The Burning
Thrones

The two suns had never been still.

Korin had grown up watching them from the roof of his father’s workshop — the larger one, Tavar, dragging its smaller twin across the sky in a slow ellipse that took most of a lifetime to complete. As a boy he’d been told they were lovers. As a man he understood they were a collision waiting to happen. The astronomers gave it two centuries, maybe three. The priests — what remained of them — said the end was already written in the Figures.

He didn’t think about any of that now. He was thinking about the scaffold.

It had appeared overnight on the flank of The Witness — forty metres of steel tubing, bolted to the fourth Figure on the left side of the Avenue of Approach, which was the figure that Korin had personally restored twice, which was the figure that stared at you no matter where you stood, which was, as far as Korin was concerned, already more than enough of a problem without someone putting illegal scaffolding on it.

He put down his coffee. He picked up his tool bag. He left his apartment.

This was going to be that kind of morning.

The Avenue of Approach was the most famous street on Vatraš that most people on Vatraš had never walked down.

Six hundred metres of black volcanic stone, running from the outer gate of the Registry complex to its main entrance, and lining both sides of it — ten to the left, ten to the right — twenty bronze Figures, each one seven metres tall, each one older than the Registry itself, each one nameless in the official records and therefore named by everyone who worked with them.

Korin’s predecessor had called them by numbers. The one before that had used colours. Korin used names, and his names had eventually spread through the entire Conservation team without anyone deciding to adopt them, the way useful things spread — quietly, through use, until one day they were just the way things were.

The Gatekeeper stood at the entrance, its chin raised. The Last stood at the doors of the Registry, its hands open at its sides in a posture that had always struck Korin as faintly threatening, though he’d never been able to explain why to anyone’s satisfaction. The Witness stood fourth from the gate on the left, and it looked at you. Whatever angle you approached it from, whatever time of day, those blank bronze eyes found you.

He’d mentioned this to Tovi, his archivist friend, who had laughed and said: That’s because you are.

He’d asked what that meant. Tovi had changed the subject, which was one of Tovi’s skills, along with ancient languages and the ability to eat lunch for forty minutes without ever being rushed.

Now he stood at the base of the new scaffold and looked up. The rig was well-built. Professional. Someone had used proper load-bearing bolts at the Figure’s base, which meant they knew the stone had a softer strata at the surface level. The padlock on the access ladder was a Tavar-brand oval shackle — Registry Security grade. It was locked. But the keyway had fresh scratches in the steel, made by a key inserted in low light or in a hurry, or both.

Someone had been up there in the night.

He looked at The Witness.

The Witness looked back.

You’re going to make me climb this, aren’t you, he thought.

He took his tension wrench out of his tool bag. Eleven years of conservation work on old bronze and older stone meant you learned to get into things that were meant to stay closed. It was, as his supervisor liked to say during their annual performance reviews, a skill with a range of applications. His supervisor said this with precisely the expression of someone who had never wanted to know more.

The padlock opened in forty seconds. He’d done worse.

The wind was stronger at the top. It always came off the Varosi plateau like it was annoyed about something, and from up here he could see the full spread of Verrath. Three million people and their noise and their smoke and their breakfast, and beyond the eastern ridge the larger sun already a handspan above the horizon, its smaller twin trailing behind it. Close this year. Visibly close.

Two centuries. Maybe three. Or maybe the astronomers were wrong.

He crouched in the lee of The Witness’s shoulder and looked at the marks with his loupe. Not scuffs. Cuts. Sixteen of them, arranged in groups of four, each one made with a powered tool at exactly the same angle and depth. Alignment guides — so two surfaces could be rejoined in exact position. So they could be opened. And closed again.

He pressed his thumb against the shoulder panel.

It moved.

His heart did something irregular. He pressed harder, and the panel separated from the shoulder, and Korin caught it before it could go anywhere and looked into the space it had exposed.

There was a cavity inside The Witness.

The Figures were solid. That was Registry doctrine, embedded in every briefing he’d ever attended. Solid-cast bronze, no internal voids, no access points. He’d never had a reason to doubt it. You didn’t doubt something like that. It was foundational. It was the kind of fact that sat underneath all the other facts and held them up.

