THE TITHE ENGINE

The marble did not crack. It parted.

A seam ran across the floor of the Senate, from the rostrum to the pit, as clean as a cut in silk. The two halves drew apart with a long grinding sigh. Cold air boiled up through the gap, smelling of rust and old incense and something sweeter, something I knew from the ward-room under the Ceremony stage. The Marshals scattered. Senators scrambled over benches. A woman in scarlet fell and was dragged up by her neighbors.

I felt the floor go out from under me.

"Tamsin!"

Declan's hand closed on my wrist. For one instant I hung there, over nothing, with my boots kicking air and the Glass above me recording every second of it. I saw the Chancellor's face, mild and attentive, looking down. I saw the great dome swing. I saw the tiers of black benches, and the faces on them, three hundred white blurs, wheeling away overhead.

Then the hand tore loose, and we fell together into the dark.

…

It was a long way down.

I counted, because I always count. Two seconds. Three. The air screamed past my ears. I felt Declan's arm come round my ribs and drag me against his chest, and I twisted, and caught a glimpse over his shoulder of a vast round shaft, lined with brass and bone-white stone, falling away into red light. Nimbus was somewhere above us, yowling. Ahead, far below, a floor was coming up to meet us at the speed of a thrown stone.

"Cinder!" I shouted.

"Yes!"

I flung out my hand. The Heart answered before I'd finished the word. A great fan of red flame burst from my palm, downward, and caught us like a hand. The fall slowed. Declan's own power came up beside it, the cold bright silver of the star on his breast, a spreading disk of force. We hit the floor together, hard, in a crouch, with a crash that jarred my teeth.

Dust rose. Pieces of the shaft rained down. Then silence.

I looked up.

The mouth of the shaft was a tiny circle of white, two hundred feet above. A square of light. Someone was shouting up there, a small high thread of sound. A Marshal's voice. A Senator's.

And from somewhere farther off, a woman's, tinny and cracked and unmistakably cheerful, over the loudspeaker horn of a Relay:

"—and that's the Chancellor of Halvern, folks, pushing the Republic's most wanted woman down a hole in the floor—"

Declan made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"Mabel," I said.

"She will be the death of him."

"That's the idea."

We stood up.

…

The chamber was enormous.

I had pictured a dungeon. A vault. A hall of stone. I had not pictured a cathedral.

It was a vast circular space, two hundred paces across, with a ceiling lost in darkness and walls that rose in terraces like the inside of a bowl. Every surface was covered in silver. Not painted: worked. Wire as fine as hair ran across the stone in a million intricate patterns, in spirals and knots and webs, and each strand glowed with a faint, restless, pearly light. Pillars of bone-white marble stood in rings around the floor. Between them hung long chains of crystal, each bead the size of a man's fist, and every bead held a spark of its own.

I stared at them.

There were thousands. Ten thousand. They hung in the dim silvered dark like stars, pulsing slowly, each one a small, soft, golden point, flickering as a heartbeat flickers. As we walked toward them, I heard it: a whisper. A faint, continuous, many-voiced murmur, like the sound of a crowd heard through a wall.

It was children.

Not their bodies. Not their ghosts. Something smaller and stranger: the little warm glimmer of whatever it is in a child that wants to be a sword, or a flame, or a song. Ten thousand and four hundred small hopes, bottled and hung in a row.

I stopped.

My hand had begun to shake. I looked at it and could not make it stop.

"Do not touch them," said Declan, very quietly.

"I wasn't going to."

"I know. I only wished to say it."

I breathed. In. Out. I put the thing away somewhere, small and hard, as he had taught me to put fear, and I walked on.

…

At the heart of the chamber stood the Engine.

I do not know what I had expected. A machine, perhaps. A great furnace. Something with pistons and gears. What I saw instead was a tree.

It rose from the center of the floor, thirty feet high, its trunk a coil of silver wire as thick as a ship's mast, its branches reaching out in every direction to the chains of crystal that hung in the dark. Every branch was alight. Every twig. They pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm, like a pulse, and with each beat, pale golden light ran up the trunk and out along the boughs and into the walls, and somewhere far above us, in the cold white halls of the Houses, a thousand Sigils burned a little brighter.

