Scald

By: Anderson, E. Lawrence

In the Kett, a nation sealed inside the mountain Tolmar, heat is life and air is money. Every breath is metered. Every hall is warmed by the Boiler at the mountain's root, where a dragon called Bellows lies in chains, and no dwarf alive has ever seen the sun.

Deis has tended those chains for forty years. A master tinker who can hear a flaw in iron before anyone can see it, he listens to metal, not people, and that has always suited him. He knows every link by its note. He does not know his neighbor's name.

Then a release valve opens at full head, and a troll stoker named Ondu dies scalded in the pit below. The Guild rules it an accident within the hour. All it needs is Deis's signature.

But the metal says otherwise. The valve did not fail. Someone turned it.

Deis refuses to sign, and in the Kett a tinker's sworn reading is law. The trolls who stoke the great forge lay down their shovels: no fire until the truth is told. As the mountain goes cold, its lamps rationed, the trains slowed, breath showing in every hall, the Guild finds an easier answer in an orc who cannot clear his own name, and the Kett is ready to give him to the open sky.

To stop it, Deis must leave the only work he has ever understood. He follows the evidence from the mountain's lowest warrens, where families share their beds by the shift and stuff the cracks in the walls with felt, to its highest halls, where the air is clean and the lamps never dim. A Silt crew-boss who reads time in dust. A child no ledger counts. A troll Speaker who hears the mountain through his feet. A polite man from the Listening Office who always knows a little too much. And a trail of tool marks that leads somewhere Deis cannot bear to look.

The answer will cost him more than he knows. The question beneath it, what the Guild is building in secret and what has begun to stir at the top of the chain, may cost the Kett everything.

Scald is the first book of the Litany of Tolmar, a dark fantasy of iron, air and song: a murder mystery set in a world built like a machine, where class is measured in breath, the truth is a reading no one can wave away, and the dark above the chains is listening.

This edition also includes "No Silk," a short story set between the books, along with a glossary of the Kett and a guide to saying its names.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN13: 9798997492342
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: E. Lawrence Anderson
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"