Chapter 112: The Other Emperor Would Not Leave the Egg

Black-green water touched the stranger’s outer toe.

His beak struck the stone before any human moved.

Varn’s chain went still in his hands at the crack. Hest lowered the gate bar he had been lifting. Even Pava, who treated threats as patients with poor manners, stayed at the chamber lip.

He did not waste a second warning on them.

He had widened his body over the pale curve hidden beneath his belly. One trembling foot stood flat. The other angled outward until its outer edge vanished under the iron yoke of the upside-down bell.

That was why he had not followed the dry stone around the channel.

Iron had pinned him there.

Jiang lowered his head.

Gold feathers lifted along the stranger’s neck as he watched the movement. His beak stayed level with Jiang’s eyes.

Behind Jiang, somebody took a careful breath.

Pava spoke without raising her voice. "Lamps down. Chains down. If you loom over him, I will let him improve your faces."

Hest set his lamp on the floor. "My face has reached its final design."

"Your ribs disagreed upstairs."

With the lamps lowered below his breast, his shadow stopped climbing the wall. His beak did not lower.

Jiang gave the two-part call again, softer than before.

His answer crossed Jiang’s call. The first note rasped. The second climbed hard enough to hurt and ended when his trapped foot shuddered.

Jiang understood pain, warning, and attention. Anything finer would have been a lie he told himself because he wanted words.

He turned his beak aside and shuffled forward with his breast low.

Green healer cord slid behind him through Aylin’s hands. She did not pull.

Jiang took one step, waited, and called.

His head followed Jiang’s movement.

Another step brought Jiang inside the reach of that long black beak.

It struck the cracked side of his own.

White pain flashed through Jiang’s face. He rocked onto his unreliable foot, caught himself with the other, and kept his injured flipper tight in its cradle.

Aylin’s cord snapped taut without dragging him backward.

"Jiang, stay with me," she said.

He could smell the stranger now: old feather oil, cold stone, fish long gone from the crop, and the sour edge of a body living on what it had stored.

Again, the male struck the floor between them.

That warning needed no translation.

Jiang backed one careful step and lowered his beak until it almost touched the grit.

Aylin let the cord slacken again.

Pava crouched beside her. "Good. He has established the border. We can try solving the problem without pretending fear makes him unreasonable."

Varn lay on his stomach to study the trapped foot from the safe side of the line. "Yoke settled when the root tore. Iron lip has the outside toe."

"Can you lift it?" Valea asked.

"Yes," Varn said. "If the bell wishes to come through the ceiling."

Roots as thick as his waist held the iron cup upside down. One had split where the Fivefold conductor broke. Every drip from it made the yoke sink a fraction, then catch again on the stone beneath the stranger’s foot.

Black-green water ran through that same stone.

Pava unfolded two squares of healer cloth. She did not offer them to the male. She passed one to Valea and one to Kedra.

"Make walls," she said. "No cloth over him. No hands beneath him. Keep the draft off the fold."

Valea drove her road knife into a crack and tied one cloth corner to its hilt. Kedra used her sound hand to loop the other around a broken stair pin. Aylin took the weight when Kedra’s injured shoulder began to shake.

Two low cloth walls rose beside the male without touching a feather.

Pava slid two wrapped salt bricks onto dry stone beyond his beak range. Heat could cross the space. Her hands would not.

One glance went to the nearer brick before the stranger covered the egg more tightly.

"He is not leaving it for warmth," Pava said.

"Could we move both?" Hest asked.

His beak hammered the floor again.

Hest looked at him. "I withdraw the question."

Jiang tasted blood where the peck had opened the crack in his beak. He swallowed it and watched the water curl around the stranger’s trapped side.

Wet film carried Jiang’s earlier call.

It came from directly beneath the male.

His body jerked toward the familiar sound. The egg shifted as his feet tightened together, and his brood fold dropped lower at once.

Jiang answered from in front of him.

At that, the stranger looked back.

Water repeated Jiang after the same empty pause.

Jiang changed the end of his next call. The male cut across it with his own rough answer. The channel copied both only after they had finished.

Gold neck feathers settled by a finger’s breadth.

Valea crawled along the yoke with chalk pinched between two knuckles. Bronze veins ran through the old heat slate beneath it, nearly invisible under rust and black-green slime.

"Iron is not carrying the whole load," she said. "The bronze is pulling the yoke toward the channel."

Kedra leaned against Aylin to see. "It should turn away when the chamber cools."

Valea glanced at her. "You remember that?"

Kedra’s mouth tightened. "My hand remembers wanting a hook. I do not know whose hand taught it."

Aylin kept her arm beneath Kedra’s good side. "Then we use the part that helps him and leave the rest alone."

Varn threaded his kinked chain around the bell root. Each damaged link knocked the next out of line. He worked it through anyway and passed the free end to Hest.