It was the Sigil. It was the shape of the Sigil, reversed, enlarged, hung upside-down in the dark. A great black mirror of the tree on my arm.

And in the trunk, at the heart of it, behind a lattice of silver wire, something was moving.

"Declan," I said. My voice sounded strange to me. "What is that?"

He did not answer.

I walked toward it. I could not have stopped if I had tried. The dust was thick on the floor. The silver wires hummed under my boots. I came within ten paces, and I saw it.

A woman.

She was suspended in the heart of the trunk, in a cage of wire, with her arms drawn out to either side and her head bowed on her chest. She was young. She might have been twenty-two. She wore the remains of a gray dress, so old that it had gone to lace. Her hair was long, and dark, and floated slowly about her in the pearly light, like weed in a current. Silver threads ran in and out of her skin, at the wrists, the throat, the ribs, the temples, and each one pulsed in time with the tree.

Her face was my own.

…

It was not a likeness. I wish I could say it were. It was not the cousin's resemblance, the family nose. It was my face, as one sees it in a bad mirror: the stubborn chin, the straight black brows, the small scornful mouth. The only difference was that she looked rested. She looked like a woman who had been asleep for twenty years.

I could not make a sound.

"Elinor," said Declan.

He said it gently. I felt him come up behind me, and put a hand on my shoulder, and I leaned back into it before I knew I was doing it.

"The ninth chain," I whispered. "The Keystone. You said it was a tap."

"Yes."

"You said they bound it to—"

"To a living source. Yes." His voice was rough. "I did not know where. I had suspected. Forty years in the dark gives a man leisure to suspect." A long breath. "I am so sorry."

I stepped forward.

I put my palm against the silver cage. The wire was warm. It was alive. I could feel the pulse in it, slow, regular, in perfect time with the beat of my own heart.

"She's alive."

"After a fashion."

"She's been here the whole time."

"Twenty-one years."

"They kept her."

I do not remember what I said then. I think I said nothing at all. I stood with my hand on the cage and my forehead against the wire and my eyes closed. I thought of the voice in the fire at Skyfall: you were slow. I had to be born first. I thought of the Wraith in the Mist. I thought of a woman I'd never met, who had held a baby for the space of one breath, in a cold room, and said, remember her name.

I thought: he lied to me. All my life.

I thought: and I believed him.

The silver threads in her arms twitched.

…

Her eyes opened.

They were mine. Black, and bright, and very tired. They found my face. For a long moment they only looked, with a kind of vague dreaming puzzlement, as though she were trying to place a word on the tip of her tongue.

Then they cleared.

"Tam," said Elinor Ashgrove.

It was not quite a voice. It was a breath in my ear, a thread of sound that came from the wires and the walls and the tree. It was dry and sweet and faintly amused. I had never heard it. I knew it at once.

"There you are. You've grown."

I made a sound. It was not a word.

"Oh, my darling," she said. "Don't cry. You mustn't cry. There isn't time."

"Mother."

"I know. I know. I have been listening to you. All these years. A little, when the tree was quiet. Through the wires. I heard you at the Ceremony. I heard you in the sand." Her voice trembled, and steadied. "I'm so proud of you. I am so sorry. I wanted to come. I couldn't."

"I'm going to get you out."

"No."

"I am. I've got a sword. I'll—"

"Tamsin." It was sharp. It was the voice of the woman who had once told a Senate it was wrong. "Listen to me. You cannot get me out. I am the Keystone. If you cut the wires, the whole tree goes. Everything in it. The Tithe, the children, the Houses." A pause. "And me."

I looked at her.

"It is what I want," she said, gently. "I have wanted it for twenty-one years."

…

I do not know how long we stood there.

It cannot have been more than a minute. I know that now. I had the Engine beating in front of me, and the shaft overhead, and a city of two million waiting above, and a Chancellor with a cane. But I had not seen my mother's face in twenty-one years, and I looked at it, and I did not want to look away.

