Canno was seven years old when the candle came down in the wrong place. That was how it began, the charcoal-burner told him as he went home. A candle in the wrong place. Dark winter nights, early nights, and his parents had been fond of books, for all that there were but two big leather-tattered volumes in the house. They were slow but sure readers and could finish each as the other did, then swap them and start again. And he and his big sister were small and careless and could have put down a light in some small secret place and forgotten to snuff it, easily.
Candles, misplaced and forgotten, guttering out alone and cold and neglected. Or growing angrier and hotter at the slight, then becoming bigger. Oh so much bigger. One little candle had swallowed up the whole house, which was still the biggest place in the world to Canno, back then, as the charcoal-burner carried him away from the gawking crowd of the neighbours, showing up too late to the queer house at the edge of the village to help; too late to do anything but sift through the ashes and pocket trinkets.
Canno was crying, maybe. The tears were freezing from the cold, or the heat could’ve dried them all up inside. Or both. The charcoal-burner’s shoulder was hard bone and cold, all warmth from the fire lost and faded from his sooty skin as the snowflakes melted on it.
“Ah, now, all burnt up, aren’t you?” he said in his raspy, scorched voice, a calloused and roughened palm touching Canno’s side, feeling where he couldn’t feel anything anymore. “Yes, you are,” he said, voice neither particularly sympathetic nor uncaring. “All alone in the world, eh? No family that isn’t kindled and gone, no friends – not if those at the home were all there were. You’re alone. We work with what’s alone.”
The charcoal-burner stopped walking. They were in the woods, the wide white wildlands where only the charcoal-burners walked, the mysterious burnt men with the white scars and the singed beards, the ones hunched from hauling brush and dusted with ashes, bent under the weight of some great secret no man knew but they. The trail stretched forwards and back, fading into snowfall both ways.
“Now you choose, boy. Yea or nay, or shake or nod if your throat still feels the smoke. Yea, you travel forwards, move on. You come to live, and be one of us. Nay, and I leave you here, to find your way back and make what you may. Choose, boy.”
Even at seven – especially at seven, children do not shrug aside such things as adults do – Canno knew this was unfair, horribly unfair. But he was numb in all things, and fear not the cold as he might – he didn’t think he would ever complain of the cold again, not ever, not ever – he wouldn’t stay alone. He couldn’t stay alone. And the charcoal-burner was the only other person in all the world.
He nodded.
“A choice, boy. A good one, perhaps. Now we’ll go, and we’ll get you some sleep. The night’s long, but not long enough for you to fit a day’s wakening and a rest in at once.”
Canno was asleep before the charcoal-burner took four more steps. It was not dreamless. It was not pleasant.
He awoke in darkness and smoke, and for a moment knew only panic – had he imagined all of that? Was he still in the house, hearing the flames crackle up the roof above and smelling his sheets beginning to smoulder?
“Wake, boy.”
No, no, the voice was harsh and rough, not like his father’s. The blanket was sooty and rough, as tough as rock, not the quilt his mother had made. And the smoke was calmer, smoother, less intense.
Canno opened his eyes. Above them was dry timber, shrouded in clay dust, cracked and ancient. Above that, dense, tufted earth, riddled with roots.
“Wake, boy.” There was impatience in the harsh voice, and coldness. “We have no time to mollycoddle ye. Ye must work.”
Canno sat up, and knew where he was, by the faint red glow in the air that was greater than the bright light that came from the pipe nodding at the charcoal-burner’s chin. He was different from the one that had brought Canno in – his beard the greyer and longer, though how much was ash and how much was age was impossible to say; his eyes the more sunken and glittering, his fingers turned black forever. A hundred hundred greyed lines streaked over his arms and face.
“Good. Now, do ye ken where ye are, or do I have to tell ye?” He hacked a barking laugh without waiting for an answer. “Of course I do. Ye be in the New Kiln, boy. I’m sure ye’ve heard tale of it. Now, get up. I’ve a task, and ye will fulfill it.”
