The king's second voice had barely finished when Ista's oven paddle folded under Last Gate.
Stone dropped hard enough to drive water across Jiang's belly. Aylin rolled over him, taking the edge on her shoulder while Dagna's broken spear shaft caught beneath the jaw.
The gap that had admitted five adults narrowed to the height of Ossin's boot.
"Tovin, keep the second pull!" Ista shouted.
The guide line drew taut above them. Iron grated inside the gate, paused, and tried to settle again.
Tovin's doubled knot had caught the ceiling tongue. One useful hand was losing the contest against royal stone.
Jiang lay under Aylin's ribs with the salt cord burn crossing his open shoulder. Hunger clenched so sharply that his feet drew toward his belly. Below both pains, the damaged cup kept speaking.
Edric's voice repeated its warning against the palace.
"Your timing remains terrible," Aylin told it.
She shoved upward with her good arm. Dagna crowded beside her, both hands braced on the broken wood. Ossin turned one Whitewake hook flat and wedged it beneath the descending stone.
Rian looked through the shrinking gap toward Glasswash. "The side wheel is turning backward."
Outside, people pulled without one rhythm, jerking the guide rope between Tovin's hand and three Whitewake hunters. From the crowd, one voice blamed the dead princess for breaking Last Gate while another ordered Ista's apprentices away from the ovens below it.
Ista heard the second voice. "My ovens are not below the gate. My apprentices are, which is considerably worse."
The black-green line around the buried cup slipped deeper into its cracked saltglass.
Jiang watched water follow it.
Runoff should have left the spill chamber through the open throat at his tail. Instead, grit and torn funeral thread crawled toward the cup. Water gathered under the inner jaw, lifting silt against the direction of the floor.
Failure at the brace explained only half the descent. Pressure was building on the wrong side of the stone.
Jiang struck Aylin's wrist twice, then pointed his beak beneath Dagna's knee.
A white ceramic loop showed between the stone teeth. It was no larger than the end of a spoon and nearly hidden by funeral salt.
Ista followed his beak. "Spill peg."
"Can it open the lower runoff?" Rian asked.
"If it has not fused since River-Open."
"That was not the encouraging half of my question."
The paddle gave another wet crack.
Jiang pushed against Aylin's arm. She tightened it around him.
"You have finished going under gates alone."
He struck her wrist once and pointed again. The loop sat beneath the stone lip where every human hand would meet the falling jaw first. His beak could reach it from the floor.
The fleeing route brightened around the cup.
Jiang wanted it. He wanted one clean pursuit before another stolen voice reached someone Aylin loved. His body offered hunger, one working wing, and the unpleasant possibility of being flattened under a letter missing from her name.
Five living people remained under the same stone.
He tapped once against her arm, then pressed his breast toward the floor. Set me down.
Aylin's mouth tightened around the answer.
"Dagna, hold his shoulder clear."
She lowered him beside the spear shaft. Dagna slid her forearm along his damaged cradle without touching the wound. The floor pitched when Ossin's hook bent, and Jiang landed with his reliable foot in black water.
His other foot folded. He caught himself on his breast and crawled.
The ceramic loop waited one beak length beyond the lowest tooth.
Jiang flattened his head sideways. Stone scraped his crown feathers. He opened his beak around the loop and felt the crack in its tip complain before the ceramic moved.
It moved less than his hunger wanted.
"Pull it toward the wall," Ista said. "Straight out will break the neck."
Jiang adjusted. The loop tasted of river mud and old lime. He drew left until the hidden peg grated inside its sleeve.
Trapped water shoved back through the sleeve.
His beak slipped. The loop struck the crack at its tip, and white pain shut one eye.
Aylin's fingers touched the floor beside him without closing over his body. "May I steady your breast?"
He gave her one clear tap.
Her palm settled behind his chest and became a wall against which his feet could work.
On his second bite, Jiang pulled the peg sideways to its first ridge. Black water punched through the wall below Rian, who threw himself flat and jammed the heavy end of his unopened road packet into the opening before the jet could take his face. Water split around it and rushed into an older gutter.
"There is your lower runoff," Rian said through his teeth. "It objects to visitors."
"Then stop introducing your face," Ossin told him.
The pressure beneath the jaw eased enough for Dagna's spear shaft to rise.
Ista shoved the bent paddle farther into the gap. Ossin called one pull to the hunters outside, then another after Tovin's answer. This time the ropes moved together. The ceiling tongue lifted by the width of Jiang's foot.
