The Ashglass Throne

Chapter 1: The Wick and the Ledger

The lamp sputtered twice before it caught, and Dunstan Sedge held his breath until the flame steadied behind its ashglass pane. He'd trimmed ten thousand wicks in his years at the Royal Archive, and still the moment of ignition made his chest tight—that half-second when the dark might win.

It never did. The flame found its purchase, and warm amber light pooled across the reading desk, illuminating a stack of requisition forms that no one but Dunstan would ever care about. Timber deliveries for the Lower Seam. Quantities of resinous pine measured in quarter-cords. The sort of records that made other archivists yawn into their sleeves.

Dunstan loved them.

He settled onto his stool—the one with the wobble he'd learned to compensate for years ago—and pulled the top form toward his good eye. His left eye saw the world through a permanent fog, a childhood accident involving a cracked ashglass pane and a shard that had scored the cornea. The healers had saved the eye itself but not its clarity. He'd grown up tilting his head to compensate, a habit that made him look perpetually curious, or perpetually uncertain, depending on who was judging.

The archive occupied a series of low-ceilinged chambers carved from the granite spine of Drennt's middle tier. It was not a prestigious posting. The ceilings dripped in the wet season, the shelves were older than the dynasty, and the only visitors were clerks sent to retrieve documents they could never find on their own. But the lamps were good—Dunstan saw to that personally—and the silence had a quality he'd never found anywhere else in the underground city. It was the silence of accumulated knowledge, of ten thousand decisions recorded and filed and forgotten, waiting for someone patient enough to listen.

He was halfway through the timber requisitions when the door opened.

"Sedge." Pim Cotter stood in the doorway, his narrow face flushed, his ink-stained fingers gripping the doorframe as though the corridor behind him were tilting. Pim was twenty-two, rail-thin, and possessed of an energy that made him vibrate slightly at all times, like a tuning fork struck and never dampened. He was the only other person in the archive who arrived early and left late, which had made them friends by default.

"You look like you've swallowed a moth," Dunstan said.

"There's been a collapse." Pim's voice cracked on the last word. "The Royal Seam. The whole gallery."

Dunstan set down his pen. The Royal Seam was the deepest of the crown's mining galleries, a vast cavern where the richest veins of ashgite crystal were extracted—the mineral that, when ground and fused, became the translucent panes of every lamp in Drennt. It was also where the Coal-King conducted his annual inspection, a tradition older than the archive itself.

"When?"

"Third bell. Maybe earlier. The tremor woke half the middle tier." Pim stepped inside, lowering his voice as though the shelves might report him. "Dunstan, the king was in the gallery. The king and both princes."

The words landed like stones dropped into still water. Dunstan stared at his young colleague and waited for the ripples to reach the edges of his understanding.

"All three?"

Pim nodded. His eyes were red-rimmed. "The rescue teams went down at once. They've pulled out bodies. The gallery is—they say it's gone. Hundreds of tons of rock. The support timbers snapped like kindling."

Dunstan looked down at the requisition forms on his desk. Timber deliveries for the Lower Seam. He'd been reading about the wood that held up the world, and the world had fallen anyway.

"Who knows?" he asked.

"Everyone. The bells haven't stopped. The Hall of Stewards has been convened. There's talk of—" Pim hesitated, glancing at the corridor. "There's talk of succession."

Of course there was. In Drennt, the goblin kingdom carved from living rock three miles beneath the surface of the earth, succession was not merely a political matter. It was a matter of light. The Coal-King blessed the glow-harvest at the Long Dark festival, the annual ceremony when every lamp in the city was extinguished and the luminous moss in the deep galleries provided the only illumination. Without a crowned king to perform the blessing, the harvest could not be formally sanctioned. Without the harvest, the lamps would run dry. Without the lamps, Drennt would die.

Forty days until the Long Dark. Forty days to find a king.

"I should get back to the forms," Dunstan said, because he did not know what else to say, and because the forms were the only thing in the room that still made sense.

Pim gave him a look that was equal parts pity and bewilderment, then retreated into the corridor. The door closed. The lamp on Dunstan's desk burned steadily, its ashglass pane casting geometric shadows across the timber requisitions, and Dunstan Sedge—lamp-trimmer, assistant archivist, unremarkable in every measurable way—returned to his work.

He did not know that he had four hours left in this life.

---

The bells did not stop. They rang in overlapping waves from the signal towers carved into the cavern ceiling high above the city, a sound like the heartbeat of something enormous and distressed. Dunstan heard them through the archive walls as a muffled, rhythmic pressure, felt more than heard, and he let them become background noise the way he let everything become background noise. It was a talent. Perhaps his only one.

He finished the timber requisitions, filed them in the correct drawer (third shelf, second cabinet, cross-referenced under both "construction materials" and "Royal Seam operations"), and moved on to a set of water-rights disputes from the previous quarter. These were more interesting than they sounded. Water in Drennt was second only to light in importance. The deep cisterns fed the city's drinking supply, its bathhouses, and—most critically—the irrigation channels that kept the glow-moss alive in the farming galleries. Water disputes were, in essence, disputes about who got to live.

He was annotating a claim from the Moss-Tenders' Guild when the archive door opened again. This time it was not Pim.

