Smoke and Iron

by Rachel Caine

"You're alone," he pointed out.

  "She's not," Annis said quietly. "And you aren't the first we've talked to."

  A lie, but a small one, and it seemed to reassure Pyotr that they were serious. "Still. Rebellions have been tried before. What makes you any different?"

  "We're going to have the strongest Obscurist in the world on our side," Morgan said.

  "Gregory?" he laughed out loud. "Don't be stupid."

  "Gregory was never the strongest," Annis said. "Keria was the second strongest. But you know who outshone them all."

  Pyotr turned and looked at her with naked astonishment. "The hermit? That's ridiculous. He hasn't even been heard from since Keria's death. He might be dead himself in there, except he still accepts meals!"

  "He isn't dead," Morgan said. "I can . . . I suppose the best way to say it is that I can feel him. Like heat against my skin. I think he's biding his time."

  "Until what?"

  "Until we get the stomach for a real fight," Annis said. "You remember how he was. Of all of us, he never accepted this. Never accommodated to it. When his door opens, everything changes."

  "First we have to convince him to try," Morgan said. "And that's where you come in."

  It took half an hour to convince Pyotr of their sincerity, but by the time he rose to leave, he seemed a different man; stronger, taller, full of purpose. "Now, be careful," Annis cautioned him. "I know you're putting yourself at risk, but be as careful as you can be. We can't afford to lose you, my sweet."

  "I know how to do it," he said. "The scripts we apply to the crystals often shatter them. I'll simply substitute broken crystals for a good pair. No one will notice. But the scripts rarely work, you know. I myself only have a success rate of forty percent, and I am the most successful."

  "Then we'll do it together," Morgan said. "Thank you, Pyotr. Thank you for trusting us."

  "You, I don't know. Her?" He laughed and, in a move so practiced that it seemed rehearsed, gathered Annis into his arms and kissed her soundly. They parted laughing, and the delight in her eyes flashed like fire. "Her, I know. And trust. I will be back."

  "One moment," Annis said, and ruffled his hair into a disordered mess and disarranged his clothes. "No one would ever believe you'd been here if you came out so neat."

  He laughed and kissed her again, and was gone, striding like a man with a purpose.

  "You didn't have to, ah, promise him . . . ," Morgan started awkwardly. Annis rolled her eyes.

  "Child. I am the mistress of my own body. It's well-known in the Tower that I enjoy what pleasure I can find. You're not compromising my honor or any such nonsense. Pyotr and I have a long-standing, cheerful little arrangement."

  "Do you love him?"

  "No. Not in the way you probably mean, at least. Keria and Eskander--they had that kind of love. But me? I've never found it, nor do I feel the lack." Annis's gaze seemed far too sharp. "In the Tower, we've never had the luxury of weddings and marriage and growing old together. You'll need to decide for yourself what your life is like outside of it, I suppose. For me, this suits well enough."

  They were fundamentally different in that, Morgan decided, but she had to admit that Annis seemed completely at peace with her life here . . . but perfectly willing to risk it, at the same time.

  Pyotr proved to be as good as his word; he appeared back at their door two hours later and produced two small quartz crystals. "Not tuned yet," he said, and handed over the written script to Morgan. "This is the formula. We keep tinkering with it, but the crystals are always slightly flawed, and that makes it impossible to know how the power will flow through both. Statistically, one of them cracks half the time."

  Morgan rewrote the script with a tiny change, and Pyotr set the crystals atop it, took in a deep breath, and held out his hands, touching both. Morgan set her own fingers over his, and together, they bled power slowly into the crystals. Pyotr was strong, but he'd never attained the kind of fine control that Morgan had been born with, and she guided and smoothed the power he imbued through every pen stroke of the script.

  It flashed through the crystals in a simultaneous burst that left a burned smell in the air, and a strange hum; when Morgan opened her eyes and pulled her hands back, she saw that both crystals were intact.

  And both were glowing, very faintly, along the cloudy fault lines within.

  "What did you do?" Pyotr asked. "I've never seen it so perfectly aligned before, not even with a successful match."

  "You have to think of the cracks and faults inside the crystal not as flaws, but as features," she said. "You're matching two unlike things together, and each has different weight, different features, different alignments. But at the smallest level, they are the same. Don't think at the top. Think at the bottom."

