The river didn’t welcome them. It struck them like an iron anvil dropped from the clouds.
Water at forty miles an hour was not liquid. It was concrete, jagged river slate, and blinding blast, an unbending mass that drove the breath from Ren’s chest in a violent, bloody gasp as they hit the churning surface of the Blackwater Gorge.
The impact tore through Ren’s broken left collarbone, the fractured bone ends grinding together with an agony so total that his vision flashed blinding white before plunging into black. But in the heartbeat before they underwater, Vane Vale had thrown the heavy folds of his shredded velvet frock coat across Ren and Mira, the enchanted weave of the maritime merchant’s garment scattering forty percent of the moving blast into the frothing current before the seams crumbled.
Then the freezing blackness took them.
The Blackwater River in midwinter was a churning, sub-zero torrent fed by ice-slow melt from the High Spire peaks eight leagues to the north. The water was thick with chunks of jagged river ice that tumbled through the rapids like underwater daggers, carving bloody furrows through wool and flesh alike.
Ren kicked wildly with his cobbler’s boots, fighting the downward suction of the clouded eye pool. His right arm was locked around Mira’s waist. He refused to release her even as the icy water invaded his mouth, his nose, and his ears, numbing his brain with excruciating cold.
Her right arm was an anchor.
The stone-hard limb—fourteen pounds of dense, many-sided smoky quartz—was dragging her downward toward the boulder-strewn riverbed thirty feet below. Her wool shawl had been torn away by the violence of the entry. Through the murky, churning foam, the crystal bough of her arm caught the distant, dying embers of the train explosion above, glowing with a faint, eerie violet soft glow that lit the black depths like a drowned lantern.
She was sinking into the silt.
Ren’s lungs burned with choking agony. His fractured shoulder hung limp, fully useless for swimming. That left him with only his right arm and his kicking legs to fight the crushing drag of her stone limb and the swirling high-pressure eddies that spun them in blind circles.
I won’t let go.
The thought was not a thought. It was a physical reflex, the core axiom of an orphan boy who had spent his life mending torn thick parchment. That was because he couldn’t bear cut things. He had watched contracts rot, he had watched promises dissolve, but he wouldn’t watch his sister vanish into the dark.
I won’t let you drown.
Ren clawed at the black water with his callused, violet-stained right hand. His fingers caught a tangle of underwater driftwood. An ancient, water-logged hemlock root wedged deep between two river boulders. He hauled with every scrap of sinew left in his back. He ignored the blinding fire in his shoulder, dragging Mira upward inch by painful inch through the darkness.
CRACK-HISS.
Above the water, seventy feet overhead, a huge piece of iron boiler plate from Freight Van Three struck the river surface like an artillery shell, throwing up a fifty-foot geyser of freezing foam, steam, and twisted pipe. The blast wave rippled through the deep pool, bruising Ren’s ribs like a physical blow. But the high-pressure blast shattered the water’s skin of the whirlpool above.
Ren kicked upward with a final, desperate burst of strength.
His head broke the surface.
He gasped, drawing freezing winter air and rotten-egg smoke into his burning lungs, coughing wildly as he dragged Mira’s face out of the churning froth.
“Mira!” he wheezed, spit, blood, and river water streaming from his chin into the foam. “Mira! Breathe! Look at me!”
The girl’s head rolled back against his shoulder. She coughed—a weak, strangled sound that spat river salt water onto his collar—and then, deep within her chest, that familiar, clear glassy chime rang out against the roar of the rapids. The crystal had not shattered. The frozen stillness had held. The mammoth bone transfer on the train platform had preserved the blood-vessel margin. Her heart was beating behind the quartz cage.
Ten feet away in the swirling foam, a hand clad in waterlogged kidskin shot out of the current. It grabbed the mossy rim of a flat gravel shelf.
Vane Vale hauled himself out of the torrent like a half-drowned hound. His velvet coat was gone, sacrificed to the impact. His white silk cravat hung in sodden shreds around his neck. His hair was plastered across his pale, high-born face with freezing silt. He lay on the gravel bar for three seconds, vomiting river water, before his slate-grey eyes snapped open.
