Iron in the Storm

The bell tower of Saint Orlen's church had been struck by lightning nineteen times in living memory.

Everyone in the Sump knew it. It was the tallest building in the lower city... a thin, crooked spire of grey stone on the edge of Saint Orlen's Square, built by the Chantry two hundred years ago on top of an old Maker foundation, with a bronze bell at the top that had cracked twice and been recast twice. And every few years, in the spring storms that came roaring down off the mountains in the month of the Thaw, a bolt of lightning would come down out of the black sky and strike it.

The Chantry said that it was the Flame's anger at the sins of the Sump. Every time, the deacons preached on it for weeks. Twice, the tower had caught fire. Once, eighty years ago, the strike had come down the bell rope and killed the bell-ringer where he stood.

Teo had always assumed they were right about that one. It was hard to argue with a bolt of fire from the sky.

He was not assuming anything anymore.

"It's the same thing," he said. He was sitting on the floor of the Mercy House storeroom with the red book open on his knees, and the others gathered around him in the lamplight: Mira, and Bram, and Hesk in his chair, and Nell on a grain sack, and Captain Dane leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded and his son asleep on a pallet behind him. "The Wrath of the Flame, and lightning. The same thing. The spark from the jar is a tiny lightning bolt. And a lightning bolt is a giant spark."

"How do you know?" said Dane flatly.

"Because a Maker proved it. A hundred and fifty years before they flew." Teo turned the page. "In 1752, a man called Benjamin Franklin, in a city across the sea, flew a kite in a thunderstorm. A kite made of silk, with a sharp iron wire on top, and a long wet string — wet string carries the spark, the way a wet rope carries water — and at the bottom of the string, a metal key. And when the storm cloud passed over the kite, the hairs on the string stood up on end, and Franklin touched his knuckle to the key... and a spark leapt to his hand. The same kind of spark as from a Leyden jar. And he touched a Leyden jar to the key... and it filled up. From the sky."

He looked up.

"The Wrath of the Flame, in a jar. Out of a thundercloud."

There was a long silence.

"That," said Hesk at last, quietly, from his chair, "is the most dangerous thing I have ever heard you suggest, boy. And I have heard you suggest a great many dangerous things."

"I know."

"The red book says something else, doesn't it?" Hesk tilted his head. "I can hear it in your voice. There's another page."

Teo hesitated. Then he nodded slowly.

"A year after Franklin," he said, "a man called Georg Richmann tried the same thing. In a city in the north. He had an iron rod on his roof, and a wire running down into his house, to measure the storm." He swallowed. "Lightning struck the rod. And the spark came down the wire and jumped to his forehead. It killed him where he stood."

Nobody said anything.

"So I'm not going to touch any keys," Teo said. "I'm going to do it properly. The way the red book says. The kite string goes to a jar, and the jar sits on a block of dry glass, and nobody touches anything until the storm has passed. And the kite won't be on the bell tower. It'll be in the middle of the square, on a long string, with the tower far away from it." He paused. "And while it's up there... the tower gets its own iron."

"Its own what?"

Teo turned the page again. There was a drawing there. A tall building, with a thin, pointed rod of metal sticking up from its very highest point, and a long thick wire running down its side into the ground.

"A lightning rod," he said. "Franklin's other idea. Lightning always strikes the highest point it can reach. That's why it hits the tower. So you give it a better path. A sharp iron rod at the very top, higher than the bell, and a thick iron chain running from the rod all the way down the outside of the tower and deep into the wet ground. When the lightning comes, it hits the rod instead of the stone, and runs down the chain into the earth, and the tower never feels it." He looked up. "The Makers put them on every tall building in the world. For hundreds of years. Their towers in Glass Bones... every one of them would have had one."

Dane was staring at the drawing.

"And you want to put one on Saint Orlen's," he said slowly. "And fly a kite in the middle of the square, in a storm, and catch the Wrath of the Flame in a jar. In front of the whole Sump."

"In front of anyone who'll come," said Teo. "The Archdeacon wants them to see the Wrath of the Flame. So let them see it." He shut the red book. "Let them see where it really comes from."

It took them nine days to get ready. And then, for six more, there was no storm.

Teo had never been so desperate for bad weather in his life. He stood on the roof of the Mercy House every evening and stared at the mountains in the west, where the storms came from, and willed them to come. Bram and three blacksmiths from Coopers' Yard forged a rod of iron as long as a man, sharpened to a needle point, and a chain as thick as Teo's wrist, and they climbed the bell tower of Saint Orlen's at night, by ropes, and fixed the rod to the very peak of the spire, above the bell, and ran the chain down the outside of the stone to the ground. Dane's men... the twelve who had marched up the Crown stairs with Teo, and who were his now, as far as Teo could tell, as much as they were anyone's... stood guard at the foot of the tower while they did it, and turned away anyone who asked questions.

At the bottom, Bram dug a hole as deep as he was tall, right beside the tower, down through the cobbles and the rubble into the wet clay below, where the old Maker drains ran under the square. He buried the end of the chain there, wrapped around a great plate of iron, and filled the hole with wet ash and salt water from the pyre-yard, which the red book said carried the spark into the earth better than plain mud.

