Chapter 88: THE PRICE OF FIRE
"How many forges are up there?"
The boy had to think about it.
"Loads. Hundreds, maybe. There’s the smith-rows, and the foundries, and the big cast-houses."
"And they all burn the Chamber’s fire?"
"They buy it off them. The Chamber sells the heat down."
"All of them?"
The boy stopped.
"Most of them," he said.
Aiden looked up at the warm brick above him.
A district this old has men in it who were here before the charter was.
Somebody never signed.
Four years of locked yards had taught him one thing. You never learn a locked place from the lock. You learn it from everything nobody bothered to lock.
"My master said you’d find your own door." The boy was already off the crate, pulling his coat straight. "He told me where to send you when you did. East end. The old rows."
"How old?"
"Sixty years older than the charter. That’s what he said." The boy scratched his ear. "And there’s this one old man down there. They’ve been trying to buy him out since before I was born. He keeps saying no."
They went up at the dead hour.
Day-shift gone. Night-shift thin. Aiden kept to the back lanes, the service runs, the places a district turns its back on. He had walked lanes like these with an oil can for years.
The undercroft heat had put Cinder on her feet, glow banked low under her black. The cat trotted at her flank. Miasma rode the kit bag. Nyx stayed in his coat and pressed itself against his side to escape the district’s heat.
The old rows sat at the east end.
Squat black forges built into the wall itself, older than the brick around them. Most were dark at that hour.
One was not.
Red light spilled from its open front across the lane. Aiden felt the heat twenty paces back.
Cinder’s head came up as they entered.
The smith was old, wide, bent. His arms were scarred white from thirty years of small burns. He worked a banked fire with a long iron. Alone, at an hour when nobody else worked at all.
He did not reach for anything when Aiden stepped into the light.
He looked at the white in Aiden’s hair.
Then he saw Cinder. The iron stopped moving.
"That beast’s coat," the smith said. "I’ve seen that coat once. Forty years back. On a beast the old Baron Vane kept and wouldn’t sell."
He set the iron down.
"Black like that. Ember in the flank. They called the bloodline a phoenix-wolf, back when they were proud of it." He wiped his hands. "Then they stopped being proud of it. Then they started putting it in coldrooms."
"You know what she is."
"A beast on its last leg. But I know what she was bred to be."
The smith looked at the low glow in her flanks. Then he watched her lean toward his fire. She was not doing it on purpose. "And I can see what they did to her. She’s standing at my forge like a frozen man at a stove."
He spat to the side.
"For sixty years the Vanes have been buying up this district. The warm and the cold both. They’d have my fire too, if I let them."
"Will you let her warm herself?"
"She’s already started."
Aiden turned.
Cinder had walked to the front of the forge while they talked. She stood in the heat, head down, eyes shut.
The banked glow in her flanks rose and steadied higher than it had in the undercroft. A forge was a truer fire than a warm floor.
"But you didn’t walk the back lanes at this hour just to warm her," the smith said. "Somebody told you the warm keeps her and doesn’t bring her back. You want to know what brings her back."
"Yes."
The smith pulled a cold bar from the rack and raised it.
"You don’t warm steel into temper. You work it. Heat and hammer both. The working drives the heat down into the grain. Sitting in a fire never does that."
He laid the bar in the fire.
"A beast made of fire is no different. Sit her at a forge, and she stays alive. Make her take it in hard, with something pushing behind it. Then it goes into her grain. That’s how a line climbs."
"How does a wolf work a fire?"
"She doesn’t. Not alone. Not this weak. A bonded beast climbs on her tamer," the smith said.
"You push through the bond while she takes the fire. Costs you a night’s strength and a week feeling like a wrung rag. Every tamer I’ve watched do it, walked out of here grey." He turned the bar in the fire.
"You look grey already."
Aiden watched the bar go dull red, then red.
A night’s strength for normal tamers, not someone who scored zero on the Academy array.
For me it’s months. It was always going to be months.
"Show me," he said.
The smith drew the glowing bar out of the fire and set it on the anvil. He put a long iron in Aiden’s hand. Then he moved Cinder’s shoulder against Aiden’s side.
"Hand on her. Where the heat comes up."
Aiden put his palm on her flank, over the ember.
"When I strike, you push. Hard. She’ll take the fire in." The smith raised the hammer. "Small tonight. This is one step, not a climb. Neither of you have enough left in you for a climb."
The hammer came down.
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[ FORGE-DRIVEN AWAKENING — STEP ]
Channel: bond, ancestral resonance
Cost: 0.3 Years
Confirm.
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Yes.
The 0.3 years went out through his hand on Cinder’s flank.
Not the slow cold pull of the hollow. This was fast, and it burned.
Three months and change, out of him, between one hammer-stroke and the next.
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[ CURRENT LIFESPAN: 1.7 Years ]
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Cinder took the fire in.
He felt her flank go warm, then hot under his palm. Hotter than any coat had a right to be.
The glow rose and lit the whole forge-front. Her own fire. Nothing borrowed off a coal mound.
The ember spread across her whole flank. When she stepped away, it still glowed. It wasn’t fading.
She had climbed one step back up her own line.
Three-tenths of a year, gone in a single hammer-stroke.
Cinder turned her head.
She put her nose against the back of his hand.
That’s new.
It was the first thing she had ever given back.
"Not now," Aiden said. "There’s a man watching."
The smith kept his eyes on the anvil.
"I paid twenty years for you. You were supposed to be frightening and emotionally unavailable." Aiden did not move his hand. "This is a betrayal."
Cinder kept her nose against his palm. Her orange eyes sparkled with life; the first time he’d seen them like that.
Miasma had come off the kit bag and pushed her head against his cheek. The cat sat down on Aiden’s boot. Something warm slid down inside his collar and settled against his throat.
"So we’re all doing this," Aiden said. "All four of you. Right in front of a stranger."
Nobody moved.
The smith let it run a moment. Then he set his iron down.
"That’s one step off the bottom of E," he said. "A few more like it and she’s the D she was bred at. The forge-work does it."
He looked up. "I’ll give you the fire. The fire’s mine and the charter can choke on it."
"But."
"But hear the rest before you come back here."
"Say it."
"A step is cheap. The climb isn’t."
The smith wiped his hands again.
"E back to D is a broken line finding the rung it fell from. That part’s repair. Past D is different. That’s her climbing higher than what her blood allows her."
He looked at Cinder. At the new fire holding steady in her flank.
"And a beast like her never reaches D and settles. A descendant of the ancient phoenix-wolves at D wants the next rung like a fire wants air. Every rung costs more than the last."
He picked up his hammer.
"And whatever it takes out of a tamer, it takes more each time."
The system put it in front of Aiden then.
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[ RE-AWAKENING — PROJECTED COST ]
E → D (full): 1.4 Years remaining
Current reserve: 1.7 Years
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He read the cost with Cinder’s new heat warming his side.
Off E to D. The rung she fell from. The smith had called it the cheap one.
It cost a year and four months.
He had a year and eight months.
The cheap step left him four.
The cure worked.
He was just too poor to afford it.