Fire & Bone — Chapter V

Halen did not like it. He had been standing outside the Rag Lantern for nearly a quarter of an hour, broad enough to make the boarding house appear to have grown a second door. The afternoon had cooled around him. The seams in his stone body had not. Orange light showed at his wrists and beneath the plates of his jaw, brighter than it had been when they entered.

Apple saw the exact moment Halen counted them. Sebastian. Wyn. Isca. Apple. No Myra. “Where is she?” Sebastian began well. He explained the trained cattle, the bells, and the sequence Malrick intended to repeat. He explained the Elder Tree Monastery and Venom Thicket Tower. Then he reached the Emberkin. “They used something taken from the eggs to stabilize the creatures,” he said. The glow inside Halen sharpened. People crossing the street gave him more room. “Taken,” Halen repeated. “Myra claimed she never saw how.” “Myra claimed.” Sebastian continued with the crucible, the ley lines, and the ritual meant to turn every domesticated animal on Solfawn into part of Malrick’s design. He did not lie about Myra. Sebastian was not good at lying to Halen, and Halen was very good at waiting through omissions. Sebastian merely arranged the truth so that Myra’s departure came last and arrived wearing as little importance as he could give it.

“She gave us a location,” Sebastian said. “A cache. Charged stones for a scrying ritual.” Halen looked past him into the Rag Lantern. “And where is Myra?” “Gone,” Apple said. Sebastian gave him a look. Apple spread his hands. The part had not been improving with age. For several breaths, Halen said nothing. Heat pressed against the damp street. The first fallen leaves at his feet curled inward and darkened along their edges. “You released the woman who helped do this.” “We made a bargain,” Sebastian said. “You made a bargain.” “Yes.” Halen’s eyes went to the broken roofs beyond the street, then to a wagon carrying two shrouded bodies toward the temple quarter. “And you believed her.” “No,” Sebastian said. “I believed we needed what she knew.” That answer did not make Halen less angry. It did make him listen. Wyn unfolded Myra’s map. Apple showed him the iron key. Isca stood beside them with the field journal held close against her chest. When they had finished, Halen looked north, toward streets still choked with wreckage from the stampede.

“She lied,” he said. “Probably,” Apple said. “But we should find out which part.” “The cache will be trapped.” “Also probably.” “Then we go.” Isca did not follow. Fishbrook had wounded people enough without sending away everyone able to bind a splint or carry water. She handed Myra’s journal to Wyn and promised to find them at the Scarlet Wizard when the relief work no longer needed her.

Then Halen’s Heroes went to test the truth of Myra Block.

– • • They saw the pair before they reached the red house. The man leaned against a plaster wall with one boot braced behind him, dressed too well for the narrow lane and too comfortably for a man waiting in it. His charcoal coat had a high collar, good stitching, and enough road dust at the hem to suggest the clothes were used rather than displayed. A copper coin walked across the backs of his fingers, vanished into his fist, and appeared again at the smallest finger without ever seeming to fall.

The young woman beside him wore a fitted green coat over practical trousers and boots. Pouches crowded her belt. Two glass vials—one orange, one blue—hung in padded loops at her hip. Her blonde hair had been cut short enough to keep it from flame, gears, and other people’s hands. Dark stains climbed both forearms from her cuffs: ink, copper salts, soot, and the yellow- The man opened his hand. The coin lay across his knuckles. “Cameron,” he said. He tilted his head toward the woman. “Gina.” Gina examined the four of them without greeting. Her attention paused on Halen’s glowing seams, Wyn’s hands, Sebastian’s sword, and each visible weapon Apple carried. It took her longer with Apple. “We were waiting for you,” Cameron said. “Before we arrived?” Sebastian asked. “That is generally when waiting happens.” Apple liked him slightly more than was sensible. Halen did not. “Friends of Myra’s?” Wyn asked. Cameron’s coin began moving again. “Friends is a flexible word.” “We had a deal with her,” Gina said. “You are walking toward her rooms with her key, so either she sent you or you robbed the correct woman.” Apple tucked the iron key deeper into his palm. “What kind of deal?” Sebastian asked. Cameron glanced along the lane before answering. “We came into possession of a chest from the Blacklands.” “Won it,” Gina said. “Eventually.” “After losing it twice.” “The middle of a story is rarely its strongest part.” Cameron smiled. “The chest came out of Glarus. Stone, iron, unpleasantly warm. It has defeated every key and pick we tried. More accurately, it melted them.”

