"What happened after you followed the lamp?" Aylin asked.
Brann Tev climbed the rest of the way out of the maintenance hatch and put his hammer against the floor.
He had river mud to his belt, two fingers fixed against his left palm, and no interest in the question that had pulled Aylin across two worlds.
The hammer handle trembled.
"Your lower gutter is feeding my underwheel," he said. "We stop that before I improve anybody's childhood."
Aylin rose from beside Jiang's bench. The quick movement pulled at her injured arm; she caught it against her body and kept her face on Brann.
"I watched a man go through after my father's lamp."
"Then your eyes worked that night. Bring the bird."
Ossin lowered a Whitewake hook across the hatch. "You have not asked why a marked emperor penguin is lying in Ista's furnace cloth."
Brann glanced at Jiang. "Did he open the spill peg?"
"With his beak," Ista said.
"That answers why I want him. The rest can remain strange until the city stops drowning upward."
Jiang approved of a man willing to postpone the obvious question. He approved even more when Brann pulled a waxed packet from his coat and opened it over the bench.
River fish, smoked dark and slick with oil.
Brann held one strip toward him. "Can you eat without taking my thumb?"
Jiang looked at the two crooked fingers folded against Brann's palm. The man had brought fewer to risk than advertised.
He took the fish cleanly.
"Better manners than Whitewake," Brann said.
"We use forks," Ossin replied.
"You use hooks and call them policy."
Ista gave Brann a look that carried years of hearing this argument through flooded walls. "I know him. Brann keeps the underwheel, clears my spring channels, and overcharges me in insults because I refuse to pay him in beer."
"Your beer can remove furnace scale. People should not drink tools."
Brann offered Jiang a second strip. Jiang swallowed more slowly this time, letting oil sit warm behind his tongue.
Aylin stepped between Brann and the hatch. "The gate is braced. Answer me while they set the next timber."
Brann's scarred ear faced her. His other ear stayed turned toward the floor.
"King Edric threw his lamp into the spill channel," he said. "The lower jaw had caught with me inside. Light showed the scouring notch. I went after it because the main throat was already full."
"Did he pull you out?"
"He turned the wheel. I supplied the crawling."
Brann raised the damaged hand. "The notch took these. Your father got enough weight off the jaw for the rest of me."
Aylin's mouth opened, then closed around a different question. "The warning cups?"
"I struck from below before the lamp came. One answer reached me from the lower harbor. The upper braid gave me nothing."
"I heard two answers."
"You heard one line and a festival full of people who liked hitting copper."
The nearest Glasswash workers slowed over their timber. Brann made no effort to soften the sentence for witnesses.
Aylin held his gaze. "I opened the gate."
"You did. Someone killed the upper answer before you chose. You still chose. Both things fit in the same night."
The hammer jumped against the floor.
Black water spat through the maintenance hatch and stained Brann's boot.
"There," he said. "Now the night is trying again."
He pulled a narrow tool tray from under the hatch lip. Its iron runners were polished by old stone and its shallow bed smelled of lamp oil, lime, and fish.
Jiang started to climb off the bench.
His unreliable foot bent under him before he reached the edge.
Aylin caught the furnace cloth rather than his body. "The tray or my arm. Choose the insult you prefer."
Jiang considered her injured shoulder, the steep hatch, and his remaining dignity. Only one of those had no medical value.
He stepped onto the tray.
Brann packed warm lamp cloth along Jiang's wounded side and left the failed flipper free. Aylin checked the placement with one hand. She waited until Jiang settled his breast before fastening the cloth across the tray, loose enough for him to lift his head.
Ossin assigned three hunters to Last Gate and sent the rest to clear Glasswash's lower stairs. Tovin kept the guide line above; Dagna took its descending end. Rian carried his wet road order open to the air, where the ink bled into shapes that no longer looked official.
Brann led. Ista followed with a furnace lamp. Dagna lowered Jiang's tray while Aylin stayed close enough for him to see her boots. Ossin and Rian came last beneath the hatch.
Beside every River-Open step, one channel ran clear toward the underwheel while black water climbed the other.
Brann struck each landing before trusting it. His hammer produced a clean ring from dry stone and a dead knock wherever flood glass had entered the foundation.
At the third landing, the dark channel borrowed Edric's voice.
"Aylin, you need to come home."
Brann walked through the voice without slowing.
Aylin looked down at his scarred ear. "You recognize him."
"I recognize what he sounded like with all his teeth. That water has never met him."
Rian lifted the ruined order. "The palace horn has met somebody who owned a royal seal."
"Seals are why I prefer hammers. A hammer lies only when the hand does."
Jiang rested his beak on the tray rim. Warm cloth held beneath him, and oily fish had begun replacing the hollow ache under his breast. The stair's sway worked against his eyes.
He tried to watch Aylin and Brann at once, then lost to his own eyelids.
Hammer blows carried through a sleep without dreams. Between them, Jiang heard chain moving, Ista cursing a lime-packed hinge, and Aylin refusing to let Brann pull a wheel with his damaged hand. Nobody woke him to witness their competence.
When he opened his eyes, the tray rested beside a lamp box in a round chamber.
His feathers were dry along the back. Warmth remained shallow but real beneath his breast. The old drag behind every breath had released him; air entered, did its work, and left without demanding a meeting.
The shoulder still hurt. His flipper still lay useless in its cradle. Recovery had returned one tool and repaired nothing else.
Across the chamber, Brann and Dagna leaned into a chain wheel. Ista knocked crust from its teeth while Rian held the furnace lamp. Aylin stood at the open water channel, watching black-green threads slide beneath clear current.
"The underwheel should divide runoff between Glasswash and the royal spill," Brann said. "Something has tied both gates to the same pull."
Ossin tested the closed royal side with his hook. "Can we cut the tie here?"
"If you enjoy choosing which district floods before seeing either channel."
Jiang lifted his head above the tray.
From his height, the clear channel reflected the furnace lamp. The black channel swallowed it. Between them stood a wall Brann had dismissed as dry because no water showed at human knee level.
Along the floor, a dark bead squeezed from beneath that wall and rolled toward the wheel.
Jiang struck the tray rim.
Aylin turned first. He pointed his beak at the base of the dry wall.
Brann knelt. His good fingertips found the bead, rubbed it, and came away threaded with green-black shine.
"That wall was sealed after River-Open," he said.
Ista brought the lamp lower. "Sealed with glasswash waste. My guild mark is on the cap."
"Your guild mark is on everything that survives long enough to become inconvenient."
Brann drove his hammer claw beneath the cap. Ista added a narrow glass chisel. Dagna braced the top while Rian moved the lamp away from the first crack.
Aylin reached for the chisel.
Brann blocked her with his scarred hand. "Your arm is poor, and I have not finished being angry at you. Hold the lamp."
She took it from Rian.
The glass cap broke outward under their tools.
Cold water washed around Jiang's tray and filled the chamber with the smell of old river clay. Behind the wall, black glass rose in a frozen curl around a stone the size of a clenched hand.
A hole had been drilled clean through its center. Pale cord remained inside, protected from the water by the glass that had formed around it.
River stones with drilled centers had carried Aylin's empty death cloak through Last Gate.
Brann sat back on his heels. His mouth remained open without a useful instruction behind it.
Aylin lowered the furnace lamp. Light entered the old glass and stopped at the pale cord beneath it.
"That glass formed during the flood," Ista said.
Brann touched the wall beside the stone, careful to keep his skin off the black-green thread moving behind it.
"The mourning weight was here before the water rose," he said. "Empty, royal-sized, and waiting beside your father's lower gate."