  Pyotr gave her a long, considering look and then nodded. "I see what you mean, I think. But I don't think I could have done that without you." His eyes widened. "You don't look well, child."

  She didn't feel well, either. This wasn't the drug still coursing through her system; that had very specific uses and triggers. No, she had just poured a great deal of power out, and in a manner that her body was no longer capable of replacing in the way that Pyotr could. The drug and the collar didn't shut her down, because what she was doing was in no way an aggressive use . . . but at the same time, her own body had a way of punishing her.

  She felt the hollow darkness inside, and a growing desperation. I'm empty. I need . . . I need fuel. But not food, not rest, nothing that innocent.

  She held out her hand to Annis and noted the faint dark lines forming beneath her flesh. "Take me up," she said. "To the garden." Because the alternatives were impossible. She hadn't extended herself so far before, not since coming here, and the Iron Tower's walls muted her ability to draw from outside. Out in the world, she could have taken a little from a lot of things around her, and none would have been the wiser. But here . . . there were few things she could reach to drain.

  And all of them would notice.

  Annis led her quickly out of their rooms and to the lifting chamber, which swept them upward level after level, past the rooms she'd once had, past another floor where her friends had been imprisoned. As she passed it, she felt a dark surge of need overtake her, and it was all she could do not to reach for Annis's hand again.

  Instead, she shrank into the corner, shivering, and when the doors opened, she plunged out into the rich foliage of the greenhouse.

  There were people here. No, no, no . . . She stumbled away to a secluded alcove veiled by ferns and flowering bushes and sank down on the ground. The earth here went deep, and when she blinked, she could see the life pulsing through the stalks of the flowers, the plants, the leaves, the roots.

  "Get back," she said to Annis. "Leave!"

  Annis flinched and pulled back, and Morgan couldn't control her need any longer. She plunged her fingers into the loose black soil . . .

  . . . and killed.

  The flowers near her wilted first, all their color fading. But she couldn't stop there. She pulled life from the stalks, the leaves, down to the roots. Then one thick shrub. Then the next. Then a willow tree. Worms boiled to the surface, and she ripped life from their writhing bodies.

  She heard Annis gasp in horror and told herself to stop, stop, before it was too late . . . and somehow, with all the strength in her, she pulled her hands out of the now-sterile soil and crawled backward. Dry branches rattled. Dead petals and leaves rained down, dry and desiccated.

  She blinked back tears of relief and rage and horror and saw what she'd done. A portion of the garden ten feet all around her had turned brown and brittle.

  It would never grow anything again.

  Annis backed away from her, hands at her mouth, as Morgan wearily rose. Tears glittered in her pale blue eyes. "What are you?" Annis asked. It was barely a whisper.

  "I don't know," Morgan said, and she meant it. "I'm hoping Eskander can tell me."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

&nb
sp; It must have been a crisis for Annis, but Morgan hardly noticed; she was too busy fighting the enormous need to keep drinking in the life buzzing and hissing and pulsing around her. The bright sparks of flying insects. The hum of a beehive. The warning call of birds, fleeing to the farthest branches.

  The bright blurs of Obscurists. They were blinding to her, and desperately burning with just the energy she needed.

  She shut her eyes and concentrated on deep, steady breaths until the emptiness inside began to recede. The howling vortex slowed and then stopped. I am not empty. I'm not.

  When she opened her eyes again, she felt better. More herself. And realized that she was stumbling along, half-dragged by Annis; just as she realized it, Annis got her out of the lifting chamber, and Morgan foggily realized she was now on their residence floor.

  "I'm all right," she told Annis, and pulled free. She had to brace herself against the wall, but she would be all right. No matter what. Annis seemed glad to let go, because she moved a sharp three steps away and watched her carefully. "I'm not a mad dog, Annis. Not yet."

  "You destroyed things," Annis said. "I've never in my life seen an Obscurist do that. We channel life. We don't destroy it."

  "Not here," Morgan said, and forced herself into a normal walk, with only a slight pressure of fingertips on the wall to keep herself upright. Once they were back in the room, she saw that Pyotr was gone but the crystals remained, humming and gently glittering along their faults.

