Steam struck the underwheel ceiling and came back carrying chips of lime.
Dagna dragged Jiang's tray beneath the chain housing. Aylin folded her coat over his head, leaving a gap at his beak, while Ista dropped beside the vent and hammered an answer to the people below.
Three blows came back. Then two. Then a frantic run with no working rhythm.
"They have lost the wash stair," Ista said.
Brann hung his weight from the chain wheel. Black water forced it backward one tooth at a time.
"The royal channel is open," he said. "I can chase that pull or slow the cellar flood. I cannot hold both."
Through the crown-marked passage, the black-green thread flashed beneath clear water and disappeared toward Eres.
Ossin watched it go.
His next order would decide whether Whitewake remained a hunting line or became nine people's rescue crew.
"Slow the cellars," he said.
Brann hauled the chain across his damaged hand. Dagna left Jiang long enough to lock her shoulder beside his.
Ossin pulled the guide rope twice. "Korrin, send down the palace-call horn."
Tovin's voice answered from above. "The clean one?"
"Unless you have a dirty one that can hold a roof."
The rope descended with a broad white horn tied beneath it. Worked salt formed its flare, copper bands bound it to a dark wooden throat, and one palace-blue cord remained around the mouthpiece.
It was smaller than the west horn Ossin had destroyed at Cliffhook, but it was the last instrument his line could use to answer Eres.
Ossin cut off the blue cord.
"Whitewake will answer in person," he said.
The First Furnace Row lay below a broken flight of stone steps. Steam filled the upper half of the cellar, hiding the ceiling chains and turning every hanging tool into a drop of hot water.
Jiang emerged from beneath Aylin's coat at stair height.
Three saltglass furnaces worked along one wall, their square mouths glowing orange through chalky doors. Wash wheels churned gray water between them.
Racks of red rods crossed overhead, and monster-fat flames crawled blue beneath copper pans. The cellar smelled of hot lime, burned wool, and the sweet rot of quenching monster bone.
Floodwater poured through a split sluice at the far end.
Six workers held the nearest wheel against it. Two apprentices crouched on a cooling rack above the center channel. A third, a narrow girl with one sleeve burned away, clung to a ledge behind the broken sluice.
"Nemi, answer me!" Ista shouted.
The girl lifted her face. "Still expensive, Master!"
"You are my cheapest apprentice. That is why I cannot lose you."
Nemi laughed once and nearly slipped.
A glasswright below caught her wrist against the wall. He looked up at Aylin through the steam and spat into the flood.
"The dead princess brought the river back."
Another worker braced her feet against the wheel. "She also brought a rope. Hate her after we use it."
Dagna took command of the line before either opinion could spread. She ran the guide rope around the stair pillar, rejected its cracked base, and pointed at the broken sluice.
"Horn across that throat. Copper band toward us. Tovin holds the high turn. Whitewake takes the lower pull."
Ossin and Rian drove the white horn between two split stones. The flare caught behind the sluice lip. Tovin's doubled knot came down the rope and cinched the wooden throat while his one useful hand kept tension from above.
Water struck the horn. Saltglass began whitening along its edge.
"That will not survive the row," Ossin said.
"Neither will the row," Ista replied.
She reached the first furnace's kill chain.
The worker at the wheel shouted, "Master, the winter blue is still in that belly."
Ista looked through the open inspection slit. Jiang saw the color reflected on her face, deep and clean as the shard in Aylin's coat.
She had spent years teaching that furnace how to hold heat. The glass inside carried whatever her district had been saving for Eres.
Ista pulled the chain.
The lower quench mouth opened. Floodwater left the trapped workers and drove into the live furnace.
Blue glass burst against the closed door. The iron frame bent outward, and the cellar filled with a sound like a frozen lake splitting beneath heavy feet.
The first row died. Steam fled through its broken chimney instead of across the apprentices' ledge.
"Now," Ista said. Her voice was rougher than the furnace. "Move my people."
Whitewake hauled the first workers up the line. Dagna chose the order: the woman with burned hands, the limping wheel tender, then the people strong enough to help pull from above.
The oldest wheel tender refused to release his brake bar. Water had reached his belt, but letting go would send the wash wheel into the two apprentices on the rack.
Aylin waded to him and put her good shoulder beneath the bar. Her injured arm shook against her body.
"I have it," she said.
"I know your face."
"Then remember it while you climb."
He left the bar one finger at a time. Aylin held until Brann's chain turn caught the wheel from above, then stumbled back with a fresh burn across her coat sleeve.
Rian held the guide rope where it crossed a red stone edge. Smoke rose from the fibers.
He looked once at the folded lead order inside his coat.
