The Ashmaker's Chains

Chapter One: The Deep Vent-Line

The heat had a taste. Every Sotho child learned it before they learned their letters — which was to say, before they learned nothing at all, since letters were forbidden them. The taste was iron and ash and something sweetly rotten, like fruit left too long on a hot stone. It sat on the back of the tongue and never entirely left.

Oben Rushat had been tasting it since he was seven years old.

He crouched at the mouth of the deep vent-line, four hundred feet beneath the streets of Kolavar, and pressed his palm flat against the obsidian wall. The glass was hot enough to raise a blister on an upper-city hand. On his, it registered as little more than a warm greeting.

"Well?" said Kesho Abat behind him.

"She's breathing hard today."

"She breathes hard every day."

"Not like this." Oben moved his palm three handspans left and held it there. Under the glass, deep in the rock, something pulsed. Not a sound exactly — a rhythm you felt in the bones of the wrist. "Feel that."

Kesho did not feel it. Kesho never felt it. He was a broad, cheerful young man with a laugh that carried down two hundred yards of tunnel and hands like scarred shovels, and he thought Oben's habit of listening to walls was a form of showing off. But he came and laid his hand where Oben's had been, because they had been friends since they were small enough to fit in the same crawl-duct, and humoring each other was most of what friendship was, down here.

"Warm," Kesho announced.

"Everything's warm."

"Then I'm right, and we can eat."

They ate. It was the third bell of the shift, and the ration was what it always was: a wedge of black bread pressed hard as slate, a strip of salted goat, and a measure of the mineral-heavy water they pumped up from the deep cisterns, which tasted like a coin held under the tongue. They sat with their backs to the cooler wall of the service niche, and above them the great obsidian channels ran away into the dark in every direction, glowing faintly orange along their seams like veins under thin skin.

This was the Furnace. Not one thing — a system. A labyrinth of black-glass channels bored through the throat of a living volcano, gathering its heat and pushing it where the city wanted it to go. Some of it went to the forges of the middle city, where the Highborn made their spears and their siege-glass and their beautiful, wicked swords. Some went to the pumps. Most of it went into the heat-baffles.

The baffles were why Kolavar existed at all. Twice a year the black-glass deserts to the south birthed firestorms — walls of superheated wind and airborne cinder a hundred miles wide, moving at the pace of a galloping horse. Any ordinary city in their path would be scoured down to its foundations in a quarter of an hour. Kolavar stood on the rim of its plateau and split them. The baffles reached out from the walls in an invisible lattice, and the storms broke around the city like water around a boulder and closed again behind it, and inside, the Highborn drank chilled wine in gardens.

And underneath, the Sotho tended the channels, and cleared the slag, and breathed the ash, and died at forty if they were lucky.

"Duma says they're extending nine-line again," Kesho said with his mouth full.

Oben stopped chewing. "Extending it where? There's nothing past nine but the shelf."

"Past the shelf."

"That's magma pocket down there."

"Duma said that. Duma said it to the overseer, actually, in exactly those words, and the overseer wrote his name down." Kesho tried to make it sound like a joke and did not quite manage. His brother Duma was thirty-one, a shift-captain, a careful man with three children and a permanent squint from twenty years of glare. Having his name written down was not a small thing.

Oben set down his bread. "How far past?"

"Sixty yards. Maybe eighty. They want another four tapping-heads on line before the season turns."

"Why?"

"Because the general wants spears." Kesho shrugged, a great rolling motion of his shoulders. "Deshune's massing on the salt road. Everybody says so. Bekoro Oruman means to go and teach them manners, and to teach them manners he needs fifteen thousand spearheads, and to get fifteen thousand spearheads he needs the forge-heat doubled, and to double the forge-heat he needs us to open the rock where the rock does not want opening." He wiped his mouth. "That's the whole of the world's business, explained by a man with no letters. Are you going to finish that goat?"

