The Guild of Liars

Old Tobin was seventy-one years old and had spent fifty of them pretending he couldn't hear the forges breathe.

He told her this sitting on an overturned bucket in the tool shed, voice pitched low enough that the words barely survived the distance between them. Fifty years ago, he said, there had been eleven forge-hearers in the guild. Now there were two, and one of them was a girl who scrubbed slag for a wage that wouldn't buy her a decent coat.

"They don't kill us," he said, when she asked the obvious question with her eyes rather than her mouth. "That would be too easy to notice. They just... promote the ones who go quiet. Long apprenticeships for the ones who don't. Nobody hears the forges anymore because nobody who could hear them ever stays long enough to teach anyone else."

"Why?" Wren asked. "What's so bad about hearing it?"

Tobin didn't answer right away. He looked instead toward the mountain, where the dead sky-forge sat black against the stars like a tooth pulled from a smiling mouth.

"Because the forges aren't machines, girl," he said finally. "They never were. And something that isn't a machine can be tired. Can be hurt. Can, after a thousand years of being fed and never once being asked what it wants, decide it's simply had enough."

He looked at her with an expression she would spend years afterward trying to name — something between pity and relief, like a man setting down a weight he'd carried so long he'd forgotten his shoulders could ache.

"You're the only one who can ask it what's wrong," he said. "So I suppose you'd better."