"Rian first," Aylin said. "He is holding our river in a letter."
Rian wriggled under the jaw without surrendering the packet until Ista jammed a glassworker's chisel beside it. Dagna followed, dragging the broken spear. Ossin stayed until the Whitewake hook could be withdrawn from the safer side.
Aylin picked Jiang up only after he struck permission against her sleeve.
They slid out together. Last Gate dropped behind Aylin's boot and stopped crooked on Ista's paddle, the chisel, and one corner of Rian's soaked order.
Last Gate hung too low for anyone to crawl back through and too high to seal. Glasswash had acquired a royal stone problem with Ista's tools inside it.
Jiang twisted in Aylin's arm to face the chamber.
The black-green line was gone from the cup. A faint glow moved under the gutter toward a maintenance hatch farther down the wall.
He pointed one foot toward it, and hunger folded him before he managed the second. Aylin caught his neck against her elbow.
"You found the road. You also found the floor with your face. We are considering one discovery at a time."
Jiang tried to tell her that his beak had found the floor first. The sound came out too thin to improve his reputation.
Glasswash filled the gate court around them. Ista's apprentices brought timbers from the furnace racks. Whitewake kept a lane open with lowered hooks rather than raised ones.
A flour-streaked man pointed at Aylin's torn coat. "She broke the name over the gate."
"She also came out from under it carrying the bird who opened our spill," Ista said. "You may decide which fact annoys you after the brace is set."
Without looking at Aylin again, the man shouldered a timber and joined the brace crew.
Ossin sent two hunters to the side wheel and three to the lower stair. "Nobody follows a voice into a drain. Nobody carries a royal order until we know which king is speaking through it."
Rian peeled wet lead away from his packet. "That rule arrives after my order becomes a sponge."
"You are alive enough to complain about it. Whitewake records that as a favorable result."
"Does Whitewake record anything without pointing iron at it?"
Ossin looked at his bent hook. "Rarely."
Ista cleared a glass-cutting bench with her sleeve. She set down a shallow clay bowl, poured hot fish broth from an apprentice's kettle, and dropped two oily strips into it.
Jiang smelled the fish before Aylin reached the bench.
His neck stretched out of her arm. The first strip vanished so quickly that hot broth ran into the crack in his beak. He jerked back, swallowed, and reached again.
Ista put one finger on the bowl's rim. "Do not bite it. My least favorite apprentice made that bowl, and replacing it would make him proud."
Jiang took the second strip more carefully. Pottery politics had managed him, and his traitorous stomach accepted the arrangement.
Warm furnace cloth went beneath his belly. Another piece covered his back without binding the failed flipper. Steam rose past his face while ordinary breaths stopped arriving as separate emergencies.
Aylin knelt beside the bench. Her injured arm stayed against her body.
"May I clean the shoulder?"
Jiang looked toward the gutter where the hostile route had escaped. Then he looked at the blood darkening the edge of his cradle and tapped once against the bench.
Dagna held the cloth away while Aylin washed funeral salt from the wound. Water left it raw, and clean pain replaced dirty pain, which was the sort of improvement nobody celebrated in songs.
Rian stood on the other side of the bench, dripping onto his ruined order. "The lower voice called you daughter."
"So did the cloak," Aylin said.
"And the palace horn."
"Half the palace heard him call me daughter."
She opened her good hand. The broken blue seal shard rested in her palm, its edge pale against old blood.
"Neither voice gets to become him because I want one answer more than the other."
Ossin heard her from the gate brace. "Good. I have lowered the hooks. I have not thrown them away."
A hammer struck beneath the glass-cutting bench.
The sound came through the floor rather than the gutter: two firm blows, one dragged scrape, then a final blow hard enough to shake broth against the bowl.
Ista stopped with a timber on her shoulder.
The pattern came again.
"That is Brann Tev," she said. "He keeps the River-Open underworks."
One apprentice dropped to the maintenance hatch and pulled its lime-packed pin. The hatch rose against black water, followed by a square shoulder in patched flood leather.
An older man climbed into Glasswash with river mud to his waist. Two fingers on his left hand had healed crooked against the palm. One ear was little more than a white scar.
He saw the broken winter seal in Aylin's hand.
Then he looked at her face.
"Princess," Brann Tev said, "you watched me follow your father's lamp into River-Open."