Hearth’s ash gate was under the sunrise shrine, and Mara had walked past it every week of her life.
The shrine stood at the eastern edge of the Low Brace, where the district gave way to the cooling towers: a squat round building of old grey stone with a copper dome gone green, and a bell tower, and a printed board beside its door with the great table of Hearth’s rising times, one line for every day of the year. Pell had copied today’s line from that board the night before the roofs. Every morning the priests rang the shrine’s bell at the minute the table said Hearth would rise, and every clock in the Low Brace was set by it. Mara had stood under the bell tower as a child with her mother’s hand on her shoulder and watched the priests in their grey sashes pull the rope.
She had never been inside. Almost nobody went inside except the priests. The shrine was where the Founders’ machines announced the dawn, the primer said, and the machinery was sacred, and the priests kept it.
The machinery was a gate.
Mara stood in the cold service passage beneath the shrine late on day three with Tavin beside her. It had taken the supervision slip with the guild’s red spanners and a quarter hour of argument with a priest at the shrine’s side door to get this far: down a stair behind the bell tower’s base, along a passage lined with old…
