Chapter 46: The Furnace

On the forty-eighth day, Roderick threw a sword at Aren’s feet and walked away.

There was no steel in the Abyss, no forge and no smith, so it wasn’t a real sword. It was a long curved blade cut from the jaw of the black eel Roderick had killed on the thirtieth day, the one that had pushed him into Bone. He had spent two weeks on it in secret, scraping it against the stones of the shore and grinding the edge until it could split a hair, then wrapping the handle in strips of dried eel skin until it fit a hand, and the hand was Aren’s.

He had climbed away into the hanging streets before Aren could even pick it up.

Aren sat turning it slowly in the faint blue light for a good while afterward. It was lighter than the soldier’s sword Old Mag had sold him, and sharper. It sang very faintly when he swung it, a thin high note like wind across the mouth of a bottle.

[Roderick. Hostility: 84%.]

Eighty-four percent, higher than it had ever been.

’He makes me a sword and hates me more for it. That’s very nearly friendship, in a deeply unhealthy way.’

But he understood it perfectly. In his old life he had known men who hated the people they owed, because of the debt rather than in spite of it. Every fish Aren cooked, every night of sleep behind a barred door, every inch of growth was something Roderick owed. And a boy who had waited seven hundred days for anyone to help him had no idea how to carry a debt like that without it burning. So he had paid some of it back in the only currency he had, a blade, and he hated Aren a little more for making him want to.

Three days later Aren fed the cold in his side twice, just to be safe, and they left before the jellies woke.

The way to the Furnace ran along the ceiling. Out in the open dark there was nothing to stand on and nowhere to land, so they went along the underside of the great black stone that the hanging city clung to, which stretched out over the Abyss like the roof of the world. It was cracked and broken, full of ledges and handholds and long splits you could wedge a boot into. It was also upside down.

They climbed it carefully, like flies crossing a ceiling.

It took a whole day. Aren’s arms screamed, and his fingers bled into the cracks, healed and bled again, and beneath him there was nothing at all, neither sea nor shore. Varn fell away behind them, a little cluster of pale towers glowing like a lantern left on a windowsill, and below that the dark went down forever. He made the mistake of looking down once. After that he kept his eyes on the stone in front of his face and counted handholds out loud.

"Two hundred and twelve. Two hundred and thirteen."

"Why do you count?" Roderick called back.

"Because if I stop counting, I’ll start thinking."

Roderick apparently found that perfectly reasonable.

They felt the Furnace before they saw it.

First came the heat, a dry warmth on their faces after fifty days of cold, so welcome at first that Aren nearly laughed. Then it was much less welcome, as the stone under his hands grew warm, then hot, and the air began to taste of ash and old iron.

Then came the light, a dull heavy glow the color of embers rising from below and ahead, staining the black ceiling like a bruise.

Then, finally, the sound.

It reached them in pieces on the hot wind, shapes that might have been words. Aren stopped on a ledge and listened carefully.

...welcome...

...the Festival...

...three hundredth...

His skin went cold in spite of the heat.

They crawled to the edge of the ceiling where the Furnace began, lay flat on a hot ledge, and looked down.

It had been a city once, older than Varn and built of black stone instead of white. Its towers were thick and square with narrow windows, as if the people who built them had expected to be attacked every day of their lives. Now the whole city was glowing. Light came up from cracks in every wall and street, thick and heavy like the inside of a forge, as if the stone itself had swallowed a fire that refused to go out. The air above it shook with heat.

And the things that lived there were moving.

They looked like dogs made of cooling lava, with a cracked black crust and ember light glowing in the cracks. They were as tall as horses at the shoulder, dozens of them, walking lazily through the burning streets in loose packs, like dogs with nowhere in particular to be.

[Cinder Hound. Rank C: Core Condensation.]

Rank C, every single one, a full rank above them both. Aren remembered Rook in the warehouse, and the pressure of his aura pushing him to his knees, and Rook had been one Rank C with a broken core.

’There are about forty of them! I’m going to need a better plan than counting.’

And they were talking.

They were not talking to each other. They talked to nothing. As they walked, their cracked heads tilted and words came out of their lava mouths in a voice that wasn’t theirs, calm and polite and very young.

Welcome to the Festival.

The Light has touched this young man.

Blessed. Truly.

