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Chapter 12: The Magistrate
The fine for reading without a license was four silver marks, and Vespera Hallowgate collected it before she let him stand up.Kaelen counted the coins out of the scrip pouch with the lens still in his other hand. She watched every coin land in her palm. Then she closed her fingers over them, and something in her face eased by the width of a hair."You are the first litigant in sixty years to pay on the spot," she said. "Most of them argue.""Would it have helped?""No." She turned. "This way."The Adjudication Chamber lay at the end of a corridor so long that the end of it never seemed to get nearer. It was round, windowless, and built of black stone polished to a mirror, so that every step they took echoed back as a second set of feet. A high desk stood at one side, and below it, on the bare floor, two plain stools waited. Nothing else. Kaelen had stood in dungeons that felt more welcoming.Vespera went up three steps to the desk without a sound and sat. She laid the great quill acr
Chapter 11: The Hall of Contracts
For a long moment nobody in the Gilded Cinder did anything at all, and Kaelen worked out the price of that silence. Ten thousand crowns a head, held back by a treaty as thin as a candle flame.A chair scraped. One of the Pit mercenaries had begun to rise, a scarred brute with a boar's tusks and a hand already drifting toward his belt. Ignis's fingers curled against the bench."I would advise against it," said the clerk.He hadn't raised his voice. He didn't need to. He lifted one gray finger, and the roll of black parchment in his other hand unfurled another foot, silver letters crawling across it like ants."Summoned parties travel under Hall protection from the moment of reading until adjudication." His smile never changed. "Anyone who lays a hand on them or detains them commits a Class Four breach. The penalty is forfeiture of name. I am obliged to mention that I have a very good memory for faces."The mercenary sat back down. Slowly, like a man lowering himself onto a stove. All a
Chapter 10: Brimstone Market
Nobody had been murdered in Brimstone Market in four hundred years."It's the first thing they teach you," Pip said, riding Ignis's shoulder like a small, smug parrot. "The Truce of Ash. The Abyss and the Hells got sick of burning each other's trade, so they signed a treaty. No blood on the cobbles. Not a drop. If you want to kill somebody, you take it to the Pit.""The Pit," Kaelen said, from his shuffling half-step behind."The arena, east side. The Pit Lords run it. You can bleed there all you like. Anywhere else inside the walls, the Hall sends a clerk.""A clerk.""With a very long list of ways to ruin you." Pip's tail flicked. "People don't die in Brimstone, my boy. They get signed away."It was a better lesson than any map. Kaelen kept his head down, and his eyes moved.The city climbed the crater wall in terraces, and each terrace had its own smell and its own law. The Lower Market was all haggling and smoke, a hundred stalls under red canvas, where hobgoblins sold knives off
Chapter 9: Collar and Leash
Humans did not walk into Brimstone Market. They were walked.Kaelen kept his eyes on the cobbles and the leash slack in front of him and tried to remember how a man with no hope was supposed to shuffle. It was harder than it sounded. The body wanted to stand tall. The old prince had been taught his posture by a swordmaster with a ruler, and every time Kaelen's shoulders squared, a quiet tug at his throat reminded him who was supposed to be in charge.The tug came from Ignis, at the other end of three feet of braided cord, and she was gripping it like a snake that might still bite."Head down," she muttered."It's down.""Lower. And stop looking at the gate."It was hard not to look. Brimstone Market rose out of the ash plain like a blister on the world. The city had been built in the lip of an old crater, tier on tier of black stone and iron scaffolding, lit from within by a hundred thousand lamps the color of rust. The walls were thirty feet thick and carved all over with grinning fa
Chapter 8: Bounty on a Prince
Five thousand crowns is a great deal of money to spend on a dead boy.Kaelen sat on the tower sill with the poster in his hands and read it a third time. The woodcut had been carved by someone with talent. Beneath it, in the Crown's heavy black ink: Alive, preferred."Alive," he said. "Not 'dead or alive.' Not 'proof of death accepted.' Alive.""I noticed that," said Pip, perched on the shutter. "A corpse is cheap. Nobody pays five thousand for a body unless they've already got a use for the rest of it.""Think," Pip went on. "Somebody's ward breaks, and within a day there are posters on every gatepost for twenty miles. Nobody carves a woodcut that fast. Either the Church is very stupid or it wanted you found."Kaelen had heard that line before, from a very different mouth, on the first day of his second life. It sounded worse in the imp's.Behind them, the bedclothes stirred. Ignis woke the way a cat does, all at once, with her ears forward and her tail flicking. She took the poster
Chapter 7: Maintenance Cultivation
It took Ignis nineteen hours to admit she needed him again, and she did it by trying to start a fight."Draw," she said.Kaelen looked up from the courtyard wall. He had been working through a set of sword forms with a rusted quartermaster's blade, trying to find out what the dead prince's body remembered. It remembered a surprising amount. Church swordmasters had drilled this boy until his hands bled, and his arms still knew the cuts even when the head behind them didn't.Ignis stood at the other end of the yard with her cloak off and her fists wrapped in pale fire. It was whiter than it had been two days ago, a clean silver-gold, almost pretty. She wasn't holding it still. The flame shivered along her knuckles, and her breath came a little too fast."The contract has a clause for this," she said."Dispute resolution. A regulated duel, no lethal blows." He set the sword down. "What's the dispute?""You know what it is.""I really don't."She came at him anyway.She hit like a falling
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