"Lift on my pull," Varn said. "If the root splits, let the bell take the chain."

"And the birds?" Hest asked.

"Do not let it take those."

Hest planted the gate bar under the yoke. His bruised side made him breathe through his teeth before he had taken any weight.

Pava heard it. "One rib complaint and you stop."

"You have already spent my face. Leave me one useful side."

Black-green water rose over the stranger’s outer claw.

Jiang moved before Aylin could ask.

He circled wide of the male’s beak, turned his sound shoulder toward the channel, and backed into the narrow gap between water and foot. The stranger lunged once. Jiang flattened his head and took the beak along his upper back instead of near his eyes.

Impact drove his breast into the wet groove.

Black-green water soaked the lower feathers on his sound side. His body displaced it into a shallow drainage cut running away from the egg.

Cold reached his skin with patient teeth.

Nothing in him warmed. Nothing froze.

He spread his webbed feet against the channel and made himself part of the bank.

A black beak hovered above his neck.

Jiang did not look up. He called with his face toward the stone, leaving the ending open.

Warm breath stirred Jiang’s back feathers with the answer.

Varn put his weight into the chain.

Kinked chain climbed root bark one link at a time. Hest drove upward with the gate bar. Valea caught the bronze vein with her road knife and twisted it toward a dry anchor.

Iron lifted from the stranger’s claw.

Then the heat slate lifted with it.

"They are one piece," Valea said. "Set it down."

Hest’s arms shook. Varn eased the chain until iron touched stone again, lighter than before but still across the foot edge.

Jiang’s belly dam sent a thin black stream past his open shoulder. The cold found the wound through the cloth, and his reliable foot slipped.

For one breath, the male pushed his breast against Jiang’s back.

It was pressure, not trust. It kept Jiang from rolling into the channel.

When Jiang found his footing, the stranger withdrew and covered the egg again.

Varn wiped root grit from his mouth. "We can drag bird, egg, and slate together."

Pava’s stare stopped him before the stranger needed to.

"Or," Varn said, "we break the slate."

Valea scraped chalk across the bronze vein. "This is the chamber’s heat path. Break it, and the warm draft dies."

"The warm draft is carrying Gredudande under his foot," Kedra said.

Black-green water swelled against Jiang’s side as if answering her.

Aylin slid a glass shard into the dry seam beside the trapped claw. Kedra guided her wrist lower.

"Not toward the foot," Kedra said. "Follow the old heat crack."

Aylin adjusted without arguing. The shard disappeared into the slate until only its blunt end remained.

Varn looked to Pava.

"Break his shelter," the healer said, "or tear him off the egg. Those are the choices we have earned."

Jiang pressed harder into the channel. The male remained over him, beak ready, feet locked around the pale life beneath his fold.

Varn wrapped the source chain twice around his forearm.

"Break it," Aylin said.

Hest lifted the yoke. Valea pulled the bronze strain sideways. Varn hauled the root toward the bell crown while Aylin held the glass wedge and Kedra kept her hand aligned.

Heat slate split under the stranger’s foot.

Warm air sighed out through the break and vanished down the black channel. The chamber’s stone lost its faint heat before the broken pieces had stopped grinding.

With a wrench, the male tore his trapped foot free.

Blood marked the outer toe and ran into Jiang’s back feathers.

He did not step away. He shifted by the width of one claw, drew the injured foot beneath the egg, and settled its weight across both feet again.

Bell yoke dropped into the space he had left.

Hest’s gate bar bent against it. Varn’s chain went slack. Valea’s bronze vein snapped and curled into the dark.

A colder wind descended through the root cup above them.

Pava moved the salt bricks closer with the end of a splint. The male watched but did not strike. She laid clean cloth on the dry stone near his injured foot, close enough to use if he chose to shuffle, far enough that it touched neither him nor the egg.

Jiang remained in the wet groove until Aylin pulled once on the healer cord.

One hard tug meant stop.

He tried to climb out. His numb claws scraped without finding the edge.

Beside Jiang’s cheek, the emperor’s beak descended.

Jiang waited for another blow.

Instead, the male planted the point of his beak behind Jiang’s sound shoulder and shoved.

Jiang rolled onto dry stone with no dignity left to injure.

Pava caught his healer cord and drew him only as far as the windbreak. "Congratulations. He finds you less objectionable than drowning."

Jiang lay on his breast, shivering hard enough to knock his beak against the floor.

He could have taken the space Jiang left. Instead he stayed, one bleeding foot beneath the brood fold, his beak near Jiang and the humans beyond it.

Aylin reached for Jiang, then stopped when the stranger’s head rose.

Jiang answered with one tired call.

A rough answer returned from inside beak range.

Under his belly, something touched the shell from within.

It was tiny, no louder than a claw against buried glass.

Above them, the unstruck sixth bell gave one soft answer.