Chương 103: Cinder

The thing in the tunnel had stopped looking like a soldier long ago. Some pieces of that shape remained, preserved where the cold had been kind enough to keep them useful. A helmet with a split visor still clung to the left side of its head, though the face beneath had collapsed into a rime-packed hollow. One arm remained, mostly human from shoulder to wrist, wrapped in mail of darkened mirrorsteel and carrying a narrow arming sword that might once have been a masterwork blade.

The upper half of its ribcage lay exposed, threaded with crystal and the blackened remnants of skin drawn tight against cracked bone. The rest was less merciful. Ice had grown where flesh had failed. Bone, shale, dead metal, and whatever else the storm had dragged through its long, patient hunger had been forced into the gaps. Its other arm was far too long, jointed in three places and ending in fingers of fused black shale.

Its legs were a mismatched arrangement of old femurs, splintered greaves, and jagged columns of ice that scraped against the stone with every step. Its eyes were two pinpricks of raw iron burning with a faint blue light from behind the visor. Resonance that belonged to none of the Houses or known powers seeped through those eyes as it dragged itself forward, sword scraping a pale line along the frost-glazed ground. Cin lifted two fingers. Mark of the Searing Ward.

The creature's blade swept toward his throat and stopped a handspan short. The ice threaded through its shoulder flushed a deep, dull red from within. The color spread through its arm in narrow veins, turning the frost cloudy and fractured. The thing stuttered as the heat trapped inside it expanded, splitting the cold apart along every hidden seam. One leg burst into shards. A new brace of thickening frost and broken stone began forming from the surrounding ice to steady it, but its other leg was already glowing.

Cin turned his fingers slightly, guiding the sword away from his face. A dry hiss bled from the metal where his skin touched the chill clinging to it. The blade trembled once, its old enchantments flickering beneath the rime, then shattered into three long pieces that fell into the snow. He stepped closer and touched two fingers to the temple of the broken helm.

"Though your name has long since been forgotten," he said, voice low, "the Wounded Sun remembers all sacrifice. Your suffering ends here." The red veins reached the hollow of its skull. For a breath, the creature stood almost still. Ice cracked through the body in branching lines, from shoulder to spine, from ribs to jaw, from the long wrong arm down to its fingers of shale. The light in its eyes softened into something dimmer, almost relieved. Then the frost binding it together lost coherence all at once.

The soldier collapsed inward, finally allowed to come apart. Helmet, bones, mail, and pale ice sank into a heap at Cin's feet, glowing red. He waited. The tunnel offered only the slow drip of meltwater from above and the softer whisper of a distant, howling wind. Cin lowered his hand after a count of twelve. Sometimes, this particular strain of foe was allowed a revival. But this one did not appear to be among them. Good.

Those who had once been soldiers in life should not have to suffer this kind of indignity, regardless of how many ages might have passed since they last drew breath. He turned from the remains and looked over the tunnel. It had likely been a service drift once, or one of the manways used for the old ore-roads cut beneath the pass. The Thryne Passes were riddled with the remnants of mines that had been bled dry during the previous cycle under the auspices of the Ember Throne and its southern ambitions.

Cin had no notion of how many forgotten tunnels these mountains truly contained, nor did he have the inclination to learn. He had spent enough time in them already. His gaze moved past the ceiling covered in spears of blue-white ice, resting briefly on the bodies of the furred, long-limbed beasts that had likely made this passage their den before the Rimebound Soldier appeared. Their corpses were frozen and almost pristine, but he didn't bother approaching them. Cin snapped his fingers. Mark of the Quiet Wake.

Their corpses flared into ember, smokeless flame as the Quiet Pyre's flame welcomed and cleansed what remained of them. He had seen enough of the pattern already. Beasts killed by the Rimebound carried ice in their marrow that was far older than their actual bones. The storm preserved, altered, and returned what it took, and whatever it touched was better consigned to flame. There was a logic to how the storm worked. He was certain of that much. He simply hadn't found it yet.

Cin's eyes focused on the end of the tunnel, and the fissure upon reality that waited there. It was a crack running from floor to ceiling through a slab of black mountain stone. Narrow enough that a man could not have forced an arm through it, but the air around it bent inward with a pressure that hungered for Resonance. Snow slipped from the fissure in thin streams, curling through the tunnel, drifting upward, and clinging to the ceiling. Beyond it was that storm. A depth of churned whiteness.

