The Void Prince Who Devoured the Demon Queens

Chapter 5: Cinder Keep

Cinder Keep had been abandoned for six years, and somebody had left the pantry fully stocked.

Kaelen stood in the kitchen doorway and did not like it. Salt in sealed crocks. Sacks of barley gone gray but dry. A row of iron pots on their hooks, and a ladle still hanging beside the stove as though the cook had stepped out for a smoke. In every campaign he had ever run, a dungeon that left its chests unlocked was hiding something.

"What are you doing?" Ignis asked behind him.

"Being suspicious."

"Of soup?"

"Of soup that lasts six years."

She had found herself a gray Church cloak and wore it like an insult, belted over her leather, the little sun cut off the breast. Kaelen wore a quartermaster's spare: wool trousers, boots a size too big and stuffed with rag, a tunic with the sun scratched out. The body fit better than it had yesterday. Mortal Tier 4 showed up in small ways. He had shifted a fallen roof beam this morning without noticing.

Ignis had mentioned Hallowgate eleven times since breakfast.

"Her house has audited the Abyssal families for three hundred years," Ignis said, for the twelfth. "She took a Baron's whole estate once over a missing comma."

"Then we'd better be rich before she arrives." He stepped into the kitchen. "Come on. I want to see the rest of this place."

The rest of it was a lesson in how the Church treated its soldiers. The chapel was bigger than the infirmary. In the quartermaster's office, under a thick fall of ash, he found a ledger bound in gray cloth, and he read it standing.

The garrison had numbered three hundred and six. The Hellgate had sealed itself on a Tuesday. By the fortieth day after, the entries stopped listing supplies and started listing names.

Pvt. Harren, forearm laceration, blessed oil applied. Expired day 9. Pvt. Oss, blistered heel, blessed oil applied, prayer vigil. Expired day 12. Cpl. Teague, thumb, splinter. Expired day 14.

Two hundred and twelve men, give or take, and not one of them killed by a demon.

"Ash rot," Ignis said, reading over his arm. She had a way of leaning on his shoulder without seeming to notice. "Humans die of everything."

"They die of dirt." His jaw tightened. "A cut goes bad, the ash gets in, and nobody washes it out because the man in charge thinks God will handle it. Three-quarters of this garrison didn't die of a siege. They died of a splinter."

He closed the ledger. Something cold and practical had settled over him, and it felt a lot like purpose.

"Ignis. What do people in Brimstone Market buy?"

"Everything. Blood, steel, secrets, slaves." She tilted her head. "Why?"

"Because there's a market for the one thing every mercenary in the Ashfall is afraid of, and these idiots left me a whole pharmacy."

The infirmary had been built by someone who knew what they were doing and then ignored by everyone who didn't. The shelves still held rows of sealed jars in Church script: honey, white vinegar, a brick of rendered tallow. Along the back wall stood a copper alembic, tall as his chest, with a curled neck and a cracked but mendable coil.

"A still," Kaelen breathed. He put a hand on it the way you might touch a horse. "Somebody here was good."

"And that will make what?"

"Two things. Tell me, is there any wine in this place?"

There was. The cellar held forty barrels of sacramental red, the Church's own, blessed at the cask and turning slowly to vinegar in the dark. Ignis pried one open and sniffed it and wrinkled her nose.

"It's gone sour."

"It's perfect."

He worked for the rest of the afternoon, and Ignis worked with him, mostly under protest.

The first step was ash. The kitchen hearth had six years of it. He packed it into a barrel with a spigot and a layer of straw, poured water over it, and left it to drip into a pot. The liquid came out the color of weak tea and felt faintly slick on his fingertip. To test the strength he dropped in an egg from the garden coop. It floated with a patch the size of a coin showing above the surface. Right on the line.

"That," Kaelen said, "is lye."

"It looks like dirty water."

"It's dirty water that eats grease." He tipped a measure of melted tallow in, and stirred, and lit a little fire under the pot. "I need a slow boil. Hour and a half, give or take. Would you...?"

Ignis stared at him.

"I am," she said slowly, "a princess of the Abyss."

"I know."

"I have broken the spines of men who asked less of me."

"Nine minutes of low heat. Then you can go back to being a princess."

"I am not a stove."

"No." He met her eyes, perfectly sober. "A stove can't hold a flame steady for an hour. That's skill."

She opened her mouth. Shut it. Then she turned her back with great dignity and held one finger over the pot. A tongue of white-gold fire curled from it, steady as a candle.

"If anyone asks," she said to the wall, "I was supervising."

By dusk there were forty bricks of rough gray soap drying on the infirmary shelves, scented with pine resin. The second batch was harder. The alembic took three attempts before the coil stopped leaking. But sometime around the ninth hour a thin stream of clear liquid began to drip into the jar, and when Kaelen lit a spoonful on a saucer it burned with a flame so pale it was almost invisible.

"You made a drink that is already on fire," Ignis said.

"I made medicine." He passed it through the still again, and then once more. "Seven parts in ten. Strong enough to kill what's in a wound, weak enough that it won't kill the person with the wound."

He poured it into forty clay bottles and stopped each with wax, then sat back on his heels and looked at the shelves. It wasn't much, in the grand scheme of kingdoms. But he had walked into this ruin with a dying body and no money, and now he had a product.

"Will they pay for it?" Ignis said. She sat on the counter, long legs dangling. "Soap. A flask of poison."

"Half your market is mercenaries," he said. "They die of cuts. I'm selling them the difference between a bad week and a long life."

She was silent. Then, almost reluctantly: "My mother's guard had a hundred imps. They died of splinters, too."

"Now you do."

She looked at him for a long time. Then she hopped off the counter, picked up one of the barrels, and said, "Where do you want these?"

"Somewhere cold. The cellar."

Past the wine racks, where the stone turned from mortar to older rock, a passage ran down into darkness, and at the bottom of it stood a door.

It was iron, black with age, and the middle of it bore a great engraved sun. The rays glowed faintly gold. Ignis set the barrel down, very carefully, and every hair on her tail stood on end.

"Church ward," she said. "A strong one." She flexed her fingers. "Stand back."

Fire poured from her hand, white and furious, and splashed against the sun in a hiss of steam. The glyph flared. The flame turned and curled back at her like a living thing, and she snatched her hand away with a curse.

"Whatever's behind there," she said through her teeth, "they locked it up to stay locked."

"Mm."

Kaelen walked up to the door. The hunger behind his breastbone had been dozing all day, full and lazy, but now it sat up. He could feel the ward. It tasted like old gold, and a very pure kind of fear.

He put his palm against the sun.

The glyph shuddered. Light bled out of it in thin bright threads and poured into his hand, up his arm, into the black, patient place behind his heart. It took about three seconds.

The door swung open on silent hinges.

Ignis stared at him.

"That," she said, "was a Church ward."

"It was a snack."

Beyond the door lay a small round room with a single iron cage in its center, and in the cage, perched on an upturned bucket, sat a creature the size of a house cat. Bat-winged. Barbed tail. Two tiny horns on a face that looked, all at once, like a goblin, a monkey, and a very disreputable lawyer. In his clawed hands he held a hand of cards, and he looked up at them over the top of it with an expression of vast, unhurried delight.

"Well," said the imp. "Took you long enough. Which one of you is paying the ransom?"