Apple’s ears lifted. “Myra agreed to help us open it,” Cameron continued. “Whatever was inside, we would divide evenly. She has apparently become unavailable. You, however, have acquired her key and seem to possess a wider range of useful abnormalities.”

Halen’s inner light brightened. Cameron raised both hands. “Abilities. I meant abilities.” “You knew about the cache,” Sebastian said. “We knew enough to prevent you from burning alive in it,” Gina replied. “There is a muffling line inside the entry. Break it and no one outside will hear what follows. Beyond that is a pressure plate linked to an alchemical fire charge. Myra did not trust visitors.”

“She told us there was no magical protection,” Wyn said. “There isn’t,” Gina said. “Alchemy is chemistry with ambitions.” “And in return for your help?” “You help with the chest,” Cameron said. “Half to you. Half to us.” Sebastian looked at Halen. “First the cache,” Halen said. “Open the door. Show us the traps. Then we will hear the rest.” Gina held out her hand. Apple considered the key, her stained fingers, and the many ways courtesy could become theft. Then he passed it to her. The red house had once been brighter. Weather had faded it to the color of old brick dust. Its side door sat beneath an exterior stair, exactly where Myra had said it would. Gina unlocked it, crouched at the threshold, and ran a thin brass probe along the jamb. She found a thread the color of plaster, hooked it, and pinned it against the frame with two waxed wedges.

“Muffling line,” she said. “Disabled until someone kicks the wedges loose.” She opened the door and stepped back. No flame came. No blade fell. An ordinary dark hallway waited beyond it. “You first,” Cameron told the heroes. “Generous,” Sebastian said. “We do not know where the plate is.” The four debated in low voices. Halen ended it. “We came to learn whether she lied. We learn by going inside.” Apple nodded. “And if she told the truth, the temple is in danger.” Halen looked at Cameron and Gina. “If the chest contains tools that can be used against Malrick, we will need them. In this war, we will need every tool we can get.” Cameron closed his fingers around the coin. “Then we have a bargain.”

– • • Apple entered low to the ground. The hallway smelled of old plaster, lamp oil, and the bitter mineral bite of alchemical salts.

He ignored the rooms ahead and studied the floorboards. Dust revealed where feet had passed. Wear revealed where they had not. Near the end of the hall, four boards were cleaner than the “That is where the trap is.” “I understand. It sounded like a rule you expected Halen to need.” Halen stepped over both plate and remark. Apple searched the remaining floor, walls, door frames, and the underside of the stair.

Nothing else waited for them. The lower flat had been made into an alchemist’s laboratory. A workbench filled one wall beneath shelves crowded with stoppered bottles, glazed pots, copper scales, stained funnels, and bundles of dried roots. Burn marks overlapped on the bench like a record of arguments. A narrow bed occupied one corner. Women’s clothes had been folded into a crate beneath it with more care than comfort. Whoever had slept there had expected to leave quickly.

Halen began moving furniture. Wyn stood at the center of the room and let his vision soften. Magic emerged slowly: a residual gleam on several potion bottles, a faint net of warding along the rear window, and a compact blue-white radiance from a small chest resting on a side table.

“That one,” he said. Apple approached it with the solemnity expected of a dangerous lock. He examined the hinges, probed beneath the base, smelled the keyhole, and listened while moving a pick against the first pin.

Then he shrugged. His tail curled around the pick. One turn. A quiet click. “That was disappointing,” he said. Inside lay an amulet of braided gold and silver surrounding a brilliant blue gem. Light gathered in the stone until it appeared deeper than the chest that held it. Beside it rested a drawstring pouch and two narrow vials filled with cloudy liquid.

Magic radiated from all four. Wyn lifted one vial and eased out its stopper. The liquid rose. It did not spill. It climbed in a smooth silver-gray cord, flowing upward against the pull of the world. The end unfurled toward Wyn’s fingers as if the magic inside had smelled him. Wyn recoiled and drove the cork back into place. The liquid struck it from below with a soft, wet tap. For once, he had no immediate cleverness to offer. “What was that?” Sebastian asked. Wyn held the vial at arm’s length. “Liquid magic.” Apple waited. “You say that as though it explains the liquid moving by itself.” “I have read theories. I have never seen it.” The admission disturbed Apple more than the liquid. The pouch contained three fire opals and two smoky quartz crystals, each charged so densely that Wyn felt their presence before Apple emptied them into his palm. Exactly what Myra had promised. Enough, perhaps, to awaken the book and ask it where Malrick had gone.

