Midday glare turned the rock into a bladed thing. Heat rolled off the slope that fell toward Goldbarrow’s outer works, shimmering above the broken plates and scree so that the distance looked like it trembled. Bardrin counted his steps because counting kept his mind from splitting along the line that panic drew. Forty-three from the last outcrop. He knew the number even as his lungs felt like bellows that had been run too long in a careless forge. Skorik ran ahead of him by a length or two, the loose tail of his cloak now a burnt edge, hair singed back from one temple, hand hammer thumping against his hip.

  “Do you see what you started?” Bardrin called, not looking up from the next three footfalls because if he missed one he might miss the ground entirely.

  Skorik threw a glance back sharp enough to cut. “Me? Your careful foot started a whole hill moving. I stepped on honest rock; the hill lied.”

  “It slid because you took the line with speed,” Bardrin returned, crisp even while breathless. “You dumped half a slope into a nest.”

  “Into a nest?” Skorik barked, hopping a chink and landing hard behind a knuckle of stone as heat washed past from above. “It was a smear of dirt. Any mother worthy of the name brushes her eggs and goes on with the day.”

  Another rush of flame raked the ground behind them. It skimmed the tops of the rocks and seared the air, a broad sweep rather than a spear. Bardrin felt it in his eyes first, a dry ache; then on his exposed forearm, where the skin protested and tightened beneath his makeshift bandage. He kept counting because the numbers did not care what burned. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. He pointed with two fingers to the next run of cover and forced his legs to obey his own instruction.

  Three dragons had hunted them down the slope. The first, the mother—scales like dark slate with lighter, worn edges and a horned line along her skull—kept to the high arcs, watching. The two others, red-scaled drakes not half again the mother’s bulk, ranged lower, strafing to drive the dwarves out of whatever shelter they claimed. They were not of a mind to grab and go; they wanted a clean sweep of fire, a cinder and a pair of charred bundles that could be flown home as lessons or trophies.

  “Left,” Skorik shouted, his voice flat around a breath he could not spare. He had an edged confidence that made a dwarf follow an order even when it came from a man who often made orders he had no right to. Bardrin went left. A long basalt fin rose and gave them momentary relief from the glare. The rock smelled of dust and old rain ground down to smell alone.

  “One,” Bardrin said, touching the fin as he passed it, ticking the landmark in his head and on the inner ledger where he kept the path alive. “Two,” he added as the fin’s mate came into being, half-buried and sharp enough to tear the hem of his cloak.

  “Stop cataloging,” Skorik said, ducking behind a boulder with a scarred top where lightning had once made a fuse of a seam. He wore one of his irrepressible grins, the kind that made Bardrin want to knock it off and that, perversely, steadied his own hands. “We know where we are.”

  “Knowing in general and knowing precisely are two different verbs,” Bardrin answered, then flinched as a shadow knifed across the ground.

  The red dragon stooped. It folded its wings to narrow its body, and its jaw opened, the dark of its mouth going to a dull, terrible glow. The sound of the breath coming built inside its chest. Both dwarves dove for the next trickle of broken stone and found nothing but open. The slope ahead ran flat and bare for a stretch of twenty steps before it broke again into a garden of spike-backed rocks. Skorik skidded, caught himself, and froze for half a heartbeat, calculating in a way that had no numbers in it. Bardrin saw him freeze and swore in a single syllable entirely brief and without blasphemy. They were going to burn on open ground because the world had decided it had been too generous this morning.

  “Apology?” Skorik asked, throwing the word like a shield that could only cover them both if they took hold of it at once.

  Bardrin’s mouth worked and found the truth it always had to work to get to. “I am harsh because I care,” he said, the sentence short, tidy, thrown out like a line to a drowning man. “You infuriate me. You keep me alive.”

  Skorik’s laugh was a puff of air that was not a laugh at all. He stepped closer so that their shoulders touched as if bracing against a wave. “I insult because I’m afraid and I’d never say that while sober. You’re right more often than I want.”

