Ashes Of Broken Home

Chapter Five – Flame and Choice

They dragged him deeper into the Spire where the air tasted of metal and old sweat. The inner chamber breathed heat like a living thing. Iron girders loomed overhead and coils of pipe ran like veins along the walls. Men in the regent’s livery moved with a quiet that made the hall feel like a place waiting for a verdict.

Darian’s ropes were changed. These were not simple strands of hemp. They had filigree of copper and a faint hum when the torchlight hit them. The guards did not seem at ease. Even Captain Merek’s jaw was tight as if he had swallowed a wasp.

The machine stood at the center of the chamber like a judge carved of steel. Its silver face had no expression, but its wheel above the pit turned slow and steady. The blue coals glowed beneath like a second sky. Men pressed along the walls, faces pale and eyes fierce. Above them the regent watched from his dais. He had not sat since the trial began. His robe caught the light and the crown on his brow glinted like a coin.

"Bind him to the rack," the regent ordered. His voice did not tremble. It sounded like law.

A pair of clerks stepped forward. They fitted iron clamps to Darian’s wrists and ankles and tightened them until pain flared. The iron bit into his skin but did not draw blood. Instead it thrummed, a low sound that matched the beating of his own heart. The locket under his tunic heated like a pebble in the sun.

Lyra stood at the railing, not a foot from the pit. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears. She had been pushed back twice by men and each time she had pushed forward again. Now she held a scrap of paper clutched so hard the edges were soft. Names scribbled on it. Faces she hoped would speak.

When the clamps clicked the machine reached out. Its hand hovered just above his head and the blue smoke brushed his hair. The coil above began to turn faster. The glass panes on the ironwork hummed. Darian felt something in the machine find him like a key finding a lock.

"Answer and the Spire will know your truth," the regent said. He sounded as if he were giving a mercy. "Confess what you are and the law will decide."

Darian tasted metal in his mouth. He could have lied. He could have bowed and begged for a mercy that would be slivered and sold back to him in pieces. Instead he looked at Lyra. She looked back with something like pleading and something like accusation. He thought of his father’s map table and the way light used to fall on inked lines. He thought of the scrap of cloth and the gold thread that had fallen into the seam. He thought of a thousand small wounds he had turned into a single bright hunger.

"I will tell the truth," he said. His voice was steady even when the machine breathed a small blue light across his chest. "Not because I seek mercy but because this city deserves to remember."

The machine answered not with words but with images. Memory flooded the glass panes. Darian saw his father, younger, arguing with a man in a regent robe. He saw a ledger of names. He saw lists set to flame. He felt the hands of men who had signed those lists as if they were his own. The hall shuddered. Someone sobbed and covered a child’s ears.

The regent’s face went the color of dust. He moved as if to step down and hush the images, but the machine kept showing. It turned its head toward the regent and for the first time its voice, that metal voice, did not sound like the Spire but like a question.

"Who bound the oath?" it asked.

A hush hit the chamber so hard it made Lyra gasp. The regent opened his mouth and closed it. Captain Merek swallowed. The clerks shifted like guilty things.

"Silence," the regent said at last, his voice tight. "You would make spectacle. We do this by law."

"Law follows oath," the machine answered. "Oath follows blood."

Darian felt the iron at his wrists pulse. A warmth spread from the clamps into his veins. The ember beneath his ribs answered and did not flinch. He had felt its hunger and he had trained himself to keep it small. Now the Spire itself coaxed it awake.

From the crowd a voice rose, small but fierce. An old woman stood and spit on the floor. "We were told they were monsters," she said. "We were told to forget who loved us. I remember my boy. I remember the flames that took him. Do you want us to remember no more?"

A dozen heads turned. The crowd shifted like a beast that had been poked. Lyra’s lips formed names from her scrap of paper and they rose. One by one old faces, women and men who had survived the purge, stood and spoke of missing sons and husbands and burnt tokens. The hall became a place of memory and accusation.

The regent’s jaw worked. He looked down at Darian as if the boy were suddenly the storm he had always feared. "You seek to turn grief into riot," he spat. "You seek to unmake our peace."

Darian felt something like pity for the regent then. He was a man who had built his safety on a lie and now that lie was a brittle throne. The machine’s wheel turned and the coals flared. The iron clamps warmed.

"Choose," the machine said. The voice was a grind of gears and an old melody. "Claim the oath or break it."

The regent stepped forward and laid a hand on the machine’s arm as if to claim its authority. His fingers trembled. "Bind him to the crown," he said. "Let the oath be tested. If he is true Ember he will not break the binding. If he breaks it, he is heretic and must burn."

Merek’s face paled. "By law," he said, though his voice had no iron left in it.

Lyra lunged. In the press she made it within reach and she shoved a scrap of cloth at the clerks. "Do not," she begged. "Do not take him to the crown. You do not know what you will wake."

A guard seized her arm and twisted. Pain flared. Lyra’s cry cut the chamber. Darian looked at her and then at the regent and then down at his hands. The iron at his wrists had a seam that matched the star mark on his skin. It hummed with the same frequency as the wheel.

The machine’s fingers closed around the rim of the crown seat. The regent signaled and men moved like clockwork. Ropes were lashed and the iron clamps slid into place. The inner gears clicked and a ring of ember rose from the pit like a small sun.

"Choose," the machine said again, softer now. "Ember or oblivion."

Darian felt the locket throb against his chest as if it had its own heartbeat. He knew that if he let the ember take him he might save Lyra and unmask the regent, but he might also lose himself and every life that still clung to him. If he refused he might die and the city might remain in its made peace. The choice was not only his. It was everyone’s.

Lyra screamed his name. The scrap of paper fluttered from her fingers and drifted toward the pit. The machine leaned in as if to drink the falling names. The regent’s hand hovered over a lever ready to close the trial.

Darian’s fingers moved of their own will toward the locket. The gold on the scrap thread warmed in his palm like a captured sun. The clamps tightened another notch and the crowd held its breath as if they had all been pulled to the same thin edge.

He closed his eyes. The ember under his ribs rose. The machine’s voice folded into his bones like a sentence waiting to be finished.

He opened his eyes and for the first time he did not see the man who had been taught to be careful. He saw a boy at a table of maps with his mother humming near the hearth. He saw a name burned into a ledger and hands that had lied. He saw Lyra and the people and the torn scrap of cloth and a choice that would not fit into law.

"Choose," the regent hissed.

Darian let his fingers press the locket to his chest. The metal seared his skin. The crown of ember above the pit flared blue and leaned toward him like a hungry thing. The regent’s lever began to fall.

Then, before the lever hit the lock, the hall filled with a sound that was not quite a scream and not quite a bell. Something in the Spire answered the falling names and the ember at Darian’s chest burst into a ring of light that reached for the crown.

Lyra’s cry cut the air. The lever stilled halfway. The machine’s hand closed and the iron clamps bit deeper. The ring of light and the crown were a breath apart.

The chapter ends on the instant the crown and the ring of ember touch, and the Spire holds its breath for the choice that will split the city.