A BARGAIN IN ASH

"Charity," said Declan Marrow, "is a word I have not heard in forty years. I find I miss it. Do go on."

"I am not offering it."

"I had gathered."

"I will examine the lock," I said. "If it can be opened, I will tell you the price. If you think the price too high, I will take my cat and my bad decisions and leave you to your evening. I would rather you decided with the figures in front of you."

"That," said the Warlord, "is the most sensible thing anyone has said to me since the Third Congress. Examine."

I took a lamp from the pack and lit it. Nimbus, who had been crouched on my shoulder with his ears flat, jumped down and stalked to the door of the chamber and sat in the opening with his back to us, tail around his feet, like a sentry who had decided the matter was beneath comment.

I went to work.

…

It took me an hour to see the whole of it.

The chains were extraordinary. I had been right about the lattice, but I had underrated the artists. Each of the nine was a different species of ward. The first, at the left wrist, was a Binding, a simple prohibition: do not lift this hand. The second, at the right, a Prohibition on speech to his own power. The third and fourth bound the ankles, with a runic grammar I had to follow with a pencil on the floor to understand. The fifth, at the throat, was an Ordinance of Silence; he could speak, but he could not cast. The sixth, seventh, and eighth wound across the chest and abdomen, strapping the very organs of his soul to the stone. The ninth, a thin bright chain that ran from the crown of his skull to a socket in the dome, was the keystone. It drew his Mana upward, drop by drop, from the day of the sealing, and spilled it into the stone.

Sixty years of sustained draw, I thought. No. Forty.

I stood back and wiped the sweat from my face.

"Well?" said Declan.

"They're beautiful," I said. "And they're wrong."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Mana flow. The fifth through eighth are standard Silver work, a bit dated, but sound. The ninth is another matter. There's a style in it I recognize." I put my finger on a line no thicker than a hair, a looping, almost decorative hook at the end of a rune. "Whoever wrote this has a signature. I've seen it before. I've seen it on hundreds of pages in a house library. It's a mannerism. You see it in a certain family's wards, because their founder was left-handed and his students copied his flourish."

"Which family?"

"House Whitlock."

I said it flatly. It sat in the air between us.

For a moment he said nothing. I did not look at him. I kept my eyes on the little hook, and I counted my breaths. When I finally raised my head, his face was perfectly calm, and I wished I had not looked.

"Whitlock," said Declan Marrow, in a very soft voice.

"Yes."

"The boy's family."

"Which boy?"

"Is there not a boy?"

"Alden Whitlock," I said. "My fiancé, as of this week. He is currently the principal heir of the House. His uncle runs the Marshals. His father sits at the right hand of the Chancellor." I considered. "I have recently broken the engagement."

"With what?"

"With a spark."

"Ah." Something warm and terrible crossed the Warlord's face. "I begin to understand why you were not found at your Academy."

"His House sealed you."

"His House sealed me. It was the great pride of the Whitlocks, forty years ago. Their patriarch led the seven who wove the Binding. I watched him do it. I believe he wept." His tone was perfectly level. "It would be amusing, would it not, if the grandson were to be the ruin of the work?"

I filed it away. It was one of those facts that arrives in the mind complete, with its own weight, like a stone dropped into a pond.

The Whitlocks sealed him. The Whitlocks have the Heart's keeping. The Whitlocks took my life.

All the lines ran back to one house.

…

"Here are my terms," I said.

I sat on an upturned crate in front of him, with the lamp between us. My shoulder ached. The blood on my shirt had dried to a stiff brown crust. I felt about a hundred years old.

"I will remove one chain. One. The weakest; the second, at your right wrist. You will have the use of your right hand. Nothing more."

"Only one."

"I do not know what you will do when you are loose. I do not know whether you are what the books say, or what Hale says, or something that neither of them guessed. I will not set a wolf free in my own house because he asked me nicely." I held up a finger. "I will remove one chain, and in return you will teach me the Cinder Doctrine."

His brows rose. "The Cinder Doctrine."

"The Founder's methods. The theory of the Heart, and how it is used. I know what it does. I do not know what it is. I have no teacher and no book. You are the only man alive who has ever, so far as I can tell, been trained in it." I leaned forward. "You smelled the Heart on me. You knew its name. You are not a man who uses words by accident. I think you know exactly what it is. I should like you to tell me."

"And if I refuse?"

"I leave. Taking the Heart."

"And if I merely wait?" The gray eyes gleamed. "I am a patient man. I have been waiting forty years. You will go back up the stair, and you will go on, and you will make a number of exceedingly stupid mistakes with that stone, and one day you will make the last one. And I shall be here. And the next person to open the door will be whoever the Chancellor sends to retrieve your corpse."

"Yes," I said. "I considered that."

"And?"

"I decided you would rather talk."

He regarded me.

Then slowly, with an effort that seemed to cost him, he smiled. It was a wolfish, delighted, shocking smile that made him look suddenly ten years younger and twice as dangerous.

"You are a very annoying girl," said Declan Marrow. "Begin."

…

It took six hours.

