The Salvage of Ironmire

The city of Ironmire exhaled steam before dawn, a long sigh that rose from the ribs of boilers and the teeth of clockwork mills. Brass filigree on the rooftops caught the first gray light and threw it back in fragments: a thousand little sunbursts that shimmered over soot-streaked glass and the curled iron bridges that stitched districts together. Down in the alley where Maia Voss worked, the air smelled of oil and boiled sugar, because the confectioner two stalls down burned syrup the way a bellows breathes fire. Maia liked that smell—sweet and hot, like the promise of making something from nothing.

She bent over a courier automaton the size of a cat, coaxing a stubborn mainspring into smooth obedience. Her fingers were stained in working oil, knuckles scabbed with fine metal dust. Pip, her brass raven, shifted on a perch made from an old wrench and clicked a tiny beak in approval. The raven's wings gleamed with etched patterns, and a faint amber light pulsed beneath its breast when Maia hummed the right rhythm. Pip was mostly clever enough to fetch lost screws, and sometimes clever enough to keep Maia from forgetting to eat.

'Careful of that coil,' called Mrs. Gorton from the doorway of the bakery, voice like a cracked bell. 'If it snaps we'll have no post until the carrier guild can come through.'

Maia straightened and wiped a smear of grease on the hem of her coat. 'It won't snap. It's been tempered for the Foundry's worst winters,' she said without looking away from the automaton's teeth.

Mrs. Gorton came nearer, apron dusted with flour and soot. Her cheeks were pinched with worry. 'You hear about the lamplighters last night? Half the lanterns down Cascade Row went dull. My Georgie couldn't wake the pump and he swears the pressure fell like a sigh.'

Maia's throat tightened at the word 'pressure.' The city ran on a complicated geometry of steam and aether: pumps, pipes, the great central machine the civic engineers called the Heart. It sat, distant and secret, below the council domes, wrapped in copper coils and guarded by men with coats like folded brass. The Heart had thinned many times across Maia's life—last winter it coughed ice into the supply and her sister's fever had hung in the air like rust. The Heart's steadiness mattered in every small way that made a day pass: boiled water, lit lamps, the breath for airships.

Pip hopped to Maia's shoulder and brushed his cold metal beak along her jaw. She could half-hear, under the city's ordinary clatter, a tremor of notes as if someone had plucked a strand of a great string. It was too faint to name.

'There's a deputation at the quay,' Mrs. Gorton said. 'They say the governor's men are making a list. They said—' Her voice broke.

Maia stood. The courier lay forgotten. A rise ran under the city's pavements, a small vibration that made the teacups on her shelf thunk ever so lightly. She went to the window and saw the sky: drifts of smoke like cloud-sails, the steady silhouette of dirigibles anchored like slow whales. Lanterns guttered in the street below. Where lamplighters should have been, men in slate coats moved in pairs, noting doors and names.

A deeper sound rolled then, barely audible, a long, metallic resonance that made Pip's light flare. Maia pressed her palm to the glass until it warmed. Whatever it was, it had found the city. She tasted copper on the air.