Ice, cloud, and something old. Now and then, something moved inside that depth, sliding behind the storm like a shadow passing beneath a frozen lake. Cin removed a sigil-inscribed strip of sable copper from the inner pocket of his coat and walked up to the fissure. He set the strip against the wall beside it. Resonance and frost consumed half the copper's length in less than two seconds. He watched the spread, noted the speed, then brushed the frost away with his thumb.

The metal beneath warmed in response, but the cold resisted longer than it should have. Worse than the last one, then. These were still well within his ability to contain, but it had already reached the point where even a Tenth Binding sigilist would be forced to give up. And the storm above the passes was still building. How much more time did they have? He pressed two fingers against the stone, ignoring the frost that tried to climb him as his Resonance began burning a path into the wall.

Lines of muted light sank through part of the mountain, branching outward as they carved the shape of a boundary into its substance. That was when a distant pulse of Resonance moved through the tunnel. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. He paused, lips drawing tight. The pulse was very distant. Perhaps at the other end of the passes.

A working at that range wasn't impossible, but it was difficult, and almost assuredly wasteful unless one had a specific need. Or an extremely distorted sense of proportion. The Resonance that reached him was too faint to determine its source, but he suspected he already knew. He returned his attention to his half-formed Mark, taking a moment to finish the Resonance structure before stepping back to look through the fissure at the storm beyond. Then he let the completed working ignite. Mark of Pyrebound Suture.

Heat gathered without flame. It began beneath his hand as a compact point of red-gold light, then spread into a lattice of ordered lines, each one finding the next with deliberate precision. He motioned, and the lines threaded forward to cross the fissure in layers. Frost screamed where the first line touched. Cold spilled into the tunnel in a sudden sheet, hard enough to drive loose snow across the floor and plaster it against his boots. With his free hand, Cin traced a second Mark into the air at his side.

Mark of Ashen Mandate. The ember-lines he had laid through the mountain wall surrounding the fissure answered. A web of bright-red geometry surfaced from the stone, tightening around the crack as the Pyrebound Suture began to strain. For a moment, the fissure pushed wider. White fought back beyond it, pressing hard enough that the nearest lines bent inward and flickered. Then the Fifth Seal of the Ashen Mandate took hold.

Red light sank deeper into the stone, and the black rock around the fissure started melting into slag as a broad oval of the wall, from floor to ceiling, was burned into nothingness. The fissure disappeared. Along with it, the upward-falling snow faltered, only to come dropping down on Cin's head and shoulders. He watched the flakes that fell near the empty space where the fissure had been melt as they neared the lava that remained of the wall. For now, that was enough.

He adjusted the cuff of his fingerless glove, stepping over the remains of the Rimebound Soldier as he headed toward the tunnel mouth. He needed to have a conversation with his colleague about not announcing her location to half the pass. Cin had located and closed two more fissures by the time he climbed one of the southern spurs above the Thryne Passes. The wind and sleet had done little against his Resonance in the lower reaches. Higher up, closer to the source of the storm, that changed.

The cold grew more intrusive with every ascent, pressing through warded cloth and Marks with the slow insistence of water finding cracks in stone. It didn't overwhelm him, but it was always an annoyance. Even the air seemed reluctant to carry breath here. He reached an upper shelf beneath a jagged shoulder of black stone, its ledge jutting from the mountain like a broken tooth.

It was broad enough for a small camp, but exposed on three sides to the drop below, where blowing snow moved in thick, restless sheets through the pass. Ahead, the storm churned low across the peaks, folding over itself in pasty layers that made the sky look too close. Mireya sat at the edge with her legs dangling as if they were reaching for that whiteness. Cin stopped a short distance behind her, just outside a semicircle of sigil-carved wardstones half-buried in the rock.

Their reliefs glowed faintly, holding open a rough patch of calm where the worst of the wind broke.

"Did you finish your side?" he asked. Mireya did not answer. Her head was tilted slightly upward, eyes fixed on the storm. Thick dustings of snow had gathered in her dark hair and along the shoulders of her coat, but she seemed not to notice. One hand rested beside her on the stone, fingers twitching now and then, counting something only she could see. Cin waited.

"Mireya," he finally said.

"Hm?"

"Did you finish your side?" She turned slowly, pearly eyes blinking at him as if his voice carried across a great distance. Then she pointed somewhere down into the white below.

"That one, yes."

"That one," Cin repeated.

"There were others."

"I am aware." Her gaze drifted back to the storm.

"I didn't do those." Cin exhaled through his nose. Arguing while she was in this state rarely produced results. She claimed it was sometimes entertaining, but he had yet to experience that. He walked into the center of the warded space. A narrow field table stood there, its dark iron legs driven into the stone and its surface carved with sigils that still held the remnant warmth of his earlier work. He pulled a folded length of sigilcloth from his coat.

