Sleep would not come to August. He lay upon his cot, and he stared at the water stains on the ceiling, and he listened to the snores of the other 'prentices.

  The morning came grey and sullen.

  The gate creaked open.

  A heavy dray rumbled into the yard, drawn by four draft horses of great size. The springs groaned under a heavy burden.

  August stood up. He wiped his hands on his trousers.

  On the back of the cart, bound by thick chains, sat three blocks of void-glass.

  They were a wonder to behold. They were pure, and absolute black. They drank the grey morning light into themselves, and they gave nothing back. They looked liquid, like frozen oil, yet sharper than any steel.

  August drew near the cart. He could feel the cold radiating from the stone. It was not the damp cold of the morning; it was the deep, dry cold of the earth’s marrow.

  He reached out. He desired to touch it. He wanted to feel the grain, and the terrible smoothness.

  "August!"

  The shout cracked the morning air.

  It was Master Borin. He stood at the entrance to the main workshop, a shadow of blocked light and heavy leather. He wasn't limping. He was storming.

  August froze, and his hand was inches from the void-glass. He turned, and he squinted against the glare of the lantern held by Borin.

  "Master?"

  "Put down the chisel. Put down the files." Borin stepped into the yard. He looked weary. The lines around his eyes were etched deep, and filled with grey dust.

  "The stone waits. The Guild Master won't."

  A cold weight settled in August's stomach.

  The hope curdled.

  "The void-glass?" he asked, and he glanced back at the blocks.

  "It'll keep," Borin rumbled. He spat on the cobblestones. "The High-Mages want their road flat for their parade. A carriage cracked a paver on Kogsworth Way. Some fool noble driving too fast."

  "A... rut?"

  "A hasty fix," Borin corrected, and his voice dripped with scorn. "King's Warrant. The Artificers can't have their precious toys bumping over a crack in the street."

  August looked at his hands. They were raw and scarred, capable of coaxing a songbird from a river stone. And now they were sent to fix a hole in the ground.

  "I'm a mason," August whispered. "Not a road-layer."

  "You're a 'prentice," Borin snapped. "And you're unseen. That's what they need right now. A soul to mend the error without being seen. Go. Take the cart. Mend the road. And for the love of stone, keep your head down. Don't look at the shiny things. And don't hum."

  The cart rattled over the cobbles, and its iron wheels ground a rhythm of protest against the uneven stones. August pushed, and his head was down, and his shoulders were hunched against the wind that whipped through the narrow streets of the Lower Ward.

  One moment, the air smelled of coal dust, boiled cabbage, and the damp rot of the river; the next, as he crossed the unseen line into the Upper Wards, the scents shifted.

  The coal smoke fled, replaced by the sweet, thick perfume of copper and jasmine. The grey stone of the tenements gave way to polished limestone and gleaming brass fronts.

  Kogsworth Way was a riot of noise.

  Banners of blue and gold snapped in the breeze, proclaiming the "Artificer's Trial." Clockwork birds chirped from gilded cages hung on lampposts that buzzed with spirit-light, even in the daytime.

  There were folk everywhere, Artificers in velvet coats, Mages in silk robes, and nobles in stiff collars. They swarmed the pavements, and their laughter was high and brittle like breaking glass.

  The weight of being unseen lay upon August. He was a smudge of grey in a world of color. He guided the heavy cart through the throng, and the people parted around him not out of respect, but out of a thoughtless distaste for grime. He was an obstacle. A piece of moving scenery.

  He reached the barrier of striped wooden horses that walled off the center of the way. A Watchman of the City, his armor polished to a mirror shine, lifted the rope with a sneer, and he waved August through as if he were letting a stray dog into a feast hall.

  August knelt in the center of the street, surrounded by piles of loose cobbles and the barrier. The air smelled of sharp, dear perfume, and the hot grease of the food sellers lining the pavements.

  He hated it.

  He picked up a stone. It was heavy, dumb granite. No song. No life. Just a dead weight cut into a square.

  He scraped the old mortar from the bed of the hole. It was weary work. Mindless.

  Above him, on the raised iron stage, the crowd roared.

  He did not look up. He kept his eyes on the dirt.

  Just a rock, he told himself. Just a stupid, flat rock.

  He set the stone. He tapped it with his hammer.

  Thud.

  Dull. Lifeless.

