Chapter Two: Cold Coal

The bell rang early on my second morning at Hobb's Pledges and Loans, and a woman came in carrying a fire in a tin.

I was out on the front shelf by then, behind the counter and under the window. Mrs Hobb had decided that if I was going to bite people, I could at least be seen doing it. Pledges in her shop were kept where customers could look at them, she said, because a pledge that is looked at is a pledge that gets redeemed. So I lay in my scuttle between a carriage clock and a box of spoons, and I listened to Greyhithe come in out of the cold.

The woman smelled of a small house and a long walk. She set the tin on the glass, and even through the lid I could feel it. There was a live coal in there, a real one, warm all the way through. It had been given to somebody once, and passed on, and kept. It was a cousin of mine. Every warm fire in this city is.

"I'd like to pledge this," the woman said. "It's my mother's hearth. It's the last of it."

Mrs Hobb did not open the lid. "I can't take fire, my dear."

"It's a good coal. It's been in our family since my grandmother."

"I'm sure it has, and it's a good coal now, while it's yours." Mrs Hobb's voice was not unkind, which surprised me. "But fire doesn't keep on a shelf. The minute I pay you for it, it'll go cold, and then I've given you money for a lump of nothing, and you've lost your mother's hearth. I won't do that to either of us."

There was a queue behind her, three people deep. Pawnshops in winter always have a queue. A man near the back shifted his boots on the boards. He smelled of horses and of a long day still to come.

"I'll give you a penny for it," he said. "It's worth a penny to me, missus. I've a cold room and a colder wife."

"Don't," said Tansy, from the ledger. Her pencil had stopped. "Mr Abel, you know what happens."

"Grandmothers' tales," said the man. "A coal's a coal."

I could have told him. I did not. I had decided to sulk, and a dragon who sulks for one morning and then gives a lecture is not really sulking at all. So I lay in the scuttle and listened.

The woman hesitated. Then the penny rang on the glass, a small flat note, and she lifted the lid of the tin and tipped the coal into the man's gloved palm.

I heard the fire stop. That is the only way I can put it. A live coal makes a sound, if you know how to listen, a tiny breathing tick like a clock in another room. It stopped. The warmth went out of the air above the counter as quickly as a door closing. The coal was still glowing, a dull orange, but there was no heat in it at all. And then, while I listened, even the glow went grey.

The man said a word I won't repeat. He opened his hand and the coal sat in it, cold as a stone from a river.

"Grandmothers' tales," said Tansy, very quietly, and wrote something in the ledger.

The woman did not cry, which I thought was brave of her. She looked at the grey coal, and at the penny, and then she put the lid back on her empty tin. Mrs Hobb took the tin from her, turned it over in her hands, and said she would lend threepence against it, since it was good tin. That was a lie too. It was not good tin. But it was the kind of lie I didn't mind, and I filed it away. I had not expected Mrs Hobb to tell that kind.

When the queue had gone and the shop was quiet, Tansy came and sat on her crate in front of my shelf, the way she was already starting to do.

"I'll explain that, if you like," she said. "Since you're new."

"I am considerably older than this city," I said.

"New to the shop, I mean." She had a way of answering exactly the thing you'd said, which I found very irritating. "It's like a price list. Fire you're given stays warm. You can pass it on as often as you like, and it's still warm. But fire you pay for gives light and no heat. Not a penny's worth. It's only the flame that counts, mind. You can buy coal, and you can buy candles. It's paying for the flame itself that kills it. Everybody's grandmother says so, and everybody's grandmother is right, and still people like Mr Abel try it every winter."

"I know how fire works," I said. "I was there when it started."

"Were you?" She did not sound as though she believed me. She sounded as though she would write it down and check it later. "Well, then you know. That's why the Guild's lamps are no good for anything but seeing by."

I did not ask what the Guild was. I found out at dusk.

They came along Tallow Lane as the light went, two of them, with a ladder that clanked and a pole with a hook on the end. I heard them before anything else. Each lamp, when they lit it, gave a long thin hiss, like a cat that has been asked to leave. Then light came through the window and lay across the counter in a bright cold square. I could see it, in my way. It was the most light I had seen in weeks. It did not warm the glass by the smallest degree.

"Lamplighters' Guild," said Tansy, without my asking. "They've had the charter for selling fire for forty years. Every lamp in the street is theirs. You can have one in your room for two shillings an hour, if you've got two shillings an hour."

"And are you warm, with your two shillings?"

"Nobody's warm with it," she said. "That's not what it's for. Mrs Hobb has one for the counter, so she can read the hallmarks."

Frost was forming on the inside of the window. I could hear it, a faint crackle like someone walking on sugar. Outside, the lamplighters' ladder clanked against the lamp-post nearest our door.

Then the clanking stopped.

One of them had come down his ladder and was standing at our window. I heard his breath on the glass. I heard him sniff, twice, the way you sniff at a kitchen door to find out what's for supper. Dragons have a smell, you understand. We smell of hot pennies. Even a small, old, sulking dragon does.

He stood there long enough for his breath to freeze on the pane. Then he went back up his ladder, and the two of them clanked away down Tallow Lane, and the lamps hissed after them, one by one, all the way to the river.

"What was that about?" said Mrs Hobb, from the back.

"Nothing," said Tansy. But she had stopped chewing her pencil, and I heard her write something down.

That night I lay in the scuttle on the cold shelf and did the thing I had been putting off. I listened to my own fire.

It was lower than it had been the night before. Not by much. By about as much as a candle burns down in an evening. But I had not been giving it to anyone or using it for anything. It was simply going, the way it had been going, slowly and then less slowly, since Ferrier Street.

I did not mention it to anybody. There was nobody to mention it to, and in any case, I was sulking.