It was Leon Harrow’s voice, coming out of every one of them, dozens of burning dogs speaking like a polite fourth-year student who had stood on the white sand with something looking out of his eyes.

Beside Aren, Roderick had stopped breathing.

Aren turned his head. Roderick was not looking at the hounds at all. He was staring deeper into the city, toward its center, and his bright, mad eyes were wide and wet.

"Do you hear her?" he whispered.

"Hear who?"

"My mother." Roderick’s voice cracked. "She’s calling me. She’s down there. She says she’s been waiting."

Aren listened hard. He heard the hounds and the heat and the dry crackle of the stone. Under it, very faint, from the center of the city, there was something else. It wasn’t Leon’s voice, or any voice. It was a pull, like a hook in the chest, the same feeling he had had on the sand of the arena when the song began, low and slow and patient.

"That’s not your mother, Roderick."

"She says you’d say that." Roderick was getting up unsteadily. "She says you’re not real. She says you were never real."

Aren grabbed his wrist instantly.

Roderick turned on him faster than a snake, the bone blade already in his hand. For one terrible second there was nothing Aren recognized in his face, only the Abyss looking out, and the blade went for his throat.

Aren let Street Fighter’s Instinct show him the angle, leaned his head two inches to the left, and let the blade slide past his ear. Then he pulled, gently, just enough. Roderick was leaning out over the edge of the hot ledge, off balance, and the pull brought him back and down onto his knees, and Aren wrapped both arms around him from behind and held on.

Roderick fought. He was Bone stage now and stronger than Aren in every way, and he could easily have thrown him off the ceiling. He thrashed and screamed and clawed at Aren’s arms, and Aren held on like a man holding a rope in a storm.

"It’s not her." He kept repeating it into Roderick’s ear, over and over. "It’s not her. It’s not her!"

It took a long time. When it was over, Roderick was crying silently, his whole body shaking, his face pressed into the hot stone.

"How do you know?" he whispered.

"Because she would have come for you sooner. Seven hundred days sooner. Anyone who loved you would have."

He couldn’t tell if it was cruel or kind. He only knew it was true, and that it was the one thing Roderick couldn’t argue with.

[Roderick. Hostility: 84% → 88%.]

They lay on the ledge after that, waiting for the heat on their faces to become bearable, watching the burning city below.

While Roderick lay with his face against the stone, Aren tried the crescent. It needed light, and any light would do if he breathed right. In Varn he had cut with the pale glow of the hanging city every day until his arms shook. Here the light was everywhere, pouring up out of every crack, so thick he could almost touch it.

He drew the eel blade, breathed slow and all the way down as the grey book taught, and reached for it.

Nothing came.

He tried again, a second time and a third. The light didn’t push him away. It simply wasn’t there to take, like closing his hand on a full bag and finding only air. Whatever burned in the Furnace had never come from any sky.

[Crescent Moon Blade: no source found.]

He sheathed the blade quietly. Under his shirt the long scar was cold and very quiet, as if it were listening.

Then he went back to learning the city’s shape: the streets, the towers, the paths the hounds walked. He made a map in his head, just as he had once learned every alley in the lower city. Where the openings were, where the walls were, and where the way through might be, to the far side of the Furnace and the pale white light beyond it where the black flowers grew around the chains.

In the very center of the city, he saw it.

At first he took it for a building, a great dark shape larger than any tower, kneeling in a wide square of glowing stone. Then it moved.

It was a figure, enormous, armored from head to foot in plates of black iron so old and thick they had fused together. It knelt on one knee before a huge anvil of glowing stone, and in its right hand it held a hammer as long as a house. Chains as thick as a man’s waist ran from its wrists and ankles down into the burning ground.

It had no head. Above its armored shoulders there was only a stump of black iron, cut clean.

Then something rose from the stump.

It was black smoke, thin as a thread at first, twisting upward in the heavy light like a living thing. It thickened and gathered and drew itself together into a shape above the kneeling giant’s shoulders. A face. Young and calm and polite, with a quiet mouth.

Leon Harrow’s face, made of smoke, sitting on the shoulders of a headless giant at the bottom of the Abyss.

It turned slowly across the burning city and the long dark, up toward the hot ledge where two small figures lay pressed against the stone.

It smiled.

"There you are," it said pleasantly.