Dawn came like a blade pulled from ice. The kiln-smoke wrapped the Fallow Mire in a pall that made the sun a bleached coin; every breath tasted of glass and old fire. Kaelen moved with the others at his back like a shadow with purpose—Serenya and Varik as hard as iron, Lira with the ward-light a pale pulse, Daren tight as a coiled spear, Neren clutching the chain-limb beneath a tarp. The teacher's captive sat hooded and slumped against a post; his hands were raw with cord but his eyes darted like a man who expected phantoms.
They skirted the pines and took the low gullies where the Mire's hidden runnels swallowed sound. The Crown's kiln lay in a natural bowl, half a ruin and half a scaffold of scaffolds: rings of glass plates hung from ropes, coils mounted on iron frames, and a lattice of crystal struts that glittered like the bones of an animal. Men moved between them with the purposeful calm of artisans at work—careful hands, less armor than ritual, tongues muttering notes that made the bitternesses of glass sing.
Kaelen watched them and felt the conduit whisper like a small bell against his rib. The Warden-sigil pulsed; the mountain's answer tugged in the direction of the kiln like a tide to the moon. He kept the feeling bunched and small—only enough to find seams, not to let the maw taste wildly.
Serenya split the team: she, Varik, and two veterans would sweep the ridge and cut the guards' line. Kaelen, Lira, Daren, and Neren would find the kiln's belly and the heart where Gavre kept his ledger and the phial—if the teacher's words were true. Eldan's wife would remain with the stronghold; they had paid dearly to free her and she would not be risked again.
They moved like theft. Neren's eyes shone with feverish intent; the chain-limb on his sled felt like a grave at his knees. They threaded the maze of scaffolding where the Crown's apprentices sharpened plates and tuned coils, and Kaelen felt each rung, each vein of stone, as if the conduit mapped the skeleton of the place.
They found Gavre where the kiln's throat gagged with heat and glass dust—he did not stand enthroned like a priest but bent over a table, fingers stained with powder, lips moving as if tasting syllables between breaths. He looked up as if he had been waiting for them, and his glance carried the flat, clinical curiosity of a man examining a specimen.
"You took the trouble to come," he said without surprise. His voice was soft and threaded with ash. "I had thought the mountain would sing anyway."
Kaelen stepped forward. "Gavre. Come quietly and no more will be broken tonight."
Gavre smiled the smile of a man who had learned the arithmetic of pressure. "So it would seem. Or perhaps you would take my throat and read what I can sing."
Lira's light caught the rim of a phial on his table; inside the glass swirled a blackness that drank the light. The same brew the binder had swallowed at the pass; the same small desperate poison that steadied a voice to force the mountain's will. Gavre's partnercraft was not merely skill but a potion to harden the tongue and silence conscience.
"Throw it out," Kaelen hissed. "Do not drink."
The man's fingers toyed with it as if weighing a coin. "You misunderstand the economy of song. It is not the phial that makes the song; it is what the phial allows a singer to hold." His eyes slid to Kaelen's arm, to the pulsing sigil. "You said you would cut me tomorrow. Why buy a kiln and call it yours today?"
Before Kaelen could answer, a bell in the outer ring clanged—three sharp knocks. Serenya's signal. The outer sweep had begun; the guards lifted, voices rising in alarm across the bowls. Gavre's apprentices looked up, hands finding coil and chord. The kiln began to hum with a note that made the air taste metallic.
"Now," Kaelen breathed.
They moved. Lira's wards spilled out like thin lace and settled around the coils; Kaelen let the conduit touch the seams beneath their boots and the earth folded minutely to raise a lip that made a scaffolding creak. Neren and Daren slipped between racks and tossed bundles of oil into carefully chosen hollows—small fires, more to distract and wreck tuning than to burn.
Gavre snapped. He lifted the phial and drank clean, and for a terrible heartbeat he looked every inch the binder's artisan: steady, eyes bright, voice clear.
He sang.
It was not a full pattern—yet—but notes bent glass like wind bends reeds. The coils shivered and answered fractionally; a tone rose and the scaffolding vibrated in sympathy. Kaelen felt the conduit gasp in his arm as if the mountain had been prodded. He knew, with a thudding certainty, that if Gavre found the phrase and if the choir in the valley were made whole, teeth would open like a snapping maw.
He moved.