The money box sat beneath the workbench. Apple distrusted it on principle. It was iron-banded, heavy, and placed where a careless thief would see it. He spent several minutes searching for poison needles, false tumblers, spring blades, acid reservoirs, collapsing pins, and the sort of ingenious mechanism that justified owning a tail.

At last he inserted the very tip of one pick. The lid opened. Apple stared at it. Then, offended, he closed the box and opened it again using only his tail. Hundreds of gold coins filled the interior. They lay edge over face in a dense yellow mass, darker and heavier than modern Fishbrook coinage. Each bore the worn crest of Glarus. Seven hundred and fifty ancient pieces, if Myra’s inventory had been accurate.

A smaller pouch held two topazes, three pearls, two amethysts, and a single emerald. “I can carry these,” Apple said. No one objected. “Everything she told us was true,” he said more quietly. “The stones. The money. The room.” He looked at Wyn. “That means Travis is going to the Elder Tree Monastery. We have to warn them.” Wyn closed his hand around one of the smoky quartz crystals. “It means she wanted us to believe the parts we could test.” “It also means we can test the book.” Across the room, Halen lifted the mattress with one hand. A wand and a dagger lay beneath it, placed within easy reach of anyone sleeping in the bed. Wyn took the wand. A spiral ran the length of its shaft. Its grip was pale bone veined with something dark, like old blood trapped beneath ivory. The balance settled into his palm so naturally that he turned it once before realizing he had done so.

“Spooky,” Apple said. end of the pommel as if held by a claw.

Sebastian lifted it. The runes brightened. “I think—” he began. Then he looked at the size of the grip, at Apple’s hands, and at the collection of blades already arranged across Apple’s body with no regard for restraint. “Apple should try it.” Apple received the dagger carefully. It settled into his hand as if the grip had been measured for him. He tested the balance, turned it beneath his wrist, then passed it to his tail and drew it back again.

Perfect. He moved one of his old blades to the belt at his back, where his tail could reach it, and secured the new dagger at his hip. “It is very generous of you to recognize what belongs to me,” Apple said. “I recognized what fits.” “That is what I said.” Halen lowered the mattress. For the first time since learning Myra had escaped, some of the light in his seams dimmed. Not forgiveness. Only purpose.

– • • Cameron and Gina waited outside. Halen emerged, nodded once, and said, “Take us to the chest.” They led the party away from the rebuilt market streets and toward the oldest, poorest edge of Fishbrook. The locals called it the Shams. Cameron claimed the name came from the shambles of connected rooms, collapsed courtyards, and houses leaning on one another for support. Gina claimed it came from landlords pretending the buildings were fit to rent.

Both explanations appeared true. Roofs overlapped at uncertain angles. Upper rooms bridged alleys that had once been open.

Walls had been repaired with ship planks, feed signs, and doors taken from other houses. The smell of boiled cabbage, damp wool, river mud, and too many people collected between the buildings.

Cameron brought them through a crowded first floor where conversation weakened as Halen passed. Curious faces appeared in doorways. No one asked a question. In the Shams, curiosity was free and answers usually cost something.

Gina opened a reinforced door at the end of a passage and led them down narrow steps into a storage room.

Autumn ended at the threshold. The room below was close to ninety degrees. Heat struck them with the flat, breath-stealing force of an oven opened too soon. The timber walls had dried and shrunk away from their pegs. Resin wept from the beams. A shallow tub of water in one corner gave off constant steam.

The chest stood in the center of the floor. It had not been carved from volcanic stone so much as assembled from pieces of a dead eruption. Blocks of black basalt formed its sides and rounded lid, each rough, porous, and heavy enough to have belonged in a fortress wall. Thick iron straps wrapped the stone in both directions. Their rivets had swollen with rust, but the bands themselves showed no weakness. Two iron rings hung from the sides, too hot and too massive to lift without poles and several strong backs.

A red-orange seam burned beneath the lid. It was not reflected lamplight. The glow came from within, an unbroken line of contained furnace heat. In places the basalt had cracked, and dull red light breathed through those fissures. The air above it trembled. Dust could not settle on its surface. Whatever touched the stone darkened, smoked, and curled away.