  The dragon drew in. Heat pressed against their faces, their beards, their eyes. Bardrin found Skorik’s wrist with his right hand and felt the bones under the burned skin. Skorik squeezed back hard enough to hurt. They both opened their mouths to give the fire somewhere to go when it came.

  It never came. A sound cut across the slope with the authority of a verdict. It was the hiss and shriek of a heavy shaft tearing the air at speed, the low rumble of torsion arms relaxing, the whip of cable releasing stored power. A steel-headed spear as long as a balk of timber came from their southwest—downslope and left—arcing flatter than an arrow. It hit the red dragon on the draw of its breath, under the left forewing where the plates overlapped. Steel punched, plates parted, and the shaft went through with wet finality and slammed the beast back as if a hand had grabbed its spine and yanked. Fire that had been pulled inward choked in the throat and scattered in a brief orange flare that licked the dragon’s upper palate and burst from its nostrils as a mean jet no longer coherent. The dragon’s weight made a loud, ugly sound when it met rock in an uncontrolled fold. Dust leapt. The spear stuck out the far side like a grotesque flag.

  Skorik’s grip might have crushed Bardrin’s wrist if Bardrin’s attention had been available for something as small as pain. They had both flinched toward each other on instinct. The fact of it, the warmth and the speed, embarrassed them. They sprang apart as if stepped on.

  “Move,” Bardrin snapped, voice too loud for the way it scraped his own throat.

  “Move, he says,” Skorik barked back, already moving, already scanning for the next cover because mockery for him and command from Bardrin were braided ropes he could use in any weather.

  Another hiss thrummed overhead—the song of an engine spitting more javelins of steel. Past the dead drake, the other red banked, wings beating hard to get height, to look for the source of the threat. A spear clipped the trailing edge of its right wing, splintering soft membrane and ripping a ragged hole near the joint. The dragon screamed. The sound went through the dwarves like something you couldn’t keep out with your hands.

  They reached the next crest of rocks and found enemies of a smaller and more reasonable size: dart-tailed lizards no longer than a dwarf’s foot that scattered under the shade, and the noise of boots coming from below—steady, purposeful, and welcome.

  “Up slope!” a voice bellowed, strong and clipped. “Eyes right! Krag, Tor—cover them! Garan—watch the sky! Keep your mouths shut when the ballista speaks!”

  Commander Rurik had the sort of presence that made a dwarf straighten even when bent double and bleeding. He topped the low rise flanked by four mountain-runners in mail shirts that hung like water over their shoulders. All wore black-dyed leather caps with brass studs, and all carried their hammers in a way that implied the hammers were merely extensions of their hands. Rurik’s beard was braided short and tucked—a practice that said he had no interest in giving an enemy handhold. He took in the scene in one glance and then pointed with his hammer as if the head were an extension of his knuckles.

  “You two,” he said to Bardrin and Skorik, with a tone that suggested he had used “you two” as a single proper noun many times before. “With me. If you bleed, do it on your own time. You—cover the left. You—watch the right. Don’t chase glory. The engines are singing; don’t step in front of the notes.”

  Skorik puffed his chest despite the burns. “We were surveying—”

  “You were doing whatever it is you do when you don’t want to be watched,” Rurik cut in, not unkindly. “Save the speeches for the council hall if you live to flap there. Now move your feet.”

  They moved. Rank joined their rhythm and made it cleaner. The runners spread across the slope with an easy net of angles, never more than ten paces apart, never bunched, always with eyes working the sky and fists steady at the ends of their arms. Bardrin’s count started again, this time to the rhythm of the runners’ boots. Five, six, seven to the next jut of rock. Eleven, twelve, thirteen to the next low trough where their knees could briefly be lower than their ankles.

  “What did you do?” Rurik asked without looking over. It was not accusation so much as a professional’s reflex: know the shape of the mess before you plan the clean-up.

  “A soft seam,” Bardrin said. He would not soften his own part. “Skorik’s foot, the slope lied, the earth moved. Dirt went where it should not. The mother took offense.”

  “Dirt,” Skorik said, catching breath enough to defend himself. “A little dirt.”

  “A little,” Bardrin conceded, because truth mattered even when it did not make him look better. “We made a hot thing hotter by being near it.”