She told me, quickly. She had come to Crane at twenty, with a plan. She had meant to open the Tithe and release it back to the children, quietly, with the Senate none the wiser. She had been betrayed by a friend. She had been brought to the chamber on the night I was born. They had meant to use me, the child of an Ember-bearer, as the new Keystone. But there had been a flaw in the rite. She had put her own hand on the tree, in the last second, and offered herself in my place.

"It was the only thing I could do," she said. "I knew he would come for you. I knew he would wait. I hid your Heart in the tree on your arm, where he couldn't see it, and I told Declan's old friends to take you to the Frontier, and I prayed." A smile, brief and painful. "I'm afraid it was not much of a plan."

"It was a good plan."

"It was a desperate one."

"It worked."

"Did it?" Her eyes searched mine. "You're here. You're whole. You're standing in front of me, and you're everything I hoped." Her voice cracked. "It was enough."

"Mother—"

"Burn it, Tam."

The words fell between us like a stone.

"The Emberheart will do it. You carry it. Cinder burns structure, and this is nothing but structure, a lattice of ward and wire. You can unmake it. All of it. The tree, the chains. Everything held in the crystals will go back where it came from. Ten thousand children, my darling. They will wake up tomorrow and not know why they feel strong."

I couldn't speak.

"And I will be free."

…

"Well," said a voice behind us. "That is very touching."

I turned.

He had come down the shaft on a silver platform, with a bodyguard of twelve Gold Guards in white and a pale, rigid, fixed expression I had not seen on his face before. He stepped off it with his cane in one hand, and a white rose in his lapel, still fresh. His shoes made no sound on the marble.

Everett Crane looked at the tree, and the woman in it, and he smiled.

"Elinor," he said fondly. "I hoped you would wake."

"Everett."

"You look well." He shook his head. "Twenty-one years. And not a day older. I'd forgotten how much I liked you."

"You're a monster."

"Am I? I rather think I am a gardener." He walked slowly round the trunk, touching the wires with one gloved finger. "I found a field of fallow ground. Ten thousand little seeds, going to waste. I planted them. I tended them. I have made them bear fruit. Every House in this Republic is richer for my labors, and not one child has died." He glanced at me. "Not one."

"They were robbed."

"They were redistributed." The pale eyes were mild. "Most of those children would have been unremarkable. A merchant. A clerk. A man who carves toys. I have given their gifts to people who will use them. The Republic is a machine, Miss Reeve. Machines require fuel."

"I'll show you what I do with fuel."

"I know you will." He sighed. "That is why I came down."

He raised his cane.

…

I never saw him strike. I only saw the chains.

Every crystal in the dark flashed at once. The ten thousand golden sparks flared, and rose, and poured down the silver wires toward the center of the room in a blazing river. They streamed into the trunk, the boughs, the cage where my mother hung. They did not stop. They ran up the cane, into Crane's hand, up his arm, and into his chest, and I saw him straighten, and grow.

His body filled out. His white hair streamed up, as if in a gale. The lines of his face smoothed and deepened, and for a moment he was thirty, forty, fifty, all his ages at once, and the pale eyes blazed blue. A vast pearl-colored radiance rose round him, shot through with the tender gold of ten thousand children's gifts, and the whole cavern shook.

"I did warn you," said the Chancellor, in a voice like a chord. "I said I would be a gardener. Gardeners prune."

The Guards drew their swords.

Declan said, "Tamsin. Behind me."

"No."

"Now."

…

He went into them like a wolf into a flock.

I have never forgotten it. He took three steps and the silver star on his breast went white, and the first Guard went down with a broken sword and a broken arm. The second took a fist in the throat. The third got in a thrust, low and fast, that would have gutted a lesser man; Declan turned it on his forearm, with a shriek of steel on bracer, and drove his elbow into the man's face. Four. Five. He moved like something carved out of a storm. Every blow was exact. Every blow was brutal.

Iron Wall, I thought, watching him. Nine-Chain Sweep. He had taught me both on the road. I had not known they were beautiful.

I went for Crane.