The fabric unrolled across the table, weighted at the corners by four slivers of clouded cobalt. The moment the final weight touched down, thin red strokes stirred across the fabric, arranging themselves into a rough map of the surrounding pass. It was incomplete. It had been incomplete for weeks. Maps of the Thryne Passes were not hard to come by. A merchant's map could show roads, old watch posts, cliff paths, and the safer approaches through the mountain wall.

A military survey could show elevation, sightlines, supply routes, and likely ambush points. This was neither. This was a Veilchart. It tracked pressure, movement, and Resonance distortions. It didn't care where the roads were supposed to be. Cin drew out the first frost-eaten copper strip from the tunnel below and set it against the cloth, drawing out the Resonance inside. The chart shivered.

A new thread of red crawled through one of the eastern gullies, bent sharply north, then dissolved before reaching the center. He frowned. He pulled out two more black copper strips. More red threads bled across the map, sketching connections between sealed breaches and confirming his fear. The source of the storm had moved again. The vaultspat thing would not stop hiding. Mireya's soft hum reached him.

"You're doing the face again," she said. Cin glanced up. Some of her focus had returned, though not all of it.

"I have several faces."

"The boring one."

"I am always boring, according to you."

"Boring, boring, boring." His eyes lingered on her as she started rocking her head faintly from side to side, then he returned to the chart. It was slightly frustrating when she drifted, but he needed the readings aligned before they moved again, so it didn't matter what she did. And interrupting her too early only made her annoyed. Cin pressed two fingers to the sigilcloth and fed a measured strand of Resonance through its woven structure.

With his other hand, he retrieved several older Veilcharts and laid them beside the active chart, cross-checking the newest thread against the pattern he had been building since he entered the inner passes. Each sealed fissure appeared as a dull ember across the various maps. There were far too many now. Too many scattered points, too many false centers, too many lines that curved toward something and then failed before giving him a location.

"How long were you sitting there?" he asked absently, more to keep her somewhat present than because he expected a proper answer. In the corner of his vision, he saw Mireya tilt her head.

"Here?"

"Yes."

"Since shortly after you left." Cin paused.

"That was over three hours ago."

"Mmh. I finished mine quickly."

"There were at least three other breaches within reach."

"I noticed."

"And you decided not to close them?"

"I didn't think I would need to." His fingers stilled against the sigilcloth. He looked up at her. Mireya met his eyes with a calmness that was almost certainly deliberate. Her boots swung idly above the drop. Then she pointed one finger toward the charts.

"Did it move again?"

"It always moves," he said.

"Seems like you're doing a bad job, then."

"I am narrowing it down."

"Yep." She laughed. The chart under Cin's hands pulsed, but he ignored it.

"Mireya, were you the one who flared your Resonance earlier?" Her gaze lifted to the storm again.

"No." Cin stepped away from the table and walked past the wardstones into the wind as it pulled at his coat, stopping behind her.

"Did you see what it was?"

"No," she said lightly.

"…Do you know what it was?" Her legs stopped swinging.

"Yep." Cin studied her for a moment, then raised his gaze over the jagged peaks and the pass half-swallowed beneath the storm. If it hadn't been Mireya herself, and she appeared to see no reason for concern, then there were not many alternatives. She had mentioned an old friend being back near Marrowfen before. Could it be…? It would be very much like her to announce her presence across half a mountain range like that. It would also be like her not to realize that such searches wouldn't work here.

"Yep," Mireya said again as if reading his thoughts.

"Ah, but she probably doesn't want to see you."

"Why would she not want to see me?"

"Hmm." She touched one finger to her cheek as she glanced at him.

"Because of your face?" Cin looked at her flatly.

"Right. That. You're going to be mad at her."

"…Do I have reason to be mad at her?"

"Who knows? Probably. But I think she's waiting, so you should go and say hello." She gave him a bright smile.

"Say hello from me too."

"You're not coming?"

"Nope. I have something to do first." Mireya braced both hands against the frost-slick stone beside her, leaning forward to peer down through the veils of snow.

"Ah, and by the way," she added.

"When you see her, tell her I took one of her old 'journals' back then and still have it. I've made copies, so if she wants to burn them all, she'll have to find me before it's too late."

"Mirey—" Before Cin could finish, she pushed off the ledge and dropped into the snow. He stepped to the edge after her, watching as the last dark flicker of her coat was quickly swallowed. For a moment, he felt a small measure of pity for their mutual companion. Then he decided to reserve judgment until he knew precisely how much anger he was personally owed.