Chapter 10 - Siltstack
Ostok hissed as his sandaled foot caught upon a buckled stone in the road. Hearn caught him by the arm. Ostok stamped and said, “Why wait until dark to drag me through this ill-kept street?”
Hearn searched up and down the empty Szem road. He saw no one else about in that clammy, cloudless night. “Do you want a repeat of earlier?” he asked quietly.
“That seems to me unlikely.” Ostok followed Hearn’s eye up and down the street as they walked on, though his small and black ones had a skeptical slant in them. “I see only closed shops and industry.”
“That’s why we walk in the dark.”
“Why?”
“They must be worse than Bond Gang thugs - men that will sleep alone inside of an abandoned loomery.”
“We appear more suspicious under the eyelights of the stars than Theman’s sun.”
Hearn stopped walking. He pinched the bridge of his nose, only a light touch as the black bruise around his eye still ached. “We’ll return tomorrow then.”
“My faithful border agent, you must relax. Hem. It’s just my nature that causes me to question your guidance.”
“A muira and a human, walking by themselves through the industrial quarter of Szem by day, will attract attention.”
“Granted.”
“Two unseen shapes, observed only by stars and wind, won’t.”
Hearn led them quickly across an open span of crossroad where the starlight beamed brightly down. The two paused at once as they heard strange footsteps, more than one set, echoing from some nearby alley. Someone laughed. “Empty, eh?” asked Ostok.
“The feeders at the lanternfish hatchery start working at the seventh span,” Hearn explained. “So do the warehouse guards.”
“They’re early,” said Ostok quietly.
Hearn nodded. “We should leave before the full night shift arrives.”
They passed along the long, high stone wall of an open smithing yard. The caustic odor of gear oil caught their noses. Ostok plugged his. “Golani works,” he said.
Hearn said, “Their empire’s been sponsoring forges in every major volon capital for the last four years.”
Ostok said nothing. They passed beneath a bright, new painted fabric sheet which had been plastered high on the wall. It showed a human in the Teironian uniform of a general, with a thick, dark grey beard, and a scowl that followed the pair as they walked. Below the scowling general, stitched into the fabric in huge black leegesspeech, were the words: ‘RINGS. GLORY. ADVENTURE. Join the TEIRONIAN ARMY.’ Someone had tried to throw red paint over the image, but hadn’t been able to reach high enough on the wall; a shiny, red, dribbling stain spread over the stone bricks below. They passed another poster a few paces further on, older and slightly worn, listing out names, laws broken, and bounties assigned:
‘Gerko Zobor; false prophecizing; three goldens’
‘Lili Szekeres; exposed her child; one fiftyskein’
‘Armin; seen swatting a torchbug, destroyed his neighbor’s window; one tenskein, two golders, three silvers’
They passed the corner of the smithing yard. The gear oil smell faded behind them. In its place rolled the not-unpleasant tang of charcoal smoke and grain mills.
“That’s the stack.” Hearn broke the silence as they turned a corner. Ostok followed the agent’s pointed finger to the shape of an enormous, glass-and-metal-walled building, slightly flat, and shaped like the wedge of an orange. The constellation of Old Man Spider gleamed down in miniature on each individual glass window - a thousand tiny, watching stars seemed to stare across at the pair from the slanted surface of curving glass. To the side of the building lay a pit, dark and unlit - a scummy reservoir, from which the workers had once pumped their water for the silt beds.
“It looks in happy condition,” Ostok observed.
“It looks abandoned,” said Hearn dryly.
“No broken glass though. How long did you say it’s been closed?”
“Six years.”
“And unoccupied for all that time?”
“We’ll see.”
With a cracking the last board on the worker access door at the north side of the siltstack broke inward. A fragment of splintered wood remained bolted to the steel frame, and cut Hearn’s outer elbow as he stepped inside. “Tainted bones,” he hissed.