“Ren!” Vane roared, his voice hoarse, raw, and desperate. “The eddy! Catch the root!”
Vane scrambled across the freezing gravel on his hands and knees. He reached out with the blunt end of his blackthorn cane.
Ren lunged through the current, his right fingers closing around the cold wood of the stick.
With a furious, snarling effort that strained every tendon in his back, Vane hauled them out of the main current. Ren’s knees scraped over jagged river pebbles. He dragged Mira’s heavy, dripping body up onto the narrow shelf of slate and crushed gravel that hugged the base of the gorge’s sheer western cliff.
They collapsed together in the snow.
The cold was monstrous. The air in the bottom of the Blackwater Gorge was twelve degrees below zero, trapped between eight-hundred-foot walls of dripping, frost-rimmed granite. Sleet hissed into the boiling foam of the river. Wind howled down the canyon like a freight whistle. Within sixty seconds, their sodden wool clothes began to stiffen into sheets of brittle ice.
Ren lay on his back, staring up through the blizzard.
High above, at the top of the deep gap, the orange glow of the train fire still flickered against the low-hanging winter clouds. Jagged fragments of burning timber and twisted iron brackets tumbled intermittently from the cliff edge. It splashed into the river three hundred yards downstream.
Locomotive 808 was gone. The Glass Pavilion was kindling. Freight Van Three was a crushed tomb of lead and zinc buried beneath fifty tons of shattered limestone on the mid-cliff shelf.
Beside Ren, Mira lay curled on her left side, shivering wildly. Her teeth chattered with an uneven, clockwork rhythm. Her skin was deathly pale, blue around the lips and fingernails.
Her right arm lay upon the frozen pebbles—a sculpted bough of semi-clear, lilac-tinted smoky quartz, fully flawless by the fall. The crystal seemed to draw the cold from the winter air, streaming an aura of total stillness that kept the sleet from melting on its polished facets.
“The... The water was cold, Ren,” she whispered, her voice tiny and fragile as a moth’s wing.
Ren rolled onto his side, his broken collarbone grinding with an agony that drew a ragged groan from his throat. He pulled her against his chest. He wrapped his freezing lambskin apron and wet wool coat around her shivering shoulders. In his breast pocket, the Speculum pressed against his ribs. It was cold now, dormant, but heavy with the weight of the road they had burned.
“It’s over, Mira,” Ren whispered. His forehead pressed against hers, his tears freezing into frost upon her lashes. “The train is gone. Malakor is gone. Voss is gone.”
“Is he?” Vane said, his voice cutting through the roar of the clouded eye.
The merchant sat on an overturned river boulder five paces away, his hands clamped between his knees to stop their violent trembling. Even in the depths of freezing sickness, his patrician stance refused to break. Even so, his breath rattled in his chest with the alarming hollow wheeze of a dying man. Sustaining Vane in the physical realm was draining Ren’s living life-force at a terrifying rate. Ren could feel a cold, hollow empty pocket in his marrow, as if his own blood was being burned to keep Vane’s dark shape from dissolving into mist.
“Look at the gravel spit beneath the old ore chute,” Vane murmured. He pointed his blackthorn stick downstream.
Ren looked through the sleet.
A hundred yards downstream, lit up by the burning wreckage of a passenger carriage that had lodged itself against the river boulders, a lone figure crawled through the freezing surf.
The man was dragging a shattered, compound-fractured leg behind him. That left a dark, steaming trail of blood across the snow. His stitched plum robe was torn to ribbons, his silver hair burned away on the left side of his scalp, his florid cheeks blackened by fire. In his good hand, he still clutched a heavy, brass-bound register—the master client ledger of the Voss Care Institute—its pages burning with a stubborn, chemical yellow flame that hissed against the river foam.
Julian Voss had survived the plunge. He was broken, bleeding, and crawling toward the rocks like a crushed spider. But the spark of life still flickered in his skull.
“The audit isn’t complete, Ren,” Vane whispered. His grey eyes reflected the yellow flames on the water. “A contract doesn’t close until the debtor is buried.”