  “You found a nest,” Rurik said, sounding resigned rather than surprised. “And you brought a tail of fury home with you. I should fine you for breaking the peace of the city, but I like your heads up on your shoulders.”

  “I’d pay,” Skorik said, then ducked as a shadow swept across the rocks and a low, roaring hush broke over them. The not-mother red had swept down for a taste at the rear of the group. Flame rolled in a skimming sheet again. Two of the runners were caught on the edge. One went down to a knee with a choked shout and pushed himself up grimly, singe marks tracing his left shoulder and the side of his neck. The other stumbled and fell forward, palms striking hot rock; he bounced up with the discipline of a man who would not be caught twice.

  The air engine spoke again from the low works near the gate. This spear, aimed in a hurry, cut inside the dragon’s arc, forcing it to abort and lift sharply, wings pumping air in hard, heavy strokes. The runners’ hammers came up and thudded against rock because the rocks were what they could hit without losing pace. It looked like folly until one remembered dwarven method: a hammer on rock steadied a hand, and a steady hand was less likely to drop a weapon on his own foot in panic.

  “Back,” Rurik ordered, and the word carried the surety of a man who had learned command on slopes like these and not in a hall. “Do not run faster than your breath. Do not stop. We move and we live.”

  Goldbarrow’s gate grew as a geometry rather than a mere opening. The walls had been carved with purpose in an age when men thought in lines and weight, not decoration. Buttresses threw their shoulders into the hillsides. Above, ledges of stone built out across the approach held the engines: torsion-ballistae with their wound skeins of twisted sinew, wood arms banded with steel, bedplates pinned to bedrock. Crews rotated on their work like watch gears; one hauled to reset, one aimed by handspike, one sighted along the steel-shod shaft, one released on the commander’s notch-hand signal. When the engines spoke, the city shut its mouth. Everyone in earshot knew to keep a clear line for the spear’s path.

  “Hold your line!” Rurik shouted as another drake, not red—a younger, green-tinged beast with paler throat scales—drew near but reconsidered at the taste of death from below. A spear went by close enough to shave hair. It hissed, the air making a sound around it like steam escaping from a sealed crack. Skorik watched it out of the corner of his eye and felt a decided affection for big, simple solutions to big, simple problems.

  They reached the stretch of bright stone before the gate, the bare apron that had been cleared so that defenders could judge speed and angle at a glance. It was not a place a dwarf lingered unless he liked being the shape of a target. Rurik pushed them hard, and the runners stepped over the bodies of two dead goats with the clean focus that put grief aside until the work was done. One runner, the younger of the scorched men, looked up as he passed beneath the lintel and finally allowed himself to slump against the inside wall. A gate warden snapped two orders—water, and a cloth—and men obeyed without making a story out of it.

  Behind them, past the clear apron, past the low works and the pinned engines, the sky rearranged its trouble. Three more shapes had arrived, and then another, until the count stood at eight: the mother, two red drakes, another pair of drakes in bronze-brown, a deep green that glinted as it banked, and two far figures circling high and slow, too distant to name. They set a ring outside the reach of the engines and began their patient, punishing vigil. They were clever enough not to test steel where steel held advantage; they were clever enough to hold trade hostage, to paralyze the movement of men and goods beneath their slow, dusty arcs. A city had to live, and a city could be starved of movement without a single wall being touched.

  “See them set?” Rurik said to no one as he looked back from the gate’s shadow and watched the dragons hold their circling line. “They’re here for something. Not just revenge.”

  “For the nest,” Skorik said, not as certain as his tone implied.

  “For what you picked up near it,” Bardrin murmured, almost to himself. The thought pushed its way forward with the inevitability of a rock falling once it has begun to fall. He swallowed and did not add the word that came with it: ore.

