Chapter 163: Cinder Citadel

"So we take away his food source."

It took three days of travel across the ash flats to reach Cinder Citadel, and they didn’t use the road. Tessa guided them along old lines on her maps, cutting through ravines that hadn’t been traveled in a long time. Orena read the wind for ash patrols the same way she read ocean currents. Rin took point so she could spot threats from farther away. Veyra stayed close to Austin Veyron whenever his mark started pulling him toward the east.

Ashbridge hadn’t fallen. Reports came in that the new food council was repairing the bridges and opening the grain counts to the people. Refugees had been given work shifts to help fix things around the camp and repair the water supplies. Arin had sent camp runners toward Coalwater with instructions on how to open grain counts to the public, and Marcus reported that the volunteers in Emberline had managed to protect the train yards without a warlord’s help.

The Cinder Refuge Chain was bending, but it wasn’t breaking. The reports were all short, written by dirty hands that weren’t used to writing reports, and every one of them ended with the same word: Holding.

Each time Austin Veyron read the reports, he felt something he wasn’t used to. Relief. It wasn’t that the problems were solved. It was that people were taking care of them. He knew Kharvek was still out there, and that Vordessa still had the plague sample somewhere to the east. But people were helping each other without him having to be the solution to every problem. He had spent so long believing that he had to be the answer to everything that it felt strange not to be needed.

Veyra watched Austin Veyron fold up the latest report and put it away. "Tell me."

"I’m happy that they don’t need me to solve everything."

"What else?"

"I don’t like it."

She nodded, as if she had known he would say that. "You enjoy being needed because it gives you control."

Austin Veyron looked down at his wrist, where the Maw mark sat. "My mark feels the same way."

"Your mark doesn’t get a say."

Sable walked beside them, keeping the crown shard covered against the ash wind. "The mark is going to be a beacon to Kharvek’s hunger engines," she said.

"That’s a weakness we can use," Tessa said from up ahead.

Austin Veyron muttered the words, "A weakness we can use," and Rin snickered from somewhere farther along the ridgeline.

"We can use it to our advantage," Tessa said, without turning around.

They walked across the flats for hours, passing the rotting frames of old wagons and burned-out signposts that marked roads no one traveled anymore. At night, they slept in shifts beneath the overhanging slag, and the ash got into everything they ate, drank, and slept in. At dusk on the third day, they finally reached Cinder Citadel.

The citadel was built like a furnace, with black walls surrounding a tall chimney in its center. The chimney was taller than any tower in Grand Meridian, and orange light pulsed through iron slits along the sides of the citadel like breath. Wagons rolled in through the southern entrance full and rolled back out empty. There were no banners on the walls to say who owned the fortress. Kharvek didn’t need a banner to tell anyone it was his. You could feel the heat from the ridgeline.

Tessa pulled out the map case she had recovered and shielded the maps from the wind blowing ash across them.

"The old furnace tunnels run under the western wall," she told them. "They used to carry heat for the coal and the grain. When Kharvek took over the citadel, he blocked them off, but this line isn’t patrolled."

Nyra held the heart shard close to the ground, and a thin line of blue-black light shot out, pointing down beneath the citadel.

"There’s something under the furnace," Nyra said, looking puzzled at the line as it trembled. "It’s not a fragment. It’s a deep ember source. It looks older and purer than the hunger sample we found."

"A hunger furnace," Sable whispered. "He’s using the food supply chain as fuel."

Austin Veyron felt DEVOUR awaken, the way someone wakes up to the smell of food cooking. If he could devour a furnace that supplied an entire city’s food, he would be unstoppable. It whispered to him of all the fire stored away in the citadel, and how it could burn every plague clause out of the Ember Marches in a single bite.

"Don’t focus on that," Veyra said, placing a hand on his arm.

"It’s not a target," Austin Veyron agreed, and he felt the truth in his own words.

They were still studying the map when they noticed an ash patrol walking toward them from the western wall. It was four men with a large black dog between them. They looked sluggish and tired, like they had been on patrol for a very long time. The dog didn’t have any eyes, but it had a glowing red nose that swept back and forth across the ground as it moved forward.

"A route tracker," Orena whispered. "If it finds the Maw mark, it will alert the entire wall."

Rin drew back an arrow, but Austin Veyron stopped her. "These men may be bound by the fever. We need to stay hidden."

The dog’s nose brightened as it turned toward them on the ridge, and Austin Veyron’s mark throbbed in answer.