Canno didn’t move. The charcoal-burner leaned over and prodded him hard in the knee with his pipe’s stem. It was near sharp enough to draw blood, and Canno jumped out of the bed – a crude pile of tattered blankets mounded roughly together – before he even knew what he was doing.
“Good, good. Now listen, and listen well-close now, better than ye did to your mater nor yer father neither: ye are here to work. Work and learn, ye ken? Ye have no family. Ye have no friends. All ye have is us, and only as long as ye act as we do, and that means work. And if ye work here, ye will follow three rules above all else.” He put his pipe in his mouth again and took a pull on it, obviously warming to his words.
“First, ye will not touch what ye are not told to touch, whether it be wood, dirt, clay, stone, flame, or food. Ever. Or ye’ll take a beating the likes of which ye can’t imagine. This is great work, delicate work, boy, and too much care be needed in its making for the likes of your clumsy hands to go spoiling years in one moment’s stupidity.”
“Second, ye shall always do what ye are told by yer superiors. Ye will know who they are. Ye will know who they are not. And right now, they be everyone. Ye will not argue, ye will not spare time to agree or acknowledge, ye will do, and do so fast.”
“Third. This be as important as the first, though ye may ken it not. Ye will never. Ever. Ever. Ever speak to those not of our lot. Ye ken? You speak not to any man nor woman nor child that lives outside these mounds and kilns. When yer older, if ye’re older, ye will speechify for trade and business, but for now, with your mouth as raw and untrained and prone to flapping as it is; ye. Will. Be. Silent. Ye ken?”
Canno nodded. There wasn’t much else he could do.
The charcoal-burner smiled. The lines around his mouth crinkled oddly, twisted into a shape they weren’t familiar with. “No ye don’t. But ye will. Now go and find Keplak Cinders. Go down the tunnel, take ye no turns till ye reach fresh air. He’ll be out there, near the woodpiles. Get him to running ye messages, so ye learn the land’s lay. And fast now, mind ye. Go!”
Canno went, head spinning, lurching from wall to wall. He burst into air so clean and cold that it made his teeth ache and his eyes dwindle, and stumbled his way to a giant, brownish blob that was probably a woodpile.
“What’s this now?” boomed the woodpile. A beard formed on it as Canno squinted in puzzlement. “Speak up lad! Who sent you and what are you here for?”
Canno opened his mouth, and much to his surprise, all that came out was a small croak, a hiss of air puffing down aching passages.
“Hah, fire-mute, eh? Don’t speak, I know. Smoked out… you must be the boy Half-leg brought in last night. Ashmaster sent you, did he? Don’t speak, nod or shake – yes, he did I’ll bet, old greybeard. Likely sent you for messages, eh? Hah!” The giant’s laugh was like a thunderclap to the face, ruffling Canno’s hair with its force. “No good having a messenger with no mouth. No lad, you can carry some kindling for me. Gather it from there – see where I point? – and take it to here. Stack it neat now, and don’t go too fast; we don’t want mistakes and we don’t want you tipping over and spearing yourself on something. Go!”
Canno went, and it wasn’t until many days later that his mouth healed well enough to run messages for Keplak. By then he knew the layout of the place well enough – three great charcoal mounds, half-barrow, half-hall, half-furnace all, each lived in even as it was kept burning. The little, less-than-a-decade-old and still-expanding New Kiln, the three-century-old Younger Mound, which was bigger than the village his family’s house had once stood on the outskirts of, and the ancient, older-than-time Elder Mound, which was so big he couldn’t tell how big it was, only that trying to walk a full loop around it made his feet hurt and shouldn’t be attempted.
He worked at many things. He lifted kindling for Keplak Cinders, and later logs. He ran messages, first from Keplak to others, then from the others to others still, and then from anyone to anywhere, because he knew all the places. He learned to tend fires and let them neither die nor billow out of scope. He learned how to pick up charcoal, move charcoal, and store charcoal without giving it so much as an errant bump. And he learned all these things well and fast, yet it was never enough.
“Too slow!” Garren Ashmaster would spit as Canno brought him a sample of fresh charcoal to be examined with his one still-working, ever-critical eye. “This is nearly cold! I need it warm! Too slow!” Often he’d throw the coal at Canno as he left – invariably, still warm.
