The Tongue of Embers

Chapter One: The Gather

The furnace at Kerth Glassworks had not gone cold in ninety years.

Davan Kerth knew the number because his mother recited it the way other people recited prayers — once a season, in the same flat voice she used for measurements and prices. Ninety years, four generations of Kerths, one fire. It sat in the belly of the workshop like a patient animal, fed from below by the mountain itself. A clay throat ran down through the floor into the vent, and the vent ran down into the dark, and the dark went further than anyone in Kindlemarch cared to think about.

On a good day the furnace breathed a steady white heat and you could gather glass off the end of a pipe as smooth as honey. On a bad day it guttered and surged, and you learned to read its moods the way a sailor reads weather.

This was a bad day. It had been a bad day since dawn.

"You're holding your jaw like a man about to be hanged," said Josse Caddow, from the doorway.

Davan didn't look up. He was rolling a gather on the marver, flattening one side, watching for the shiver in the surface that meant the glass had cooled too far. "That's just my face."

"Your face is usually stupider. This is a new one." Josse came in and dropped his shoulder-yoke against the wall with a thud that raised charcoal dust in a black cloud. He was a year older than Davan and built like something you'd use to break a door: wide shoulders, forearms scarred with a hundred small burns, hair the colour of wet straw and permanently grey at the temples with soot. He hauled charcoal up from the lowland forests three times a week, a full day's climb with a loaded mule, and he had never once arrived in a bad mood, which Davan found personally insulting.

"Twelve lamps," Davan said. "Matched. By the sixth day."

"Matched to what?"

"To each other. That's what matched means."

"And what have you got?"

Davan tilted his head at the annealing shelf. Nine lamps stood there in a row, cooling slowly, each one a globe of clear glass with a spiral of amber threaded through the wall — the Kerth pattern, the one his great-grandmother had invented and his mother guarded like a state secret. Eight of the nine were beautiful. The ninth had a spiral that wandered off true in its last turn, a wobble no wider than a hair.

Josse squinted at it. "Looks fine to me."

"You haul burnt wood for a living."

"I do," Josse agreed cheerfully, "and it's honest work, and nobody has ever once made me weep over a wobble." He wiped his palms on his thighs. "Come to the Cracked Bell. There's a fiddler down from the Terraces with only three strings and no shame."

"Can't."

"You never can."

"That," Davan said, "is because I am an apprentice, and apprentices cannot."

"You've been an apprentice three years. My cousin got made a journeyman cooper in eighteen months and he can't count past his fingers."

Davan set the pipe down in the cradle and straightened, pressing the heel of his hand into the small of his back. He was nineteen, lean and long-armed, with his mother's dark hair and, so far as anyone had ever told him, nobody's eyes. Three years at the furnace had cooked the softness out of him and left the rest scarred: the pale seams on his knuckles, the shiny patch on his right wrist where a thread of molten glass had once found him.

"It isn't about the counting," he said. "She won't sign me off until the work's perfect. And the work isn't perfect."

"Is her work perfect?"

"Yes," Davan said, and it wasn't even bitterness. It was just true.

The door at the back of the workshop opened and Mareta Kerth came through it with a slate in her hand.

She was fifty-one and moved like a woman who had budgeted her movements for the century. Grey at the crown, forearms thicker than her son's, a leather apron worn to the shape of her body. She did not greet Josse. She never greeted anyone; she simply began speaking at whatever point in the conversation she considered relevant.

"The Vaith commission," she said. "Nine done."

"Nine done," Davan said. "Eight good."

She crossed to the annealing shelf, found the flawed lamp without hesitating, and picked it up in a rag. She turned it once. Her mouth did something that was not quite a frown.

"The spiral drifts," she said.

"I know. My second turn was slow."

"Your second turn was slow because you were watching the clock over the door instead of the glass." She set it down. "Break it in the morning. The Alderman's household does not receive drift."

Josse made a small noise. Mareta's eyes went to him, and he had the sense to turn it into a cough.

"Charcoal on the ledger, Caddow," she said. "Four sacks?"

"Five, mistress. One's the fine stuff, for the colour pot."

"Then five." She marked her slate, and paused, and for a moment Davan thought she might say something else — thank you, or good night, or you look tired, boy, go to bed. She had done such things. Rarely, and always as if reading from an unfamiliar script.