I will not say it was easy. The chains were not a lock to be picked; they were a tapestry to be unwoven. I had to find the one thread in the second ward that held the rest in tension, and then, with the Cinder, burn it from the inside out, so slowly that the pattern around it did not know it was dying. Every other moment I had to stop and hold my breath, because the chain, when it sensed the damage, would flare, and a bolt of white-gold force would lash out and crack across the floor.

Twice it hit me. The first time threw me ten feet. The second took a handful of hair.

Nimbus, in the doorway, kept watch. He did not turn his head. Every now and then, through the pact, I felt the thin cool pulse of his attention checking on me, as one checks a stove.

My nose began to bleed at the third hour. By the fifth I could not feel my left hand. The Heart, at the center of me, was burning hotter than I had ever felt it, a red molten core. The Cinder poured down my arm into the metal in a steady stream, and the metal fought it. It was like trying to unpick a knot in a rope of steel, one filament at a time, with a needle held in my teeth.

Declan watched.

He did not speak. He did not move. He simply stood in his nine chains, a tall black silhouette against the glass, and watched me with a gaze I could feel on my skin like a draft. In the first hour I thought he was waiting for me to fail. In the second I thought he was waiting for me to beg. By the fourth I had the uneasy sense that he was doing neither. He was learning me, the way a smith learns a new alloy, by watching how it behaves under heat.

I did not ask for water. I did not ask him to stop. I did not complain, or flatter, or say a single word that was not about the work. When the blood ran down my chin I wiped it off on my sleeve, and kept on.

At some point in the sixth hour, I heard him murmur something under his breath. I did not catch the words. I caught the tone. It was the tone of a man reading a verdict.

"Remarkable."

…

The chain gave way an hour before dawn.

It did not break. It unwound. The last thread of it slipped from its anchor in the stone with a long soft sigh, like a breath let out, and the glowing coil around his right wrist went dark, loosened, and fell in pieces to the floor. The runes along it faded from white to gray. The noise it made, hitting the ground, was almost gentle.

I sat back on my heels.

I could not feel my face. My hands were burned across the palms. The back of my shirt was soaked with sweat. I looked at the Warlord, and he looked at me, and for a long, still moment neither of us spoke.

Then, slowly, he lifted his right hand.

It was a big hand, long-fingered, scarred across the knuckles. The skin of the wrist was gray with forty years of confinement, and white where the chain had been. He flexed the fingers. He turned the palm up. A tremor ran through the whole arm, the shudder of a limb long deprived. He looked at it with an expression I could not read, as a man might look at a letter from a country he thought had been burned.

"Forty years," he said, to nobody.

I said nothing. It did not seem like a moment for it.

He closed the fist. He opened it. Then he laid the open hand over his own chest, over the heart, and drew a long, uneven breath.

"Now," he said, turning the gray eyes on me, "to the debt."

…

The Doctrine did not come as words.

It came as a flood. He placed two fingers against my forehead, lightly, and said, Hold still, and the world turned white.

I have tried many times to describe it. The best I can manage is this: it was as though someone had taken the library at Calloway, all four floors of it, every tome and scroll and ledger, and driven them through my skull with a mallet. Not in order. Not gently. A great flaming blizzard of knowledge, diagrams, theory, sensation, centuries of notes. I saw the First Sovereign's hands. I saw the Heart as it had been before it was a stone, a living thing, vast and burning, beating in the chest of a woman in a field of ash. I saw the first Tithe, and what it had been for, and I saw it twist.

I screamed. I know that I did, because afterward my throat was raw. I fell backward onto the floor and lay there convulsing while the world tore itself open and poured through me.

When it stopped, I was lying on my back looking up at the dome. A thread of daylight had begun to enter the round window. My head felt like a bell. A hand was supporting the back of my neck.

"Breathe," said Declan Marrow. "Slowly. You've done well."

His face was above mine. It was very close. The gray eyes had changed. They looked tired, and a little amazed, and unguarded as I had not seen them.

"Most of what I have given you," he said, "you will not understand for months. It will unfold. Give it time."

"I can't feel my teeth."

"That will pass."

"I think," I said, "that you did that on purpose."

"I did it as gently as I could." A pause. "That is not a joke, as it happens. I am out of practice."

I laughed. It hurt. He lowered me carefully back to the floor and stood. He did it stiffly, with one hand against the glass, favoring his legs. But he stood.

He looked down at me for a time with an odd, abstracted gaze. Then he said, in the dry, level tone of a man announcing a matter of simple fact:

"You are the third person I have met who could touch the Heart."

I turned my head on the stones. "Third?"

"The first was a man who tried to take it from the Founder's corpse, in the year of the Compact. The second was a woman I trained, forty-two years ago. She was very gifted. She was braver than you." The gray eyes did not move. "They died very badly, both of them. The Heart does not forgive an unwilling bearer."

"Mm," I said.

I closed my eyes. The weariness was enormous. I felt it come over me like a tide, and I did not have the strength to resist.

"I also died badly," I said. "It was not so very different. I cannot say I noticed the improvement."