Inside the cavity, wrapped in the grey treated cloth used in the Registry’s Conservation Archive, was a flat object the size of a sheet of paper.

Well, he thought. Obviously.

He unwrapped it. It was a plate of darkened steel, engraved on one face with extraordinary precision. At the centre was a circular emblem, and inside the emblem was an image he recognised — he’d seen it once, three years ago, on a document left open on his supervisor’s desk for about four seconds before his supervisor had closed it.

A throne. Not furniture — something more essential. The idea of a throne, distilled to its minimum. Mass. Permanence. Authority. The image of someone sitting in judgment over everything below.

His communicator buzzed. A Registry message: the scaffold was unauthorised, report to the site office at eight o’clock, do not ascend.

He looked at the message. He looked at the plate. He had forty minutes.

He rewrapped the plate, slid it inside his jacket, and began to replace the panel. He had his own bonding agent in his kit — close enough, for today, for a casual inspection.

He descended the scaffold at the pace of a man with nothing on his mind, walked through the Avenue gate, and looked back once at The Witness from the street.

The Witness was watching him go.

I know, he told it, silently. You knew about this the whole time.

He needed Tovi. He turned east through the Ferrath district and bought coffee from a street vendor and drank it while he walked, hand flat against his jacket, feeling the hard edge of the plate through the grey cloth.

His communicator buzzed again. Unknown number.

You found it. Good. That means you’re the right person. Don’t go to Tovi yet — Tovi’s being watched. Go to the old casting yard behind the Ferrath ironworks. Be there by 08:15. Come alone.

My name is Dara. I put the plate in The Witness six weeks ago. I need it back.

Also — check the base of The Gatekeeper when you get a chance. The one at the entrance gate. Third stone from the left on the plinth.

This is much bigger than a missing plate.

Korin read the message twice. He thought about his father, who had been a man for fixing hinges and not for drama.

He put his communicator in his pocket and walked toward the ironworks.

He was already late for the site office. He might as well be useful.

The old casting yard behind the Ferrath ironworks was the kind of place a city keeps because it can’t decide what to do with it.

Three walls standing, one collapsed into rubble. An iron gate hanging on one hinge, open wide enough to walk through sideways. And in the middle of the yard, exactly as described, a Harvest Figure — smaller than the Avenue Figures, made of grey-brown stone rather than bronze, its arms ending at the wrists in clean-cut stumps. Someone had been leaving offerings at its base. A cup, long dried. A bundle of yellow cloth. Three small crosses made of raw timber, each tied with a cord, propped against the plinth in a row.

Korin looked at the crosses. They were everywhere this year, in the weeks before the Approach Festival. You saw them in windows, tucked into doorframes, scratched into the render of old Ferrath walls. Raw timber ones in the old quarter, like these. Iron rebar ones in the factory districts to the north. In the derelict temples you still found the carved ones, the old-style crucifixes, the wood so dark with age it had gone almost black. Three registers of the same symbol scattered across the city like a conversation conducted too slowly for anyone to follow in real time.

A woman stepped out from behind the Harvest Figure and said: “You’re four minutes late.”

Her name was Dara, and she was not what he’d expected. Perhaps thirty-five, a few years older than him, with the kind of face that had made a lot of decisions in a hurry and found most of them acceptable in retrospect. Dark coat, working boots, a satchel over one shoulder. She could have been a Registry surveyor. She could have been anyone.

“The plate,” she said, holding out her hand. “Please.”

“I’d like to know what I’m handing over first.”

She lowered her hand. She studied him with the calm attention of someone deciding how much rope to give a situation. Then she sat down on a chunk of fallen masonry and said: “Fine. Sit down. You look like a man who needs things explained.”

He sat on a different chunk of masonry and waited.

“The plate is a registry record,” she said. “Not a Registry record — the Registry knows nothing about it. A record of what’s in Level Five. What the five families have stored there for a hundred and sixty years.” She paused. “The Thrones.”

“I know the word,” Korin said. “I know the emblem. That’s the sum of my knowledge.”

“That’s more than most people have.” She reached into her satchel and produced an identical grey cloth packet. “There are twelve of these plates. Each one maps a section of Level Five. Together they form a complete record of every Throne object in the inner chamber — who commissioned it, who holds its authority, what it represents.” She rewrapped it. “The five families don’t know these records exist. They were made by someone inside who understood what the Thrones actually are, and who wanted to make sure that knowledge survived.” A pause. “Survived what?”