Oben handed him the goat. He was not hungry anymore.

He was nineteen years old that season, and he had already outlived his mother's expectations. She had died of heat-lung when he was twelve — coughing black for nine months, growing lighter in his arms each week, until at the end she weighed no more than the ash she'd breathed. His father had lasted another year. Then a Highborn overseer named Ushan had kicked over a water barrel in front of a crew that had gone eleven hours without drinking, and Oben's father had struck him once, open-handed, across the face.

They hanged him from the Cinder Gate. Oben and Imbali were made to stand at the front.

After that, Oben had learned to be very, very calm. It was a talent, in its way. Other men shouted, or wept, or drank the sour cactus liquor the tunnel-brewers made. Oben simply put things away. He had a place inside himself, a kind of sealed channel, and he swept everything into it and stoppered it up, and to the world he presented a young man who worked twice as hard as anyone, never argued, and had a face like still water.

The channel was full now. It had been full for years. He could feel the pressure behind the stopper the way he could feel the volcano breathing under the glass.

---

They climbed out at the tenth bell into the Ashfall Quarter, which was not a quarter and had never seen anything fall but soot. It was a warren of tunnel-mouths, terraced galleries cut into the plateau's inner wall, and rope-bridges strung across a chasm that funneled hot air up from below like a chimney. Nine thousand Sotho lived there. The gallery lamps burned low-grade oil that stank of fish, and every surface — the walls, the wash-lines, the children — carried a fine gray film that came back an hour after you scrubbed it off.

Oben liked it anyway. He would have denied it, but he did. The Ashfall was loud with living: someone always singing, someone always arguing about a lost tool, the tunnel-brewers calling their prices, the potters' wheels grinding, the smell of pepper-broth and hot stone.

His sister was waiting on the third gallery, sitting on the parapet with her bare heels drumming the stone.

Imbali Rushat was sixteen and looked younger, all elbows and quick eyes, her hair bound up in the twisted knots the tunnel-women wore to keep it out of the vents. She had their mother's face. She had, unfortunately, their father's temper, though she hid it better than he ever had.

And she had the other thing.

"You're late," she said.

"We're not late. You're early."

"I'm always early. Being early is a personality." She hopped down. "Kesho, your brother's looking for you. He's in a mood."

Kesho groaned and went, lifting a hand in farewell.

Imbali waited until he was gone. Then she took Oben's sleeve and pulled him into the shadow of the water-cistern, where the noise of the falling overflow made a curtain against listeners.

"It spoke again," she said.

Oben's stomach dropped. He kept his face still. "How long?"

"Most of the night." Her eyes were bright and bruised-looking. She had not slept, then. "Oben, it's not — I know what you think. I know you think it's the heat, or the bad air, or that I'm — "

"I don't think you're mad."

"You look at me like you do."

"I look at you like a man watching his sister walk along a cliff edge," he said quietly. "There's a difference."

Spirit-sight. Three generations ago, before the current dynasty, the Sotho had had seers — men and women who could look at the volcanic rock and perceive what lived in it. Fire-spirits, the old stories said: presences that dwelt in the heat the way fish dwell in water. The seers had negotiated with them. Had been, in some tellings, respected.

Then the Highborn declared spirit-sight heretical. The seers were rounded up and blinded with heated rods and set to work in the vents until they died. The law still stood, word for word: *Any who claim converse with the fire shall be relieved of their eyes, that they may see nothing at all.*

Imbali had been able to see since she was four.

"What did it say?" Oben asked.

She hesitated. In the orange half-light her face looked older. "It said the same thing it always says at first. *I am cold.*" She swallowed. "Which is absurd. It lives in a volcano."

"And then?"

"Then it said: *they are going to open the wrong door, and I cannot stop them, and I am sorry.*" She looked up at him. "Oben, I think something bad is going to happen on nine-line."

He stood very still, and under his feet, four hundred feet down, the mountain breathed hard.

"I know," he said.