Apple remembered the magma pools beneath Glarus—the slow brightness under black crust, beautiful until the crust moved.

“No one touches it,” Gina said. “Not yet.” Cameron placed his coin on a distant shelf. Even he had stopped playing. Sebastian looked between them. “Half of whatever comes out.” “Half,” Cameron agreed. Wyn’s voice changed. It did not grow louder. It seemed to arrive from immediately behind the listener, though Wyn stood several paces away. Shadow gathered beneath his words and made them difficult to dismiss.

“And you will honor the division after you see what is inside.” Cameron’s shoulders tightened. Gina’s hand drifted toward an orange vial. Then Cameron met Wyn’s eyes. “We honor the deals we make.” does not cross inward. It does not cross outward.”

“If your chalk understands you,” Sebastian said. “The chalk is the most reliable participant.” Apple removed a small jar of heat lotion from his pack and rubbed the pale grease into his hands, wrists, and tail. He coated the metal parts of his own picks, though he did not expect the protection to last.

“Tools,” he told Gina. She sighed with the particular pain of a craftsperson asked to lend instruments to someone who might destroy them. Then she unrolled a leather case and passed it over. Apple coated those too. Halen approached the chest. He did not touch it. At first he only stood above it with his hands open and his head bowed. “Shaper,” he said, voice low beneath the hiss of the room, “what was made in fire has been turned toward concealment. Let the fire know one of its own. Let what is bound be carried. Let what was hidden be shown.”

He placed both hands against the stone. Light erupted through him. It began at his palms, white-orange against black basalt, then climbed the seams of his forearms. The glow spread across his shoulders and through his chest until every division in his stone body burned like the cracks of a newly opened kiln.

Cameron stepped back. Gina forgot to. Halen drew the fire into himself. The red seam beneath the lid dimmed from orange to sullen crimson. Heat rolled away from the chest and gathered around Halen, bending his outline. The room did not become cool, but breathing ceased to hurt.

“Half,” Halen said through clenched stone teeth. “I can hold half.” Wyn set his palm above the inner circle. The runes answered. Heat peeled from the chest in visible currents, thin distortions that caught ash and carried it around the chalk track. Faster they moved, circling the basalt once, twice, ten times, until a wall of shimmering air stood between the two lines. Wyn pulled another quarter of the furnace into the working.

“Now, Apple!” Apple crossed the inner circle. Even diminished, the chest radiated enough heat to sting his eyes. The lotion on his hands liquefied at once. He climbed onto a low crate, braced his feet, and studied the lock. It was large. It was old. It was not difficult. The makers had trusted the fire. Apple inserted Gina’s coated tension bar and one pick. Heat traveled through the metal in spite of the lotion. His fingertips began to ache. His tail curled around the edge of the crate and held him steady.

One pin. Two. The third dragged, expanded by centuries of heat. Apple lifted it, felt the cylinder turn, and jumped back as the lock opened with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil. “Done!” Halen bent, seized the iron-bound lid, and lifted. The chest opened like a raku kiln. A column of heat roared upward. Light flooded Halen’s face from below. The basalt lid groaned in its iron frame, and the inner edges glowed red where they had been sealed together. Yet the objects within lay untouched by the heat, arranged in layers of black cloth and wire baskets as cool islands inside a furnace.

At the center rested an Emberkin egg. Halen went utterly still. It was dark, oval, and veined with living orange. The glow within it pulsed slowly. Not a coal. A heartbeat. Around it lay coin pouches, a small crucible, a brass scroll tube, bundled stones, jewelry, chains, and packets wrapped in heat-blackened cloth. “Table!” Cameron shouted. Gina and two of their friends dragged one close. Wyn held the circling heat between the chalk lines. Halen kept one hand against the lid and the other against the chest, taking fire into himself faster than his body could release it.

Sebastian unloaded the contents. He passed each object outward. Apple and Gina arranged them on the table. Cameron took Then a thick gold ring set with a flawless black onyx. Sebastian turned it once, saw the engraving inside, and stopped. Senca Valcour. He closed his hand around the ring before anyone else could read it. An elegant silver amulet followed, set with a clear blue sapphire. High-contrast patterns moved across the stone whenever it caught the furnace light. It recalled the pendant they had recovered among the kobolds—and the blue-gem amulet from Myra’s room—without being identical to either.