She looked up at the strip of sky above the ruined casting yard. Both suns visible. The smaller one in that slightly reluctant orbit that had been getting more pronounced for three years.

“This,” she said simply.

The Fallen Star tavern occupied the ground floor of a building in the Ferrath district that had been, at various points in its history, a tannery, a textile workshop, and a Registry clerical office. It smelled of old wood and something fermented. The ceiling beams were too low for anyone above average height, which gave the whole place the atmosphere of a very relaxed conspiracy.

They took a corner table. Dara ordered something brown in a clay cup. Korin ordered the same. Through the low window he could see the street outside beginning to decorate itself — festival banners in the Registry’s official colours, gold and grey, strung between the upper storeys.

“How long have we got?” Korin said.

“Eleven days until the alignment.”

“And this year is different.”

The noise of the tavern continued around them — ironworkers arguing at the long table, a woman reading a broadsheet, the landlord behind the bar wiping glasses with the methodical calm of a man who had decided the world was going to do what it was going to do.

“How long,” Korin said.

“Sixty years. Maybe less.”

He drank some of his drink. It tasted like wood smoke, which seemed appropriate.

“And the Council families know.”

“They’ve known for six weeks. The festival preparations were doubled two days after they received the report.” The implication sat on the table between them like a third cup. Give people somewhere to look. Give them something bright.

“What are the five families doing?”

“Buying land on the plateau. High ground. They started quietly four years ago when the preliminary data came in. By now they control sixty percent of the highland plateau above the Varosi line. They’ve registered it as agricultural consolidation.”

“Agricultural consolidation.” He repeated it flatly.

“It’s a very useful phrase.”

He walked back alone through the festival streets, the plate wrapped against his ribs. Verrath in festival mode had a particular quality. Not happiness exactly — more like the mood of a crowd that has decided to believe something together for a limited time, with the understanding that the belief will be set aside afterwards.

But this year it was different. He could see it in faces. The festival decorators, the banner-hangers — they worked with the right movements but the eyes were doing something else. Between the transactions, in the half-seconds when nobody was performing commerce, the eyes went up. To the suns. Always back to the suns.

Two of them, above the eastern ridge. One dragging the other. Both beautiful, both warm, both slowly becoming a single catastrophe.

He turned into the Avenue of Approach.

People were already coming. A family with two small children who ran ahead to The Dreamer and pressed their palms against the plinth. An elderly couple walking slowly in step, not speaking, looking up at The Patient. Three young men who stopped at The Hollow — one of them reached out and touched the bronze with the back of two fingers, very briefly, and they moved on.

He stopped at The Gatekeeper. Crouched at the plinth. Third stone from the left. He pressed it.

It pressed back. Not inward — upward. A faint, precise resistance, like a key that has met its mechanism and is waiting for the next step. He didn’t push further. Not here, not now.

He stood and looked up at The Gatekeeper’s face, raised toward the far end of the Avenue. For the first time in eleven years, he understood what it was looking at. Across six hundred metres of bronze and black stone, over the heads of twenty Figures, The Gatekeeper was looking directly at The Last. Two figures in conversation across the whole length of the Avenue.

The Madonna and the Harbingers hung in the entrance hall behind The Last. He’d walked past it ten thousand times. Four thousand people passed it on a heavy festival day. He doubted more than a dozen had ever really looked.

Hidden in plain sight, Dara had said.

He put his hand to the plate inside his jacket and turned toward the city, toward Sabel’s and eggs and the thing he needed to think through before he decided what to do next.

Above him, the two suns continued their slow, inexorable work.

Sabel’s had four tables and a counter and it had been in the same building on the Ferrath corner for sixty-one years, which meant it had outlasted three Registry administrations, one significant earthquake, and the steady encroachment of the festival decoration industry that had been trying to take over the ground floor of the entire district for the past decade.

The woman who ran it now was the third generation of her family to do so. Her name was Osa and she had never, in Korin’s experience, been in a hurry about anything.