Mira and Nell made the kite. It was nothing like Franklin's. There was no silk in the Sump. But there was oiled canvas from the barges, and light, straight cane from the reed beds of the Fens, and Mira cut and stitched it with a healer's patience into a great square sail as wide as Bram's outstretched arms, with a long tail of knotted rags. On its top, Teo fixed a long, thin spike of iron wire.

The string was a thin hemp line, nearly six hundred paces long. Teo had counted it, twice, as Nell wound it onto a great wooden reel. At the bottom of it, there was a short length of dry silk... the only silk in the Sump, a ribbon from Mira's mother's old dress, which Mira had cut off without a word... because silk, when it was dry, did not carry the spark. That was where Teo would hold the string. On the silk. With dry hands. Never on the hemp.

And just above the silk, tied to the hemp, an iron key.

The jar sat on a block of thick old Maker glass, from a broken window in the Mercy House. It was a big clay crock from Tobin's brewery, lined inside and out with the thin silvery foil that the Chantry wrapped around its holy candles. Nell had stolen the foil, a sheet at a time, from the back door of the candle-maker's on the Shelf. Teo had decided not to ask how. A brass rod stuck up through a wooden lid, with a short chain dangling from it, inside, to touch the foil at the bottom.

On the sixteenth evening, the sky in the west went black.

The storm came down off the mountains like a wall. Teo saw it from the Mercy House roof, a vast, boiling, purple-black mass of cloud that swallowed the peaks one by one, lit from within by flickers of white and violet. The wind came first, cold and wet and howling, rattling every shutter in the Sump. Then the first heavy drops of rain.

Then the thunder.

"Now," said Teo. "Now, now, now."

By the time they reached Saint Orlen's Square, there were people there. Not many, at first. Then more. Word had gone round the Sump, the way word always did. The cart-man is going to catch the Wrath of the Flame in a pot. They stood under the eaves of the tenements around the square, wrapped in coats and blankets, staring. Some of them were laughing. Most of them were not.

Teo stood in the very centre of the square, on a dry wooden board, with the great reel of hemp line on the ground beside him and the brewery crock on its block of glass at his feet.

Bram and Dane held the kite up into the wind.

It went up like a living thing. The wind caught it and snatched it out of Bram's hands, and it shot up into the black sky, its tail streaming, higher and higher, the hemp line hissing off the reel faster than Nell could let it out. Teo held the silk ribbon in both hands, dry under the oilcloth Mira was holding over his head, and felt the kite pulling, pulling, like a fish on a hook.

Above them, the storm was right overhead now. The clouds churned. Lightning cracked across the sky in great white branches, and the thunder came so loud and so close that Teo felt it in his teeth.

And on the hemp line, just above the key, the loose fibres of the string began to stand up on end.

Like the hair on a frightened cat. Bristling outward from the line in a fuzzy halo, all along its length.

Teo's breath caught in his throat.

He took a thin iron wire from his coat with his dry hand, and very carefully, holding it by a wooden handle, touched one end to the key and the other to the brass rod on top of the brewery jar.

There was a tiny crackle. A faint blue spark, no bigger than a grain of sand.

And another. And another.

He held the wire there for as long as he dared... while the thunder crashed and the rain hammered on the oilcloth and the crowd under the eaves stood frozen and silent... and then he pulled it away and threw it aside, and let go of the silk, and Bram hauled down the kite as fast as he could pull.

Then Teo turned to the crowd.

He did not make a speech. He had thought about making one. He had thought about it for nine days, and in the end, he had decided that Valdris Kahl made speeches, and that he did not want to be Valdris Kahl.

Instead, he took a long iron poker from Mira, wrapped its handle in a thick wad of dry wool, and held its tip toward the brass ball on top of the jar.

The spark leapt out with a crack like a whip.

It was a finger long. Blue-white. Jagged. Bright enough to leave a purple streak across the eyes of everyone in the square. Exactly like the spark that had thrown the old man down in the Cathedral.

The crowd gasped. Someone screamed.

And in that moment, high above them, at the top of the bell tower of Saint Orlen's, the storm reached down.

The lightning bolt was so bright that Teo saw it through his closed eyelids. It struck the iron rod on the top of the spire with a sound like the sky cracking in half, and for a single blinding instant, the whole tower was outlined in white fire... and then the fire ran down the iron chain on the outside of the stone, all the way to the ground, in a single crackling flash, and vanished into the earth at its foot.

The thunder rolled away across the Sump.

The rain fell.

And the bell tower of Saint Orlen's stood there in the storm, exactly as it had stood before. Not a stone cracked. Not a slate fallen. Not a single flame on its roof. The bronze bell, at the top, gave one faint, startled hum from the shock of the thunder... and was silent.

Nobody in Saint Orlen's Square made a sound for a very long time.

Then, at the back of the crowd, someone began to laugh. Not mockingly. It was a wild, shaky, astonished laugh, the laugh of a man who has just seen something he will never forget. And someone else joined in. And someone else. Until the whole square was laughing, and weeping, and shouting, in the pouring rain, under the bell tower that the Flame had struck nineteen times and could not burn.

Teo stood in the middle of it, soaked to the skin, holding a poker wrapped in wool, and found that he was laughing too.

He did not notice, at first, the two men in grey coats standing at the far edge of the square, under the eaves of Deacon Pruett's house.

They were not Dane's men. They wore their masks down.

And when the laughing crowd surged forward toward the bell tower, they turned without a word and walked quickly away up Tallow Row, toward the switchback road and the Crown.