I will not claim it was a duel. It was a thing like drowning. I came in with Ashbrand high and the Cinder pouring down the blade, and he met it with a single raised palm. The two powers collided. The shock threw me back twenty feet. I landed on my feet, skidding, and came in again, and he turned the blade with his cane, and it rang.

"You have your mother's technique," he said, almost admiringly.

"Shut up."

"And her temper. It will kill you in the end."

I cut for his knee. He stepped inside the stroke. A hand struck me in the chest, open-palmed, and I felt my ribs go. I flew. The silver floor met my back, and the world went red. I tasted blood. I rolled, and came up on one knee, and the sword was still in my hand.

Hold, I thought. Hold.

He was walking toward me. He wasn't hurrying. His cane tapped on the marble, click, click, click, in time with my heart. Behind him, the children's lights streamed down the wires and into his body in a bright unending flood.

"Ten thousand," said Crane. "Against one. It is hardly sporting. But then, I never was a sportsman."

…

I should have lost. I knew it. I knelt on the floor in the pool of my own blood and I looked at the man who had broken my life, and I knew that I was outmatched, outpowered, out of everything.

And something in my chest turned over.

It was the Emberheart. It had been sleeping since Skyfall, vast and slow and patient. I felt it wake. I felt it stir in its deep place, and look, and I understood, in a rush, what my mother had said.

Cinder burns structure.

Crane was not stronger than me. He was bigger, bound to ten thousand borrowed sparks, held together by wire and ward. He was structure. He was nothing but structure, a man assembled from other people's gifts. And I was the one thing in the world that had been made to take such things apart.

I lifted my eyes.

"Chancellor," I said.

"Yes?"

"You're leaking."

He glanced down.

At the hem of his coat, where the light poured in, a thread of red had begun to creep upward through the pearl. It ran up his leg, thin as a hair. It spread. The pearl light dimmed, round it, as snow dims where a coal is laid. I saw the pale eyes widen.

"What have you done?"

"Nothing yet," I said, and rose.

He struck at me. I let him. Light exploded. Pain went through me, a white knife from crown to heel, and I took it. I took it the way I'd taken the Storm, the way I'd taken the sand. I took it, and I did not break, and I stepped inside his guard and put my free hand flat on his chest.

"This is for page forty," I said.

I let the Heart go.

…

It was not what I had planned.

The Cinder poured out of my palm and into him, and for a moment I felt the whole shape of him: the wires, the crystals, the ten thousand thin bright threads that held him together. I felt them shiver. I felt them begin to unravel. Crane screamed. It was a vast, ringing, chord-like scream, with ten thousand small voices in it, and they were not screaming in pain. They were singing. They were rising out of him, one by one, golden and astonished and free.

Go, I thought. Go home.

They went.

They broke out of his chest like sparks from a bonfire. They burst out of the crystals, the chains, the wires. They poured up the walls of the shaft and into the Senate floor and the streets of Ravenport, and out, through the roofs of the city, in a blazing river of gold. The whole chamber was bright with them.

The tree began to burn.

And then I felt the hand.

It came out of nowhere. A bolt of white fire, from behind. Not Crane's. A thing that Crane had left, a last-ditch ward, set in the stone beside the Engine like a trap beside a nest. It took me in the back and drove me forward, and I lost the Heart, and the red light went out of my hand.

Crane staggered, and straightened. His coat was smoking.

"Clever," he said, and his voice cracked. "Very clever. But not enough."

He raised his cane.

I saw the point of it. A spike of white light, a hundred feet long, drawn up out of the dying Engine. I saw it rise. I saw it turn. I could not move. I was on my knees, on the silver floor, with my hands empty and my sword out of reach.

It came down.

"No!"

Something hit me from the side, and the world spun, and I rolled across the stones. When I looked up, the light had gone.

Declan stood where I had been.

He had put himself between us. He was standing with his arms spread, and the spike of white fire was in him, through his chest, through the silver star, so bright that I could see the shape of his ribs against it. His back was to me. I could not see his face.

He turned his head.

He looked at me over his shoulder, and his eyes were very calm.

"Tamsin," said Declan. "I did say I'd do my best."

And he fell.