He sat at the window table and Osa brought him eggs in the clay pot without asking, with bread on the side and a small cup of something bitter, and then she left him alone because she had worked in a restaurant long enough to understand which customers needed to talk and which ones needed to think.

He needed to think.

He spread the grey cloth on the table and looked at the steel plate for the third time since the ironworks. The engraving was finer than he’d first registered — the work of someone with a very small tool and a very steady hand and a considerable amount of time. In the bottom right corner, barely visible without his loupe, were six characters in the Registry script he now recognised as a document reference number. His predecessor’s format. The numbering hadn’t changed in forty years.

Which meant there was a corresponding entry in the Registry’s document archive. Tovi’s domain.

He folded the cloth back over the plate and put it inside his jacket.

He paid for his eggs. He left a tip slightly larger than usual, in the way that people do things slightly more deliberately when they’ve just been told the world has sixty years left.

The corridor between the Registry’s main doors and the administrative core passed beneath the Madonna and the Harbingers. Korin had counted them once. Approximately four thousand people passed through on a heavy festival day. He doubted more than a dozen had ever really looked at the painting.

The woman with her back turned. The birds arriving. The sun-eye head.

He walked past it without stopping and took the service lift to the sub-basement.

Tovi was at the third desk, which was where Tovi always was. Surrounded by flat cases of documents, a loupe out, two reference books open simultaneously to different pages. They looked up when Korin came in. Two seconds of rapid assessment. Then, quietly: “Close the door.”

He closed the door.

“You missed the site briefing,” Tovi said.

“I know.”

“Security flagged the unauthorised rig. They’ve been asking where you are.”

“I know that too.”

Tovi looked at him. “Did you go up it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you find something?”

Korin put the cloth-wrapped plate on the desk.

Tovi didn’t touch it immediately. They looked at it, then looked up. “Where was it?”

“Inside The Witness. There’s a cavity in the upper shoulder. Someone opened it last night.”

“Inside.” Tovi said the word as if testing its weight. “The Figures are solid.”

“That’s what I thought.”

A pause. Then: “Sit down. Don’t open that cloth until I tell you to.” Tovi stood and went to the room’s single high window — just below street level, a rectangle of legs and feet visible above the sill — and looked out for a moment. Then they came back.

“There’s a reference number on the plate,” Korin said. “Bottom right corner. Your predecessor’s format.”

“I know.” Tovi finally unwrapped the cloth. Looked at the plate for a long time. “This is new — the right third was added recently. The original plate is older. Someone retrieved it, updated it, and resealed it.” They looked up. “Who?”

“Dara,” Korin said.

Tovi went very still. “How do you know that name?”

“She contacted me. She said she put the plate in the Figure six weeks ago and she needs it back. She told me the plate is a registry record of Level Five. That there are twelve of them.”

Tovi was quiet for twelve counted seconds. Then: “Then it’s started.”

“What’s started?”

But before Tovi could answer, both of them heard it — footsteps in the outer corridor. Not the shuffle of an archivist. The deliberate, measured pace of someone who knew exactly which room they were walking toward.

Tovi moved fast for someone who spent their days sitting very still. They pressed the plate back into Korin’s hands and said, barely above a breath: “The maintenance alcove behind the east shelving. Go. Don’t come back through the main building. Use the loading bay exit, north side — it’s not on the current security schematic.” And then, at normal volume, as the footsteps stopped outside: “Yes, I think the restoration protocol you’re referring to is in the Harrath collection — let me find the reference for you.”

Korin was behind the east shelving before the door opened.

He stood in the dark between the metal shelving and the stone wall, the plate against his chest, and listened to a voice he didn’t recognise ask Tovi a question about access permissions for the Level Three gallery. Standard administrative query. The kind of thing that happened a dozen times a day.

Except that Tovi had told him to hide.

He waited until the voice left and the door closed and the footsteps retreated. He waited another full minute. Then he found the loading bay corridor and followed it north, in the dark, past the smell of old paper and preservation chemicals, toward whatever kind of day this was turning out to be.

Above him, through two floors of Registry building, through the corridor with the painting and the public entrance and the festival crowds, the two suns continued their slow catastrophic approach.

He had the plate. He had twelve minutes before anyone would think to check the loading bay exit.

He needed to get to Dara.