“Strike up the lantern I think,” said Ostok mildly from behind. Hearn bent to the floor just inside the stack and did so. Yellow light fell mattely on the studded metal floors and the wood-paneled walls with flaking green paint. The corridor ran roughly, as far as the light showed, along the outer brick wall of the stack’s flat, glassless north face. Even in this remote corner of the stack, where the offices and storage rooms were; even given the passage of many years since a bed of coarse grain was last reaped and ground in the facility; silt dust hung in the air. It swirled slowly in the new air of the opened door, and the yellow light. It smelled of old decay and summer fields.
“Where to?” asked Hearn. He raised the lamp high, lighting the corridor east and west.
Ostok shrugged. “It’s a big structure,” he said. “Let’s simply walk. The more we see the better.”
They had been crunching over the dry residue of old silt husks that littered the floor for only a few moments when they turned into a high-ceilinged room with a more-functional atmosphere. The green painted wood of the corridor gave way to a tangle of ductwork and slatted grates. Two pairs of furnaces gaped at each other on respective sides of the room, their cold, slatted faces staring lightlessly. Hearn saw that they were not simple wooden furnaces, but that a reservoir of oil stood beside each. “For controlling the heat, I think,” he said to Ostok’s inquiring look.
“Marvelous,” said the bountyman.
“And the air’s wetness.”
Ostok sniffed at the top of one basin. He rubbed his hand along the surface, but shook his head. “Dusty. Not used for many seasons.”
“This one is different.” Hearn’s voice echoed in the chamber as he stooped beside the metal device in the northeastern corner. “The pipes coming off of it are larger round than an oxen’s head.”
Ostok walked over, bent down, and peered through the grate. “There’s a wick dangling inside.”
Hearn held his lamp over the oil receptacle nearby. He saw a dry, thin film of silt dust covering a plate on top of the receptacle. Removing this plate by way of a small brass knob, he uncovered a stagnant pool of oil. Moreover he found a screw on the side of the reservoir, which he proceeded to untighten. There came a gasping, gulping sound, followed by a trickle from within the grate of the furnace.
Hearn went to depress a button on the side of the great metal machine.
“Don’t!” said Ostok.
Hearn stopped. “It’s only an igniter for the multicandles,” he said.
“I know that.”
“You would search in the dark?”
“No. I’m not that type of bountyman.”
Hearn checked his pocket clock by the lantern’s light. “We have half a span. We’ll see and cover less in the dark.”
“Just consider this for a moment. If we light the multicandles throughout the building, don’t you think it will alert any onlookers? Like those ‘night crew’ workers you said were out in the street. Besides,” he added, with a wave of his hand through the air that made the silt dust swirl, “we might start a fire.”
“They don’t build these stacks to burn down when someone starts the lights. But I take your other point.” Hearn stood up from the furnace.
“This rusty metal lamp has shed light for me in darker places. Fear no hindered perception.”
There were three open doorways leading from the furnace room. “Where now?” Hearn asked.
“Up and around. Let us see as much as we may.”
They skulked through the crackling husks and thick air. Ostok began to puff when they had summited a third flight in a long circling stairwell. “Let’s look at this level,” he said.
“One of the silt platforms,” said Hearn as they stepped through a door on the landing. Ostok’s lantern threw buttermilk light over four, a dozen, a hundred raised beds of dry cracked soil, as he angled his beam higher and higher. He stopped abruptly and arced the beam back when it gleamed off the slanted, curving surface of the south-facing glass wall. “Best not to signal anyone by accident,” he chuckled.
The wooden boards of the floor groaned underfoot as Hearn and the bountyman stepped down the narrow path between two beds. “What’s that odor?” Ostok asked.
“Maybe it’s pest powder?” Hearn suggested.
“After all this time?”
“Like residue accumulated in the seams.”
They walked and briskly scanned the growing space. They found nothing of note. Nothing was to be found in the fourth platform’s growing chamber either. By the time they had reached the fifth floor of the structure, the bountyman was heaving air to and from his lips, his breath uncatchable.
“Let me sit… for a moment,” Ostok said.
