Iron Tooth

Darío rests his heel on the edge of the esparto mat. The floor is burning. He has picked the corner farthest from the hearth, where the stone takes half an hour longer to heat through, but the heat is already creeping up his ankles, sticky and dry.

In the wall niche, the grease wick gives off a thin thread of smoke that smells of rancid tallow. Tarsio is snoring on his back on the pallet, one arm dangling toward the flagstones and his mouth half open against the coarse cloth of the pillow. A four-day beard shadows his jaw; a dirty beard, full of limestone dust.

Darío tears a hangnail from his thumb with his teeth. He pulls too deep and a thick, salty drop wells up; he sucks it before wiping his thumb on the leg of his breeches. His lower back aches from sleeping crooked on the edge of the cot.

The chimney flue hisses.

There are no embers in the hearth, only the grate fitted into the main ashlar, swallowing the air from the lower boilers. A continuous, dull whistle, like a broken bellows working blind at the bottom of a well. The long poker still lies across the slot in the flue; Darío sees the cracked leather grip, two spans off the floor, trembling slightly in the hot air. The tip, buried in the vent, has been gathering heat for days in the dark of the duct.

Tarsio grunts without fully waking. He turns over with a heavy groan and stretches a leg until it brushes Darío's thigh. His skin burns like a brick fresh from the kiln.

"Cover that wick," he mutters into the pallet. "It's getting in my eyes."

"It's already low," Darío says.

"Then blow it out."

Darío doesn't move. He stays sitting on the edge of the stool, staring at the three-finger gap beneath the door to the passage. An icy draft comes through it, freezing the toes of his left foot while the sole of his right bakes against the flagstone. The contrast turns his stomach.

Ever since Tarsio tucked the vial into his waistcoat, Eusebio hasn't looked Darío in the face.

The oak door swings inward a hand's breadth. It makes no sound, because the hinges wear a layer of black tallow so thick it won't let the iron sing.

Eusebio comes in sideways. He has two gray cloths soaked in lye draped over his forearm, dripping murky drops onto the threshold. His eyes are swollen from lack of sleep and the sides of his nose are smeared with dry soot. He doesn't greet them. He stands still by the jamb, breathing short.

"The relief from the vats hasn't come up," he says in a rasping whisper.

Tarsio opens one eye, lazily, without lifting his face from the bolster.

"To hell with them downstairs. Bring me water."

"The water in the tub smells like rotten iron," Eusebio says. His voice neither rises nor falls; it sounds flat, as if he were reading out a list of spent provisions.

"Then go fetch it from the north cistern, you brute."

Eusebio doesn't go to the cistern.

He drops the wet rags. They hit the basalt with a soft slap. From beneath his leather apron he pulls a short skinning knife, the blade notched and the handle bound with rusty wire so it won't slip in the grease. He takes two sharp steps, his heels barely leaving the stone, his body leaning forward. He doesn't look at Darío. He stares fixedly at the triangle of sweaty skin exposed between Tarsio's collarbone and his neck.

Tarsio doesn't even blink in time. He has barely begun to turn his head with a thick grunt, fumbling for the pewter jug.

Darío doesn't scream.

His belly clenches all at once, a dry heave that doubles him over before he can name it. If that knife touches the artery, the ones below won't see dawn; the pitch will pour through the coal-hole grilles before Tarsio's blood has finished cooling on the mat. It's a clumsy, inglorious spasm, the blind swipe of a cornered animal: his right hand slides over the warm leather of the poker's grip, closes on the end, and pulls upward with the full weight of his body.

The bar comes out of the flue with a screech that sets the teeth on edge.

The tip is glowing a dull red, without flame, a tongue of iron that warps the air around it. Darío doesn't aim; he shoves the bar with both hands toward the shadow lunging at the pallet.

The iron drives in beneath Eusebio's Adam's apple.

It doesn't sound like steel cutting flesh, but like the wet crunch of a shovel sinking into mud. Eusebio stops dead. His hands drop the knife—which bounces off the wood of the pallet with a hollow knock—and clamp onto the red-hot bar. The stench of burned flesh and boiling fat fills the room in a second, thick as hot pitch. Eusebio's fingers twist, smoking, but they don't let go of the iron; his eyes open wide, washed of color, fixed on Darío's face in mute astonishment, without hatred or plea. A thick gurgle rises from his torn throat, a black foam that stains the front of Darío's nightshirt before the old man's knees give way and he falls sideways onto the hot flagstones, dragging the poker with him in a last jerk.

Silence.

Only the hiss of steam seeping through the joints of the ashlar and the heavy drip of blood onto the basalt.

Tarsio sits bolt upright, his back pressed to the stone wall and the skinning knife grazing his thigh. He looks at the sprawled body, then at the black stain spreading toward his bare feet, and finally at Darío, who is still on his knees, trembling, a sour nausea lodged at the back of his throat and his empty hands still clenched in the air.