Shadow leapt under his boots and twined up Gavre's table leg like a cat in the dark. He did not sever the man's throat; he wanted the tongue intact. Instead he let a ribbon of dark coil around Gavre's wrist and slipped a catching knot at the phial's neck. The man startled, but his voice did not break.
"Hold him!" Lira cried.
Daren lunged; Neren swept Gavre's arm with a light web of rope. Varik's shout came from the ridge as Serenya's strike met the Crown's outer guard in a clash that had the taste of iron.
Gavre barked a new cadence—fast, serrated, a life-preserving wheeze—and the kiln answered with a gust that threw dust and ash like rain. For a second, the coils rippled and a long line of crystal flashed—a small rebellion against their tamperers. Kaelen felt the mountain answer with a low, slow pull, like a throat trying to clear itself of a stone.
The teacher's captive—brought by them—saw Gavre's phial and shrieked. "It steadies the note! Break it!" he cried, as if what Gavre had was the last thin thread between their world and a chorus.
Neren, fingers bloody and frantic, slashed with a dagger and the phial rolled, struck a stone, and split. Blackness fanned and hissed, but not like poison: like a mist that carried sound. Gavre staggered, his voice ragged, and for the first time his hands showed uncertainty.
That was the opening Kaelen needed. He swept Gavre to the ground with a move that left the binder winded but alive; the phial lay in shattered black beads, the brew seeping into ash. Neren's breath came like a wolf's pant; Daren's hands shook.
They cuffed Gavre, bound him, and dragged him from the kiln's throat. Outside, the clash of edge and shout had grown savage; the Crown's men poured from tents like hornets. Serenya's veterans fell back as they lured men into traps: anchored stones, snagged ropes, narrowed fields where bolts could not arc.
Varik reached them bloodied; a thin slice of glass had torn across his cheek and his breath came hot. "They are pulling a lever," he panted. "A winch on the Spire—something heavy. The Hollow Flame has hooked a rig to the chain-beast and are hauling a section toward the heart."
Kaelen's skin cooled. The Hollow Flame had not been lying; they moved to take parts and remold them. If they fused what the Crown had learned with the chain-beast, the valley would stoke a different order entirely.
"Pull the teacher," he ordered—meaning the caught Crown smiths. "I want Gavre's ledger and any notes. Burn the coils that cannot be taken. We ruin the choir tonight."
They worked like surgeons on a living engine. Lira's wards muted syllables as binders tried to sing; Neren and Daren ripped away plates and hurled them into shallow pits where they shattered; Serenya and Varik carved paths for retreat as more men pressed, desperate and angry. The kiln convulsed like a throat with a bad cough, then settled into a dull rumble.
As they hauled Gavre, the man did not scream or plead. He looked at Kaelen with a curiosity that bordered on pity. "You bought a key," he said quietly. "But keys do not choose benevolence. They are tools. Men are the ones who choose." He coughed; ash flecked his lips. "Do you think you have the right hand?"
Kaelen's answer was not words. He felt the empty place in his chest like a bell with no clapper and then like a bell with a new, strange tone. He had paid for this night with a private thing; he had not paid for the world it would wake. Yet the ledger—Gavre's notes—might tell them how far the Crown had woven its choir, and the phial's shattering might slow a song.
They fled under the kiln's smoke, Gavre bound, the teacher and a handful of apprentices taken and limned for interrogation. The chain-limb on the sled thudded like a heart against the tarpaulin. As they slipped into the pines, a horn answered from the ridge—thin and mocking. The Spire's broken throat indeed had been tweaked, not murdered. Someone would carry the tune forward.
On the run to the rendezvous, Gavre cursed once, under breath. "The Maw does not like what you take," he said. The words were not an accusation but a fact. "You think to ransom the world back to itself. But the mountain counts and remembers. It will ask for larger things."
Kaelen gripped the tarp until his knuckles whitened. The missing sound in his chest had not returned, but something in him—an ember of stubbornness—glowed bright. He had a ledger and a captive; they had a broken cradle and another hour stolen from the Crown. They had bought a price and paid one.
Dawn crept into the trees like a promise that keeps terrible counsel. The valley below breathed, complicated and dangerous, and somewhere, in a coffin of glass and stone, the Maw had tasted song and found that it liked it.
They would need more than blades and broken phials to stop the choir.