“Take care lad,” warned Keplak. “Those logs’re stacked skewed; they’ll come down on you sure as stone won’t melt. Best to stack ‘em again now, hurry up.”
“Bah!” said Mirmar the head lumberjack, swatting him on the head. “Too slow! Where were you five minutes ago, boy? Speed up!”
Canno sped up. He took care. He found that doing both at once was immeasurably difficult, but he did it, he and the others boys that lived in the New Kiln’s cramped, dry interior. There were four of them, all as withdrawn and wan as he (there had been a fifth, but he vanished before long had passed – he had been quick to boast, and Canno suspected he’d been caught talking to strangers), so much so that between errands and their own shyness, more than three months had passed before they exchanged each other’s names.
“Plalt,” said Plalt, the skinny one. He was nearly as quick at the chores as Canno was, but far twitchier. He needed to take care much more often.
“Tagmus,” said Tagmus, the big one. He was tall, yes. He was broad, yes. He was not fat – at least, not any more. The thin gruel they sipped wasn’t near enough to keep them fat, not least with their work.
“Hullger,” said Hullger, the pale one. Hullger did little. Very little. He was quite good at it, Canno had noticed – he’d move just a hair slower than he needed to, be just a bit more fussy than he had to, anything to slow down the day. Canno envied him one moment, despised him the next.
They didn’t get much farther than introductions. The very next day, their workloads were near-doubled, and their sleeping quarters were moved. “You are here to work, not to chatter,” Garren Ashmaster told them all as they were separated. He never smiled unless someone else had stopped, Garren did. The others were different shades of dour, but he was diabolical.
Keplak was different. Keplak was the nearest thing Canno had to a friend. Keplak was the one who suggested that the boys be taken into town for the next trading.
“They’ll talk,” Garren argued.
“Of what? They know nothing, not yet. Or are you afraid they’ll speak of the quality of Utu’s cooking?”
“They will talk, and that will teach them to talk later, when they know secrets. No, no, they should not go!”
“Or,” said Keplak, “they will learn to not talk. And they had best do so now, while they know nothing should they fail, eh?”
Garren fussed and groused a bit longer, but his heart was no longer in it. And so it was that Canno found himself sitting on a wagon with the other three boys, legs dangling as Half-leg piloted them into town, forever half-a-step ahead of the plodding mule that towed them. If the charcoal-burner who had rescued Canno had any other name, no one seemed to know it.
“Remember,” they’d been told as the wagon left the broad, treeless clearing that the charcoal mounds squatted in like sleeping tortoises, “say no word. Not even to Half-leg. Not even to each other.”
So they didn’t speak. Instead, they silently competed in a game of who could flick a pebble the furthest behind the cart. Tagmus won by a good foot and a half with a cunning ricochet that he insisted after the trip wasn’t luck.
The town was strange. The children stared, the adults stood back, the trading with Half-leg was slow and reluctant, with many awkward pauses and hurried, failed attempts at easing the silence with senseless remarks on the parts of the townsfolk.
The charcoal-burners keep secrets, they whispered, the sound arising from the air rather than any particular mouths. Great secrets. Treasure? Gold? Magic? I heard they guard a sleeping king, I hear tale of angel’s graves, I know of portals to fiery pits and wrathful demons. They keep secrets.
“Hello,” said a little girl to Canno, interrupting the sounds that he wasn’t listening to.
He nodded at her.
“It’s rude not to say hello back,” she explained to him. “My momma told me that.”
Canno made a face and cut across his throat with his hand. She frowned. “Got a cold? Daddy had a sore throat once. He couldn’t talk at all.” She scratched her nose and examined the cart. “Daddy said you hide treasure in your mound. Have you seen any treasure?”
Canno shook his head.
“Not even a little? A tiny bit of gold at all?”
Canno made a face.
“Oh don’t be mean! Fine then. Keep your stupid treasure, you dirty dumb thing!” She stomped on the ground and ran away. She hadn’t yet made it out of sight before incredible pain reached Canno’s ear and dragged him over to Half-leg’s side.
