The stone was warm.That was the first thing wrong with it. It sat on a bronze tray at the priest-king's elbow, forty paces from where I knelt, and the morning air in Karesh had that bitter edge it gets before the sun clears the walls. Everything in the square was cold. The cobbles were cold. The chains on my wrists were cold. The crowd breathed out little clouds of fog.And above the stone, the air shivered like it does above a forge.I noticed, because noticing is what I do. It is also, I was beginning to understand, what I was about to die for."Kaelen, son of Tarn, of the smith quarter," said the priest-king, and the crowd went quiet the way a crowd does when it has been taught to. "You are accused of the oldest heresy. You took the fire the gods threw down and claimed it was a thing a man could understand."I had, in fact, claimed that. Three times, to a priest, a magistrate and a very bored scribe. They had written it down each time. I will say this for the priests of Karesh: th

I woke to the sound of a man trying very hard not to be heard.He was good at it. Most of the city's soldiers would have announced themselves on the stair like a cart on cobbles. This one placed each foot at the outer edge of the step, where the stone is firmest and the grit least likely to shift. I knew it was a trained walker before I knew anything else about him, because I had lain awake half the night listening to the empire's patrols, and none of them had walked like that."Three humans," said the voice in my head, so quietly that I almost thought it was my own thought. "Approaching from above. Heart rates are elevated. No weapon is drawn."I had slept badly, curled against the cold stone of the lowest step with my broken chain bundled in my shirt. The blue grid still hung faintly in the corner of my vision, and beneath it a small line of text I was getting used to reading.CHARGE: 58%. ECHO: 2%.Seven percent in a night. At that rate, I thought sourly, I would be fully charged i

"The vault has seven doors," said Orin, "and I can tell you how to open exactly two of them."He had drawn the temple in the dust of the quarry floor with the stub of a burnt stick, a rough square with a smaller square inside it, and he stood over it with the grim patience of a man explaining a defeat he had already suffered once. Lyra crouched on the far side, chin on her knees. I sat with my back to the forge wall, hands blistered and black, trying to remember how many hours I had slept that week. The answer was an uncomfortable number."Eleven years is a long time," said Orin. "The empire has changed the locks. They've doubled the watch. And I was only ever posted on the outer gate. The man who knows the inside of that vault is not me.""Then who is he?" I said.Orin looked at Lyra. Lyra looked at the dust."A thief," she said. "He's called Dax.""Is he any good?""He's the only person who has ever gone into the vault and come out again," said Lyra. "Six years ago. He was caught on

We smelled the harbor of Marat before we saw it.It was not the smell of fish, or tar, or the sour-sweet rot of drying nets, which is what a harbor ought to smell like. It was the smell of burning timber and something underneath it that I did not want to name. Orin knew it at once. I watched his shoulders change, the way a man's shoulders change when he sees an old enemy across a market."Smoke," said Orin. "A lot of it. Wait here."We had been walking for three days. After the vault we had slipped out of Karesh before dawn, the twelve men of Orin's company carrying the fourteen swords I had forged, and Lyra, Dax and I walking beside them with the stolen fragment wrapped in a rag against my chest. Ushar's search had come down on the temple like a hammer. Behind us, somewhere in the hills, I felt sure the spearmen were following. But the fragment's coordinate pulled at me like a hook in a fish, and it pulled south and west, toward the sea.I crouched at the crest of the last ridge and