The winter seal had survived River-Open, Brinehook, the funeral cloak, and every chance he had been given to open it.
Rian wrapped the unopened order around the rope.
Aylin saw the winter seal break beneath his hand. "You waited a long time to hear that order."
"The rope did not," Rian said.
Lead took the heat. The seal cracked beneath his grip, and black ink bled from the fold into the water without giving anyone a sentence.
"I hope that was important," Brann called from the wheel.
"It was becoming repetitive."
The two apprentices crossed next, belly-down over the horn while the copper bands cut grooves through its whitening salt. Nemi remained beyond the broken sluice.
There was no human-sized path to her. The maintenance culvert beside Jiang ran beneath the steam and opened at the waterline behind her ledge.
Aylin saw him looking.
"The failed flipper stays in the cradle," she said. "The line stays on your body, not your beak. One pull means stop. Two means bring you home."
Jiang tapped the tray twice, then once.
"That is not an answer."
He pecked the culvert lip once, hard enough to answer.
Aylin closed her eyes long enough to dislike it. Then she asked Dagna for the thin retrieval line.
Dagna retied the cradle beneath Jiang's useless flipper and ran the line around his breast without covering the mark. She tested the knot against his feathers, loosened it, and tested again.
"Come back before Grell's horn becomes powder," she said.
"It is Whitewake's horn," Ossin replied.
"Then Whitewake should pull faster."
Jiang slid into the culvert.
Cold floodwater closed over his breast, but furnace heat lay across its surface like a second current.
The stone ceiling pressed near his back. A human would have needed to crawl without room for shoulders; Jiang drove forward with his good wing, spread his webbed feet, and let the body everyone underestimated become the right shape.
His unreliable foot missed one stroke. The current rolled him into the wall, and the cradle took the blow meant for his failed flipper. Pain opened through his shoulder anyway.
He drove onward before the shoulder could settle.
Beyond the culvert, Nemi's burned sleeve trailed in the water. Jiang caught the cloth with his beak and pulled it clear before black-green light could climb the wet fibers.
"You are smaller than the last time," she said through chattering teeth.
Jiang decided smoke had damaged her judgment.
He remembered her hand reaching through the fallen cooling rods when the funeral cloak first crossed Glasswash. She had called him the marked beast then, and Ista had promoted him to drain tool.
Now Nemi was a stranded apprentice and Jiang was tied to a rescue rope. Glasswash had an aggressive approach to advancement.
The retrieval line reached her ledge, but the broken edge crumbled when she put a foot on it. Dagna's pull from the far side could not lift Nemi until she crossed the gap between stone and horn.
Jiang shoved a loose cooling board against the ledge. Hot water warped it away.
Nemi tried the hanging chain. Its upper hook tore from the mortar and struck the channel beside him.
The horn gave a long crack.
"Last pull!" Dagna shouted through the culvert.
Ordinary tools had run out before the girl did.
Cold text opened across Jiang's sight.
`[FROSTWAKE I | CONTACT ICE | COST: RESTORED HEAT | USE / REFUSE]`
He remembered the fish oil warming his empty belly, Aylin's coat over his head, and one blessed interval when breathing had required no courage.
Then he looked at Nemi's bare foot sliding toward the flood.
Jiang accepted the heat cost and chose Frostwake.
Heat poured out through his breast and feet.
A white skin formed where his body touched the channel. It spread no farther than his feathers and webbed toes. Jiang braced beneath Nemi's ledge, one good wing against the wall, while fragile ice climbed into a lip the width of her boot.
"Step on him," Aylin shouted.
"He will bite me!"
Jiang barked at her.
"That means hurry," Ista said.
Nemi planted her foot on the ice.
It cracked at once. The brief resistance lifted her high enough to catch Dagna's line with both hands.
Whitewake put its whole line into the pull.
The palace horn split down its flare. Ossin trapped the wooden throat beneath his boot while Rian held the smoking rope inside the ruined lead order. Aylin and Ista dragged Nemi across the sluice as the last salt edge broke into the flood.
Jiang let Frostwake go.
The ice vanished under his breast. His right claws went numb, his unreliable foot folded, and the current carried him backward through the culvert.
Dagna felt the retrieval line move. She hauled him out beneath Nemi, wet and shaking so hard his beak knocked against the stone.
The worker who had called Aylin dead tore off his dry overshirt and held it toward Jiang.
"For the bird," he said. "I still do not know who she is."
"Neither do we," Ossin replied.
Ista gathered Nemi against her ruined furnace coat. Behind them, First Row filled with gray water, carrying years of blue glass out through the broken floor.
All nine people were alive.
Under Jiang's numb breast, the royal-road stone began to ring.
Aylin's funeral bell had reached the road before them.