  Inside the gate, the city’s noise rose up and then cracked against the sudden sight of the sky beyond. Goldbarrow was carved into the Granite Crowns with a patience that had outlived men who had started the first strokes. Vaulted halls spread back from the gate like cut arteries, words that meant nothing warm and living except when filled with people. The forges did not go cold. Their breath came in the steady breathing of bellows, the ringing of hammers on the anvils, the hiss of quenching. Today those sounds hesitated and came back with a jitter. Men kept working because a dwarf kept working. But eyes slid toward doors and someone was always finding a reason to step to a threshold and stare out toward the western light where the ballistae thumped and the dragons drew arcs as if measuring and re-measuring a loop of rope around the city.

  A runner—older, scar down his jaw that looked like a long, precise chip from an old accident—tugged Rurik’s sleeve and tilted his head toward the inner stairs. “Council summons,” he said. “The king’s fist is on the table, I’m told.”

  “Of course it is,” Rurik said. He looked at Bardrin and Skorik. “You put your feet in this water; you come answer for the depth. Follow me. Don’t wander. Wash your faces.”

  They obeyed the last order first. Bardrin carefully swabbed the soot and rock dust from his face with a damp cloth, then cleaned the skin around his burn and smeared a thin layer of salve from a runner’s kit across it. The salve stung and then did its quiet trick. Skorik scrubbed hard, then wiped his teeth with the hem of his cloak and spat black water into the gutter, because a clean mouth made a man feel more like he would keep his words tidy.

  The central council hall of Goldbarrow was not a place that intimidated Bardrin. It made him straighten and adjust the set of his shoulders, but it did not frighten him. It was a long, wide room cut into the mountain, pillars left in their natural square shapes to support the arching ceiling. The far end held the King’s seat—a massive, smooth block with arms carved to feel the weight of hands—set on a low dais only high enough to be seen above a crowd. Guild benches ran long down either side, not raised, because a dwarf respected a bench that had been made to sit and listen, not to preen and look down.

  King Wuldrim Orehammer sat with his hands resting lightly on the arms of his seat. The man was built like the room—square, unornamented, fitted. His beard was iron-gray, his eyes the color of the dark side of slate after rain. He had that feature that marked a certain kind of leader: he did not move much when he spoke, and when he did move, it counted. He did not raise his voice until the room forced him to, and then he did not need to raise it again. Across from him, on the guilds’ side, sat Dorla, Guildmistress of the Orehammer craftsmen. Dorla wore plain leathers darkened by work, a brass chain wound double on her left wrist—a habit learned at the forge to keep the chain out of the way if she had to lay her hand on hot metal to handle it properly. She had a manner of planting her hands on her knees that said she would rise quickly if she had to. And beside her, Master Hark leaned forward with his fingers steepled under his chin, eyes bright and hungry; Hark could look at a pebble and see a page of stories in it if you gave him time and a light.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  An agitated murmur ran through the hall like water that could not find the right course. A slender adviser in a clean robe—one of the king’s court, more hair oil than muscle—stood near the dais with a scroll, making the noise worse just by his presence, though he had said nothing yet. The mountain-runners ranged along a side wall in a line that invited any trouble to think twice.

  Wuldrim raised one hand and brought it down slowly onto the arm of his chair, one firm rap. The sound was ordinary. The effect was not. The hall’s noise went ragged and then settled like dust when the breeze dies.

  “Rurik,” Wuldrim said without wasting the breath on a greeting. “Report.”

  “Two of mine singed, no deaths,” Rurik said. “We brought in the perpetrators.” He jerked his chin toward Bardrin and Skorik as if pointing out a pair of goats that had knocked over a cooking fire. “Three dragons chased them to our apron. Engines took one. The rest have set their ring and begun their stubborn watch.”

  “We were surveying,” Skorik began, because he could not bear a headline without a clarifying sentence.

  “Both of you will speak in turn,” Dorla said, and her tone cut through Skorik’s words like the nick of a fine chisel. “And when you do, you will remember we like the city more than we like your reasons.”

  “It seems extravagant to imagine a handful of dragons would venture past the outer stacks to spit fire at our walls,” an adviser said from behind Dorla. He wore a slightly indulgent expression, as if he were correcting a child on the names of the stars. “Dragons keep to the northern ranges; they do not—”

  “Eight,” Wuldrim said, not loudly and not slowly. He did not turn his head to see if the man would shut his mouth; he knew he would. “Eight bodies sweep the outer air—one elder female, two reds, two browns, a green, and two at distance. They hover just outside the place where my engines turn them to meat. Eight is not a handful. Eight is a purpose. You will all speak to purpose today.”

