Chapter 649: The Kiln

The Kiln was the floor of the crater.

It lay at the very top of Oruth, a wide round bowl of black glass with the great shaft at its center, roofed with iron grating so that the red light from the heart of the mountain came up through it in long bars. Around its rim, on terraces cut into the crater wall, the whole of the Cinder Palace had come to watch. They did not cheer. They watched the way smiths watch metal in a forge, in silence, waiting to see what it would do.

Ashe walked out onto the glass. The heat came up through her boots, and she let it.

Iskra Dain was waiting on the far side of the grating.

She was lean and short-haired and very calm, bare-armed like all of them, with three red beads braided at her temple and a long single-edged blade of black glass held loosely at her side. She did not posture. She simply looked at Ashe across the bars of red light, and nodded once, the way one craftsman nods to another.

On the rim above, Bastien Oro raised one scarred hand.

"Until one yields," he said, "or one can’t stand. Begin."

Ashe went in hard.

The Killing Intent came off her in a wave, heavy and red, and she followed it across the grating with her blade already moving, and struck Iskra Dain full across the guard with everything in her shoulders.

It was like hitting an anvil.

The black glass blade did not break. It rang. Iskra gave half a step, no more, and Ashe felt the heat go out of her own strike and into the other woman, through the blade and up the arm, and saw the bare skin of Iskra’s forearm darken very slightly, like iron left a moment longer in the coals.

Every blow you land makes her harder to hit again.

Ashe struck again. And again. She went in high and low, fast and then faster, and every blow landed and rang, and with each one Iskra Dain grew a little denser, a little more like the glass under their feet. She did not counter. She simply let Ashe pour herself into her, and grew harder.

Ashe broke off and circled, breathing hard. Her arms were already heavy. Across the grating, Iskra Dain had not even raised her blade.

So Ashe opened the Avatar.

[War God’s Avatar, Grade S]

The Warlord came up through her like a furnace door swinging open. Her horns burned. Her markings went bright as wire in a forge. She came across the grating so fast the red light bent around her, and hit Iskra Dain with a blow that would have put a Dark World beast through a cliff.

The glass blade rang like a bell. Iskra slid back three paces on the hot floor.

Then she stopped, and set her feet, and for the first time she moved.

Her blade came round in a single short, economical arc, not fast, not hard, and touched the flat of Ashe’s sword. Heat went into it. Not fire. Heat, deep and patient, the way a smith tempers steel, except backward, and Ashe felt her own blade go suddenly brittle in her hands as if it had been left in a kiln for a week.

It cracked across the middle.

Ashe threw the broken half aside and stood on the grating with the hilt in her fist and the Avatar still burning, and understood, very clearly, that she was losing.

Warlord’s Decree.

It was right there. It always was. Designate the decisive front, declare where the fight would be won, and let the Authority make it so.

She reached for it, and found nothing to designate.

There was no front. That was what was wrong. Iskra Dain had made herself the same everywhere. There was no weak point, no hinge, no place where the fight would turn. Every inch of her was equally hard, and the harder Ashe hit, the more equal she became.

Ashe stood very still in the red light.

Too heavy. You’ll crush anyone who gets close.

She had spent her whole life pushing. The Killing Intent, the Avatar, the blade, every fight she had ever won: weight thrown at the thing in front of her until it broke. She had thought that was what heavy was for.

But last night, in a hot room above the sea, four people had leaned on her. And she had not pushed any of them away. She had simply stayed where she was, and let them.

Isole’s voice. It isn’t that you can’t move. It’s that you haven’t found where to put it.

Ashe stopped pushing.

She let the Warlord settle. Not out of her, but down, into the glass beneath her feet, into the grating and the hot air above it and the whole round floor of the Kiln. She did not throw it at Iskra. She simply put it down, the way you put down something very heavy, and let it stay there. Let it be the ground.

The whole crater changed.

She felt it happen. The red light from the shaft bent and slowed. The heat that had been flowing so freely across the Kiln, up through the floor and into Iskra Dain and out again, faltered, as if it were trying to move through deep water. Across the grating, Iskra took a step and stopped, and a look of surprise crossed her calm face for the first time, because the air around her was carrying Ashe’s weight now, and so was the floor, and so was everything she touched, and her Kiln Heart could not move heat through any of it.

She was still hard. She was hard all over. But she could no longer move fast, because to move at all inside Ashe’s field she had to carry Ashe with her.

[Rank: 6 — Mid Expert]

Ashe barely noticed it go past. She was looking at Iskra Dain, and at last she could see it: the one place where the other woman had to go. The step she had to take to free her blade. The only front that mattered.

[Warlord’s Decree, Grade SS]

She declared it.

She crossed the grating with the broken hilt in her fist, inside her own field, at a walk. Iskra’s blade came up toward the place Ashe had named, because it had to, because there was nowhere else for it to go. And Ashe met it there, the ruined hilt against the flat of the black glass, all of her weight behind it at once, the whole of the Kiln leaning in with her.

The glass blade shattered.

Iskra Dain went down onto one knee on the grating in a shower of black fragments, and stayed there. She looked at her empty hands. Then she looked up at Ashe, and slowly, unexpectedly, began to laugh.

"Yield," she said. "Oruth’s teeth. I yield."

Ashe let the field go. The heat rushed back across the crater all at once, and the red light straightened, and the silence on the terraces broke into a sound she had not expected. Not cheering. Hammers. Every smith on the rim of the crater had taken a hammer from their belt and was striking it on the black glass at their feet, hundreds of them, in a rising, ringing, rolling thunder that went round and round the Kiln and down into the heart of the mountain.

Above her on the rim, Bastien Oro was striking his own hammer on the stone and roaring with laughter.

Ashe found the others at the front of the nearest terrace. Valerica, with her hand pressed over her mouth. Nyx, standing on the wall. Isole, perfectly still. Isaac, steaming gently. Mara, with her ledger open.

And Vane, who did not shout or wave or do anything at all. He was simply looking at her, the way he had looked at her on the gallery before dawn.

Somewhere behind them, very faintly, a small boy with a bucket was swearing.