“I didn’t save you for you to give away our secrets, boy,” the man whispered, low and fast and threatening. “By word or otherwise. Now hush up. One more incident like this and Garren’ll know. You want Garren to know?”
Canno started to shake his head, then paused.
“Good boy. You keep still now. Don’t move a muscle ‘till we’re back home or you’ll get a lot worse than a pinched ear.”
Canno didn’t participate in the second round of the rock-flicking contest. He didn’t miss much; the others were too terrified to play well, and so it petered out miserably halfway back, comfier though the return journey was with bags of wheat and barley and other goods to sit atop rather than the hard piles of charcoal.
“Remember,” Half-leg said, leading him aside as the others hurried back to their pallets, “you say nothing. Not a word, not a gesture. What secret we keep here isn’t for you to know. Not yet. And it is never yours to give away. Understood?”
“Yes,” said Canno.
It wasn’t really a lie. Not really.
He understood perfectly what he was being told. He just wasn’t promising to do it.
Six years after his promise, Canno was beginning to grow slightly more hair on bits of his face than there should be. His voice had dropped into a pit and never fallen out, though it kept an edge of harshness from his work amidst the burning wood and the fire at home so long ago – sometimes he still frightened himself when he spoke, back bracing against an expected scolding from one of the senior charcoal-burners.
There were other little boys now, two of them. One, Yemmic, he had witnessed being brought in by Mirmar, who had found him wandering the woods in a daze. He’d tried to bite and scratch and had understood no human words when he first came, but now he fetched and carried as obediently as Canno had, once upon a time. The other was little more than a face that he occasionally ordered to bring him fuel when he was tending a fire.
Tending fires was all he did now it seemed. Somehow, along the way, he and Tagmus, Hullger, and Plalt had been split apart, separated along unseen lines and sent to learn different portions of the trades. Tagmus laboured under Mirmar to chop the wood and heave it in; Hullger laboured hard for the first time in many years under Keplak’s watchful eye; and Plalt learned to be the fast, roaming hands of Half-leg, whose peg troubled him more every winter.
A shadow fell across Canno’s back, followed by a sharp poke with a pipe handle. “How burns the fires? Speak ye up!”
Canno had been hand-picked by Garren, for what reason he could not tell. Perhaps the Ashmaster required a handy whipping boy at all times, perhaps he was too old to watch the charcoal smoulder as long as he wished to. Whatever reason, Canno spent his days and nights in observation now, in memorizing and realizing the patterns of the coals and burnings, in tasting a smoke’s thickness and hearing the whistling sound of a fire that needed banking, in finding and decoding the tiny scraped runes and messages that charcoal-burners years past had left on the timbers to help along his kind years later. He worked in the Younger Mound now, a maze that seemed all but endless, a warren of tunnels and burning pits rigged carefully, ventilation tilted just so, where one careless handful of dirt could ruin fires left burning for decades or suffocate all within.
“They burn well,” said Canno. Garren had done one good thing for him: it was near-impossible for him to find his own voice harsh as long as the old charcoal-burner was near.
“Bah! Details, mind ye!”
Canno forced himself not to flinch at the second, heavier jab as he thought his way through the last few hours. “The pine layer has become heavy. The clay grade is constant. There are notes jotted down that appear to be counts of trees needed to complete the pile – we are two-thirds through their total. The charcoal burns steady, and should be ready in another eight months to a year.”
“Pah! And it took ye that long? I learned that much just at a glance!” Garren spat in disgust. “Details, boy, details! Ye fuss over details like an old hag, when what ye’re looking for be as plain as the nose on yer face! Away with ye and yer details, and go to fetch me a good fine coal from our outer layers.”
“Where from?” asked Canno, and knew it was the wrong question precisely too late.
Garren turned near purple. “DETAILS! Pah! Perhaps I was wrong when I kenned ye had some semblance of a brain jellying its way about yer skull! Forget the coal! Get ye to the heart of the Younger Mound, get ye to my pallet, and ye’re not to move from its side ‘till ye can name me each and every coal within six feet of it. If ye must learn, ye will learn now! GO!”
