Chapter 134: The Smoke Cellar

Seren came down the stairs at the fifth bell with a white cloth in her hand, and the first thing she did was run it along the edge of the middle furnace.

It came away clean. She looked at it, and then at the floor, which had been swept, and the mortars, which had been scrubbed and set out in a row by size, and the slop bucket, which was empty. Then she looked at Aren, who had been there since the fourth bell and was grinding lily in the corner.

"Who told you to touch my mortars?"

"Nobody."

"Then don’t." She threw the cloth at the slop bucket. "Grind that finer."

Then she lit the left furnace and held her bare hand in the fire. A woman stepped out of the flames, jaw-cut hair, burned fingertips, apron on, and went to work without a word. Seren did the same at the right furnace, and went a shade paler each time.

’Copies, out of her own fire.’

At the sixth bell the left furnace burned out. The copy at it went grey from the fingers up and fell into a heap of warm ash on the floor.

"Sweep that up," Seren said.

That was the first morning, and the next three were the same.

"Do you know what that is?" she asked him on the second day, without looking up from the blue pills cooling on her bench.

"False Glass."

"It makes the Measure read one rank higher for an hour. Fat merchants buy it to get their sons into good marriages." She tipped the pills into a jar. "Bought rank on top of bought rank. You should feel right at home, goose. Tell Auntie that when you report. You’re her fifth. The four before you ground lily in that cold corner all day under three of me, and none lasted a season."

She called him Servant, or goose, or nothing at all. She threw away his lily, his salt and his ash, and once a whole morning’s work, without looking at any of it, and used the jar the last boy had left.

’Abyss lily is the cheapest thing in this cellar, and she bins it like it insulted her mother.’

She talked to the furnaces more than she talked to him. He swept and scrubbed and ground, and watched her.

She was the best he had ever seen at anything.

Her hands never stopped and never hurried. She could tell the heat of a furnace by holding her palm over the vent, and she was never wrong. Her class was Crucible, Auntie had said. He watched her lift a glowing pot off the coals with her bare fingers, set it down, and go on swearing at it. Heat that would have burned anyone to the bone had only scarred the tips of her fingers. She made False Glass in a quarter of the time her own notebook said.

Everything she touched warmed. Once she picked a fresh lily out of the crate to show him how fine she meant, and the petals went brown under her fingers. She threw it in the fire and swore at it.

"That’s what you’re for," she said. "Cold hands. Don’t let it go to your head."

The copies never pressed. When a side batch was ready, Seren came over and did it herself. And at the end of every batch, when she held her hands over the furnace and pressed the pills shut with her own essence, her face changed.

It went tight. She was bracing for it. Then she would take the finished pills to a small round glass on a brass stand at the end of the bench, drop one onto it, and read the number that came up in the glass.

"Thirty-four," she said, on the third morning, to nobody. On the fourth: "Thirty-five."

Her last Marrow for the House, months old, sat on the top shelf with 34 chalked on the lid.

She caught him looking at the glass.

"Stop watching my hands."

"I’m learning."

"Geese don’t learn. They get fed." She turned back to the furnace.

She swept the whole batch into a jar for the House, and didn’t speak again until noon.

On the fifth morning Aren stopped grinding and watched her press.

He had been waiting for the angle. Now, with the light of the furnace behind her and her hands spread over the mouth of it, he could see her essence going down into the pills, a clear hot pressure like the air over a summer road. And running through it, there was a thread of black.

It was thin as a hair, and it went into every pill.

[Comprehension: Seren Veil’s press. Structure understood.]

’Something black, like rot in a beam. Somebody fed her something, and it’s still in her. Every pill she makes carries a piece of it.’

’The copies are her, body and core. Same thread. That’s why they never press.’

Veil Gold was not in her notebook. The pages had been cut out, close to the spine, four years ago, where the dates stopped. Someone had put this in her, and taken the recipe, and left her in a cellar.

’And she has to look at the number every single time.’

That afternoon, after she had dropped a pinch of his lily on the glass when she thought he wasn’t looking, she stopped throwing it away. By evening the False Glass read cleaner than it had all season.

"New crop," she told the furnace. "The south had a wet spring."

’Nobody ever ground it for her with hands that leave nothing behind.’

On the sixth morning, Auntie’s order came down the stairs.

It was a Marrow, a real one. A Sarkhane captain wanted Veil Gold for his son and would pay the House eight thousand crowns for it, as long as nobody asked where it came from. Seren read the order without changing her face, then cleared the middle bench with one sweep of her arm.