“Less than half a span to the night shift,” said Hearn, pulling his clock from his tunic with a tinkle of the chain.
“Nothing here.” Ostok waved about them. “Abandoned for years. Abandoned still. We’ll go… just a moment.”
Hearn sat down on the wooden rim of the dry growing bed opposite his companion.
After the bountyman had stifled his wheezes to a level that did not seem to pull the very air past Hearn’s ears, he coughed to clear his throat and said, “My glory days are, I believe, well and truly passed.”
Hearn said, “It’s been a busy day.”
“Did I ever tell you about the job I did for the great Wind Cathedral in Bruna? For its elder priest?”
“I believe so.”
“This would have occurred almost two decades ago,” Ostok went on. “Let me see now, hmm, it may have been more than twenty years. How time evaporates. This priest’s hearth had been the victim, so it was presumed, of a religious attack. His wife and child were murdered before the waking of day, in their private chambers of the temple dormitories.”
“Only the lay members of a wind church are allowed within its dormitories.”
“How did you know that?”
Hearn twisted about and jerked a thumb in the direction of the glass wall, toward the night and the vast sprawl of Aster-Szem that lay visibly beneath it. “That’s how it is at our temple.”
“As it is here, so it is there. You grasp preemptively some of my difficulty on that job. I had been given a bounty for ‘the person(s) responsible for the murder of this priest’s wife and son’. Yet from all I could presume, the only suspects who might have held the switch that cut them were the elder priest’s own clergy.”
“Was it them?”
“No. It unraveled more convolutedly than that. I said the expectation around the murder involved motives of a religious character. I have, doubtless, no need to tell you that a temple devoted to the Wind receives less than enthusiastic support in any muira city. There are those among my people who see, in the established Wind temples, an attempt by an enemy to exert control over our species. Or, to crush under the hoof of the war elk the bones of our household gods. Now you needn’t look so frowning and sour - I’m not about to deliver some singular moral lesson on the virtues of my species, or the ‘attacks we suffer from the humans’. Some of our most ancient kings, in fact, sponsored the construction of the temples. After all, it would be an easier thing to govern the disparate hearths if all were united in the worship of one deity.”
Hearn rose. Taking the lantern from beside the bountyman, he turned a slow walk about the growing platform. He examined the dry old soil of the beds with half interest. Two or three ancient stalks of silt stuck up from one bed.
At Hearn’s back Ostok spoke on without interruption. “Now Bruna - no doubt you already know it’s the setting of Queen Balgah’s court and castle - entered into a state of civil panic at these events. Small wonder. It’s not every day an elder priest’s family is murdered. Anyway, the city lent me the service a Knight of Ahn. Ostensibly this was for protection, and to show the cooperation of the governing council. At the time I was young, still fresh from the war. I took it as a slight. Wasn’t I strong enough to handle some filthy plotter on my own? Hehehe. Wind and my Father’s bones hold me to the truth when I say: I’m glad to have a fit fellow like yourself along.”
Hearn’s foot crunched on something. “I’m a guide, not a guard,” he said absently. He looked down to see bits of glass, then cast the light up at a broken panel in the ceiling.
“Nevertheless it’s comforting. I did grow fond of my knightly escort back in Bruna. His name was Sir Matyar Fulks. A skilled fighter, and not a bad chanter either. They train all the knights to chant, usually skin-shields or wound-tending. It’s a shame what happened to Sir Fulks. The royal army hanged him before the Knights’ officer corps.”
Hearn brought the lantern down from the fractured ceiling. He cast it along the rail of a nearby growing bed. “Why was he hanged?”
“Because the murder of the head priest’s family was conspiratorial. And, because he was one.”
Hearn looked over at Ostok; Ostok stared back, blank-faced. “One?” Hearn asked.
