IM AN ORC?

The forge had become another wound.

Ruk's hand slid down the cage chain as the mechanism pulled it toward the pale furnace fire. Heat surged through his boots. The prisoners inside clung to the bars, their faces lit from below by the false glow.

"Hold it!" Zira called.

She stood beneath the cage with both arms raised. Her healing light pressed upward against the black wires, slowing the descent but not stopping it. The wires had sunk into the cage floor and wound around the mechanism below, feeding on the fear and pain of the people trapped inside.

Nym reached the top of the cage first. She wrapped one arm around a chain and cut at the nearest wire with a hooked blade. The wire snapped back and slashed her shoulder. She ignored the blood and cut another.

"There are too many," she shouted. "They are linked under the furnace!"

Zree pushed through the workers toward the stone rim of the pit. Her amber eyes searched the pale fire rather than the cage.

"Three notes," she said. "The engine is split into three parts. The cage is one. The furnaces are another. The hollow-metal stockpile is the third. Break only one and the others will force it back together."

Ruk looked across the cavern.

The stockpile sat beyond the rails: crates of dark ore and shaped anchor pieces, all threaded with the pale glow. The furnaces stood beneath the hanging cage. The cage itself was still descending.

"Grasha! Karg!" he called.

They looked up from the work line, where they had been holding back the last Court overseers.

"Take the stockpile. Break the pattern, not the metal. Zree tells you where."

"Gladly," Grasha replied.

Keth came to the pit edge, soot and blood across his scales. Pik was beside him, gripping a mining hammer with both hands. Behind them, the kobold workers had stopped running. Some were dragging their families toward the east tunnel. Others stood uncertainly between the old fear and the new chance to fight.

Keth raised his voice.

"The Court made you mine the metal. Now you decide what it becomes. Hold the rails. Do not let anyone reach the cage."

The older kobold miner from the listening camp stepped forward first. He lifted a broken baton and threw it into the pale furnace.

The furnace flared.

Then half the workers shouted and moved.

They overturned ore carts. They blocked tunnel mouths with rail beams. They pulled Court guards away from the fight, not with polished weapons but with picks, shovels, and the anger of people who had been trapped too long.

Ruk felt the cage chain jerk.

The mechanism below the furnace had taken another turn. The cage dropped to shoulder height above the pale fire.

He let go of the chain with one hand and raised the artifact.

The false note rushed at him in three layers: cage, furnace, stockpile. Each one tried to drown the others out. He did not chase them. He reached beneath all three, toward the true boundary voice in the hot stone below the forge.

It was there, strained but strong.

The old volcanic seam had held heat for ages. The Court had wounded it, but it still knew its own shape.

Ruk aligned the artifact with it.

Clear light ran through the cage chain.

The descent slowed.

"Now," Zree cried.

Her resonance struck the furnace line. The pale flames guttered. Grasha and Karg reached the stockpile at the same moment. Zree pointed from across the cavern.

"Second crate left. The black wedge under it. Pull it out."

Karg smashed the crate open with the flat of her axe. Grasha drove both hands into the shattered ore, found a wedge of hollow-metal hidden beneath it, and tore it free.

The stockpile's false note broke.

The cage shook violently.

Drae's voice rang from the far tunnel.

"You think you are freeing them? You are teaching every buried seam to fight you!"

She stood at the tunnel mouth with three Court soldiers behind her. In one hand she held a long tube of dark metal. In the other, a small hammer.

Nym saw it and went still.

"She has a trigger."

Drae struck the tube.

A high wrong tone cut through the cavern.

The surviving furnaces answered. Pale fire rose in columns. The cage chain snapped downward.

Ruk dropped with it.

He landed on the top bars as the cage plunged toward the furnace pit. Heat struck him hard enough to blur his vision. Below, the pale fire opened like a mouth.

Zira reached for him from the rim. Too far.

Then a cable whipped across the cavern.

Pik had climbed the rail tower. He looped a hauling line around the cage chain and threw the other end to Keth. Keth caught it, planted his feet, and pulled with both hands. The broken chains on his back tore open again, but he did not release the rope.

Kobold workers joined him.

One by one, then in a rush, they took hold of the line.

The cage stopped inches above the fire.

Ruk felt the true voice beneath the furnace answer the weight of them. Not only his artifact. Not only Zree's resonance. The work of many hands refusing to let the wound deepen.

He pushed the clear light down into the furnace.

The pale fire collapsed.

The black wires burned away from the cage floor. The prisoners fell against one another as the mechanism died.

The cavern went dark except for ordinary forge flame.

Drae stared at the ruined engine.

Then she smashed a smoke capsule at her feet and disappeared into the far tunnel.

Sorn ran after her, but the tunnel roof buckled where the Court soldiers had set charges. Stone came down between them.

"She planned the escape," Nym said, coughing through the smoke.

"She planned everything except the miners choosing themselves," Ruk answered.

The cage was lowered to the cavern floor.

Zira cut the last restraints. The prisoners crawled free. The horned woman with furred ears clutched Ruk's sleeve as he helped her stand.

"The Court has three river marks left," she whispered. "They are going to light them together. When they do, Orrin's Ford will look small."

Ruk looked at the eastern tunnel, blocked by falling stone. Drae had escaped. The Court's next move was already in motion.

Behind him, the kobold workers gathered around Keth and Pik, waiting for someone to tell them what came after survival.

Keth looked at Ruk.

"The Ember Warrens are not free yet," he said. "But they will know you came."

Ruk looked at the freed prisoners, the broken engine, the people holding the rail line together.

"Then we make sure they know why," he said.