"The furnace is uneasy," she said instead. "It's been uneasy nine days. Don't work it past midnight."

"There are three lamps to make."

"Don't work it past midnight," she repeated, and went out.

Josse waited until her footsteps had gone up the stair. "She frightens me," he said conversationally. "I want you to know that. A grown man, and she frightens me."

"She's the best glasswright between here and Ossory."

"I didn't say she wasn't good at it. I said she frightens me." He hoisted his empty yoke. "Midnight, then. I'll drink to the wobble on your behalf."

He went. The door swung shut and the workshop settled into its night noise: the low roar in the throat of the furnace, the tick of cooling metal, the faint hiss where the vent seams let out steam.

Davan worked.

He made the tenth lamp and it was good. He made the eleventh and it was better than good; the spiral came off his hand as though it had always been there, waiting for the glass to be poured around it. He set it on the shelf beside the others, and stood back, and allowed himself one breath of something like pride.

Then he went for the twelfth, and everything went wrong.

He felt it in the pipe before he saw it. The gather came out heavy — too heavy, hotter than it should have been, the glass running like water instead of holding like syrup. He turned the pipe up to slow it and the mass kept moving, sliding, stretching down toward the floor in a thread of glowing orange.

Behind the iron door the furnace surged. Not a flicker: a jolt, as if the mountain had shoved something up the throat all at once. Light flooded the workshop and Davan's shadow leapt up the far wall, huge and thin.

"No," he said, to nobody, to the glass. "No, no—"

The thread parted. A drop the size of a plum fell free and cracked against the stone floor. The rest of the gather bloomed, swelling on the end of the pipe like something alive, and he knew with absolute clarity that in the next half-second it was going to slough off the iron and go across his boots and up his legs.

And a word came into his mouth.

He did not choose it. It arrived the way a name arrives when you see a face you had forgotten you knew — complete, unhesitating, older than thought. Three syllables with a warm weight in the middle of them.

"Vareth-el-ai," Davan said.

The world stopped being ordinary.

The falling glass halted in the air. It did not freeze the way water freezes; it kept flowing, it stayed molten and bright, but it hung there half a foot above the floor and turned, slowly, as if considering. Then it began to open. The mass drew itself out into threads, and the threads split, and the splits split again, and in the space of three heartbeats there hung in the middle of Kerth Glassworks a lattice of glass — a sphere of interlocking fibres finer than any human hand could pull, glowing from within, each strand no thicker than a spider's silk and each one perfectly, impossibly true.

Davan forgot how to breathe.

The furnace dimmed. Every light in the workshop dimmed with it — the lamps, the coals in the colour pot, the little candle by the ledger — all of them drawing down at once as though a door had opened somewhere and a great slow inhalation had begun.

And then something answered him.

It was not a voice. Later he would spend years trying to explain that, and never manage it. It was a pressure inside his skull, behind his eyes, in the roots of his teeth. It came from the furnace and it came from below the furnace and it came from very far down, and it carried meaning the way a hand on your shoulder carries meaning. It carried three things and it carried them all at once, and they were:

You spoke.

How long. How long. How long.

Stay.

Davan tried to answer and made a sound like a man drowning. The pressure grew. It was not angry. That was the worst of it — it was not angry, it was glad, it was so terribly glad, and the gladness was the size of a mountain and he was a nineteen-year-old boy standing on a stone floor in his shirtsleeves.

The furnace roared.

Light slammed back into the room, white and blinding. Davan flinched, threw up his hands, and the pipe swung, and the lattice met the iron.

It shattered. Not into pieces — into a fine bright dust, a shimmer of glass-hair that flared and went out in the air like a handful of thrown sparks. Something struck his palms, both palms, a searing line across each, and he screamed and stumbled backwards over the marver and went down hard.

When he could see again the workshop was as it had always been. The furnace breathed its steady white breath. Nine good lamps and two better ones stood on the annealing shelf. On the floor there was a splash of cooling glass, a scatter of glittering dust, and a young man sitting in it, staring at his hands.

The pressure was gone.

But it had left something behind, in the same way a bell leaves something behind in a room after it stops ringing, and Davan Kerth understood, with a certainty that had no argument in it anywhere, that he had just been spoken to.

And that whatever had spoken had been waiting a very long time for someone to say hello.