Two palace guards stood in the doorway. They wore the formal armor of the Coal-King's household—blackened steel with ashglass inlays that caught the lamplight and threw it back in fractured patterns. Their faces were professionally blank.

"Dunstan Sedge?" the taller one said.

"Yes."

"You will come with us."

It was not a question. Dunstan looked at the water-rights dispute on his desk, then at the guards, then at the dispute again. He set down his pen with the care of a man who expected to pick it up again shortly.

"May I ask why?"

"The Hall of Stewards requires your presence."

The Hall of Stewards. Dunstan had never been inside it. He'd seen the doors—massive slabs of polished ashglass set into the rock face of the upper tier, etched with the lineage of every Coal-King since the founding—but he'd never had cause to pass through them. Assistant archivists did not enter the Hall of Stewards. Assistant archivists did not enter most rooms that mattered.

"There must be a mistake," he said.

The guards did not reply. They waited with the patience of men who were paid to wait, and Dunstan understood, with a sinking feeling, that there was no mistake. He rose from his stool, straightened his ink-spotted work coat, and followed them into the corridor.

The middle tier of Drennt was a labyrinth of tunnels, chambers, and connecting passages carved over centuries from the grey granite that formed the bones of the mountain above. The ceilings were low—goblins averaged five feet in height, and Dunstan, at five-foot-two, was considered tall—and the walls were lined with ashglass lamps at regular intervals, each one a small sun holding back the eternal night. The air smelled of stone dust, lamp oil, and the faint mineral tang of deep water.

Normally the corridors of the middle tier bustled with clerks, traders, and laborers moving between the administrative chambers and the market galleries. Today they were nearly empty. The few goblins Dunstan passed stood in tight clusters, speaking in low voices, their faces drawn with the particular anxiety of people who have just learned that the ceiling can fall.

The guards led him upward through a series of switchback stairs carved into the rock. The upper tier. Dunstan had been here only twice in his life—once as a child, brought by his mother to petition for a school placement, and once as a young man, delivering a set of historical records to the palace secretariat. Both times he'd been acutely aware that he did not belong. The upper tier was where the noble families kept their estates, where the great trading houses maintained their offices, where the palace itself sprawled across a natural cavern so vast that its ceiling was lost in shadow above the reach of even the brightest lamps.

The ashglass doors of the Hall of Stewards were open. Light poured from within—not the warm amber of oil lamps but the blue-white brilliance of glow-moss panels, the most expensive illumination in Drennt. Dunstan squinted against it, his bad eye aching.

Inside, the hall was a semicircular chamber with tiered seating carved from the rock walls, rising in concentric arcs like the inside of a shell. Every seat was occupied. Dunstan recognized none of the faces—or rather, he recognized them the way one recognizes figures in a painting: distantly, as representations of power rather than as people. The stewards of Drennt's great houses. The guild masters. The military commanders. The clergy of the Deep Flame.

At the center of the chamber, on a raised platform of black stone, sat a chair. Not the Ashglass Throne—that was in the coronation hall, a separate chamber Dunstan had never seen—but a lesser seat, carved from the same dark rock, reserved for the presiding authority of the Hall.

In it sat a woman Dunstan had seen exactly once before, at a distance, during a public festival. Maelis Drewe, the late king's sister. She was perhaps fifty, with the sharp features and iron-grey hair common to the royal line, and she wore the silver circlet of the regent—a title that, as of this morning, she had apparently claimed.

She looked at Dunstan the way one looks at a tool of uncertain quality: with hope tempered by doubt.

"Dunstan Sedge," she said. Her voice carried easily in the acoustics of the chamber. "Son of Brenn Sedge, moss-tender of the lower galleries, deceased. Son of Elda Sedge, née Wainscott, seamstress of the middle tier, deceased. Born in the thirty-second year of King Edrun's reign. Educated at the Clerks' Common School. Employed as lamp-trimmer and assistant archivist in the Royal Archive for eleven years."

She paused. The hall was silent.

"And son," she continued, "of Coal-King Edrun himself. Conceived during the king's exile in the border settlements, before his restoration to the throne. Acknowledged in a sealed document held by the Clerk of Bloodlines, opened this morning by order of the Hall of Stewards."

Dunstan heard the words. He understood them individually. Together, they formed a sentence that his mind refused to process, the way his bad eye refused to process fine detail—the information was there, but it would not resolve into clarity.

"I'm sorry," he said. "What?"

A murmur rippled through the hall. Maelis Drewe's expression did not change.

"You are the last living heir to the Ashglass Throne," she said. "And you will be crowned in forty days."

Dunstan stood in the center of the Hall of Stewards, surrounded by the most powerful people in Drennt, and thought about the water-rights dispute he had left unfinished on his desk. Someone would need to file it. Someone would need to trim the archive lamps before the evening shift. Someone would need to do all the small, essential, invisible things that kept the world running while the people in this room decided who sat in which chair.

He opened his mouth to say something—he was not sure what—and one of the guards placed a hand on his shoulder, firmly, and guided him toward the platform.

The chair was cold. The light was too bright. And Dunstan Sedge, who had never wanted anything more than a steady lamp and a well-ordered shelf, began the longest forty days of his life.