Moving four tons of coal by hand is a problem of arithmetic, and arithmetic does not care how tired you are.
We began at dawn with thirty-one people, two handcarts borrowed from the Hospice, and every bucket in Cinder Row. Greaves had sent word through a silent clerk that the east tunnel was ours to use, and that his own carts would not be waiting there. A courtesy, in his language. A reminder that nothing was free.
"Forty buckets a trip," Tobb said, squinting at the sun he could not see. "Ten trips an hour if nobody stops to breathe. That's four hundred buckets."
"How many do we need?"
"For five tons? Eleven hundred, near enough."
"Then we need three hours of everyone not breathing," I said, "or six hours of everyone breathing a little."
"You're learning," said Tobb.
I made it six hours. A human chain ran from the bunker mouth to the furnace, two hundred yards of people passing buckets hand to hand, so nobody walked more than ten steps. Marrow set the rhythm with a drum she had found in a collapsed shed, a slow beat everyone could hold without thinking. Children carried water along the line. Kaelen stood at the dark end, at the mouth of the shaft, and loaded buckets with a face so grim that two of the Row's old women began quietly bringing him tea.
The bellows kept breathing at the hatch. Nobody went below without a rope, a lamp, and a partner who could see the lamp. Nobody sat down for a minute, either. Wren patrolled the ladder with her stick, and anyone who yawned got rapped on the shin.
By noon the first mound of black coal stood beside the furnace, glittering, absurdly tall. People stopped to look at it the way you look at a stranger who has turned out to be family.
◆
Tobb's nine builders had spent the morning on the iron, and by afternoon they had made a decision I would not have made.
"We're not melting the cracked rails," Tobb announced, standing in the rail yard with a hammer in each hand. "Your friend was right. A third of them are rotten through."
"We need the weight."
"We need the weight that holds." He tapped a rail section and it rang with a flat, dead note, like a bell with a crack in it. Then he tapped another and it sang. "Listen. Good iron talks. Bad iron mumbles. We sort by sound."
It took three hours. Tobb and the old woman, whose name turned out to be Odda, walked the yard tapping, and the Row's children dragged what they pointed at into two piles. Singers on the left. Mumblers on the right. By evening the left pile was shorter than I wanted and the right pile was taller than I could bear.
"It's not enough," I said.
"No," said Odda. It was the first word I had heard her speak. "But the mumblers can be mended."
"How?"
"Fold them," she said. "Like bread. Heat, hammer, fold, again. Every fold drives the weak out." She looked at me with eyes like two small black coals. "It burns a lot of fuel."
"We have a lot of fuel."
"Then it's slow work, not impossible work." She turned back to her pile. "Slow is all we've ever been good at."
I wrote that down, in the ledger, in the margin, where I keep the things I do not want to forget.
◆
By the time the sun, wherever it was, had gone down, we had a furnace full of good coal, a yard full of sorted iron, and nineteen hours left.
Wren found it just before we lit.
We had gathered around the firebox at dusk, all of us, dirty and aching and quietly proud. Tobb had laid the kindling with the care of a man arranging a funeral. The first splits were stacked. The bellows crew stood ready at the great air valve that fed the tuyères, the ring of cast-iron nozzles at the base of the firebox. All that remained was the match.
Wren had been hovering at my elbow for an hour with a look I knew from my own childhood, the look of someone who has noticed a thing and is not sure whether she is allowed to say so.
"Wren," I said. "What is it?"
"The feather."
"What feather?"
"My da always tested the blast first. Before every firing." She held up a small grey feather, bent at the quill. "You blow through the nozzles. If the feather stands up, the air's clear. If it lies down or curls, something's blocking."
"Nobody mentioned this," said Tobb.
"He did it quiet. He said it was luck." She looked at her feet. "He said you never light a furnace without asking it first."
I looked at Tobb. Tobb looked at the bellows crew. Nobody said anything, and then the oldest of them, a stooped man with a scar across his jaw, shrugged and worked the valve one slow stroke.
Air hissed through the nozzles. Wren held the feather before the first one.
It stood straight up, quivering.
She moved to the second. Straight. The third. Straight. The fourth.
The feather curled.
It did not flutter or wobble. It simply bent away from the nozzle and lay flat, as though the air coming out of it was too tired to lift a feather.
Wren looked up at me.
"Check them all," I said quietly.
She did. Twelve nozzles. Nine were clear. Three, clustered in a row on the south side, bent the feather over as if it had been pressed with a thumb.
◆
Tobb got the first nozzle open with a long iron rod and a muttered curse.
What came out was white.
Not ash. Not soot. A fine, chalky powder, packed tight into the throat of the tuyère like flour into a sack. It spilled onto the stone floor in a small pale heap and lay there looking harmless.
"Don't touch it," said Odda sharply.
She was already at my side. She did not look at the powder. She looked at the nozzle, at the neat circle of clean metal around its rim.
"Someone packed that in," she said. "Careful. By hand. Not a fire, not a collapse. Careful."