  Annis still left a good distance between them. Morgan looked down at her hands and spread her fingers. The dark streaks were gone. And she felt almost herself again.

  "Silencio. Now," Annis said. "Explain."

  "It . . . it's difficult. I used too much power, too quickly, when I was too weak; I didn't have a choice: I was trying to save lives by making things grow faster . . ." Her voice faded out. It sounded like a threadbare defense, even to herself. "It all went wrong. The plants died. Insects. Animals. Everything. I was told that if I rested, took good care, I might improve again. But it would never be the same for me. The connection I had to power . . . it's distorted. Twisted. And sometimes I need . . ." She gestured helplessly upward. "You saw."

  "You need things to die to make you live?" Annis said.

  "You consume living things in every dish you eat."

  "It isn't the same!"

  "It is," Morgan said. "But if you want to leave and never deal with me again, I understand that. Just . . . don't betray me. Please."

  Annis shook her head and sank down on her bed, head in her hands. She looked her age in that moment, every year of it; then she wiped the tears from her face and took a deep breath. "I always said I'd deal with the Christian devil to win freedom for those who wanted out of here. Like Eskander. I suppose you're near enough, at that." She swallowed. "Could you kill Gregory the same way? Just . . . draw the life out of him?"

  "Not before he'd kill me. That's why I haven't. That, and . . . I don't want to do that. Not that way."

  "Why? It would solve everything."

  That evil taste on her tongue. That howling emptiness. She couldn't describe why, except to say, "Because if I kill that way, I think . . . I think it will destroy whatever's left in me that's still good. And you'll have something much worse than Gregory to stop." She looked up and met Annis's eyes. "Will you help me? Get me to the air duct?"

  It was a long moment, and then Annis said, "If you're up to it."

  "I am." I have to be.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Getting to the proper level meant bypassing four separate security measures, but those were minor issues, far too reliant on the wards and scripts and common knowledge that the area was off-limits. There was one guard present, on a roaming schedule, but Annis had noted down his routes, and they slipped by him without notice. He was bored and tired and had likely never had an alarm in all his time inside the Iron Tower.

  The air-circulation hub was a vast open core, drawing in air from the outside of the building, filtering it, running it through a complex series of devices to heat or cool as needed, and then blowing it back out through a series of branching ducts.

  "Constructed by Artifex engineers," Annis said, and pointed to the etched letters beneath the rows and rows of grilles. "And helpfully labeled as well. But we won't be able to take these covers off, you know."

  "Doesn't matter. Can you tell which one goes to Eskander's rooms?"

  "Which room do you prefer?"

  "Sitting room," she said. Talking to him in the privacy of his bedroom seemed . . . presumptuous. Annis nodded and led the way through a twisting, confusing maze of corridors that must be used only by maintenance engineers, and only very occasionally. "Here," Annis said, and pointed to one particular grille. "That's the one."

  "You're sure?"

  "I'm sure. It's the same number that appeared in the plans for the vent. Engineers like things to be specific." Annis winked. "I met one of them once who was assigned here to install the lift and the new electrical lights. Well, met isn't quite the right word. But I did like him."

  "Very helpful," Morgan said, and pulled one of the crystals from the pocket of her robe. Even wrapped in the thick layer of padding she'd tied around it, it was a small thing, only about the size of her finger, and nearly as slim, and it fit easily through the grate. She set it down carefully.

  "The question now is, how do we ensure it gets to the far end . . . ," Annis began, then checked herself as she heard the steady roar of the air system begin. "Of course. It's light enough. The air will take it to the other end of the duct, all the way to the grate."

  "We hope. Move."

  They wedged themselves into an alcove meant for this purpose, holding tight to handholds put there, as the huge fan set in the center of the open middle spun up with an increasing roar and fresh air blew through every grated opening around the circle. It was deafeningly loud, which was amazing, since Morgan had never thought about how the air moved through this sealed tower . . . or why she rarely heard the sound of it. There must be sound suppressors on the grates of some kind. Oh no. No, no, no . . . That might destroy this plan before it could start.

