Page 59 of Scorched
Ifind the vault by following the singing.
Not the main weapons vault—I know where that is. Not the Bloodwork display cases he showed me two weeks ago, the careful exhibition of a dead people's tools arranged on velvet like museum pieces. Something deeper. Something the fire-thread has been pulling me toward for three days, a tug in my blood that I've been ignoring the way I ignore the sigil's pulse, the way I ignore the fact that I can feel his heartbeat through my chest every minute of every day.
The staircase is behind a wall in the forge. I find it because the Bloodwork harmonic leads me to it—a specific frequency vibrating in the stone, strongest at a point on the back wall where the mortar is a slightly different color. Old repair work. A sealed entrance.
The god-killer opens it.
I press the blade's edge to the stone and the wall cracks along the old mortar lines, the Fae wards dissolving on contact like ice meeting flame. Behind the wall: a staircase spiraling down into darkness. The caldera's heat pours up from below, stronger thanthe main forge, almost unbearable. The air tastes like sulfur and old iron.
I go down.
The vault is larger than the one he showed me. Three times the size—a long, low room carved from the mountain's basalt, the ceiling close enough to touch, the walls lined not with display cases but with shelving, floor to ceiling, packed tight. Scrolls. Ledgers. Bound documents. Folded maps. Loose papers in careful stacks.
And weapons. Hundreds of them. Not the curated collection upstairs—the raw, unsorted contents of an entire people's forge. Blades stacked in barrels. Hammers piled in crates. Tongs and files and rasps bundled in leather wrappings that have gone brittle with age. The Bloodwork harmonic is deafening down here. Every piece of metal singing at full voice, the combined frequency pressing against my eardrums, my teeth, the brands on my skin.
I stand in the middle of it. My hands are shaking.
This is not a museum. This is a grave.
I start with the ledgers.
The first one I pull from the shelf is bound in leather so old it cracks when I open it. The handwriting inside is precise, angular, Fae script that I can read because my grandmother taught me—another thing she taught me without explaining why a human assassin would need to read Fae formal notation.
It's an inventory. Forges. Listed by location, by output capacity, by the names of the masters who ran them. I run my finger down the columns. Forty-seven forges. Each entry annotated with a date and a single word in a different hand—a hand I recognize because I've seen it on official court documents,on weapon commissions, on the note he left on my workbench three days ago saying the forge was mine to use.
Ignatius's handwriting.
The annotations read: Extinguished.
Forty-seven forges. Forty-seven times the same word. Extinguished.
I turn the page.
Names. Bloodwork masters, listed by forge. Their apprentices beneath them. Their families beneath that. I read the names the way I've been trained to read intelligence reports—systematically, without flinching, the assassin's discipline holding even as the information tries to break me.
The families have children listed. Ages noted in the margin. The youngest is three.
I close the ledger. I open it again. I read the entry for the three-year-old. A name I don't recognize. A forge in the eastern mountains. The annotation beside the child's name, in Ignatius's hand: Confirmed.
Confirmed. A three-year-old, confirmed. I know what that word means in the context of a purge. I've used that word myself, in different reports, for different targets. It means dead.
I set the ledger down. My hands are steady. The assassin's hands, trained to hold still, trained to hold still, trained to hold still.
I pick up the next ledger.
It takesme four hours to read everything.
Four hours on the stone floor with the caldera's heat pressing up through the basalt and the Bloodwork harmonic screaming around me and the ledgers spread in front of me like a map of the dead. I read it all. Every forge. Every name. Every child's age noted in the margin. Every annotation in his handwriting:extinguished. Confirmed. Relocated. Eliminated. Administrative words for slaughter, written in the precise, angular Fae script I recognize from court documents and the note he left on my workbench three days ago.
The kill orders are in a separate ledger. Formal documents, sealed with the Ember Court's fire sigil—the wax still carrying a trace of heat after six centuries, the fire magic preserved in the seal the way it's preserved in the brands on my skin. I crack the seals one by one. The wax crumbles to red dust between my fingers.
The orders are specific. Forge locations with maps drawn in precise detail—I recognize military cartography, the kind of map a commander draws when planning a siege. Master smith identities with physical descriptions. Family members to be accounted for, listed by name, by age, by the forge they belonged to. The language is the language of logistics. Supply lines. Troop movements. Asset disposal. The same vocabulary I've read in a hundred intelligence briefings, applied to the deliberate destruction of a people.
I read them in order. Eastern forges first—fourteen of them, clustered in the mountain range that borders the Frost Court. The orders are dated over a period of three weeks. Forge by forge. Family by family. His handwriting doesn't waver. The letters don't shake. Whatever he felt while writing these orders, it didn't reach his hands.
One name stops me.
Not a smith's name. A woman's name, in a list of descendants identified but not located. Not a name I recognize at first—but the family name, Vey-Sorath, I know. And the given name: Ilara. My grandmother's name. The name she was given because it was her ancestor's.