  "The force is... great," a voice boomed from the stage. A judge. Pompous. Made loud by some spirit-trick.

  "Balance-wheel, my lord," a woman's voice answered. Clear. Sharp. " Jointed springing on each limb. It can fix a pipe in a storm."

  August gritted his teeth. He knew that voice. Not the person, but the kind. Learned. Clean. The kind of folk who looked at a wall and saw a barrier, not the sweat it took to stack it.

  He reached for the next stone. His hand brushed the bare earth at the bottom of the hole.

  He stopped.

  The earth was not cold.

  It was warm.

  Hot.

  A shudder traveled up his arm. It was not the dull thud of the hammer. It was a hum. Low. Angry.

  He frowned. He pressed his palm flat against the dirt.

  Beneath the dirt, beneath the road footings, beneath the sewer lines... something was waking up.

  Thrummmmm.

  The shudder felt wrong, less like something natural, more like an answer.

  He looked up at the stage.

  The woman, the Artificer, stood next to a machine. A spider. Brass and glass. It moved. It skittered up a pipe.

  The machine hummed. A high whine.

  Eeeeeeeeeeeee.

  August winced. The sound hurt his teeth.

  But the ground... the ground hated it.

  The First Dominion foundation stone, the ancient, white bone of the city that lay deep underground, shook in sympathy. But it was not a harmony. It was a fight. A friction.

  The machine sang High. The earth sang Low.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  And where they met...

  "Stop," August whispered.

  He tried to pull his hand away from the dirt.

  He could not.

  It stuck.

  Not suction. The grip of the lodestone. The sheer weight of the shudder glued his skin to the earth.

  The hum in the ground spiked. It became a shriek.

  SCREEEEEEEEE.

  It hit August like a fist.

  His head snapped back. His sight blurred. The world went grey at the edges.

  Pain.

  White-hot needles in his veins. His blood began to boil. The "song" in his head was not a tune anymore. It was a roar. A landslide inside his skull.

  Let go! he screamed in his mind. Let go! It's too loud! It's too heavy!

  The stone did not let go. It pulled. It drank.

  It felt like being drained. Like a leech the size of a mountain was bound to his palm.

  The air tasted of copper. Sharp. Blood.

  He opened his mouth to scream, to warn them, to tell the woman with the spider to shut it off.

  "RUN!"

  The word was a choke. A gurgle. Lost in the rising whine of the machine and the grinding roar of the earth.

  The tone hit the peak. A perfect, impossible note of pure doom.

  August’s sight went black.

  He screamed.

  And the power exploded.

  On the stage, the world tilted.

  Bella smiled. She watched the spider weld the final seal. She reckoned the prize money. She saw in her mind the look on her brother's face.

  Then, the floor heaved.

  The heave was not a gentle tremor, but a sudden kick.

  A ripple of force, visible, shimmering like heat off a summer road, shot up from the street. It passed through the wooden planks of the stage as if they were mist.

  It hit the platform.

  The iron legs of the stage buckled. Metal screamed.

  The ripple hit the Spider.

  The machine did not fall. It warped.

  It looked like a reflection in a twisted mirror. The brass legs twisted. The gears stretched, like pulled sugar. The main frame groaned, and the metal turned liquid for a heartbeat before seizing hard.

  SCREEEECH-CRUNCH.

  The sound of a thousand fine parts fusing together in an instant.

  "No!" Bella screamed. She lunged forward. "The governor! Sever the flow!"

  The air blistered.

  Heat.

  A wave of it. Dry and sudden.

  "Stand back, girl!"

  Master Elmsworth seized Bella's collar, and she hauled her backward. "It is set to burst!"

  The crowd took fright. A stampede of velvet and silk. Screams. The sound of chairs overturning.

  "Wards!" the Head Judge roared, and he ducked behind his podium. "Raise the hazard wards!"

  A shimmering blue wall of force sprang up around the judges' booth.

  Bella fought Elmsworth's grip.

  "My work!"

  Then, the light died.

  The flash was blinding. White. Silent.

  Then darkness. Then dust.

  Silence returned. Heavy. Ringing.

  Bella lay on the wooden planks. Her ears popped. The smell of metal was gone, replaced by the thick, choking scent of hot stone and burnt oil.

  She coughed, and she pushed herself up.

  "Master?"

  Elmsworth was already standing, and she brushed dust from his apron. She looked shaken.

  Bella looked at the platform.