  The adviser closed his mouth as if it had surprised him by being too slow to keep up. He sat. Wuldrim’s eyes settled on Bardrin and Skorik. “You brought trouble with you,” he said. It was not a question. “Now tell us why. Step forward. Speak in the order you came into the hall: the precise one first, the noisy one after.”

  Bardrin swallowed and stepped into the open space between the benches, his burned arm held steady against his side. He spoke as he always spoke: as if words were tools that should be well-fitted to a task. He described the ridge line, the pocket where they had set their evening shelter, the early morning slope below, and the bowl where the nest lay. He described the mother’s posture and the number of eggs, how the clutch had been arranged, the way she turned them. He explained the soft seam and the thin skin of clay, the way a layer had slid and sent a sheet of dirt across the rim of the nest. He did not spare Skorik and he did not shield him from fault. He did not spare himself either.

  “We took refuge in a fissure,” he concluded. “We made our way inward just far enough to survive the flame. The fissure opened into a chamber. We noted known seams—iron, copper, tin—and then we found a lode I could not name. We took three chips, wrapped them, and we left when the wind told us the mother had moved away. We made our return in order, following safe lines. At midday above our apron, three dragons chased us into the engines’ range. You heard the rest through Rurik.”

  Skorik stepped beside him, and even in a hall he couldn’t keep his hands still. He spread them and lifted and dropped them with his sentences. “What he calls a soft seam was treacherous clay under honest stone,” he said. “It wasn’t reckless; it was bad luck. We didn’t meddle with the eggs. We moved away. The mother decided a breath on her neck was reason to set fire to the world. The chamber below—he’s right. There’s good iron, a little green tongue of copper, tin that might be worth a longer pry if it holds, and a streak of glassy black with a weird inner glow if you hold a flame to it. It’s not obsidian; I know obsidian. This felt heavier.”

  “Bring what you brought,” Dorla said.

  Bardrin and Skorik had already unstrapped their packs. Bardrin laid them on the floor with a care that would have looked fussy if it hadn’t looked so much like discipline. Skorik upended his onto a low table that a clerk dragged into place with more zeal than strength. Ore chips rang against wood and each other. Iron flashed dull red-brown; copper flashed green where it had sweated a thin frost. Tin lay like dry gray tongues. It was a tidy, honest haul, the sort of thing that made a guild master nod because it promised days of regular work.

  Some pieces did not behave. They didn’t ring; they thunked with a density that the ear read. They slid across the wood as if the surface were slicker beneath them, came to rest against a cup, and sat there with a self-assured, private thing in the way they occupied space. They were glassy-dark, not quite black, each holding a depth that seemed to drink the light rather than reflect it. Inside, if the light struck right, something like a breath moved, a faint, red-gold awareness that was not flame but resembled the idea of it.

  No one touched them at first. Dorla had leaned forward; now she leaned back. Hark—somehow both delighted and wary—exhaled through his nose as if the thing had just called him a name and he’d recognized it. King Wuldrim did not change expression, but his shoulders came a line tighter and a set of guardsmen along the wall adjusted their posture as if they had been told to expect a blow.

  “What is that?” Hark said, his voice carefully empty of claim.

  “At the time of the find, a thing I could not name,” Bardrin replied steadily.

  Wuldrim raised two fingers and made a small motion. One of the advisers—shorter, broader, older than the air-breathers—stood. He wore his hair in the old way, close-cropped, his beard braided in two heavy lengths that lay across his chest like ropes.

  “In old texts,” the adviser said, and here his voice shifted from ordinary talk to the careful, measured cadence of a man reciting something memorized out of respect more than fear, “it is called Dragon-ore. Rare to the point of near myth. Dense. Glassy-cleaved. Holds a faint inner light when heated—less a glow than a breath. Dragons covet it. That word is chosen. They hunger for it in a way that goes beyond possession. In prior eras—your grandfather’s grandfather’s time, Sire—small finds under Goldbarrow were hauled in secret along sealed routes. The ore was taken north, then north again, across the underways and fed to a chasm they named The Deep-Voiced. We sealed after each passage. We did not keep it. We did not work it. We did not want to learn what it would teach us to want.”