"What is it?" Kaelen asked.
Tobb crouched. He did not touch it either. He leaned over it, nostrils flared, and drew one slow breath through his nose.
"Smell that," he said.
I knelt. At first there was nothing. Then, underneath the dust and the coal and the cold iron, something sharp and bright and wrong, like a struck match held too near a face.
"Witch-fire base," Tobb said. His voice was very flat. "Unlit, dry, packed in the blast lines. You fire the bellows, the air carries it into the box, the coals light it, and the whole thing goes up like a bottle of lamp oil."
"Three nozzles," said Odda.
"Three. On the south side." Tobb stood, slowly, and looked at the furnace like a man looking at a dog that had nearly bitten him. "That's enough to take off the roof. And everyone standing under it."
Nobody spoke. I could hear Wren's breathing, quick and shallow, and the faint hiss of the bellows as they settled.
"Same as before," Marrow said at last. She had come up behind me without a sound. "Fourteen months ago."
"Yes."
"Someone knew we'd light it."
"Someone knew we'd light it today," I said. "And knew exactly how."
I looked at the clean cut metal around the nozzle, at the neat white heap, at a very small boot print in the soot by the south wall. Too small for a man. Too deep for a child.
"They were here this afternoon," I said. "While we were all at the bunker. Every single person in the Row was in that chain. Nobody was watching the furnace."
"Then the whole thing was a distraction," said Kaelen.
"Or the whole thing was a clock."
He looked at me.
"They wanted us to spend the day carrying coal," I said slowly, "and then light the box at dusk, tired and hopeful, with every person we have standing around it."
Kaelen said nothing for a long moment.
"That is a cruel plan," he said.
"It's a good one," I said. "Which is worse."
◆
We cleared the nozzles by lamplight.
It took four hours. Tobb worked each nozzle with a long hooked rod and a wet cloth tied across his face, easing the powder out in a thin steady stream and sweeping it into a bucket of water, and nobody was allowed within ten feet. Odda stood by with a second bucket and a pair of iron tongs. Wren, who had saved all our lives with a feather, was sent to sit with Marrow on the farthest step and was not allowed to move.
I stood at the edge of the lamplight, watching Tobb's hands.
They were steady. They were an old man's hands, calloused and thick, and they did not shake at all. I thought about the cold quiet purpose of someone who could lay powder into a furnace's lungs with hands like that, small and careful and certain, and then walk away in the dark.
"Kaelen," I said.
"Yes."
"Did you see anyone on the rail yard this afternoon?"
"Besides the thirty of us?" He shook his head. "I walked the whole yard twice. There was nobody."
"Not a shape? A movement?"
He was quiet. "Near the old foreman's office," he said at last. "Just before noon. A figure. Small. Hooded. I thought it was one of the children."
"What did it do?"
"Nothing. It stood in the doorway for a moment. Then it went inside." His jaw tightened. "I assumed it was looking for somewhere to sleep."
"Did it come out?"
"I didn't see."
I turned and looked across the yard to the shell of the old office, a black square against a blacker sky. Its door hung open. Inside, nothing moved.
"Wait here," I said.
"Aren."
"I'm only looking."
"You said that at the vault."
"I did," I said. "And I came out."
He did not argue, which meant he had already decided to follow me.
◆
The office was empty.
Dust lay thick on the floor, dust and old paper and a rusted desk with one leg gone. The lamp showed me everything and nothing. In the corner was a pile of sacking, flattened in the shape of someone who had slept there and left. Beside it, neatly arranged on a crate, sat a small tin cup, a half loaf of bread, and a folded piece of cloth.
I picked up the cloth.
It was grey, thin, worn nearly through. Embroidered in one corner, in thread so faded it was barely visible, was a tiny mirror, no bigger than a thumbnail. Beneath it, three small stitches, the beginnings of a letter that had never been finished.
"A mirror," Kaelen said, behind me.
"Yes."
"The Broker's mark."
"The Broker keeps a hundred mirrors," I said slowly. "It's her whole house. But anyone could stitch a mirror."
"Anyone could."
"And anyone could leave it here, folded neatly, where we'd be sure to find it."
Kaelen was silent for a moment.
"Do you think she did this?" he asked.
I turned the cloth over in my hands. The back was clean. No dirt, no thread, no stain. Only the small neat mirror and the three stitches of an unfinished name.
"I think someone wants me to," I said.
"That isn't an answer."
"No." I folded the cloth and tucked it into my coat, next to the copied pages and the black card and everything else I was carrying that I did not understand. "It's a question. I'll ask it when I know how."
The ache behind my left eye pulsed, slow and heavy. Outside, faint and far away, I could hear Tobb calling for water.
"Sixteen hours," Kaelen said.
"Sixteen hours."
"We still have to light it."
"We do." I looked once more at the narrow room, the empty bed, the half loaf of bread. "And whoever slept here will be watching to see whether we do."
We walked out into the dark together, and I did not look back.