The Bureau's file classifies me thus: Earth-Splitting Flame Demon. Violent of temperament. Ground splits three feet wherever it passes. Avoid at distance.
Ground splits three feet — accurate. The violent temperament, I must contest.
Have you watched a kettle boil? Stop the spout, keep the flame — what happens? It bursts. A mountain is the same. The earth-fire gathers below, gathers past holding, and must find a mouth — and if it finds none, the whole mountain becomes the mouth. The elders still remember the first great bursting of the Flaming Mountains three hundred years ago: half a peak thrown into the sky.
I was born from the ash of that half peak.
So this body's whole art exists for one purpose: to open the mountain's mouth before the mountain bursts.
Where the earth-fire gathers, I can hear — the Lizard Marshal hears the pulse; I hear the swelling. Wherever the deep aches with pressure, I hurry, choose the line farthest from any living soul, set both claws to the ground, and tear — a vent three feet wide rips open, the earth-fire vents with a roar, one harmless wildfire burns itself out on empty slopes, and the mountain is at peace.
It is a trade that guarantees curses.
After the wildfire: scorched ground, and woodsmen and hunters who see only the Flame Demon's passage. No one knows that without that vent, what burst would have been their village. In three hundred years I have torn more than four hundred vents. The mountain hamlets saved, I cannot count. The curses taken, the hunters' gun-shot, the Bureau's encirclements — I cannot count those either.
I do not defend myself. The one who opens vents was always going to stand in the cursing. A kettle-spout does not ask the steam for gratitude.
Old brother Scorched-Earth was the first who understood me. He breaks his fields beside my old vents — ground that has vented its fire bears the richest ash. He said: brother, you tear the openings and I plant them. One of us breaks, one of us builds. Only together do we make a whole sentence.
The medicine-basket boy was the second. Their channel-to-the-sea works ran on the very logic of my vents: fire cannot be dammed, only led. The boy pored half a night over my three-hundred-year map of vent-sites — scratched claw-stroke by claw-stroke on my cave wall — and said the thing that warmed this old rock through: Elder, this is three centuries of flood-relief engineering. This is a treasure.
Good. Now for the matter that keeps me from sleep.
These three years, the vents grow harder and harder to tear.
It is not age. The ground has changed. In the old days, the earth under my claws was swollen — one tear and it opened, the fire surging out eager to be free. Now the ground is braced. The swelling is still there — worse than ever — but beneath the skin of the earth lies a strength I cannot name, clenched, refusing the tear.
I rip; it presses. I rip again; it presses again. Last month, north of Blackstone Gorge, I tore a vent with everything I have. The fire escaped in a single thread — and then that strength snapped shut, and the vent closed itself in front of my eyes.
The ground closed itself. In three hundred years: the first time.
Do you understand what that means? Something is forbidding the earth-fire to vent. It wants the fire gathered. Gathered, and swelling, and swelling on — until
the day that war drum beats one breath to the measure.
The Lizard Marshal hears the deep fire at drill. I feel the hand pressing the vents shut. The two facts lock together: troops in training are forbidden to fire early; gathered flame is forbidden to leak a thread.
The one in the west wants a single, simultaneous volley.
So I walk with the boy now. Old Scorched-Earth saw me to the field-ridge and pressed a bag of his new seed on me, saying: go. Find the hand that presses the vents.
These claws have torn earth for three hundred years.
This time, I mean to learn —
whether they can tear open a hand.