Chapter 647: The Cinder Lord

The Lark came down on a landing gallery cut into the side of the mountain, two-thirds of the way up, and the heat met them at the gangplank like a closed door.

It came up out of the rock itself. It came through the soles of their boots, and off the black glass walls, and out of long cracks in the gallery floor where a dull red light pulsed slowly, like something breathing in its sleep. Isaac walked down the gangplank, took two steps onto the glass, and stopped with the expression of a man being cooked from the feet up.

"Water," said Sarai Vell, handing him a flask. "Small sips."

"I’m fine."

"You’re steaming," Nyx observed.

He was, very faintly, from the shoulders. The frost that he carried with him everywhere was evaporating off him in a thin white haze. Ashe walked past him onto the gallery, put both hands flat on the hot black wall, closed her eyes, and let out a long breath of pure contentment.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that’s nice."

"I’m going to die here," said Isaac.

"You’re going to sweat here," said Isole. "It’s different. Drink the water."

The people of the Cinder Palace wore very little and looked at everything.

They were smiths, Vane realized, most of them, or had been at some point: men and women with bare, scarred forearms and leather aprons and small beads of colored glass braided into their hair, and they stopped in the galleries as the party passed to stare openly at the horned woman, the Glacial heir, the girl with opal eyes, and the young man with the spear. Nobody bowed. A boy of perhaps ten, carrying a bucket of water twice his size, walked straight up to Vane, looked at the spear on his back, and said, "Who forged that?"

"I don’t know," said Vane honestly.

The boy looked at him with deep contempt and walked off.

They were led up through the mountain by a herald in a red apron, through galleries of black glass and long halls where forges roared behind iron doors, up stairs so hot that the air above them shimmered, until they came at last to a vast round chamber near the summit, open at its center to a shaft that went straight down into the heart of the mountain. Red light came up the shaft. Around its edge, set into the floor in a great ring, were a dozen anvils, and at the far side, on a seat of black glass worn smooth by centuries, sat a man eating an apple.

He was enormous. Not fat, but built on a scale that made the seat look small: broad as a doorway, bald as an egg, with a beard down to his chest braided with beads of glass that glowed faintly from within, as though each had a coal inside it. He wore a smith’s leather apron over a shirt of red silk that had probably cost more than the whole of Holloway, and his forearms were covered from wrist to elbow in old burn scars, white and shiny as wax.

He finished his apple, threw the core down the shaft, and stood up.

"The Usurper," he said. His voice filled the chamber the way the heat did. "And the Ice Queen’s boy. And Thessaly’s envoy, who looks as if she would rather be anywhere else." He grinned at Sarai Vell, who inclined her head with perfect politeness. "And a great many other people. Welcome to Oruth. I’m Bastien Oro. I’ve been looking forward to this for nine days. Nothing interesting has happened here in thirty years."

Vane did not reach for the Usurper. He did not need to. The read came on its own, the way weather comes.

[Authority: Heart of Oruth (SSS)]

[Danger: Error]

"Don’t," said Bastien Oro cheerfully. "Thessaly told me once that it gave her a headache when people did that. I’ve always wanted to try it out." He held out one huge scarred hand. "Well? Isadora sent a falcon to say you had something for me."

Isaac stepped forward and gave him the letter.

The Cinder Lord read it standing, and his face went through several expressions in a row.

"She’s agreed," he said slowly. "Isadora’s agreed to sit at Thessaly’s table."

"She has, my lord," said Isaac.

"After due consideration," Bastien Oro read aloud, with tremendous disbelief. "Isadora Glacium has never in her life given anything due consideration. She decides, and then she freezes anyone who disagrees." He looked at Isaac over the top of the page. "What did she actually say?"

Isaac hesitated. Valerica, beside him, closed her eyes very briefly.

"She said she was not too proud to know when she was losing," Isaac said.

There was a short silence. Then Bastien Oro threw back his head and laughed, a huge, booming, delighted roar that rang off the anvils and went echoing down the shaft into the heart of the mountain.

"Not too proud!" he said, when he could speak. "Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a decade. I’m having that carved over my door." He wiped his eyes. "Very well. If the Ice Queen sits at that woman’s table, then so do I, if only to make certain she doesn’t get the good chair."

Valerica’s pen had already begun to move.

"There’s one thing," Bastien Oro said, and the laughter went out of his voice, though not out of his face. "Nobody sits at a Cinder table who hasn’t been through the fire. Not Isadora, not Thessaly, not the Emperor of Aurelia himself, if he ever comes asking, which he won’t." He spread his scarred hands. "It’s the oldest custom in Oruth. Guests are proved. Tomorrow, at the Kiln, in front of the whole mountain."

"Then prove me," said Vane.

"You?" The Cinder Lord looked at him with something close to disappointment. "No. You beat Ormond on a road. Everyone from here to the ice knows it. I don’t want to watch a Master knock down one of my children. That proves nothing." He looked past Vane, at the others standing behind him. "I want to see what a man like you stands in front of. Who he chose. One of them."

Ashe stepped forward before anyone else could move.

"Me," she said.

Bastien Oro looked at her for a long moment. He took in the horns, and the red markings on her skin, and the way she stood with her weight on the balls of her feet in the heat as if she had been born in it.

"Warlord," he said. "EX, by the feel of it. And still only a Low Expert." He tilted his head. "My champion is High Expert."

"Good," said Ashe.

Behind her, Vane felt Isole’s hand close on the back of his coat.

The Cinder Lord smiled slowly through his beard.

"Tomorrow, then," he said. "At the Kiln."

On the way out, in the long hot gallery, Isaac stopped beside one of the cracks in the floor and looked down at the red light pulsing inside it.

"My books say Oruth’s lower galleries were too hot to walk," he said quietly. "That you’d burn your feet through your boots. We walked through three of them."

Vane looked back toward the summit chamber. Through the open doors, he could see Bastien Oro standing alone at the edge of the great shaft with his hands behind his back, looking down into the heart of his mountain.

He was not smiling now.