Whatever worries and resentment Canno had felt were washed away in a tide of enthusiasm that he was careful to keep hidden as he dashed away down the tunnels, excitement building in his veins like a second heartbeat. To the heart of the mound. To see the secrets, to see what the charcoal-burners guarded so close and so near, to know what no one outside of the mound did…
Finding the heart chamber took some time. Mustering the self-control to let his heartbeat drop back down to something normal so he could enter the room without hyperventilating all the meagre oxygen that remained within it took longer – the Ashmaster must have had cinderheaps for lungs to ignore it in his sleep.
Inside, there was almost no light, no heat-glow at all. Canno reached down and plucked up a coal, held it in his hand. There was warmth, just above the temperature of the air. Faint, but there.
Warmth, and nothing else. No secrets here.
It was two days before Garren came for him. Canno’s throat was becoming too dry to speak through when the report was demanded, his finger’s numbed with ashes and heat blisters that had built up over patient hours of careful grasping, his only means of identifying the invisible coals in the darkness.
“I can name them all,” he said.
“Good. Do it.”
By the time he was done speaking, Canno’s voice was no more there than it had been after he’d been plucked from the embers of his home by Half-leg.
“Good,” grinned Garren. “Good. Ye’ve made a start. Perhaps we’ll have ye out of here and in the Elder Mound someday after all, instead of just throwing yer bones to it.”
Canno croaked out something before he could stop himself.
“Yes, yes, good, bone would spoil it, yes. Good to know ye can still think. Now go and sleep. But not too long; ye’ve work to do.”
Canno brooded even as he dreamt, thoughts looming through the sea of sleep like icebergs. No secrets after all in the mound’s heart, only the dark and barely-there remnants of coals. How long had the Ashmaster and that before him kept them burning, barely-alive? No secrets there. None to explain the whispers, the rumours, the awe. What were the charcoal-burners hiding?
Canno forgot what he’d been dreaming of when he awoke. But some part of him remembered that: the charcoal-burners were hiding something. Not him.
Canno did go to the Elder Mound someday – someday was more than a decade of labour away.
People came and left – the children grew up, and he had two of them working under him (‘children’ was a broader age category than he would’ve said it to be, a decade ago), examining the coals as he walked the long roads and trails to scout for new lumber-spots, nodding hellos to startled stranger-eyes that followed his tracks with wonder at this legend that tread their paths. Garren was less and less sneering in his speech, though he remained spiteful. Mirmar had been struck by a tree, and Tagmus now was the chief lumberjack, doling out errands and harsh language to the young. Plalt and his assistants managed the trips to town, and Half-leg spent more and more of his time warming his stump in the fiercer heat of the Younger Mound. Hullger’s softened limbs were corded now, though try as he might, Keplak could still beat him and any other at arm wrestling simultaneously.
He could talk in town now on the days he went with Plalt, albeit of no secrets. Still they asked, still they stared, asking with their eyes, their minds.
“Come in then,” coughed Garren. “Come on! Take us in.”
Canno shifted more of the weight of the Ashmaster onto his shoulder, walking arm in arm with the old man as they tottered their way into the mouth of the strangely small opening that was the Elder Mound’s only entrance. Canno had to duck to enter – Garren didn’t, hunched as he was.
Inside was all but darkness. No coals glowed in the deep dark of the Elder Mound – they smouldered, smothering themselves under their own smoke, keeping their burning to a dull roar. A glance and a sniff told Canno’s senses of fires that were older than the entire Younger Mound, here at the very freshest rim of the mound’s vast bulk.
“Inward,” wheezed Garren. “I will direct the turns. Now, get ye going.”
Slowly, slowly, much more slowly than Garren would’ve liked (but out of necessity – the old man was near-toppling even at a crawl), they moved inwards and outwards, back and forth. Sometimes Canno swore they were moving in circles, sometimes he half-imagined that the passages had closed behind them. He gave up trying to keep track, and resigned himself to walking as the halls grew ever darker and smokier. Air vents were few and tiny, a mole’s warren chewed into the ceiling without rhyme or reason that all his knowledge could divine.