  The Spider was gone.

  In its place stood a statue.

  A twisted monument to ruin.

  The machine had not just broken. It had been eaten.

  A spray of molten cobbles from the street below had burst upward, and it caught the machine in a deadly embrace. The brass gears were buried in grey granite. Iron struts were twisted around melted brick. A piston jutted from a lump of rock like a broken bone.

  It looked like living flesh. Cankered. A growth of metal and stone fused into a single, useless lump.

  It hissed still.

  Bella crawled toward it. She heeded not the heat radiating from the mass.

  "My... my work," she whispered. "It's..."

  "By the Saints."

  Lydia Veras stepped out from behind her own shielded cage. Her perfect hair was dusted with grey soot. She looked at the fused lump with true horror.

  "What... what is that?"

  Valerius scrambled up the tilted stage. His glasses were crooked. He did not look at Bella. He stared at the wreckage with a wild, fearful wonder.

  "It is not a blast," he muttered, and he leaned in close, and he squinted at the seam where brass met stone. "It is a binding. Look at the spirit-wick. The stone did not break the metal; it became the metal. It is a change."

  His eyes moved quickly past the melted mass and down through the rough opening that the blast had created in both stage and street below.

  The liquid cobbles had cooled into a dark glass-like bowl, with waves spreading outwards evenly from one spot. In the center of those wave patterns, like an insect trapped in amber, lay a soul wearing a mason's jacket.

  Bella reached out. She touched a gear that was half-swallowed by the rock.

  Hiss.

  It burned her fingertip.

  She pulled her hand back, and she cradled it.

  The pain cleared her head.

  She looked past the ruin. She looked down through the hole in the stage floor.

  Into the pit in the street.

  August lay in a bowl of glass.

  The cobbles around him had turned to water and then flash-cooled. They were smooth, black, and slick.

  He could not move. His body felt hollow. Scooped out.

  He breathed. It rattled in his chest.

  He looked at his arm. His right arm. The one that had touched the earth.

  It ached. A deep, dry ache, like old wood left in the sun too long.

  He lifted it. His sleeve was burned away.

  The skin was grey. Withered. It looked like parchment stretched too tight over the bone. The muscle beneath was shrunken.

  He blinked, and he tried to clear the sweat from his eyes.

  A lock of hair fell across his forehead.

  It was not brown.

  It was white. Stark, brittle white.

  The silence broke.

  A murmur started at the edge of the pit. Then a shout.

  "He lives!"

  "Look at him!"

  "He did it! The road-layer!"

  The crowd realized they were not dead. The fear vanished, replaced instantly by anger. Rich, high-born anger.

  "Treachery!" a man in a silk coat shouted, and he pointed a trembling finger. "Clear as day! He attacked the stage!"

  "He's a stone-breaker!" another voice screamed. "One of the Prophet's madmen!"

  August tried to sit up. The world spun.

  "I..." he croaked. "I didn't... I didn't touch it."

  A senior foreman from the Masons' Guild pushed his way to the front. He looked terrified, and he clutched his velvet cap.

  "He's a rogue!" the foreman squeaked, and his voice was high with dread. "A clumsy 'prentice! The Masons' Guild bears no guilt for this ruin!"

  Five paces away. The Artificer.

  She did not look at him. She stared at the twisted, slagged lump of metal that had been her hope of escape.

  The fine work she had spent months filing by candlelight was now just a smear of iron slag on the pavement.

  She stood silent, for screaming was a luxury for those with choices, for women who could afford to faint and be caught by a wealthy suitor.

  She stood with the stillness of a statue, face a porcelain mask glazed in ice. Her hands, usually so busy, so restless with tools and lead, hung dead at her sides.

  Ink stained her thumb, a small, human mark on a day that had turned monstrous.

  A laugh cut the silence. Light. Tinkling. Sharp as a glass shard.

  Lydia Veras stepped forward. Silk skirts rustled with a dear, haughty whisper.

  The fabric was dyed purple that cost more than August's life earnings.

  She did not look at the wreckage. She inspected her fingernails, and she frowned at a smudge of soot with open distaste.

  "A pity, Arabella," Lydia said.

  Pitch perfect for the stunned crowd of Masters and Guild-heads.

  "The tuning must have been... fine. Perhaps next year the Guild will lower the gates for you. Charity is a virtue, after all."

  The words hit Arabella like a slap. The porcelain mask cracked.

