt rotten eggs, vinegar, and boiled copper. A stench so sharp that Ren’s eyes instantly began to stream with tears. His throat seized in a paroxysm of coughing.
“Up!” Vane snapped, coughing into his cambric handkerchief as he followed them onto the ladder. “The hounds will inhale the vapor at the landing. The acid will corrode their sense diaphragms before they clear the second flight!”
Ren pushed Mira up through the hatchway onto the slate roof of Tenement Forty-Two.
The gale hit them like a physical hammer. Snow whipped horizontally across the ridge of the roof, blurring the emerald gaslights of Low-Khorat into smeared, watery halos far below. The slate tiles beneath their boots were coated in a dangerous skin of black ice, slick as greased glass. Ren gripped Mira’s waist with both arms. He anchored his heels against the lead flashing of the brick chimney breast.
Behind them, the attic door below burst off its hinges with a sickening shriek of tearing oak.
A metal roar erupted from the open hatchway. The air-powered snarl of the lead hound charging through the doorway. But the sound choked instantly into a high-pitched, grinding squeal as the clockwork beast inhaled Vane’s chemical smoke. The sound of shattered clockwork, stripped gears, and bursting copper bellows echoed up through the chimney pipe as the strong etching acid vapor rusted through the beast’s internal air-powered lungs.
“Damned witch-tricks!” Thorne’s furious voice bellowed from the floor below, muffled by the choking fog. “Cover the alleyways! Bring the heavy steel crossbows to the street! Shoot anything that moves on the roof!”
Vane pulled himself through the hatch. It slammed the heavy iron scuttle down. Then it dropped a rusted crossbar across the retaining brackets with a sharp clang. He stood upright on the snowy ridge, the wind whipping his velvet coat against his legs. He looked out over the connected rooftops of Tanner’s Row like a sea captain surveying a storm-tossed reef.
“Where now, boy?” Vane yelled above the roar of the blizzard.
“The aqueduct bridge!” Ren shouted back, pointing through the swirling snow toward the huge stone arches of the Third Waterway towering sixty yards to the east. “There’s a check narrow high walkway beneath the main high-pressure pipe! It leads directly into the drainage vaults under the Voss Sanatorium!”
“An aqueduct narrow high walkway in a sub-zero gale,” Vane muttered, adjusting his silk cravat with frozen, shaking fingers that were already turning blue. “My dividends just keep getting richer.”
Ren helped Mira forward along the snowy spine of the roof. Mira moved with fierce, quiet concentration. Her left hand grabbed Ren’s collar. Meanwhile, her frozen right arm hung motionless against her side, dead weight balanced by sheer willpower and stubborn grit.
Beneath them, in the street below, lantern beams swung wildly through the swirling snow. Crossbow quarrels hissed through the dark like angry hornets. One bolt struck a terracotta chimney pot three feet to their right, showering them with sharp red shards that stung their cheeks.
“Keep low!” Ren warned, dropping into a crouch and shielding Mira with his body.
They scrambled across the adjoining roof of the cooperage, hopped a narrow two-foot gap over an alley where the wind screamed like a banshee, and hauled themselves onto the icy iron narrow high walkway of the aqueduct.
Beneath the grating of the walkway, the black, churning waters of the high canal rushed through the iron channel, drowning the shouts of the pursuing court guards in an ear-splitting high-pressure roar.
Vane leaned against the iron channel pipe, his chest heaving, his face ashen with tiredness. His counting frame clicked in his hand. Not a deliberate math, but a reflex tremor of his fingers as Ren’s body-energy reserves dwindled toward zero.
“We have reached the outer edge,” Vane rasped. He looked through the snow at the massive, soot-blackened stone walls of the Voss Crystalline Sanatorium rising on the far side of the canal. “The laundry chute is thirty paces ahead. Catch your breath, Ren. The real butchery begins inside.”
Ren checked the ivory awl in his satchel, feeling the cold weight of the bone against his palm.
The hounds were dead behind them. But ahead lay the cages, the ledgers, and the harvest of glass.