Eight

Viktor closed his eyes and blotted out the grime-tinged walls. He propped his elbows against the railing and let the suffocating air wash over him. The sharp, breath-stealing tang of molten metal. The dry heat in his lungs. The prickle of sweat. They evoked memories of childhood long past and held the cold of his shadow at bay.

Pulleys creaked. Viktor leaned out over the gantry’s edge. A kraikon’s towering form emerged from the seething pool.

Forging constructs was a volatile art, even for those who commanded a glint of the magic that was Lumestra’s light.

The proctors who fashioned the creatures spoke of a process more instinct than rational endeavour, with Lumestra’s eternal light yearning to be born anew into ephemeral form. At least, until the bronze shell was breached, and the light seeped away, leaving the metal cold and still once more. Whether that was a form of death, or no less sorrowful than a leaping flame, Viktor wasn’t sure. But in the foundry, all constructs were named as diligently as all newborns, in defiance of the fact that those names were seldom used elsewhere.

Streaks of liquid bronze ran like livid wounds through a skin of older, darker metal. The figure swayed as it was borne away into the gloom. Stray magic crackled from empty eyes and arced about rattling chains. The labours of the treadwheel horses set the chainway rattling, offering up another lifeless kraikon husk to the molten pool.

Scuffed footfalls crept along the gantry to Viktor’s right.

“Let me guess. You’ve quarrelled with your father again.”

As ever, Elzar’s voice held a hint of mockery.

Viktor growled, and stared down at the burbling, seething metal. “It’s that obvious?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

Viktor grunted. The foundry had been his refuge since he’d been a boy. He’d been desperate, searching for a place to hide in the aftermath of his shadow’s first flaring. And the foundry had . . . called to him, in sensations he’d never been able to describe. As if his magic had been drawn to that practised within, different though it was.

Of course, the building had been cold and dark then. Dark enough to lose the vranakin footpads in the maze of hoppers, gantries and workshops. Somewhere along the line, he’d fallen asleep, and the opportunistic robbers had wearied of the chase. Hours later Viktor had woken to the hiss of steam, and Elzar’s hand upon his shoulder.

Viktor had pled ignorance of the night’s events, for he’d barely understood them himself. He’d been too young to know of the vranakin – the crow-brethren, as they were named in less formal language – as anything other than legend. Thieves he knew of, certainly; a starving underclass bred wickedness and desperation.