Chapter 95: THE COLD IN THE HEAT
Cinder wanted to come. But she was a furnace, and Harken’s men listened for beasts that gave off heat like hers. There was no way she could win that argument.
That did not stop her from having it.
"You’re loud," he told her in the forge. "I love that in a field. I love it less in a tunnel."
She put her head against his chest. Full weight. The move that had made him think she loved him.
"No. That won’t work either. I’ve built a tolerance."
She did it again.
"Still no. Keep the cat. Glower at the smith. He likes it. He won’t admit it."
The smith, at his bar, did not admit it.
Miasma climbed his arm to his shoulder and settled there.
Nyx came off his other shoulder and went into his coat. The dark got darker. That was it saying it was ready.
Cinder announces herself. Miasma stays close. Nyx disappears into the quiet and waits for me there.
He shut the door of the forge behind him before Cinder could follow.
The stairs started in the undercroft, dropping down into the dark.
Down toward the one place in the world that can sense Cinder’s heat.
Brilliant. After you, then.
He had expected the dead quiet of Sewer Row. He got the opposite.
The bottom under the forge district was a city of its own, and it was awake.
Workers hauled away metal waste the workshops no longer wanted.
A woman carried a wooden pole across her shoulders and sold cups of hot water to men who worked where no fire was allowed.
Two boys ran a dice game in a dry drain. They went quiet when Aiden crossed their lamplight. They started shouting again when he was gone.
Nobody gave him a second look. Tired men came down here every day. Nobody cared where he was going.
Be nothing. Be what nobody writes down. I’ve had practice.
He bought a cup of the hot water so he had a reason to stand still.
"Cinder-sink," he said, and put a copper in her hand. "Easy to get lost down here."
"It is." She kept pouring for the next customer. "But don’t go past the deep gate. Charter men have been down there this week. They’ve got hooks and heavy gloves. They’re moving something they don’t want anyone to see."
She tipped the cup.
"My husband used to say that anything they wanted hidden was worth taking... Before they took his hands for saying it."
Aiden didn’t answer. She was simply telling him what she knew. All she needed was someone willing to listen.
"If you’re going to the sink for the heat, stay close to it. Don’t go near whatever they’ve got down there."
He remembered her warning and followed the heat through a slanted tunnel.
Down was hotter. That was backwards.
Cold sinks. Heat rises. I learned that over a lamp.
But the Chamber was different. Heat filled the stone and brick around him, turning the whole place into an oven.
The deeper he went, the hotter it got. He took his coat off and carried it.
Miasma went dim on his shoulder.
She had been running a low green since the forge. Down here she dimmed it to almost nothing before he thought to ask.
You worked that out on your own.
The dark beside him stayed dark. He could no longer feel where Nyx was, which was how he knew it was working.
Nobody can hear it in the dark. That’s the point.
He kept reaching for the place Nyx should be and found nothing. That was its own kind of company, if you were strange enough to take it that way.
He was.
"You’re enjoying this," he murmured. "The hole. The quiet. This is your personality, and I finally walked into it."
Nyx did not answer. The darkness ahead thinned just enough for him to walk through. From Nyx, that counted as an answer.
Then he noticed embers drifting through the air. They grew thicker with every step until the air looked gold.
In the lane, people bought them sealed in glass. The cheap ones burned as fuel. The better ones were fed to fire beasts. Lamplighters checked the price and usually walked past.
They drifted freely here. Down from the Chamber above, slipping through cracks and drains until they gathered around the pool the smith had named.
The deeper he went, the thicker the embers became. Soon they filled the air around him. Every breath tasted of coal and ash.
The tunnel opened into the cinder-sink.
It was a low, domed chamber. Fine grey ash covered the floor.
Heat pressed against him. A forge blasted heat straight at you. This heat came in slow waves, with a long breath between each one.
He put his palm out. The heat spread slowly between his fingers.
Old heat. Deep heat.
This is Chamber-hot. The smith was right. This will hold a threshold.
Miasma came off his shoulder onto a warm stone ledge. She stretched out full length, her green coming up brighter than it had been in days.
He let her have that.
The one room in the city that can make Cinder evolve. Of course it’s a hole nobody’s allowed into.
A grey chill spilled from the side passage and cut through the embers.
The cold reached him despite the heat.
Beside him, Nyx flinched.
That stopped him.
Nyx never flinched.
But Nyx’s darkness shrank away from the grey. A small recoil. There and gone.
On the ledge, Miasma’s green went out. She faced the side passage, spines pressed down along her back.
"Yeah," he said. "I know. We don’t like it either. Stay in the embers. I only need to see."
He went down the side passage alone.
Nyx remained near the cinder-sink, hidden in the darkness behind him. Aiden took that as her way of keeping his retreat open.
He didn’t go far. Just far enough to see around the curve into a wider chamber.
The Ice Heart sat on a cradle there, half out of its wrappings.
The hair went up on his forearms before he understood what he was looking at.
The Ice Heart was made of iron, but something else had fused with it. Its surface was pale beneath a layer of white frost.
A forge turned inside out. It eats heat to radiate cold.
The pole-iron had pulled warmth from a ring of ground. He had watched it happen.
The Ice Heart pulled heat from the whole chamber.
The glowing embers turned grey as they approached. They fell as frost before they reached it.
Soft grey snow, a hundred feet under a city, in spring.
Not a tracker’s story at a fire anymore. It’s sitting right there.
He counted the men.
Four handlers wore heavy gloves. Two worked on the wrappings. Two stood back with long hooks. A fifth stood by a lamp with a slate, writing.
There’s always a man with a slate in what Vane does. His whole job is making it official after it’s already done.
They were not rushing.
That was what bothered him.
A House rushed when it was moving something it had stolen. It didn’t rush when the thing already belonged to it.
They unwrapped the Ice Heart as carefully as the smith uncovered a bar he’d left to temper overnight. Certain it would still be theirs by morning.
Aiden looked from the Ice Heart to the cinder-sink.
The same air flowed through both chambers. The cold was already spilling into the passage.
It would reach the sink. Once it did, the sink would cool.
He had already felt its heat. It was strong enough to let Cinder evolve.
But he didn’t know if it would stay that hot with the Ice Heart draining heat from the chamber.
If the cold lowers the heat even a little, the cure will kill her.
I can’t let her eat the fruit while that thing is spreading cold through the room.
And I can’t get another fruit until a tree I don’t own is struck by lightning next year.
I’ve spent all this time keeping Cinder away from that cold. Now I have to bring her straight to it.
Behind him, Nyx shifted.
Nyx is done waiting. I’ve looked long enough.
He backed into the warm air around the cinder-sink. The grey let go of his skin.
Miasma’s green came up again the moment he crossed back. She climbed to his shoulder without being asked.
"Come on," he told them both. "We’ve seen it."
He started up the stairs.
"Now I get to tell a furnace she has to come down here." He shifted Miasma’s weight. "To the one place she’s most afraid of. So I can set her alight next to the room that froze her."
Nyx moved up onto his other shoulder.
"She’s going to take that so well."
Above him, the underground city went on with its trade. The dice boys. The water-seller. A whole city under the city, and none of them knew about the Ice Heart resting on its cradle below.
Which is its own kind of mercy.
How do you put out a fire that’s made of cold?
He did not know yet.