“Every one of us comes this way,” Garren said.
Canno resisted the urge to start at the words, coming unbidden, without instruction.
“Every one of us,” the Ashmaster repeated. “Ye’re earlier than most. Yer fellows will be along inside the next eight years. First under thirty to walk these halls since I, mind ye well it daren’t go to yer head.”
Canno nodded. Talking still pained him since his examination of the coals in the heart of the Younger Mound. His voice was harsher than any in all the kilns now.
“Early, but it has to come some day for all. All of us. It’s time ye knew, as we all must. Ye’re to be the Ashmaster one day, and ye must know of what ye speak and don’t speak when ye talk to the others, the outside-folks.” Wearied as he was, Garren’s voice managed to dredge up some extra bit of venom for those last few words.
“They speak of us, ye ken this well.”
Canno nodded.
“They buy our charcoal, trade for it, ken ye? We make enough to let us live, but in return they get…. Answer me, boy.”
Canno’s throat felt clogged. It always did. “Fuel.”
“Aye. But think ye: are they not blanketed in it? Look about these forests boy, and ye cannot help but tread over fine pine on every other step.” He paused for a coughing fit, while Canno silently supported him, feeling his ribs beat violently against his palms, so twiglike.
“Nay,” he managed, resuming his shuffling walk. “No fuel their wish. They think it be, but what they think and what is so be not so the same, eh? Always is. Tell me, for ye has been outside more lately than I: what do they say that we keep in our barrow-kiln here? What do they think we hold, eh? More than fuel, surely.”
“Treasure. Prisoners. Magic. Ancient things.”
“Aye, aye, aye. And now ye’ll see what is real and what isn’t, and we’ll show their fables what the truth is.”
They stood before a dead end, a tumbledown earthen wall.
“Clear it ‘way, and be with care. The heart be beyond.”
The rubble was old, and crumbled easily under Canno’s hands. He wondered a little, that such disrepair would be allowed in such a special spot, but then all was lost and forgotten as Garren Ashmaster drew himself up straight and dragged him inside by the hand.
The heart of the Elder Mound was around him.
It was small, maybe teen foot across.
It was dim, with a tiny beam of light filtering from above, a flue the size of his fist that wound its way up through how many metres of sod and timber and coals he could not imagine.
It was almost completely bare. A small stone fireplace sat in its centre. A crude, small, ordinary ring of stones that Canno himself had fashioned more than once on a night spent on the trek.
“Now ye see,” said Garren. “Now do ye understand as well?”
Canno considered this.
“No,” he said.
“None do, at first. Listen then.” The Ashmaster shuffled over to the fireplace, began pulling lumps of charcoal from his clothing, fill it up.
“The mound went up long ago. No one remembers why. The charcoal-burning was all there was at first, as ye say, but then there came more later, when the town was built and rebuilt and yet we stayed here, building more upon more. We became older than they, ye ken? They began at the same time, but we are hoarier.”
“Now. They began to think of us as things of awe and to be afeared of, ye ken? Such happens. Such is helpful. They direct this upon us, they take up all their dreams and nightmares and fantasies, and they bestow them upon us. Keeps them from wandering, ye ken?” The Ashmaster chuckled – or maybe wheezed – as he struck flint to tinder and set a piece of cloth alight. “Wealth? I will tell ye what wealth is: nothing. I will tell what comfort is: nothing. There is but one thing a man wants, however much wealth and comfort he possesses, and that is to have power over another man. And we have the power of them all, by right of this fire.” He slapped one of the rocks carelessly with his hand. “It be empty. It be useless. It be nothing more than some old rocks, no elder than any other ye may have used yerself out in the forest for a night’s warmth. Nothing special, nothing necessary. But it holds ye in its grasp, don’t it? Ye hunger for something more, something that must be here. As do they. But there’s nothing here, be they know it not, and so all of their dreams come here to this place and serve us, all their hopes and fears and blighted fancies, all of them right here, under our palms.” The last words were a sword, echoed with a stab of the pipe at the fireplace.
