Chapter 132: Tideglass Had Drowned Its Own Door

Brinn planted her boot on the seal hide before Jiang could drag himself into the flooded stair.

He shoved against her ankle with the foot that worked. The bad one trailed behind him, and the broken claw caught in the hide. His shoulder binding pulled tight enough to blur the green lamp.

Brinn looked down. "You have mistaken being fed for being repaired."

Jiang pecked her boot.

"I see the distinction has upset you."

Beyond her, black water covered the first step and licked at the second. The chick’s call had vanished behind the stone. Elen’s changed knock had gone quiet too.

Tir came through the low door carrying the severed hook rope over one shoulder. He had stripped off his coat. Under it, leather straps crossed a broad green-glass mask and held a shallow copper cup against his chest.

The cup was open at the bottom.

Jiang stared at it until Tir noticed.

"Breath cup," Tir said. "The glass keeps the mouth closed against pressure. The copper keeps a little air where your face needs it."

Brinn moved her foot from Jiang to the stair. "A little."

"Enough to reach the bell."

"Elen thought hers was enough."

Tir pulled the hook line from his shoulder and laid it across a workbench. The iron point had a socket behind its curve. A bronze pin fitted that socket, clean and blunt, meant to catch a ring rather than flesh.

The tide ray had seen the curve and fled.

Jiang lowered his beak to the warm hide. He wanted Tir to be wrong. Elen’s silence made that harder.

Tir fitted the hook into a shorter shaft. "A carrier line rests on the bell frame. It never touches the animal. That black wire beside the slit was not ours."

"The scar under it was," Brinn said.

"From the old frame. We changed the frame."

"The ray changed its mind. You kept lowering iron."

Tir’s bent fingers tightened around the shaft. One joint had no color left beneath the old scar. "I heard my sister run out of knocks. Forgive my manners."

Brinn looked toward the drowned wall. Her answer took long enough for the water to reach another stair edge.

"Get the free bell ready," she said. "No hook leaves this room."

Tir gave a humorless laugh. "And what will pull it? Your principles?"

Brinn picked up the cut end of his rope. "Air."

That ended the argument badly rather than ending it well.

They moved into the chamber beyond the workroom. Jiang followed on his belly because Brinn had taken the seal hide and his dignity was not load-bearing.

The room had once been a sleeping place. Low stone shelves lined both walls, each covered with rolled hides and netted blankets. Warm air leaked from cracks near the floor. Somebody had left a pair of small boots beneath one shelf and a half-carved fish beside another.

People still used this room. That mattered more than how many.

A bronze bell filled the far arch upside down. Its open mouth rested just below the rising water, trapping a pocket of air that made its green-glass ribs shine. Chains held it against a stone cradle. One chain vanished through the flooded upper throat.

The other ended in Tir’s hands.

He worked a wedge between two links. Brinn climbed onto the cradle and cut rotted hide from the bell’s rim. Neither explained the machine. Every piece announced itself by trying to injure them.

Jiang reached the bell and pressed his breast to the bronze.

A weak knock touched him from the other side.

Tap. Scrape. Tap-tap.

Tir dropped the wedge and answered against the rim with his fist.

The drowned wall copied him.

Its answer arrived louder than Elen’s and perfectly whole.

Brinn caught Tir’s wrist before he struck again. "Change it."

"She knows my hand."

"So does the thing wearing the wall."

Tir used his elbow, then his knuckles, then dragged the bronze pin across the rim.

The false answer repeated the first fist pattern.

Far beyond it, Elen gave one elbow-heavy blow and scratched twice. She had heard the change.

Jiang answered her with his beak. One strike hurt the crack, so the next landed sideways. His ending came out softer because his neck failed to hold the angle.

The dead wall copied Tir.

Elen copied Jiang’s broken ending.

Brinn’s gaze moved from the bell to him. "She hears the bird."

"Everyone hears the bird," Tir said. "He hits bronze like he has a grievance against it."

Jiang struck the bell again. This time he gave the contact rhythm that belonged to the male and chick, then turned toward the ceiling.

Brinn misunderstood. "The ray went below."

He repeated the rhythm and looked up.

Tir crouched beside him. "Something above?"

Jiang scraped his beak through condensation on one tideglass rib. He drew one crooked circle, then another beside it. Two moons, if a viewer possessed imagination and charity.

He put a smaller mark between them and gave the chick’s thin call.

The sound broke at his packed beak.

Brinn crouched on his other side. "Two-moon silver. Ninebell used it for paired returns."

Jiang pecked the small mark.

Tir looked up at the drowned throat. "A young one?"

Jiang repeated the low family call.

Tir’s expression tightened around the same fear he had carried for Elen. It was not understanding, exactly. It was close enough to hurt.

"Then we have lives on both sides," he said.

Brinn rose. "Which is why we use the sleeping air."

She pointed her broad knife toward the warm cracks at the bottom of the room. The bell’s cradle continued beneath the stone shelves. If they opened those seams, water from the stair would flood the gallery. The warm air would have nowhere to go except into the bell’s mouth.

The rising bubble could lift the carrier into the upper throat.

It would also put the beds, blankets, little boots, and every dry breath in the room underwater.

Tir stared at the boots. "We get one lift."

"We need one," Brinn said.

"If the chain catches, we lose the bell and the gallery."

"If your hook catches the ray, we lose something that can bleed."

Tir turned on her. "You keep speaking as if I made the black wire."

Brinn’s fingers touched the white split in her lip. "You opened the door when it knocked."

"With your signal," Tir said.

"With my mother’s signal. It had been dead since morning. I knew that, and I opened anyway."

The room went on being a room. Water crept over the lower edge. A blanket drank the first black line and darkened.

Brinn climbed down from the cradle. "The tongue came back through the door. It caught my mouth. You grabbed it and kept the shutter from opening wide enough for the whole call."

Tir flexed the two fingers that could no longer straighten.

"We flooded the stair while our people were still above us," Brinn said. "That is how Tideglass survived. That is what a fixed knock bought."

Nobody looked at Jiang for judgment. He was grateful. His own list of people left on the wrong side of a door had become crowded enough.

Elen struck the far bronze.

The blow barely reached the bell.

Tir put on the green-glass mask.

Brinn stepped between him and the stair. "We flood the gallery first."

"The bell will rise against a shut chain."

"We cut it from here."

"The catch is beyond the shutter. Elen was freeing it when the water changed."

Brinn held out her hand for the hook shaft. "Then I go."

Tir shook his head. "You can still close both hands."

He struck her wrist with the blunt shaft. Brinn’s fingers opened from pain, and Tir slipped past her into the stair.

Jiang lunged from the bell cradle.

His beak caught Tir’s ankle strap. For one breath, the damaged penguin and the damaged bellwright held each other at the waterline.

Tir looked down through the green glass. "Bring the young one back when this opens."

He pulled free without kicking.

Black water took him over the mask.

Brinn seized the safety line and wrapped it around her forearm. She let it run through her bleeding bite until Tir reached the first turn, then braced both feet against the bell cradle.

The line twitched once. Tir’s shape vanished beyond the green-glass pane.

Elen knocked from the far side.

Brinn answered with a new scrape and two blows.

The dead bronze repeated her pattern. Elen did not.

Jiang pressed his breast to the free bell. No changed movement reached him through the metal.

Brinn pulled on Tir’s safety line.

It came back without him.

The end had been cut cleanly below the knot.