Burning Night: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 10, Part 1: Tabitha

There was a small mountain of papers on her desk.

That there was a mound of paper at all was no surprise. Tabitha's projects had produced a mountain of notes over the years, one her table had difficulty containing. Her current project required perusing through a dozen different textbooks and almost a hundred different reports, spread haphazardly across the metal table she now spent a good portion of her life working at.

But this new collection of papers, neatly stacked, did not belong to her.

She marched over past the door, not bothering to shut it, and looked down at the tall stack left on her desk.

At the very top, there was a small note left underneath her slide ruler. She set it back on the table, took the note off without reading it, and looked at the top page.

The script was flowery, elaborate, and ostentatious. It immediately irritated her, but she forced herself to read the title.

"Metallurgic Crafting for high-temperature metals" it read. Tabitha rolled her eyes and cursed in irritation.

Someone had left her the first-year papers.

The first year was known, among full Crafters, as the forge. Apprentices were taken in, then put through a gruelling regimen of studies and activities. It was meant to discover out the extent of their power, and the strength of their restraint. At the end of an apprentice's first year the apprentices that survived and succeeded was paired up with a full Crafter, to oversee their continued education.

The tradition was for an apprentice to demonstrate their worth to the City by writing a research paper and submitting it to the Crafters chosen to train them.

Sadly, two of every three apprentices who made it through their first year were failed. Usually, it was because they lacked the strength of will to perform many of the tasks expected of a full Crafter. It was a sad waste of talent, but the demands of the Coat were harsh for those who lacked strength in the Craft.

That line of thinking led her to recall Theo's deliberate failure. The poor boy had the strength of a piece of paper, but he was intelligent, and that impressed Theo enough to coach him in some skills that might land the boy a useful role.

She recalled the boy ended up working for the Undertakers. What was his name again?

Shaking her head, Tabitha read the note left on top of the pile of papers. It was blunt and brief, a radical departure from everything beneath it. The terse and unembellished script read, "Shallow Swan Cafe, noon. Leave the coat."

Tabitha glanced out of her window, at one of the nearby clock towers. Knowing she had nearly two hours to waste, she sat back at her desk and studiously ignored both the papers, and their implications.

Instead, she stared at the scattered notes and sketches of her new pet project, a curious interest she thought would extend naturally from the research she put into buoyant suspension.

Her initial efforts were hugely successful, but incredibly simplistic. Take a massive canvas, stitch it into a balloon shape, and set a reservoir near the hole to generate heat. The contraption could stay in the air for days, and haul over four hundred pounds.

But that also seemed to be the limit of its capabilities. The weight ratios involved made picking up anything more substantial so prohibitively costly that it wasn't worth entertaining. Lifting something like a Valkyrie would require enough material to clothe hundreds of people, something the bureaucrats in Resource Distribution would sensibly scoff at.

Most people would have set the project aside, once conventional power proved to be insufficient. But a Crafter breaks the laws of nature and makes impossible things happen. She was currently working on the equations for how much heat a bag with cold-stone could handle, and was pleased to discover that the stone created a cold-air buffer, which could shield the canvas from an enormous amount of heat.

The only problem was that kind of heat would bleed a reservoir dry in about half a minute. Most Crafters could only sustain a Craft-like that for a few minutes at a time before it began to tax them. Even Coraline couldn't handle that inferno casually, and Brenda lacked the control to maintain the temperature with any precision.

Tabitha hissed in disgust, annoyed at how stubborn physics was being about letting her haul tonnes of material in the sky. She stepped over to the nearby sink, turned the tap, and rubbed some cold water on her face.

The vanity mirror hanging above the sink was a harsh and cruel thing, lacking in sympathy, discretion, or as Tabitha thought to herself as she held a bright-white ball of fire in her hand, any sense of self-preservation. The abyss-accursed thing was showing her the swaths of new grey in her hair.

It wasn't the cloud-like grey of advancing years, and it's insulting infirmity. Judging by Lionel Adams, the City's oldest living person, Crafters don't suffer age the way most people do. The man was nearly a hundred and ten years old, and his face had barely wrinkled its way into its forties. Tabitha, despite the vanity that comes from being human, would have preferred infirmity to the cause of her new hair colour.

"I liked the red," Tabitha mused to herself, poking at her hair. Once, it had naturally been almost as dark as her coat. Decades of a Crafter's work had put some of the ash in the now mostly grey hair on her head. But the change, with the finger-thick blots of grey all across her head, was a startling and heartbreaking thing to see.

She turned away, and stepped to the window, trying to think of something else.

She opened the window before looking out, trying to relax. Her self-control was never going to improve again, and if she wanted to get anywhere with this new project, she needed to come to terms with the idea that she didn't have that many more years.

But the Spire caught her eye, and her fears melted away.

From her home, well outside of Central in the Harvested Hill district, the Spire's fire was about half the thickness of the sun, and not quite as bright. But the afterimage it left on the eye, cut from the bottom to the top of her sight.

It had been a long time, since she last let herself hear the quiet roar the Spire made, a single insistent, but inconsistent note, like the drone of a waterfall, or the roar of an explosion went on endlessly.

The gentle, constant rush washed over her, and Tabitha let the sound empty her of thought, as she breathed in slowly, feeling the air in her lungs reverberate in a gentle, constant roar.

In.

In.

In.

The sound carried across the City. It vibrated through every building and wall, through every person alive, and past them, it pushed at the air and the Gloam.

There was a mystery in that note. A mystery that called to her, in the silence of her now peaceful mind.

She looked away, to find the torches in her room blazing, the heat withering the plants and causing the papers on her desk to crinkle at the edges. Startled and frightened, Tabitha forced herself to let go of the fire she hadn't known she had seised, and felt the rush of awareness abandon her.

She felt cold again, cold and small and frail.

And she felt how much of herself she had lost.

Carefully, struggling to keep her eyes away from the Spire, she closed the shutters. She wiped the tears from her eyes before she knew they were there, stumbled over to her small couch, and wept.