“A conspirator. It was such a tragedy when the whole thing unfolded; an unfolding which I had no small part in I grant. The group that did the killing called themselves ‘Servants of the Sacred Ash Pit’. Doesn’t roll off the tongue. There were, I believe, fifteen of them in all who were executed. I don’t remember all the details. But I do recall they’d drafted plans for the systematic killing of Wind temple clergy and their families. Each killing was to be followed up with an ultimatum to Queen Balgah and her council, demanding the removal of all Wind Temple priests from the borders of Ahn. They wanted as well the demolition or repurposing of all temple facilities. They did get the first warning off, after killing the high priest. But I found the man who delivered it. I questioned him. One man led to another… I’d wager I got the lot. Mostly I remember Sir Fulks though. I think, halfway through, the guilt of what he had taken part in ate away at the soul in his body. He’s the one who handed over the keys to the temple. Another knight played a part as well. Two royal army knights, dead at the gallows, falsely loyal. What do you think?”
Hearn twisted his wrist so that the lantern’s light ran across the old silt bed beneath the broken glass. “There are sacks and vials here,” he said.
Ostok rose and walked over. “So there are,” he said. “Goldneedle and centipede wax. This was a user’s den at some distant time in our cylinder’s life. Call it seven seasons, or eleven if you like.”
“Look at this.”
“Hmmm. There still remains a good amount of wax in the bottle. Are you suggesting that we might, hem, comfort ourselves with this bit of substance? Hahaha, I’m not talking seriously. I know what your point is, and I agree with it wholeheartedly. No dust lay upon this bottle for one thing.”
“And what kind of addict would leave it behind?” Hearn asked. He fell silent and scanned the room with the lamp again.
Ostok shook his head. “The owner of this is long gone. See, look at how the glass here is recently crushed and scattered. Whoever the man or muira was, the one who came here to unwind, he left in some hurry. Quickly! Bring the light down here to the floor. Ah, my knees - but do you see there, that stain which is slightly darker? Blood. Much and dried. Look farther still, there is a thin trail. Even had the dog crusade not exterminated the species, we would require no bloodhound to follow this. Come. Let us see where it goes.”
Ostok took his lamp back from Hearn. Together they followed the trail which, now that they had seen it, stood out distinctly even from the dirt and grist of the siltstack floor. The trail led out of the growing platform, back into the paneled corridor. It passed by the main workers’ access stairwell. It continued on at their level, until it stopped at a doorway where the door had been broken or pulled off long ago. Stepping inside, the two saw what seemed to be a drying and storage chamber for harvested grain. Shelves of grated metal ran up and down in rows across the space, some of them still tangled with loose straw of the old silt grain. The air smelled musty, despite the profusion of vents in the space. The vents must have run all the way back down to the huge heating furnaces, thought Hearn.
Ostok set his lamp to the dark streaks on the floor. He followed them past one row, another, another, then down along the shelves for several paces. They came to a waist-high table whose steel top was covered in grooves and scrapes. Silt scythes and other odd crop instruments lay across the table. Most were rusted or worn.
“Wound wool,” said Hearn. He lifted a thin strand of bloodied cloth from the floor.
“And look at this,” said Ostok. He picked up a knife from the other end of the table and showed it to Hearn under the lamplight. The edge gleamed, as of fresh sharpening. Something else caught the bountyman’s eye also. He plucked a long, jagged piece of glass from the table and also set it under the light for Hearn’s eye. It gleamed, though not as brightly as the steel.
“Blood again,” Hearn said.
“The same glass as the panes of the platform.”
“So someone came in through that broken panel, spooked some addict, then came here and bandaged themselves?”
“A possibility.”
“Cast your lamp there. On that pile.”
Ostok did as Hearn asked, bringing into light a mound of rusted metal tools. The dust looked disturbed around the mound, clear lines of table showing, like those left by palms and fingers leaving trails. Hearn picked up a set of shears, a few knives, and finally tugged from beneath the pile a long roll of parchment. He handed it immediately to Ostok. The investigator set his lamp on the table to the side, and unrolled the parchment before it for both of them to read.
“But… this isn’t how it happened,” said Hearn.