  Skorik’s eyes flicked to Bardrin. Bardrin did not look back. He stared at the ore because it demanded all his attention, the way good ore demanded respect with the simplest of arguments: heft, sheen, presence.

  “You bring dragons to your porch when you set pies there,” one of the younger guildmen muttered. “And those slices are hot.”

  “How many did you say?” Dorla asked Wuldrim, though she knew the answer and had no taste for being merely told again.

  “Eight,” Wuldrim said. “Circling where they are safe and making us unsafe with their patience. Eight are enough to break the back of a trade week. Eight are enough to make a city think it is besieged without a single ram at a gate.”

  Bardrin set his tongue against the back of his teeth and found the sentence he needed. “Then we take the pie away from the porch,” he said, surprising himself with the image and then letting it stand because it did the job. “If we move the ore, the dragons will follow habit. They will leave our sky once the lure leaves our ground.”

  “You propose to carry it out?” Hark asked, leaning forward, curiosity nearly swallowing caution.

  “I propose we carry it out so we do not fight eight in a week and eighteen in three,” Bardrin said. His voice held no swagger. It was a plain plan, the sort that you could write on a board and count parts.

  Dorla’s lips pressed together—a habitual gesture when she needed a moment to let her mind sort. “In principle, yes,” she said. “In practice, the old routes are not polished stone waiting for our boots. We closed them for reasons besides secrecy. We sealed them because closing keeps things out as well as in. The underways to the north run long and hard. The last miles end at a chasm we do not visit if we can help it. We used to call it The Deep-Voiced because the wind in it sounded like the heavy, threatening breath of something huge sleeping below. There are deeper names I don’t care to bring into this room. No light. No easy air. No certainty of what took our tunnels for homes after we laid the seals.”

  “Reopen them,” Hark said, too quickly, as if his mind would rather reach than wait. “We have crews. We have powder for tight spots. We can—”

  “We can get men killed in a darkness that does not forgive a mistake,” Dorla interrupted. “We need to go quiet. We need to go fast. We need light that does not gutter when wind finds a crack. And we need hands that remember the underways’ manners.”

  Skorik lifted his chin. “We can carry. We know how to keep our heads in close walls.”

  “You have demonstrated a talent for putting them where a hammer can reach them,” Rurik said from the side of the hall, with the brusque affection he reserved for men who annoyed him but did not disappoint him.

  Skorik opened his mouth to retort and felt Dorla’s elbow find his ribs with a precision that put his breath on hold for a second. It was not personal; it was an act of governance.

  “King,” Dorla said, turning back toward Wuldrim with the economy of a woman who did not like to waste her own time, “we do as we did in your great-grandsire’s day. We take it out the old way. Not with fanfare. Not with a crew and a cart that every ear in the mountain can hear. Two carriers. A third to keep the lamps honest. A guard? No. Noise is our enemy. The mountains to the northeast already crowd with nests. A procession would look like a challenge.”

  “We ask priests,” one of the quieter advisers said, voice low but certain. “The Temple of the First Anvil keeps those whose vows require them to carry light into places where hands would rather not go.”

  Wuldrim studied Bardrin and Skorik long enough that they both felt the weight of the gaze and had to resist the urge to fidget. He nodded once, as if closing a ledger on a clean calculation.

  “Bardrin. Skorik,” he said. “You made this our problem today. You will make it less by nightfall. You will carry Dragon-ore along the old northward underways to The Deep-Voiced. You will drop it. You will close as you go. You will be accompanied by a cleric who keeps light without oil and whom I trust not to chatter in the inner echo. Dorla—name your light.”

  “Already thought of,” Dorla said. She glanced at Hark because she could rely on him to react with a mixture of alarm and delight and she liked to watch his mind turn. He did not disappoint, breathing in and lifting his hands a little as if to catch the problem where it was thrown. “Hedrun,” Dorla added. “If the temple will loan her.”

