Malekor Ironjaw's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The crystal held in Malekor Ironjaw's chest, but it did nothing. He flared his demon half and let the heat rise. The fire bloomed, then scattered. It poured out through the brass valves and vanished into the air. The crystal glowed, caught the heat, and gave it back as useless light. He had a conductor now. He had no way to aim it. Without a path, the fire spread thin and powered nothing. He could not build a fighting form on wasted flame. He needed a channel. Something to pull the heat from the crystal and drive it where he wanted. He had heard the Reanimators built strange hardware into dead bodies. So he went to their barn, the red and gold shack with the crowning sign and lanterns bolted to every board. Jester Deadlock met him in the doorway. The zombie clown was the Reanimator's first success. He called himself the founder of their faction. A shrunken head swung from his belt. He looked at the glow under Malekor's chest and did not smile. "You want what's in me," Jester said. "The Reanimator put something in my chest. Keeps me running. You can't have it." "I need a conduit," Malekor said. "Not yours. The design." "Design costs," Jester said. "A fight." Two other men stood inside the barn's left ring. Rios Samos, the C.C.C. enforcer, leaned on the ropes in black and purple, tattoos across his face. Beside him Kuro Voltage waited, face painted like a candy skull, arms crossed. They had come hunting the same knowledge for their own reasons, and found Jester charging the same toll. "He's lying about the price," Rios said. Flat, final. "The conduit isn't buried in him. It's a coil. Jester hoards the trick." "Show us," Kuro said. Jester's dead face twitched. He unhooked a coil of brass wire from the wall. It was wound tight around a single crystal shard. "Build it wrong, it burns you hollow," he said. "That's the price." Malekor took the coil. He pressed the shard against the crystal seam in his chest. Then he wound the brass wire around the valve on his right, not the left. The left gauge he did not touch. He flared his demon half. The heat rose. This time the crystal caught it and the coil pulled it straight. Fire ran down the wire in a thin hard line. It did not scatter. It gathered at his right fist and held there, burning and steady. He drove his arm forward. The flame followed the hip, followed the drive, exactly the path of his Ironclad Fold. Kuro watched the fire track the motion. "It feeds the throw," he said. "It works," Malekor said. He closed his fist and the fire banked down into the coil, waiting. Then the left gauge shivered. Something moved in the crystal that was not his heat. The coil pulled it toward his fist too. A fire he had not called rose in his hand, and he did not know whose it was.