  She turned. Not to Lydia. To August.

  Her eyes were not blue anymore. Black holes. Voids where warmth went to die. She stepped over the smoking ruin of her life, and her boots crunched on glass.

  "This was not tuning," she said.

  Her voice shook, vibrating like a boiler about to burst rather than with tears.

  "Look at the gears, mason. Look at them."

  He could not. He stared at her boots. Work boots. Scuffed leather, bound with copper strips. Stranger's boots. He knew neither her name nor her face, only that he had just destroyed her life.

  "Look at them!" she shrieked.

  He forced his head up.

  "They aren't stripped," she hissed.

  She was closer now. The smell of metal and soap was gone, replaced by the foul stench of failure and the sharp smell of acid.

  "They're fused. Melted from the inside out. Iron does not melt in a clockwork drive unless the heat comes from nowhere."

  She was close enough to see the gold flecks in her eyes, burning.

  "You," she said.

  A doom.

  "You did this. Who paid you? Was it Veras? Did she pay you to wreck it?"

  "I..." August's tongue felt thick, swollen. A dead slug in his mouth. "The stone... it shouted."

  "It shouted?" She laughed, a jagged, broken sound. "My father goes to the debtors' gaol, and you tell me the pavement shouted at you?"

  She shoved him. It wasn't hard, but his knees turned to water. He stumbled back, and his heel caught on a fused lump of stone.

  "You treachery-blinded fool!" she screamed.

  Control snapped.

  The Artificer vanished; the desperate daughter remained.

  "You burned it! You burned everything! My father... the house... it is all ash because of you!"

  The crowd woke up.

  Shock broke, replaced by the low, ugly rumble of a mob finding a target. It was a sound August knew from the rat-pits in the Lower Ward, the sound of dogs smelling blood.

  Murmurs of "wrecker" and "malice" rippled through the onlookers.

  A heavy-set man in a merchant's coat pointed a thick finger, and his jowls shook.

  "Seize the boy! That is Crown brass he ruined! That is licensed Work!"

  August backed away. Heart hammering against ribs like a trapped bird. He raised his hands, palms out.

  "No. I didn't... I didn't mean..."

  A shadow fell over him, solid as a wall.

  Silas stepped between Arabella and August. He had grace, fluid and wolf-like. A man who knew exactly how much space he occupied. He ignored the boy, and he fixed his gaze on the crowd, chin raised, hand resting lightly on the hilt of his dress saber.

  "Stand down," Silas said.

  Softly spoken, yet it cut the murmurs like a knife through canvas.

  "Do not dirty your gloves on a masterless vandal."

  He turned.

  Silas's face was pale, skin pulled tight over high cheekbones. A sheen of sweat on his forehead. Fever-heat radiating from him. It was the smell of a furnace running too hot. The hand lashed out, and it gripped August's shoulder like a vice.

  August gasped. Leather dug into the muscle, grinding flesh against bone. He tried to pull away, but Silas was immovable, an iron statue bolted to the earth.

  "Let go," August wheezed. "It hurts."

  Silas leaned in, close and dear. The smell overwhelmed, sickness masked by costly water, the metallic smell of storm-air leaking from pores. Yellowed eyes with wide pupils stared back.

  "Do you know what had to be carved away to make room for this power, boy?" Silas whispered, a hiss of steam meant only for August.

  "Do you know the cold of the iron?"

  His grip tightened. August's knees buckled. He felt the bruise forming, deep and instant.

  "And you," Silas murmured. Pure, deep disgust twisted his fair features.

  "You cast it upon the stones, like a drunkard in the alley. You waste it, and you bleed power you did not earn, yet better men bleed to hold but a single drop."

  Silas straightened, and he dragged August up onto his toes. He spoke to the crowd, voice booming. The perfect officer. The warden of the peace.

  "This acts against the Crown! Malicious ruin of Guild goods and peril to the peace! I place this mason in chains."

  "UNHAND HIM!"

  The shout was high, cracking with terror.

  A whirlwind of ink-stained robes and flapping parchment collided with the arm of Silas. Valerius. The scholar looked like a scarecrow caught in a gale. Spectacles crooked, ink smudged on his nose. A quill still tucked behind his ear dripped black ink onto his shoulder as he thrust himself between the Warrior and the mason, using his own frailty as a shield.

  "That man is... that man is my assistant!"