“No,” Ostok agreed. “This appears to be something like a first draft of a plan to kill Elder Migrant Srik Tillich. I can see why these ‘Footsteps in Red’ went with murder-during-parade.”
“Why?”
“This one’s too convoluted. A mole in Srik’s domestic service, planted three summers in advance? Manipulated him into fearing poison in any beverage except those delivered from a specific cup? A slow-acting toxin laced on the handle, so that Srik is gradually poisoned each time he touches his fingers to his lips, over the course of months?”
“I’m reading the same paper as you are,” Hearn said dryly.
“I simply find these sorts of schemes fascinating. By the way! Good of you, my faithful agent, to roam around when I had chosen to sit on my laurels and ponder past failings.”
“Luck.”
“I disagree. How did you know to search around for that broken glass, or to search under that pile of tools? You’re perceptive, Hearn.”
Hearn rubbed his lower lip with a finger. “I toured someone through this siltstack after it had been abandoned.”
“When?”
“Years ago. I suppose something must have looked off today.”
Ostok rolled up the parchment and tucked it into his shirt. “Unfortunate that this paper doesn’t tell us where these Footsteps in Red might have gone to, or if they planned to return to this place, or how many of them there are. It may be worth our while to have a longer poke around the place before-”
“Stop.” Hearn raised a hand in a sign of pause. He sniffed the air. “I smell smoke.”
Thunder. Hearn’s boots drummed a quick and steady rhythm down the old siltstack stairwell. Ostok ran behind. Hearn reached the bottom of the flight in a flash. The steps terminated at a sliding steel door they had closed on their way in. Hearn threw his fingers around the handle and flung the door wide.
Fire. Bright as gold and snow under the sun, fire threw itself from the open door. Hearn raised an arm instinctively to shield his eyes. His hand felt the sizzle of the metal door handle a moment too late. He released the metal as pain stung his palm. He backpedaled, retreating a step from the blaze.
Ostok, breathless, stumbled down the last two steps behind Hearn. He tumbled toward the open flame, and the fire leapt to catch him, as if the blooming crowns were soft as goose’s down.
Hearing the bountyman stumble, Hearn reacted. He grabbed the heated steel again, despite the pain, and flung the door shut. Ostok missed the last step in his fall and tumbled into the closed steel, rebounding before it could impart any of its blistering touch to his eggshell skin.
Ostok rolled his eyes. “I don’t understand,” he said, coughing.
Hearn grabbed the bountyman under one of his armpits and helped him to his feet. “We have to find another way out,” he said, speaking in a quick and even tone.
“Why is there fire?”
“I don’t know.”
“I told you not to light the furnace, I watched you stop. Did something we touched cause-”
The building groaned and thundered. “Down the hall,” Hearn interrupted. “We’ll find another stairway.”
Hearn took Ostok by the wrist. He pulled the bountyman along behind him as they sprinted down an access corridor of the siltstack’s third floor. Both were breathing heavily. The air struck hot in their lungs, sweltering with more than summer heat.
“Door, left,” Ostok managed to gasp. He raised the beam of his lamp to a recess in the wood-paneled wall just ahead. Hearn skidded to a stop beside it. He pulled a rag from the pocket of his trousers and wrapped his unburned hand in it, then grasped the handle and slowly pushed the door open.
The door opened out onto the third floor growing platform. They stepped inside. The air in here felt heavier even than that in the corridor. Beneath them there was a continuous, dull rumble. The floor felt hot through their boots, and beyond the glass panes, though it was still dead midnight, a light like sunrise glowed from below them.
The hand of Ostok’s which held the lantern shook so badly that the cone of light stuttered back and forth over the dry, heated growing beds. Hearn scanned the interior wall to their left and right. The ambient glow from outside shed enough light that he could see two more recesses for doors or corridors, off to their left. “This way,” he ordered, taking Ostok’s wrist once more.
The bountyman continued to stare at the light beyond the glass, jaw limp. He allowed himself to be led, however, and Hearn pulled them into the next nearest egress.
