Chapter 650: What the Fire Knows

They gave Ashe a sword that night.

It came out of the forges at dusk, carried up through the galleries by Iskra Dain herself, with her bruised hands wrapped in leather and a long bundle of oiled cloth across her arms. The whole of the summit chamber had been laid out for a feast, long tables of black glass around the great shaft, and every smith on Oruth seemed to have crowded into it. They went quiet as she passed.

She stopped in front of Ashe and held out the bundle.

"Yours broke," she said. "On me. That’s a debt."

Ashe unwrapped it. The blade inside was dark, not black glass but a deep smoky steel with a faint red sheen along its edge, as if it remembered the forge. It was long and heavy and perfectly plain.

"I made it this afternoon," said Iskra Dain. "In the Kiln. It’s never been used." She almost smiled. "It’s very stable."

Ashe looked at her for a long moment. Then she laughed out loud, and took the sword, and the smiths of Oruth began striking their hammers on the tables until the glass rang.

The feast went on for hours.

Isaac sat at the coolest end of the table with his feet in a bucket of ice that Bastien Oro had ordered brought up specially and that had to be replaced every twenty minutes, and wrote his letter to his mother under the table, and read parts of it aloud to anyone who would listen. "Weather: hellish. Food: excellent. Ashe won. She’s insufferable now. Vane is quietly insufferable about it, which is worse."

"I’m not," said Vane.

"You’ve been smiling for six hours," said Nyx.

"I don’t smile."

"You’ve been doing something with your face," said Valerica, "for six hours." She raised her cup to Ashe across the table. "I’d also like it noted that I won a week of chores from a boy with a bucket. He’s very bitter. He says the fight was rigged."

"It wasn’t rigged," said Ashe.

"I told him that. He says that’s what someone who rigged it would say." Valerica sipped her wine. "He’ll be a Steward. Mark my words."

Isole sat close beside Ashe all evening without saying much. At some point, without looking, she reached over and laid her palm flat on Ashe’s forearm, and left it there, and Ashe let her. Vane saw Isole’s eyebrows go up a fraction of an inch.

"Mid," Isole said quietly. "Properly. Your channels have settled."

"I know," said Ashe. "I felt it go."

"You didn’t tell anyone."

"I was busy," Ashe said. "Breaking a sword."

Near midnight, Bastien Oro stood up from the high seat, looked down the length of the table, and crooked one enormous finger at Vane.

Then at Isaac, and Valerica, and Sarai Vell, and Nyx.

"Come with me," he said. "Bring water."

He took them down the shaft.

There was a stair cut into its wall, a narrow spiral going round and round with nothing on the inner side but a long fall into red light, and the Cinder Lord went down it as if it were a garden path. The heat grew with every turn. Isaac’s frost went first, then his breath went ragged, and Vane put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there. Nyx walked with her eyes half closed, reading the rock. After a long time, the stair opened onto a ledge of black stone above a lake of fire.

It filled a cavern the size of the Hall of Wind, slow and red and glowing, moving in long sluggish swells like heavy oil. The heat coming off it was enormous. It should have been unbearable, Vane thought. He could stand it.

That was what was wrong.

"You see it," said Bastien Oro.

"It’s cooler than it should be," said Isaac hoarsely. "My books say no one can stand on this ledge."

"No one could. Thirty years ago my mother stood here and her eyebrows caught fire." The Cinder Lord looked down at the lake of fire with an expression Vane had not yet seen on his broad face: something very old and very tired. "Oruth has burned since before the Empire. It’s the oldest fire in the world. Since the spring, it has lost a third of its heat."

"Where’s it going?" asked Valerica.

Bastien Oro pointed down.

Not at the lake. Below it. Vane followed the line of his scarred finger and reached out with the Usurper through the rock under the molten stone, and felt what Nyx had already felt, because she had gone white.

The mountain had roots. They went down a very long way, down below the floor of the cavern and below the waterline and into the deep cold stone under the sea. And at the bottom of them, very far down, something was pulling. Slowly, steadily, without hurry or malice, the way roots draw water. The heat of Oruth was running down through the rock toward it, like warmth leaving a hand pressed to cold glass.

"It’s drinking it," Nyx whispered.

Nobody answered her.

"In the north, it’s warm and it wants to come up," Sarai Vell said slowly. "And here..."

"Here it’s cold," said Bastien Oro, "and it wants to get warm." He looked at Vane. "I’ve had smiths on this ledge every night since spring, pouring their own fire into the lake to keep it lit. Isadora stands on her ice. I stand on my fire. Thessaly sits in her tower and listens to the wind." He spread his hands. "And all three of us told everyone we were fine."

"Are you coming to the table?" Vane asked.

"Of course I’m coming to the table," said the Cinder Lord. "I’ll bring my own chair, and I’ll bring twenty smiths who can stand on ice if they have to, and I’ll send them north to Isadora myself, and she’ll hate every minute of it." For the first time since they had come down the stair, he grinned. "That’s the best part."

They climbed back up in silence. At the top, while the others went on toward the noise of the feast, Isaac stopped in the cooler air of the gallery and leaned against the wall with his eyes closed.

"I should tell you now," he said. "Which one Mother said to leave until last."

Valerica turned.

"There are seven Palaces on Thessaly’s list," Isaac said. "Ask most people and they’ll tell you there are six. After the last time the sea came ashore, one of them didn’t go back up its tower like the others did. It went down." He opened his eyes. "To the water. To make some kind of arrangement with what lives there. Nobody’s heard from it since. Not in three hundred years."

"What’s it called?" asked Vane.

"The Drowned Palace," said Isaac. "Mother says it’s the only one on Thessaly’s list that might already know what’s coming." He looked at them all in the red half-light. "And the only one that might not want to stop it."