  “Hedrun,” Wuldrim repeated. He nodded to himself once. “The steady one. She will say yes.”

  Skorik drew breath to object, because there was a part of him that objected to anything that sounded like orders one breath after a man had nearly burned. Dorla’s elbow found him again—a neat home between muscle and rib. His breath folded grudgingly back inside his chest.

  “Questions?” Wuldrim asked the hall, in a tone that made it clear that what he meant was: any objection that has not already answered itself?

  One of the younger weapons masters started to lift a hand and then thought better and rubbed his nose instead. Hark opened his mouth and shut it again, then spoke because he was a man who believed in words even when silence had a better claim.

  “Do we know what attracts them beyond the ore’s presence?” Hark asked. “Can we—”

  “No,” Wuldrim said. “We do not play at understanding the hungers of creatures we cannot outfly. We manage the thing we can move. We send it away and we let habit move what follows.”

  An older guildman, face lined by a lifetime in heat and smoke, scratched his beard. “And if they circle anyway?” he asked.

  “Then we find out what else they smell,” Wuldrim said. “But we don’t guess while the engines sit and ache to sing.”

  “That is a crisp answer, Sire,” Dorla said, and the words, from her, were strong as a seal. She rose. “Bardrin. Skorik. Pack. You have an hour to gather what two men can carry for three days under stone. I’ll fetch your light.”

  “Master,” Bardrin said, and felt that the word had in it a piece of everything he had ever meant when he spoke to the guild: commitment, obedience, and a private, stubborn pride. “Yes.”

  Skorik nodded and kept his mouth closed because when the river’s current finally agreed with you, you didn’t splash to prove you could move water. He looked at Hark. “When we come back, I want the first bottle on the table and my name on a line in your book.”

  Hark smiled in that absent, delighted way that suggested he had heard only the part about the book. “If you come back,” he said, without cruelty, “you can write your own entry.”

  They left the council hall in a movement that had the look of a plan acquiring legs. Runners peeled off to relay orders. A clerk jogged ahead to send word to the temple. The engines thumped twice in the distance and the hallway felt it in its bones. Bardrin and Skorik moved toward their quarters, where the plain kit of a survey pair had been left in tidy disorder in the morning and looked now like something versions of themselves had owned, not the men they were now.

  Bardrin packed deliberately. Rope, twice coiled and laid with an easy pay. Two lamps, one to serve and one to sleep; oil, but less than he would need if they lacked cleric-light entirely. He packed a small coil of copper wire, a few wedges, a folding piton hammer that had been his father’s. He paused on the last item, a tin charm that had hung from his pack for years, bent entirely out of shape by the morning’s heat. He set it on the table. He could not fix it with the time he had. He left it and felt its absence the way a man feels the space between his fingers after he takes off a ring.

  Skorik packed fast and then emptied the pack and packed again when Bardrin’s glance made him feel his hurry. He took a spare shirt and socks because his foot comfort was a debt he did not want to owe. He took a small hoard of chalk for marking walls. He took a cutting of a willow switch he used as a guide when moving loads under low ceilings because the willow taught a dwarf to bow without crying about it. He took his pride and deflated it long enough to put Bardrin’s coil of rope on top of his own. He did not take the carved bone dice that sometimes lived in his pocket. He felt their absence like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He left them because the tunnels did not care for distraction.

  They met at the small postern that led from the guild quarter to the central artery toward the temple. Outside, the sounds of the engines had settled into a steady pulse. Beyond that, higher up, faint roars came like threats that had gone stale through repetition. Goldbarrow’s people moved like a body whose heartbeats had lost a measure and were now trying to find it again. A group of children, wearing aprons, was being hurried across a square by an aunt who kept one hand on the smallest one’s collar and the other hand fisted and ready without knowing why. A pair of smiths stood under a vaulted arch and argued about nothing that mattered because they needed a familiar shape to fit their breath into.

  “Do you think they’ll watch us go?” Skorik asked, jerking his chin toward the high, stone-framed view of the sky.