DEVOUR could sense the tracker’s route inside the dog, a line leading all the way back to the maps in the citadel. He could devour it and end the threat completely. But the dog didn’t know what it was doing any more than the soldiers did.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The tracking function on the dog. Not the dog, not the men, and not the route network in the citadel."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable said.

Austin Veyron placed the white root chain in the ash in front of them, and DEVOUR consumed the function that let the dog track routes. It tasted like burned grain and a compass forced to point at prey.

FIND THE HUNGRY.

He devoured find.

The dog stopped moving, and its nose dimmed. It sniffed around a few times, then sat down in the ash and refused to move.

One of the soldiers tugged on the leash. "Move."

The dog didn’t move. It just sat there with its head tilted to one side, as if it couldn’t remember what it had been looking for.

The other soldiers talked among themselves, and their formation began to fall apart. Rin shot an arrow into a chunk of slag above them, and the dog bolted toward the eastern path with the soldiers chasing after it.

Once they were out of sight, Tessa led the team to the old furnace tunnel. It was hidden under a broken coal chute, and they had to crawl through it one at a time. The tunnel was coated in ash, and as they crawled beneath the fortress, the air grew hotter and hotter until it felt like they were breathing steam.

Once they were inside, they came across a maze of black tunnels branching off in different directions. The walls were slick with soot, and somewhere far away, metal groaned in the heat. Red pipes ran along the ceiling toward the middle of the citadel.

Tessa touched one of the pipes and quickly pulled her hand away. "Food supply chain information," she said, flexing her fingers. "It’s sending route information through these pipes. Grain routes, water routes, refugee movements."

"He’s using all of their food supply chains as fuel," Sable said.

They followed the pipes for what felt like miles, stopping whenever the metal overhead started ticking too loudly. Eventually, they came across a rusty grate that overlooked the middle of the citadel.

The hunger furnace took up the entire room below them, and heat radiated off it so fiercely that the air above it rippled. It was made of iron and built around a column of dark ember light. Dozens of ledgers were chained to the furnace, their pages turning as if someone were reading them. Every time a page burned, a red line of fire traveled through the pipes out toward the distant camps.

Kharvek stood on a platform above the furnace in new armor that shone with the light of the embers below. He looked well rested and sure of the power he held over everyone in the citadel. The cracked sample vial was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a black ember stone hung over the fire in the middle of the furnace, turning slowly.

Below him, a quartermaster was tied to a chair, with iron restraints around his wrists and chest. His hands were stained with ink, and his knuckles were bloody from trying to break free. A ledger lay open on his lap.

"Tell me the northern ration routes," Kharvek said.

"I won’t help you create more targets," the quartermaster replied, his face covered in soot.

"You already created targets when you recorded the information."

"I helped feed people," he said, without raising his voice. It didn’t rise, but it didn’t break either.

Kharvek took the ledger off the quartermaster’s lap and tossed it into the heat of the furnace. The pages curled up and began to glow instead of burning. Red lines appeared on the quartermaster’s arms and crept upward like veins.

"Information can become a command," the warlord said. "Food can decide who lives and who doesn’t."

Nyra’s heart shard started to glow, and she had to cover it with her hand so it wouldn’t be seen through the grate. "The ember source is feeding on his memory of the food routes," she whispered. "It’s consuming his knowledge and turning it into hunger."

Austin Veyron felt his mark pull toward the ember stone below. For a second, the world around him disappeared, and all he could see were the ledgers chained to the furnace. They looked like food to him, and the routes looked like hunger. If he devoured the ember source, he would know every route that fed the Marches. He would know where every camp was starving, and he could choose to feed them or starve them.

Veyra’s hand wrapped around his shoulder and pulled him back from the grate. "Say it."

"I want to devour the furnace."

"What would that give you?"

"The ability to see all of the routes." It felt good and bad at the same time to admit that out loud.

"Then we make our own map," Sable said, and the crown shard glowed in her hand, turning the furnace light pale.

A horn sounded from the eastern gate, long and low, and the grate beneath them began to shake.

Kharvek turned to look up at the balcony above the furnace hall. Soldiers and black wagons rolled in through the eastern gate, followed by a tall figure in a cloak the color of dried blood. The figure wore a mask shaped like a closed mouth.

"The eastern envoy has arrived," Kharvek said, bowing to the figure.

The figure looked down at the hunger furnace and then at the quartermaster tied to the chair. They moved slowly, as if they already knew exactly what they were getting.

"Vordessa sends her regards," the figure said in a calm, pleasant voice that carried to every corner of the hall.

The ember stone flared, and the shadows in the room were thrown back against the walls. The iron furnace below them began to rattle, and the chained ledgers started turning faster and faster.