“Faster,” Halen said. The word cracked in his throat. Sebastian lifted out a leather-bound sketchbook. Its cover bore sacred Simiah designs cut and branded into the hide. Inside, ink drawings filled page after page: Simiah faces, hands, tails, temple postures, domestic scenes, and careful studies of ornaments and clothing. Notes crowded the margins in a script Apple recognized but could not read quickly while Halen burned beside him.

Apple forgot the coins. He took the book with both hands. “Mine,” he said. No one argued. Several teardrop-shaped prisms came next, black glass suspended from fine silver chains.

Halen glanced at them and sent a pulse of heat through one. A red image unfolded in the air: branching flows beneath Glarus, vent shafts, pressure readings, and shifting magma channels drawn as light. The projection flickered and vanished when Halen withdrew the heat.

There was no time to determine how old the readings were. Three volcanic fire opals came out glowing and did not cool. Ashglass nodules followed, each wrapped separately to preserve its inner heat. Four raw dark quartz crystals struck the table with dull clicks. A shard of deep red garnet caught the light like a drop of hardened blood.

“I cannot hold it,” Halen said. He fell to one knee. The glow beneath his stone plates began to pulse. Too bright. Too fast. Apple had seen Halen wounded, enraged, and filled with the Shaper’s power. He had never seen him overfull. “That is everything!” Sebastian called. Halen staggered away from the chest. The stolen heat roared back. The red seam beneath the lid flared orange. Air slammed outward hard enough to scatter chalk dust and drive everyone from the table. Cameron’s friends rushed in with buckets and threw water across Halen’s shoulders and chest.

Steam exploded around him. Halen vanished inside a white cloud. Water hissed from his stone body and ran boiling across the floor. Wyn cried out and forced both hands down. The ring of heat buckled toward the room. He caught it, turned it, and drove it inward. Runic marks blackened one after another as the magic crossed them. The circling currents collapsed back into the basalt chest.

The lid fell. Iron struck stone. The room shook. When the steam cleared, the chest was as hot as it had been when they entered. But it was empty. Halen remained on one knee, smoke rising from his shoulders. The Emberkin egg rested safely in his arms.

– • • They divided the treasure upstairs where the air was cool enough to think. Wyn placed one hand on the egg and the other on the crucible. “These are part of our half.” Cameron looked at the gold spread across the table. There was enough to change every life in the house. Enough to replace roofs, buy debts, bribe officials, open shops, leave Fishbrook, or remain in it without fear of the next rent collector. Gina lifted one ancient coin, bit it, and laughed when Cameron stared at her.

“It is gold,” she said. “I told you it was gold.” “You tell me many things.” The heroes took the egg, the crucible, the four documents, Senca Valcour’s ring, the sapphire amulet, the Simiah sketchbook, the heat-revealed prisms, the fire opals, the ashglass, the dark They returned to the Scarlet Wizard after dark. The common room smelled of roasted onions, wet cloaks, spilled ale, and the faint medicinal bitterness that clung to everyone who had worked near the wounded. Fishbrook had begun the long labor of pretending it would be whole again.

Halen carried the Emberkin egg against his chest. Apple carried the sacred sketchbook beneath his coat. Wyn carried Myra’s ritual, the charged stones, and the knowledge that Venom Thicket Tower might supply the last pieces Malrick needed. Sebastian carried a black onyx ring engraved with the name of a Valcour. They found a table in the corner. “The egg goes back to the Blacklands,” Halen said. “To my people. It has been carried far enough by those who see it as a tool.” “The Elder Tree Monastery is already in danger,” Apple said. “If Myra told the truth, Travis is ahead of us.” “And if Malrick gets what he needs from Venom Thicket,” Wyn said, “warning the monastery may only give them time to watch the ritual arrive.” Halen looked at Wyn. Apple looked at Halen. Then both looked at Sebastian. Sebastian set the onyx ring on the table with the engraving turned down. For one night he had no order to give them. “Tonight,” he said, “I am going to take a bath. Then I am going to eat until I stop being hungry, drink until this day becomes less specific, and sleep in a bed.” Apple waited. “In the morning,” Sebastian said, “I will tell you which disaster we are walking toward first.” No one was satisfied. For that night, it was answer enough.