The pair came out onto a wooden scaffold. It circled a round chamber like a silo, whose walls were of the same painted wood as the rest of the structure. Smoke flowed up in a steady stream, like water through a hose. Hearn saw the same glow somewhere far below, at the base of silo. “Come on,” he said. He dragged Ostok along the scaffold. Ostok jerked his hand free and held it over his face. He coughed and sputtered in the smoke, wincing, but following the sound of Hearn’s footsteps creaking on the old wood.
Hearn stopped just before a hole where a ladder ran. Squinting against the grey fume smashing up against his face, he peered down. He could see nothing. He stepped carefully around the hole, using one hand to feel along the railing, and with the other pulling Ostok by his shirt now.
At the opposite end of the circular chamber they found another door. This was locked, but Hearn rammed his shoulder at the handle and it gave way. Both men were gagging in the chamber now, and so quickly stepped into what turned out to be a long hallway. The wall on their left was thick mortared stone - the siltstack exterior. Hearn slammed the door behind them, cutting off the smoke from trailing in behind.
“The fire’s spread all over,” said Ostok as the two gasped for air. His voice was high and panicked. “Stars help us, did the furnaces malfunction, and the whole structure take flame? Hearn, the fire’s spreading all across the first floor. We’re stuck! We’re too high to jump even if-”
“Stop,” said Hearn. He spoke in a soft and low voice, just audible over the inferno growling up the stack all around them. “Breath. We still have air.”
“Not for long we won’t.”
“We’ll find another way down. Those can’t be the only stairs. Come, we can’t stand and wait.”
“Alright.” Ostok took a breath. He set his lamp fixedly on the dark corridor ahead. “Alright. Let’s go.”
The two ran down the corridor with Ostok shining his lamp along the interior wall. When they came to another of the heavy recessed metal doors, Hearn quickly wrapped his hand in the rag. He slid the door carefully open. There was no fire beyond, only a small closet with a pocket of superheated air. They ran farther, along the gentle curve of the building, until the lantern’s yellow light shone on a set of oak double doors with iron handles at the far end. “Administers,” Hearn suggested. They each took a handle and pulled. The doors swung wide.
Fire waited. The immediate space before the doors remained clear of the threat, but its glow suffused this new chamber with such a dark-devouring gleam that it rendered the bountyman’s lantern superfluous. They had entered an open space, which must have spanned both the third and fourth growing platforms. A ramp continued to follow the curve of the exterior wall, rising to the next level. Old pallets and piles of empty grain sacks lay in stacks and heaps across the floor.
The fire jumped from stack to stack. The whole floor was a crashing sea of gold and crimson - the heat so intense that Hearn felt it scorching the air inside his lungs. “Holy gods,” Ostok said. His small black eyes stared hugely.
“Stairs, there,” said Hearn. He shielded his eyes with a hand and gestured to one of three other thresholds that they could see in the chamber. The passage beyond was lit by the fire, not yet obscured in smoke. They saw that it was a stairwell leading down.
“Too much flame,” said Ostok.
“We’ll wrap ourselves in our cloaks. See there, the fire is-”
At that moment a boom sounded from below. The floor and walls shook, the long crowns of the flames stuttered. The stairway they had been watching suddenly glowed brighter. A flow of smoke and ash surged up, like water through a pipe, and flowed over the room. Ostok and Hearn stepped back, sputtering and wincing against the fume.
“Run back!” Ostok yelled, and turned to do so.
At the same instant another boom shook the structure. “The furnaces and vents are exploding,” said Hearn. They had taken no more than a step in retreat when the same light suddenly veered around the curve of the hallway they had just come from. Heat. Smoke. They saw the wood paneling of the interior wall blacken with flame, like spreading mold; they watched the flaking paint turn to flaking clouds.
Ostok shook as the ash and smoke swirled closer from both sides. “Father,” he began to say as he took the smallbone bag from his hip. “Father, forgive me. We’re dead…”
Hearn caught the bountyman under the armpit as the latter began to buckle. “Come on,” he shouted over the inferno. “Up the ramp.”