“Now,” said Garren, recovering himself somewhat. He held out the light, and Canno took it, watching the little flame creep its way towards his fingers.
“Burn them.”
Canno thought, and looked, and watched, and stood. And then he dropped the light to the floor and placed one foot over it, swivelled it three times from side to side.
Garren did not look surprised. He was grateful to the old man for that; he’d have been disappointed if he fell apart so easily.
“Most wait ‘till it reaches their fingers,” he said. His voice was flat, strangely so – almost all the spittle and scorched heat had dropped away without warning. “They wait ‘till they’re near-burnt themselves, and then they light it.”
“Don’t want to,” said Canno.
“Bigger than that, eh? A fine thinker, boy.” He laughed, a strange sound, a wrong one. It bounced around the cramped little heart of the mound like a big dog in a small room, and it didn’t sound funny at all by the time it was through. “I ask you to burn the imaginary, and you say it’s pointless. Maybe it is.” He laughed again, louder, hurting Canno’s ears with the sharpness of the sound. “It is! Hah! Ye kenned it! Right on the spot! Good boy! No need for the flame, no need for the ceremony, when all is but ash and illusion! Good! Just to cut ye and rub the ash in then, and ye are Ashmaster beyond me.” Up came his hand, clutching a handful of old fire-leavings, old tinders and coals mixed to nothing. A knife glinted in his other, silver over the palm. “Give me yer arm.”
“Don’t want to,” repeated Canno, taking painful precision with each syllable.
“What.” said Garren. There was no question in it, just an expression of emotion.
“Keep it,” said Canno, lining up words. Each one hurt, but keeping them in hurt more. Especially after all those years. “Keep it. Keep all the labour, all the ceremony, all the fuss. Keep it. Keep your lies and half-truths and lead-ons all you want. Keep them. But you won’t keep this. And you won’t keep burning their dreams.”
And with that he plucked up the light from the floor and blew on it, and was not surprised at all when it burst into flame again. Garren was old, and had let him perform his duties one time too many, let his senses dull to what was obvious to younger eyes. Canno knew how to make any spark live again.
Garren must have seen what he was planning – there he came with the knife, a wordless screech soaring out from between gummed lips, all three of them clattering to the floor in different directions as Canno shoved him down with one hand. With the other, he raised up the light, up to the roof.
Garren screamed at him to stop, or maybe just screamed. Either way, Canno ignored him. He thrust the light into the roots, and began to drag the Ashmaster away.
Finding the exit was easier than he’d thought. The first licks of his newborne flame had stirred the air, set it a-flowing in ways he knew much moreso than the stale and dead breath he’d walked into. Carrying Garren out was no trouble either – he’d practically done it on the way in.
There were shouts, screams, calls all around as he left the Elder Mound; already the flames licked from the roof, spread in the cold wind. Before long they’d jump to the others. Slow but sure, hotter than any hell, that was a true charcoal burn, a glutton consuming a thousand-year feast. There would be no stopping this blaze, but plenty of time to avoid it, to abandon the warrens of the Kiln and the Mounds, to leave the dreamcatchers before they fell to pieces and let their captive imaginations free.
He laid Garren down on the ground – the old man had fallen into a stupor at some point during the journey, perhaps from exertion, perhaps from lack of air, perhaps in terror – and walked away, into the trees. The heat followed him, decreasing only reluctantly as he travelled. There would be no battling that fire, not with water nor dirt nor all the power in the world.
Canno saw another man on the trail. He was near town, after all.
As he drew close, he saw the man’s eyes go strange, and he burst out laughing.
“Nothing, nothing,” he reassured the man. “It’s nothing.”
“What is?”
“Back there. It’s nothing.” A blank stare was his only reply. “Never mind. You’ll see, for a change. You’ll see soon, all of you.” And all your dreams let free.
Canno walked south. The cold he didn’t mind, not anymore. But he would be happy to go where he would not need the light of fires.