Chapter 87: THE WARM WAY IN
The burner loaded his cart before dawn.
He raked the two dead mounds into sacks he stacked along both sides of the cart. That left a channel down the middle, floor to tarp, wide enough for a man.
Aiden got in with Cinder. The cat came in after them. The kit bag and Miasma went by his head.
The burner threw the tarp over the load and roped it down. He did not look at them again.
He took the reins and started the ox.
They were on the road when the sun rose.
Aiden lay under the sacks and listened to the wheels.
The morning went. He knew the hours by what reached him through the gap. Cold air first. Then warm air. Then dust off other carts. Then the sound of more wheels.
Cinder lay against him the whole way.
Around midday something changed in the air. A different warmth than that of the sun. Thin, steady, and it smelled of iron.
Cinder lifted her head.
She put her nose into the gap in the tarp.
You can smell it.
Aiden put his palm on her flank. Something had changed under the hide. Not much. A little. The dead cold she had carried since the fork was gone.
Miasma came off the kit bag in the dark.
She crossed the boards. She climbed his arm and settled against his chest, chin on his wrist.
She had not come to him for anything since the hollow.
He turned his hand over and let her have the palm.
You want to be held.
You’ve never once wanted that.
Her spines lay under his fingers. Her dim green edged the sacks stacked over them.
Inside his coat, Nyx pressed against his ribs.
Every one of you is warmer than yesterday. Not me. I’d almost feel jealous. Aiden smiled.
The cart slowed in the afternoon.
"Loads ahead of me," the burner said, low, to the reins. "Six carts on the queue. Men working it."
"Charter men?"
"Not charter. Standing men. Same as I told you." The ox stopped. "They’re walking the queue. Lifting tarps. Looking under loads."
Aiden put his eye to the gap.
The dock was a long stone quay on the river, built under the wall. A water-gate stood open where the wall met the river. Barges came through it loaded with coal. Carts queued along the stone to unload.
Four men walked the queue, lifted each tarp, looked underneath, set it down. Then the next.
They took their time over it. Two of them lifted each tarp. One looked. One wrote something down.
Nobody’s in a hurry.
Aiden watched them finish a cart and start the next.
Men hunting a man work fast, because they’re afraid he gets past them.
These four aren’t afraid of that at all.
He watched another tarp go up and come down.
So they’re not here to stop me. They’re here to write down where I went.
And then Harken brings the cold room to the address.
He put his hand flat on the sacks beside his head.
"I can’t ride through that."
"You can’t get off here either," the burner said. "A cart that stops before the queue is a cart they inspect first."
"Then don’t stop. There’s a stone stair where the quay drops to the water. Slow the ox as you pass it. That’s all I need."
The burner said nothing for a moment.
"You’d go under the quay."
"Yes."
"It’s filthy under there. Every forge in the district throws its dirty water down through the stone, and it all comes out under that dock. Hot in some places. Foul in all of them."
"I’ve walked the sewers of this city for four years." Aiden watched the four men work. "Nobody looks at filthy places. That’s why it’s the way in."
"It’s a hand’s width of wet ledge and black water. Your wolf can’t walk it."
Aiden looked at Cinder.
Her nose was still in the gap. The iron smell was thick and close now. There was heat coming from her flank against his leg.
A mile out, and she’s already warmer.
"This morning she couldn’t hold her own head up," he said. "Look at her."
The burner looked back through the gap for a long moment.
Then he faced front again.
"River end," he said. "I’ll slow. I won’t stop, I won’t wait, and if they inspect the line, I never carried anybody."
"That’s all I’m asking."
The burner slowed the ox at the river end of the quay.
Aiden slid over the tailboard and dropped into the dark. Cinder came after him. The cat dropped down last and landed on wet stone.
The burner did not look back. He took his load up the queue.
Somewhere up the line, a standing man lifted a tarp. Looked at charcoal. Set it down.
Under the quay was black water.
Hot in patches under the quench-drains. Cold where the river pushed in. It smelled of iron and burnt sand, with something sour underneath.
A ledge ran along the wall above the waterline, a hand’s width of wet stone.
Aiden put one boot on it, then the other, and started along. He followed it toward the water-gate, holding the kitbag up to keep Miasma dry.
Cinder came behind him. She walked better than she had walked the road. The stone under her feet was warm, and every step she took was faster than the last.
Halfway along, red came up under the black fur of her flank.
An inch. Then two. Then a hand’s width, deep red.
It lit the water.
The glow spread across the black water and climbed the wet wall.
We can’t let anyone see a fire burn under his boots.
"Down," Aiden said, low and fast.
He pressed the glowing flank against the wall, into the ledge’s shadow.
"Put it away. I know you can’t help it. Put it away anyway."
She did not understand the words.
She understood the hand on the place the heat came out.
The glow banked under his palm. Deep red to dull red to nothing. The dark came back to the water. She stood with her shoulder against the stone, shaking a little.
Aiden kept his hand there a moment longer than he needed to.
"Good girl," he said. "Hold it. Just a bit longer."
They reached the water-gate.
Iron bars at the waterline. Years of hot wash had eaten them thin at the bottom. One bar was gone. Two more were rotted to threads.
Aiden went through the gap sideways.
Cinder put her head in and stopped. The gap was narrower than her shoulders.
She backed up. She went down on her chest and tried again. Her front half went in. Then she stuck.
Come on. You can do it.
Aiden got both hands in the fur of her neck and pulled. She pushed with her back legs. Iron scraped a few hairs off her shoulder.
She came through all at once and knocked him flat on the wet stone.
He lay there with a wolf standing over him and laughed until his ribs hurt.
On the kit bag beside his head, Miasma lifted herself onto her forelegs to watch.
"I’m fine," Aiden said. "She’s fine. Everyone’s fine."
Miasma lay back down.
The cat walked through the gap without touching a bar.
On this side, the air was warm, and the dark went a long way back.
A stair went up away from the water. Aiden climbed it, Miasma still dry on his kit bag. Nyx had let the water flow through it and quietly came out of his coat. It gazed at him once with its pale eyes, tilted its head, found nothing broken, then went back in.
Cinder came behind him with the cat. At the top was a low brick room.
Cinder stood in it.
The heat went into her. Her flanks glowed, low and steady, and she stopped shaking.
Aiden sat down on the warm brick and put the kit bag on his knees.
In. Without a single one of them seeing which way we went.
Miasma came onto the floor. She walked to the middle of the room, close to Cinder, and lay flat on her belly with all four legs out.
The green in her spines came up brighter than it had been in the cart.
You feel better too? Get well soon.
Before his hand reached her spines, a shadow moved in the corner of the room.
The boy was sitting on a crate against the far wall. He did not look surprised.
"My master guessed you’d take the drain," the boy said. "He said you wouldn’t take the gate or queue. He sent me down here to wait."
"He guessed right."
"He guessed more." The boy stood. He was looking at Cinder. At the steady low red in her flanks. At her standing on all four legs. "He said the warmth of a forge can stabilise the cold in her. It won’t bring her rank back up."
"Then what does?"
"The Hearthstone Chamber. The real fire the whole district’s built around." The boy paused. "Tamers with a D-rank beast and a charter seal go through, not you. They’ll read your seal at the door, and you don’t have the right one."
Aiden did not answer him.
He was looking at the ceiling of the undercroft. At the brick. At the heat coming through. At whatever burned above.
The whole district is built to feed one fire.
Something that big has to leak.
"How many forges are up there?" he said.