She worked on it all day. She ground and boiled and folded and waited, and talked to it under her breath, and twice she sent him running up the stairs for salt. By the time the harbor bells rang six, the furnace was white-hot and the mixture in the crucible had gone the color of honey, and she stood over it with her hands spread, and her face went tight.

Aren was sweeping by the far wall.

’One second, on the press. She’ll never know.’

She pressed.

[Reduce to Zero: the Rot in Seren Veil’s press. Uses today: 1/2.]

[Cost: the Rot, in the Host. 1 second.]

For one second the black thread was in him, bitter and heavy behind his breastbone, and then it was gone. ’So that’s what she tastes every time she presses.’

Her face changed. Something went out of it, all at once, the bracing and the dread, and for a breath she looked startled, like someone who had leaned on a door and found it open. Then the furnace flared gold, and the pill sat in the crucible, small and pale and shining.

She lifted it out with tongs and set it on the glass at the end of the bench.

Aren kept sweeping.

The number came up in the glass. Seren stood looking at it, and didn’t move. Then she picked the pill up and set it down on the glass again, carefully, in the middle.

The number stayed where it was.

Twenty-nine.

She stood there with her hands flat on the bench on either side of the glass. The furnace ticked as it cooled. After a while he saw that her shoulders were shaking.

"Get out," she said, without turning around.

He put the broom against the wall and went up the stairs.

At the top, in the fish-smelling dark of the warehouse, the window opened in front of his eyes.

[Investment recorded. Type: Hidden aid. Anchor unaware.]

[Anchor progressed: Seren Veil. Marrow Pill (Veil Gold): Impurities 34% → 29%.]

[Mirror Return triggered.]

The little wheel spun in the dark among the fish crates. He watched it go past the thin grey sliver of x10,000 that he could no longer see as red and the narrow band of x1,000, and slow, and settle on x10.

[Result: x10.]

[Return: the Anchor’s progress, x10.]

[Skill acquired: Alchemy (Grade C).]

It went into his hands first: the weight of a pinch of salt, the heat of a vent against his palm. Six days with a broom, and his hands knew a bench. Then it went behind his eyes and met the Comprehension there.

’My lily, and one second on her press. Five points, ten times over. A start.’

He laughed out loud in the empty warehouse, once, and a cat ran out from behind the crates.

He slept for an hour at dusk, and then went back down to the fish docks.

The Smoke Cellar was locked, with an iron-banded door at the bottom of the stairs. He let himself in with the key Osric had given him, and locked it again behind him.

Two days before, he had taken his purse back from Rook and bought a furnace, a small cracked one from a pawnshop on the Ninefold Quay, for three hundred crowns. He had hidden it behind the barrels in the back store, where Seren never went. Now he set it up on the floor, lit it with cheap E-rank cores, and opened her notebook to the simplest recipe in it.

A Hide Pill, the cheap kind, grade two at best. The first stage of the foundation, the pill a cobbler bought for his son. Sixty crowns.

It took him four tries. The first boiled over. The second set too early, and he saw why. The third was close.

On the fourth, a little after the bells rang three, he held his hands over the mouth of the furnace and pressed.

His essence went down into the pill. It came from the ring behind his breastbone, the ring around nothing, and it went in clear and cold and set the pill shut. When he took his hands away, nothing of him was left inside it.

He carried it to her glass at the end of the bench and set it down.

[Hide Pill. Result: Refined. Impurities: 23%.]

He stood looking at the number, as she had.

The twenty-three came from the cracked furnace, the cheap cores and the cobbler’s salt. A grade two Hide Pill should have read about fifty. Her notebook priced the best Veil Hide Pills at nine hundred crowns, and they read thirty.

’Twenty-three would be grade five. There’s no such thing as a grade five Hide Pill. Nobody’s ever made one.’

He put the pill in his pocket, cleaned the furnace, swept the floor, and carried everything back behind the barrels. Then he put the notebook back on her shelf, at the same angle as before.

She came down at the fifth bell the next morning with a white cloth in her hand, and ran it along the edge of the middle furnace, and said nothing at all.

[Seren Veil. Hostility: 95% → 94%.]

At the first batch of False Glass she spread her hands over the furnace, and her face went tight again. Aren watched from the corner. The black thread was back in her press.

’One firing. It grows back.’

At noon a boy came down the stairs with a letter for her. It was sealed with green wax, and pressed into the wax was a mountain with a pill above it.

Seren took it. She broke the seal standing at the bench and read it, and Aren watched the color go out of her face from the top down, until even her lips were white.

She fed the letter into the furnace and watched it burn.

"My cousin," she said, to the fire, "is in Port Myrrh."