Chapter 101: WHEN COLD STOPS WORKING
The stair from the undercroft opened onto a dead-end lane behind the smith’s forge, walled on three sides and wide enough for one cart.
The smith dumped old scrap and broken bricks around, making it a place nobody came to look at.
That morning, someone came to look at it.
Aiden heard the boots first and put his shoulder to the wall.
A man entered from the open lane above. He looked at the piles of scrap. He looked at the walls. Then he pressed his palm against the cobbles.
He’s not looking. He’s feeling the ground.
When the man stood up, he walked slowly toward the undercroft, stopping every few paces to check the cobbles.
Plain coat. The cheap kind. A district permit showed in his pocket. Deliberately.
Two beasts followed him. Lean grey rakehounds, with long legs, bred to follow a cold trail through winter woods.
Trackers. Not killers.
And he’s tracking warm stone, not a scent.
Someone paid him to find what’s making the heat. Someone else will come to take it.
Aiden glanced back at Cinder. "Don’t. Not yet. Let me lie first. Lying’s free, and I’m good at it."
Cinder came up the stairs anyway.
Of course you did.
She came behind him, and the temperature came with her.
The rakehounds stopped dead. Both backed off their leads with the fur standing along their spines. One let out a thin whine that no hound should have made.
The man looked at Cinder.
He froze. His eyes moved over Cinder, taking in her size, then the white-gold coat. Aiden watched recognition settle across his face.
First the size. Then the color. Then what the color meant.
"That’s not on my paper," the man said.
His voice had gone careful.
"No," Aiden said. "It really isn’t."
"My paper says find the source of the heat."
"Your paper’s out of date." Aiden kept his hands where they could be seen. "Here’s what happens now. You walk back to your employer. You tell him that you found no one, just heat from a foundry venting wrong."
"And you let me walk."
"I let you walk."
The man looked at Cinder again. His hand went to his belt, past the knife. To the horn.
He blows that and the lane fills with men. The undercroft, the smith, the whole bottom goes on a map by nightfall.
"Nyx."
The man pressed the horn to his lips and filled his lungs.
Nyx lunged out from the man’s own shadow and struck the horn.
The horn split down one side with a sharp crack. The hunter blew into a ruined mouthpiece.
He got nothing but his own breath whistling back at him.
He looked at the horn. He blew again, harder.
Nothing.
He doesn’t know what happened. That’s worse for him than a blade.
The man stepped back, eyes wide, hand loose on his hounds’ leashes.
The hounds had been pulling toward Cinder. When the man let go, both bolted, trained to close on the largest target in the field.
Four strides in, the first hound sat down. Its haunches hit the slush, its tongue hung out, and its sides heaved. It was bred for winter. It had just run into summer.
Cinder hadn’t moved at all.
Its lungs went in expecting cold and got August.
The only sense it hunts by just turned to soup.
The second hound turned and ran for the open lane.
That one’s going for men. That’s the one that matters.
Aiden crouched, ready to shadow step, then stopped.
Miasma was already off his shoulder.
She crossed the cobbles in one green blur and drove a spine into the hound’s flank, just above the hip.
The leg gave out. The hound went down on its side ten feet short of the corner. It lay there breathing, awake but unable to stand.
Not the killing dose. The folding one.
Two Hounds down. Neither dead. In the time it took a frightened man to fail at a horn twice.
Then heat rose through Aiden.
His core climbed like a stoked grate. Every bit of cold that had lived in his bones went out of him at once.
He dashed at the man, faster than he had ever been. He pressed his palm against the tracker’s face and slammed him onto the cobbles. One cracked from the impact.
Then the warmth faded, and he was himself again.
Five seconds sharp of Solar Plexus.
The tracker lay stunned on the cobbles, his broken horn still in his hand.
Aiden gestured at Cinder, and she approached. Slow enough to let the tracker catch his breath and see her.
She walked him back against the scrap heap. She stopped with her jaw inches from his face, burning breath across it. The flares along her back lifted.
Not enough to burn him. Enough that his eyebrows curled. His eyes streamed. He could not turn his face far enough away from her to escape the heat.
The man went down on his knees.
"Please. Please. I’ve got a permit, that’s all. I don’t work for them, I just take the—"
"Stop." Aiden crouched down in front of him. "You’re not dying today. She’s already decided that, and I don’t overrule her."
The man stared at him with his eyes running.
"Say the words back to me. The undercroft’s empty."
"The undercroft’s empty."
"The heat was a foundry venting wrong."
"Foundry venting wrong."
"Good." Aiden stood. "And when they push you, hold. Because if they find out what you actually saw, they’ll send you back here after her."
He did not need to point. Cinder filled the lane.
"Nobody pays enough for that. Nobody."
Cinder let her flares drop and moved her head away.
The man collected the hound that had collapsed, carried the one Miasma had crippled, and rushed out. Neither of them looked back.
Aiden let out the breath he had been holding, then smiled at Cinder.
"Well done." He turned toward Miasma and Nyx. "All of you. Looks like the smartest one was the beast that sat first."
As he took his beasts back into the undercroft, a man in a good coat shifted from the lane’s blind spot. He had been standing there since before the freelance entered the lane.
He was there to watch the freelance. That was the whole job. You send a man with a permit to walk into a hole, and you send a man with a seal to see what walks out.
He had a clear line down the lane and a wall at his back. Nobody looked for him. Everybody in that lane had been looking at the wolf.
He had watched it all.
Not just the beast. The beast was already half-confirmed on a slate two nights ago.
What he had watched was the rest.
Two trained rakehounds. One had sat down without being touched. The other had turned for the open lane and been brought down before it reached the corner.
The little one carries poison. Fast enough to stop a fleeing tracker before it reaches the street.
But her heat is the real problem. It put a winter hound on the ground without a mark on it.
Unevolved cold-bred beasts cannot work in front of her. They cannot even stay upright.
That was the piece nobody upstairs had. It changed the hunt.
He turned and walked back toward the part of the district where good coats reported to better ones.
He did not hurry.
Every tracker we own is bred for cold. Every one of them is useless now.
So we stop sending things that can be beaten by heat.
He went to tell them to bring the Ice Heart out.
And Aiden, down in the undercroft with his hand on the jaw of a wolf who had just refused to kill, did not see him go.