  But no. She calmed her racing heartbeat. The most effective way wouldn't be to put that suppression on the grille inside a room, but here, where the noise was the loudest . . . and when the fan spun down again, and the hurricane-force wind died, she ventured out to the grate to peer inside. Good, the crystal was now gone . . . and as she ran her fingers over the grate, she could feel the script that had been woven through the metal to quiet the noise.

  She broke it with a sharp snap, took out the other crystal from her pocket, and said, "Obscurist Eskander? Can you hear me? Please answer if you can hear me. I will be able to hear you on this end."

  She held the crystal to her ear and, to her surprise, heard music--a harp, she thought, but she wasn't certain; the sound quality wasn't that sharp. Whatever it might be, it stopped abruptly, and there was nothing for a long moment. Long enough that she wondered if she'd imagined the sound after all.

  Then a man's voice, shockingly close, said, "Who are you? How is this possible?"

  "My name is Morgan," she said. "Morgan Hault. I knew the Obscurist--I mean, the old one, Keria. And I know your son, Christopher Wolfe."

  He didn't answer.

  "I came back to the Iron Tower to find you, sir. And to get your help."

  "Didn't they tell you? I don't care. And I don't help. Leave me alone. That's all I ask."

  "Keria died to save your son, sir. I was there. I saw." Morgan heard her voice shake, but she didn't know if he could. "At the end, she chose his life over her own. And she saved us all. I know how much that must have hurt--"

  "You don't know anything about her, or about me," he said. "I told you. Leave me alone."

  He could have stopped this with a snap of his fingers, Morgan thought; he could have broken the crystal any time he pleased.

  But he hadn't. And she had to believe that deep inside, h
e needed to talk. And to be useful in some way. Self-imposed exile was a harsh, inhuman sentence; how long since he'd had a visitor, after Keria? How many people even remembered he was here?

  "He needs your help," she said. "Your son. The Archivist has him in his prison. He plans to execute him."

  Silence, still. She wished that she'd worked out a way to see this man, to know if she was getting through to him at all.

  Annis said, "Morgan. The fan will start up again soon. We have to move!"

  Morgan shook her head and twined her fingers into the metal grate. "Eskander, please! Your son saved our lives. He is a brave, brilliant man, and he needs you. I'm begging you, please help!"

  "I can't," Eskander said. It sounded hollow.

  "You can; you know you should be the Obscurist! Take what's rightly yours! Stop Gregory, and lead us out of this tower!"

  "Lives would be lost."

  "They're being lost now. Gregory killed a boy in front of me, just to prove a point! Do you think he cares about any of us? He only cares about his own greed! You must have known him, before you shut yourself away. You must know I'm telling the truth!"

  "Morgan!" Annis sounded desperate now, and when Morgan glanced back, she saw the woman's robes fluttering in the wind that was already starting to form. The gigantic fan was starting its next cycle. "Morgan, we have to go! We can come back!"

  Morgan knew instinctively that if she stopped here, short of convincing him, it would all be for nothing. He'd refuse to answer again. He'd break the crystal. "Go! I'll hold on here!" she shouted over the gust of wind that pushed her against the grate. "Just go, Annis!"

  "Annis?" She could hardly hear Eskander over the building roar, but she pushed the crystal harder against her ear and hardly felt the cut that opened. "Is Annis with you?"

  "Yes! She's here! She's helping me, and she said if Keria was still alive, she'd be the first to go against Gregory! But he killed her, and now you have to be the one!"

  She didn't hear his reply. The fan spun up to a shattering roar and threatened to tear her loose, and she had to drop the crystal and watch as it shattered on the metal grate before it was blown away into the darkness. She grabbed at the mesh with her left hand and tried to cling with all her might; she felt muscles trembling and pulling and tearing, and her robes tore in the battering. Her hair came loose. It felt like threads of steel cutting her face to pieces, and she struggled to breathe against the intense pressure on her back. How long does it last? She wasn't going to make it. Her fingers were bleeding and cramping, and what breath she had was lost in a scream of pain as her right hand lost its grip, and she felt the wind shear her sideways, felt something pop in her arm, and then her left hand was loose and she felt herself lifting up, twisting wildly. She couldn't think how to use her power, or on what to focus; there was just panic, terrible and awful panic . . .