The Wrath of the Flame

The gates of the Crown opened on the first day of the month of the Thaw, with the bells ringing and the Flame roaring and the whole of Calder Reach summoned up nine hundred and twelve stairs to the Cathedral of the Undying Flame, to give thanks.

Teo went with them.

He went in a grey coat that was too big for him, with an iron mask pulled down over his face, marching in a column of twelve Ashwardens behind Captain Sorrel Dane. He had argued against it. So had Mira. So, in his slow, immovable way, had Bram. It was madness, they all said. The Archdeacon had named him. Every Ashwarden on the Crown knew his face.

"Not under a mask," Dane had said flatly. "Under a mask, every Ashwarden looks the same. That's what the masks are for."

So Teo marched up the stairs in the grey coat, with sweat running down his back under the heavy cloth and his heart pounding in his ears so loudly that he was sure the man beside him could hear it.

'This is the stupidest thing I've ever done,' he thought, around the third hundredth stair. 'And I once took the handle off a blessed pump in front of an Ashwarden patrol.'

'...Wait. That was also me.'

The Cathedral was the largest building in Calder Reach. It was larger, Teo realised as they marched into it, than the hall under Mount Selk. Its nave was a vast, towering cavern of white stone, a hundred paces long, its pillars rising up like the trunks of the grey trees in the Ashlands to a ceiling so high that it was lost in a haze of incense smoke. Its windows were tall and narrow and filled with glass of red and gold, and the light that came through them was the colour of fire. And at its far end, behind a great altar of black stone, an enormous round window opened onto the sky... and through it, so close that Teo could feel its heat on his face from a hundred paces away, roared the Undying Flame.

The whole city was packed into the nave. The Shelf at the front, in their furs and silks, looking pale and thin and haunted. The Sump at the back, crowded in the shadows beneath the pillars... and Teo noticed, with a strange pang, how many more of the Sump there were. How many of them had faces unmarked by the pox. How many of them, when they lifted their arms to cross themselves, showed a small dark scar above the elbow.

Dane's column took its place along the wall on the left side of the nave, among two hundred other Ashwardens. Teo stood among them, rigid, his eyes fixed on the altar.

The bells stopped.

Valdris Kahl came out onto the altar.

He was wearing white today. A long white robe, embroidered with gold, and on his breast a great sunburst of gold and blue stones in the shape of the Flame. Behind him came twelve deacons in red, and four acolytes in white, carrying between them, on long poles, a great box of dark wood bound in brass. They set it down beside the altar, very carefully, and stepped back.

The Archdeacon raised his hands. The whole Cathedral fell silent.

"People of Calder Reach," he said.

He did not shout. He never shouted. But his voice filled the vast nave from end to end, quiet and warm and grave, as if he were speaking to each of them alone.

"For four months, the Flame has tested us. For four months, the red pox has walked our streets. You have buried your children. You have burned your dead. You have prayed... and the Flame has heard you. The pox is fading. The Flame has spared the faithful." He paused. "But it has not spared all. And there are those among you who would tell you why."

A ripple went through the crowd.

"You have heard of the cow-scratch," said the Archdeacon. "You have heard that a cart-man of the Sump, a heretic and a thief, who stole the pages of the Makers and fled into the Ashlands to worship their ruins, came back with a mark. A mark he carves into the flesh of the faithful. A mark taken from the blisters of beasts." His voice grew sorrowful. "And you have heard that those who bear it do not die."

The silence was absolute now.

"I will not lie to you," said Valdris Kahl. "It is true."

Teo stopped breathing.

"The Flame is merciful," the Archdeacon went on, gently. "Even to heretics. Even to those who corrupt the pure flesh it made. The Flame has let them live — for now — so that they may repent. But their souls..." He shook his head slowly. "Their souls are marked. As their bodies are. And the Flame has not forgotten."

He turned to the box of dark wood beside the altar.

"Let the Flame," he said quietly, "show you."

The acolytes opened the box.

Teo craned his neck. So did everyone in the Cathedral. Inside the box, packed in straw, there were jars. Big glass jars, eight of them, as tall as a man's forearm, standing in two rows. Each one was lined, inside and out, with something that gleamed dully in the firelight... a thin, silvery coating, like the foil that wrapped the Chantry's holy candles. A brass rod stuck up out of the top of each one, through a wooden stopper, ending in a polished brass ball. And the rods were all joined together by a single heavy chain.

Next to the box, two of the acolytes were turning a crank.