“No escape that way,” said Ostok. But he followed willingly. The two stumbled, coughing and waving away the roiling clouds, advancing onto the gradual incline that curved along the exterior stone. Heat seemed to rise in visible waves through the smoke. Both men’s skin by now had turned black and shiny, as the soot in the air combined with their sweat.
As the two came to the summit of the ramp, gasping and scorched, Hearn spotted something. A gleam in the exterior stone. He pulled Ostok toward it.
A window. They came up to a wide sheet of glass fixed to the stone by a steel frame. Hearn wasted no time. Seeing nothing on the ground near, he ripped the lantern from Ostok’s hand and smashed the pane with it. A spiderweb fracture spread across the glass. He struck again - the window shattered outward. Superheated air exploded out with it, whipping ash and smoke past their heads.
Hearn broke jagged glass from the bottom of the frame using the lamp. The pair leaned out. They looked down.
“It’s too high,” Ostok groaned. “The fall will kill us.”
“So will the fire.” Hearn leaned out farther. “There’s a ledge here.”
Hearn knelt and formed his hands into a foothold, but Ostok backstepped. “It’s the same height all around - it’s death regardless.”
“Come.” Hearn took Ostok by the arm. “That reservoir is on the other side of the building. We’ll step around the outer ledge, then jump.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Ostok, you’ll burn to death. Come.”
Another boom of an air pocket bursting shook the building. It groaned, and they heard a crash as another section of the platforms collapsed. Hearn’s eyes stood out white against his sootblack face as he stared, fixedly, at the bountyman.
Finally Ostok, eyes just as wide, stepped forward and placed his foot in Hearn’s handhold. Hearn winced as the bountyman set his girthy weight in his burned hand. Ostok stopped as he stuck his torso out of the window. He stared down, swayed, then shrank back. “I can’t-” he began.
“Hurry,” said Hearn. He pushed the bountyman higher. Finally Ostok clambered out onto the ledge. He hugged the left edge of the frame - despite the jagged teeth of glass serrating along it - as he crawled out on the stone ledge that circled the outer back wall of the siltstack. The ledge presented barely enough room for a foot. Hesitating still, the bountyman rose slowly to a stand. He closed his eyes and pressed his back firmly against the rough surface of the stone wall.
Another wave of smoke and heat blasted up Hearns shirt. He crawled out quickly after the bountyman. He glanced back once.
The entire inside of the chamber was aflame. The air itself seemed to have ignited. The smoke and ash of the burning stack swirled toward their exit in a cyclone.
Hearn edged out beside the bountyman. The wind felt like that of winter rather than summer, compared with the stifling, burning interior of the building. It whipped against them. Hearn gently pushed Ostok on his left side to get the bountyman moving.
Slowly, they slid sideways along the exterior of the stack. Every few moments another boom resounded - they could hear the noise through the stone walls, which had also warmed from the fire, and vibrated with every crash.
Another shudder nearly unbalanced the bountyman. He teetered for a second until Hearn pressed him back into the wall. “Faster,” said Hearn.
“I’m going as fast as I dare,” said Ostok. His voice seemed steady, but his look was still wild and frightened. “Damn this Wind. I know it’s wrong to say, but I cannot help it. Why should it be so violent and gusting now that we are higher up. Stop! The stone is broken and narrow here. We can’t cross.”
We can. Go on! Twist your feet like so. Carefully… Good, we’re across. Keep going”
They heard a sound below. Hearn glanced down. A small crowd had formed at intervals around the grounds of the burning structure. Several people were pointing up at Hearn and Ostok. “We’re noticed,” said Hearn. “Nothing to be done.”
A second later they spotted the reservoir they had seen on entry. It reflected the white stars, the white flames, the clouds of smoke streaming up the side of the building. They edged forward. A blast of wind hit them again; they stopped; they pressed on. They passed blindly through an upward-flowing pall of smoke.
From below, three or four voices cheered them on.