  “They don’t need to,” Bardrin said. “They will smell where we’ve been and take the pattern. Dragons are not short of cunning.”

  Skorik’s jaw worked as he chewed on poor thoughts he would usually spit. He swallowed them because they were not good food and because the temple lay ahead and he had always liked the way it smelled, like oil, wool, and water, and the steadiness that came from people who felt comfortable carrying both a hammer and a quiet blessing at the same time.

  The Temple of the First Anvil lived in a bend of the central artery and opened onto a square that had a stone basin at its center. The basin was wide and shallow, with a thin trickle falling from a spout shaped like a plain smith’s tongue that fell into the water and made a sound that had comforted journeymen and apprentices for two hundred years. The temple’s doors were tall and square, their only embellishment three simple lines incised into the stone above: weight, heat, work. Words that did not require words to be understood.

  Two guards in temple livery—white tabards over mail—leaned on their spears on either side of the entry. Dorla arrived ahead of the dwarves, moving with a gait that said her mind ran faster than her legs and that time had never once outpaced her. Master Hark came with her, because he could not leave this story half-told. One of the guards stepped inside at Dorla’s word. The other shifted his spear to a resting angle and nodded to Bardrin and Skorik with the unconcern of a man who had seen so much in this square that two soot-streaked craftsmen did not alarm him.

  “You know who we want,” Dorla said to the guard who remained.

  “Hedrun,” he said, and the temple built the name into its stones by the way he said it: as if it were familiar, respected, not feared.

  “Hedrun,” Dorla echoed.

  They waited. Silence in a city is never empty, not really. It filled itself with small things—the slap of a sandal, the creak of a gate hinge not oiled recently enough, the hiss of breath from a man who had run two miles quietly and only then let himself gasp, the low, steady chant of a priest beyond the door that barely made it out into the square and turned the air a fraction thicker for a breath. Bardrin found the edge of a bench and rolled his finger along it, feeling the worn groove that a thousand hands had made. Skorik tapped his heel three times and then remembered and stopped. Hark watched the temple door as if watching it might make a soul come faster.

  Hedrun came wearing white. The robe was plain, belted against work rather than ceremony, sleeves rolled to the forearms. She came forward with that small, deliberate smile that priests learn so the person they are about to speak to feels held and not judged. Hedrun was not large in the way Dorla was not large; both women seemed to occupy exactly their space and to dissuade the air from jostling them. Hedrun’s hair was covered in a simple kerchief; her hands carried the callus that said she was not afraid of tools. She looked at Dorla and then beyond, taking in the dwarves, the light in the square, the fretful tilt of Goldbarrow’s body today.

  Dorla stepped forward. She took Hedrun’s hands in both of hers and spoke quietly, but Bardrin and Skorik were close enough to see the words, if not hear them, and to read them in the movement of the hands as the two women spoke. Concern. A gesture that mimed a line going down into darkness. Dorla’s hand, flat, indicating a span—a distance of so many days under stone, perhaps. Hedrun’s brows drew together, not in refusal, but in the moment when a mind counts cost honestly. Dorla waited. Hedrun took a steadying breath that moved her shoulders and then nodded once, a clean nod that did not wobble. Dorla pulled Hedrun into a brief embrace that had in it the steadier’s last squeeze before a journey.

  Hedrun stepped back, lifted her hands as if to bless, then lowered them again and gave instead the small, practical smile that men prefer when they have to go into a place that feeds on fear. She turned, spoke to the guard who had summoned her, and the guard disappeared into the temple to fetch what would be needed: a staff with a head that held light without flame, a simple pack, and a waterskin that had been blessed for a path that did not love the thirsty.

  Dorla came back to Bardrin and Skorik with the lines of tension on her face eased out, not gone. The tension would not leave until the thing was done. But it had been given a shape now, and that made it more manageable.

  “Pack what you need,” Dorla said, voice low but bright with that steady heat she used to harden a decision once it had been made. She looked at both men and allowed herself the smallest curve of a smile that was to be shared and not admired. “We have our light for the tunnels.”

  Episode 21 continues in Episode 30.