It was attached to a strange machine that Teo had not noticed... a great wheel of glass, as wide as a cart-wheel, mounted on a wooden frame, with pads of leather pressed against its edges. As the acolytes turned the crank, the glass wheel spun, faster and faster, rubbing against the leather, and a faint, crackling hiss began to fill the air.

Teo stared at it.

He had seen this before.

Not the machine. A drawing of it. A drawing in the red book, in the chapter on lightning and fire. Chapter 14. Electricity. A drawing of a glass globe being spun against a leather pad, and a jar lined with metal foil beside it, and a man holding his hand toward the jar with a spark leaping between them.

The Archdeacon turned and beckoned to someone in the front row of the crowd.

It was an old man, from the Shelf, thin and frightened, with a dark scar on his arm. A Shelf servant, perhaps, who had come down to the Sump and taken the cow-scratch in secret. Two Ashwardens brought him forward and stood him in front of the altar, shaking.

"This man bears the mark of the beast," said the Archdeacon. "Let the Flame judge him."

He gestured. One of the deacons took the old man's hand, and pressed it toward the brass ball on top of the nearest jar.

There was a sound like the crack of a whip.

A spark leapt from the brass ball to the old man's fingers... a thin, jagged thread of blue-white fire, as long as a finger, bright enough to leave a purple streak across Teo's eyes. The old man screamed and flew backward as if he had been punched, and fell on the stone floor, and lay there, twitching.

The whole Cathedral gasped. Somewhere, a child began to cry.

"The Wrath of the Flame," said Valdris Kahl softly.

He turned, and looked out over the crowd, and his clear grey eyes swept slowly across the nave — across the Shelf and the Sump and the long line of Ashwardens standing along the wall — and passed over Teo, and did not stop.

Teo did not breathe. He did not move.

But under the mask, he was not afraid anymore.

He was thinking.

Electricity, the red book had said. A form of energy that exists in all matter. When you rubbed certain things together... glass against leather, amber against wool, a cat's fur against a dry hand on a winter's day... tiny particles could be scraped from one to the other, and the thing that lost them and the thing that gained them would pull at each other. That was static. Everyone had felt it. A crackle when you pulled off a wool shirt in the dry cold. A tiny sting when you touched an iron door-handle after walking across a fur rug.

And in the 1740s, in a Maker town called Leiden, someone had discovered that you could store it. In a glass jar, lined with metal foil inside and out. The Leyden jar. You charged it by touching it to a spinning glass wheel, and it held the charge, and held it, and held it, until something touched the rod on top... and then all of it leapt out at once, in a single crack of blue fire.

A small jar could give you a sting. A big one could knock a man down. Eight big ones, chained together...

It was not the Flame. It was a machine. A machine out of the red book. A machine that any blacksmith and glazier in the Sump could build in a week, if they knew how.

And Valdris Kahl knew how. Of course he did. He had read it in the vault, forty years ago. And every Archdeacon before him had read it, for four hundred years, and they had been using it to frighten people every holy day since before Hesk was born.

Teo's hands were shaking under the grey sleeves. Not with fear.

The red book said something else, too. Something that Teo had read with his heart pounding, by firelight, on the long road home from Mount Selk. Something about a man called Benjamin Franklin, and a kite, and a storm.

The Archdeacon raised his hands again.

"The Flame has judged," he said. "And now, the Flame will be cleansed. The heresy of the cow-scratch began with one man. A cart-man of the Sump. Teo Brask. Who is hiding among you, even now." His voice rose, for the first time, ringing out over the nave. "I say to you, people of Calder Reach: bring him before the Flame! Bring him to this altar, and let the Wrath of the Flame judge him, as it has judged this man! And when it has — when the Flame has struck the heretic down before your eyes — then you will know the truth!"

The crowd roared.

It was not all of them. Teo could see that, even through the narrow eye-slits of the mask. The Shelf roared. The deacons roared. Many of the Ashwardens beat their sword hilts against their breastplates. But at the back, under the pillars, among the people of the Sump with their small dark scars, there was a strange, stubborn, unhappy silence.

Beside him, Captain Dane turned his masked face very slightly toward Teo.

"Well, cart-man?" he said, under his breath. "Still think this was a good idea?"

Teo looked at the box of jars. At the spinning glass wheel. At the old man on the floor, who was sitting up now, dazed and weeping, rubbing his hand. Alive.

At Valdris Kahl, standing before the roaring Flame in his white robes, with his arms raised.

"Yes," he said. "Actually."

He was smiling under the iron mask.

'You want to see the Wrath of the Flame, Archdeacon? Fine.'

'...I'll bring you a bigger one.'