The Ashmaker's Chains

Oben Rushat has spent nineteen years feeding the Great Furnace beneath the fortress-city of Kolavar, where the lowest caste burns out young so the Highborn can live cool and safe above. A blowout kills forty-seven of his people. A public flogging costs him his temper. An exiled general offers him a choice: die at dawn, or learn to fight a real war. Meanwhile his sister has heard something chained in the fire — and it knows exactly why the Sotho must suffer.