There is a room in every fire.
His third master had said that — the sword-teacher, the one with the missing ear, apropos of a temple kitchen blaze the novices had been made to fight with wet sacking. Heat rises, child. The fire keeps a cold floor for its own feet. When the burning starts, the living is done low.
Shen Huang had been mid-stride on the western arc when Iskar's eyes left him, and he spent the last whole second before the world ignited doing the only shopping the moment offered: he stopped, dropped, and folded himself flat into the ankle-flood — face down, burned arm under him, one hand finding the seam of a paving joint and gripping — and the breath he took going under was deep, and slow, and finished before the light arrived.
Then the flood came, and there was no more circle, no more Pit, no strategy, no ledger. There was noise like a mountain clearing its throat, and above two inches of black water the entire visible universe turned the color of a forge's heart.
The water saved him and the water tried to kill him, in strict rotation. It shielded — two inches of flood between his spine and the burning air, boiling off its own surface in a continuous scream. It scalded — the top layer heating past endurance, his back and shoulders reporting in long overlapping sheets of white pain where the sodden wool cooked against him. He lay under an inch of shelter and an inch of torture, gripping the stone seam while the flood-wash tried to peel him off the floor, and he made the pain into paperwork — logged it, shelved it — and counted.
The mountain that clears its throat must inhale.
Four seconds. Five. The roar wavering. Six — the light through his eyelids stepping down from white to orange to a dirty pulsing red — seven, and the sealed room, working through it all with the lights on, reviewed its holdings: a purse already at its bottom before the flood began. The flinch from his own bloom at eight meters. The lids narrowing against his own light. A man who had just set fire to the sky was a man who could not currently see — no one could see from inside that; he had bought a Pit-sized sun at ruinous cost and the first casualty of it was his own aim, and the second would be his legs, and somewhere above the water there would be a window, brief as a blink is brief, when the fire-lord of Zhammar stood spent, blind, and certain.
Certain was the asset. The rest was tuition already paid.
The roar collapsed.
Not faded — collapsed, the way a wave collapses, the heat sucking upward and away with an enormous hollow whumph of inrushing air, and Shen Huang surfaced into the ruins of the weather: steam. Steam in walls, in continents — the whole Pit exhaling a scalded fog, water hissing on stone that glowed faintly at the rims of the paving joints, the crowd's ten thousand voices arriving muffled and wrong through the white, screaming their delight at the execution they were certain they had witnessed.
He was on his feet inside the fog, low, moving. His back was an atlas of blisters. His lungs took the steam-air in shallow sips, each one taxed. The burned forearm had gone somewhere past pain into a cold ringing absence, which the paperwork noted and flagged for later, if later occurred.
Eight meters. He had marked the bearing off the paving seam before he dropped, and he walked it now through the blind white — quickly, softly, the greased stone read foot by foot — while ahead of him, out of the steam, a shape began to assemble itself exactly where the mathematics had left it.
Iskar of Zhammar stood at the hub of his own aftermath with his chest heaving like a foundered horse and his fists down, and he was diminished in a way the crowd could not see and Shen Huang, closing through the fog, read like large print. The coal-red robes hung sodden and dark. The dry-man shimmer was long dead. He was mopping at his streaming eyes with a soaked sleeve — scrubbing them, jaw clenched, the fine skin around them scalded raw by his own light — and he was laughing, ragged and breathless, playing to the roar of tiers he couldn't see, sweeping his free hand at the steam in showman's flourishes.
The certainty. On display, spending itself. He had thrown the sun at a slave. No one stood up from the sun. The fight was over because it could not be otherwise, and so he stood scrubbing his eyes at the center of forty meters of hot fog, being adored, while eight meters became six became four in the white behind his outstretched, flourishing arm.
The steam swirled. Some eddy of the dying heat pulled a channel through it —
— and Iskar saw him.
Blur, silhouette, wrongness — something the boiled eyes caught at four meters and could not at first believe, and then believed. The laughter stopped as if cut. The whole body snapped taut, the head coming around, and out of the reflex older than his art, faster than thought, honest as a scream, Iskar of Zhammar looked at the dead man walking out of the steam and made a blade.
It leapt into his right fist whole — half a meter of coherent fire, blinding even through fog, a duelist's answer from a duelist's country, the close-work tool of a man bred to finish arguments by hand — and he threw his arm out full length behind it, point at the closing shape, the classical line, the taught line, edge and eye and enemy on one axis —
— and lunged.