Just as they nearly reached the stretch where the ledge ran above the old pool of black water, the curve revealed the recess of another window opening onto the stack’s rear face. As Ostok sidled up toward it another boom sounded from inside - eruptively loud, as if it had come from just on the other side of the stone. The glass window blew out right before the bountyman’s face. An extrusion of flame - a glowing limb with white talons - stretched from the opening. Ostok stumbled away from the grasping fire. He knocked against Hearn, unbalanced, tilted toward the open space on his right.
Hearn threw an arm up and hooked the bountyman’s throat with his elbow. Straining, he pressed the heavy muira man back against the wall.
“We’re-” Ostok began.
Before he could utter one more faltering word Hearn said, “We’re almost there. Crawl under it.”
Ostok glanced back, uncertainty written on his black face, through which only a little pale muira skin showed at the creases. Hearn’s own pitch-dark expression was resolved. The bountyman turned back to face the flame. He bent down, still hugging the wall as near as he could. “The window’s too low,” he said from his crouch.
“Crawl,” Hearn ordered.
They crawled. Each man felt the weight of the flame press against his right arm and ribs as he slid, leaning on elbows and hips, under the burning window. Ostok stopped when the ledge trembled underneath them. Hearn pushed him on.
They emerged from under the smoke and light. “Go. Go. Go.” Hearn urged the bountyman on as the latter climbed slowly to his feet. Hearn’s hand stung as he rose after. Night seemed like storming day, with the smoke forming a high cloud overhead, and the fire flooding the ground below with light.
“Here,” said Hearn. They had reached the portion of the wall where the ledge ran just above the murky repository.
“It may be too shallow,” said Ostok as they looked down. His voice was coarse from the smoke.
Another shudder like a death throe shivered through the siltstack. “Ready?” Hearn asked impatiently.
“I guess we must,” said the bountyman.
Hearn grabbed the bountyman by the elbow. Then, the agent threw himself off the stone. And pulled Ostok with him.
For a brief moment, air wrapped their bodies, cool and slick against their singed skin.
They struck with twin cannonball splashes. The mirror surface shattered. Black water exploded out from the reservoir, splashing the dry, terse grass at the edge of the pool. The spectators from below rushed toward the site. The water rocked, and wavered, and fell slowly still with ripples.
Ostok’s head broke the surface first, followed a second later by Hearn. Both men gasped, the air having been smashed out of their lungs. Their faces were soaked, the soot turned to black mud.
Hearn found his sense first. Spotting Ostok’s shining muira scalp under the starlight and firelight, he swam over. He grabbed the investigator’s arm and guided him to the shore. They crawled out upon the shallow bank, sopping, filthy, badly burned, their lungs chafed and battered - but both alive.
“What were you doing in the stacks,” one of the night crew workers asked, as the crowd gathered around the pair.
Other questions followed. One of the muira - a woman - had the kindness to offer a wrap of cloth she carried. Ostok wiped his face and hands. Still shaken, but thinking with a clearer head, he explained their purpose. The muira were at first suspicious. Luckily, one man pointed out that no one would set fire to a building, then climb to the second story. Another man said he had seen someone running from the workers’ entrance, just before the fire started.
As the night crew workers of Szem’s industrial district watched the siltstack go up in flames, crumbling, and discussed what could have been the arsonist’s motive, Ostok leaned in close to Hearn.
“I’m… sorry, setter Hearn,” said Ostok croakily.
“We lived,” said Hearn. He tilted his head back and let the cool night wind play on his face.
“I should have told you sooner, before I accepted your agency throughout the city on a dangerous mission like this. I’m not useful when I’m not in control.”
“Ostok, no one forced me.”
“I hate fires and heights. I-”
“I said, ‘we lived’. We lived. Good enough for one day.”
“Do you think it was the Kingdom of Ahn’s nationalists?” Ostok asked after a pause.
“Who?”
“I mean The Footsteps in Red. For it seems to me that too many ill circumstances came together in that ruin just now.”
Hearn pressed a fist over his mouth, and stared at the burning stack.