Chapter 1, p.23
Chapter 1, page 23
Well! he thought, pleased. A mage who didn't think her spells would show her everything she had to know, that was unusual in his book. She had also given him an opportunity, the chance to lead her investigation in the wrong direction.
Half distracted by his plans, Ben escorted the caravan to the warehouse and watched them unload until he got bored. He tossed the key to his foreman with orders to lock up and return it the next day, then rode home. It was only mid-morning; not only were the streets fairly empty still, but his mother would be at temple, leaving him rare time alone.
Once he reached Ladradun House, he tended his horse, cursing his mother's refusal to keep even one servant there on Watersday. Inside the house was dark and silent. Morrachane never left so much as a single lamp lit when they were out. Ben stopped in the kitchen to gather a few coals in a carry-dish, so he could light his office lamps and build a fire in his stove.
As careful as he was, with only some orange coals for light, he banged into a hallway table. He cursed: the edge had struck his hip, sending a bolt of pain through his leg.
A slight rustle and thud greeted his curse.
"Who's there?" he called.
Silence. Ben stepped quietly into the main sitting room and lit a lamp from his coals, then took his grandfather's sword from the brackets over the icy hearth. Blade in one hand, lamp in the other, breath steaming in the chilly air, he walked down the hall to his study, lightly, so no floorboards would squeak.
His study was empty, though he was sure the sound had come from there. He went back to search the other rooms off the hall without success. Bothered still – he knew what he'd heard, and it wasn't mice – he searched the house, checking their jewel boxes and Morrachane's supposedly secret caches of money. Nothing was missing. He found no one.
His heart still chattered as he set the sword in its place and returned to his study, lamp in hand. Inside he opened the shutters, started a fire, then looked around. There was a folded sheet of paper on his desk, identical to the one in his coat pocket. On the outside of the note he saw a note in his mother's hard hand: What is this? Why does this woman want to speak to you?
Ben opened the paper with a finger. It was the same note – polite, businesslike – that the sergeant had given him. He let it close and looked at his shelves and desk. His mother had come here already, he knew that; she did it every time he went away. "Straightening," she called it. He called it poking her nose into his correspondence, drawings, and books, making sure he didn't plan to escape her. It was an insult he'd come to live with, but he was getting tired of it, and tired of her.
He checked his memento shelves last. She never touched those, at least. She said they were disgusting, that she wouldn't dirty her hands with them, but Ben knew why she let them be. They frightened her. He liked that.
He smiled now, remembering her fear, until the smile froze on his mouth. At least three items had been moved. His wife's hand: he'd searched the ashes for hours to collect the remains, but in the end, he couldn't bear to let all of her go into her grave. He'd wired the bones together himself, weeping as he'd done it. Untouched, the wire was enough to hold the hand upright and outstretched. Shift it, and some bones would be knocked out of line. The tips of three fingers had fallen over backward.
A lump of crystal, riddled with cracks, had been replaced curved side up. He disliked the curved side. And the half-melted figure of Yorgiry, taken from the neck of the maid who had saved two infants, had been moved.
Someone had been searching his mementoes. Someone who, in all likelihood, carried an invisibility charm. Someone who had taken nothing, who had only looked. And now Ben had two notes from Heluda Salt – Salt the suspicious, Salt the clever, Salt the best. The cold draft across his neck was suddenly a northwester off the Syth.
Well.
As usual, he was ready for whatever the gods threw at him. His plans for this day were long prepared. The time had come to burn away his old life.
His chief regret was that he would never see that living metal suit, never walk into an inferno as Daja could. At least he had the gloves. He would take care of them and use them to further his understanding of fire.
Everything was ready by the time his mother returned from Vrohain's temple. "You!" Morrachane snapped when she saw him. "Why are you back so soon? How even you could bungle so easy a thing as a simple escort trip – "
"Shut up," he said, cutting his mother off for perhaps the first time in her life.
"How dare you interrupt me?" Morrachane's mouth was flat with rage, her eyes poisonous.
Ben shrugged. "I know, Mother. I'm surprised myself. Now that I've done it, though, it doesn't seem that difficult. It's never too late to learn, so they say."
Watersday afternoon Daja was virtually alone in the house. Nia had gone to visit Morrachane. Most of the adult refugees were meeting with the Airgi Island council to discuss what to do next. Eidart and Peigi Bancanor were building snow forts in the courtyard with the refugee children. The servants who had offered to work that day were scattered over the large house. Jory was at Potcracker's kitchen, trying to improve her mastery over stews, while Matazi and Kol paid calls on friends, and Frostpine and Anyussa visited a winter fair. That left Daja in the book-room, reading Namornese history.
"Daja?" Nia stood in the doorway, pale under her bright red cap. "I think something's wrong at Ladradun House. Aunt Morrachane always expects me at this hour and lets me in, but she hasn't, and – and – I know I'm not supposed to do anything with my magic outside protections till you say I can, but I spread it out, my magic? I think there's a fire in the cellar."
Daja raced to the slush room for her coat. Nia followed. Together they ran up the alley to Ladradun House. Behind them came the two youngest Bancanors and their playmates, curious about what was going on.
Daja and Nia halted at the ten-foot wooden fence that guarded Ladradun House from the rear. Above it Daja saw the roofs of the extensions that included the same lesser buildings as did Bancanor and Jossaryk Houses, and the shuttered windows of the top two stories of the main house.
Nia said wonderingly, "The garret shutters are open."
A look up told Daja that Nia was right. From the darkness behind the open shutters, there were no windows to block the wind from coming in.
Daja sent her magic rolling over the big house, and felt the fire in the cellar and kitchen immediately. She grabbed it, trying to hold it, only to sense other blazes, in the cellar on the far side of the house, and in the western extension. Those she seized as well. All of them fought her control.
"Nia! The rest of you!" Daja ordered, inspecting the rear gate, "find the alarm bells around here and start ringing them – ring every one you see. Keep ringing them till a brigade comes! Go!" She and Heluda knew Ben had set the bathhouse fire. Was it possible that another firesetter was loose in Kugisko, one with a grudge against Ben, as she once thought? Because she knew Ben was somewhere between Kugisko and Izmolka. This fire couldn't be his work.
Those thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant. She found the small door the servants used to admit themselves and persuaded the metal latch to open. Inside the rear courtyard she saw why those fires she gripped fought so hard. Every cellar entryway gaped; the doors under them would be ajar, too. That was why the garret shutters were open. He had turned the entire house into a chimney. This was the work of someone who knew fire. This was Ben's doing.
Watersday, she thought as she ran onto the covered rear porch. He picked Watersday, when there might not be a brigade anywhere close, because the servants are off. She beat on the door. Was Morrachane or were any of the servants home?
Nearby she heard bright, urgent peals from the fire alarm bells that hung at the nearest street corners. A few moments later she heard another bell ring in the distance.
There was no time to be polite. She released the fire in the western extension and gave that part of her attention to the door. Seizing the nails and the hinges, she yanked. The metal flew out of the wood, dodging her politely.
"Ow!" someone cried behind her. Daja pulled Nia aside as the boards that formed the door fell onto the porch. The girl was nursing a cut along one cheekbone: she had been scored by a nail.
"I told you to summon fire brigades!" Daja told her. "Get out of here!" In the part of her that gripped the biggest fires, under and in the kitchen, she felt an errant flame discover a trail of oil. Strengthened, it raced along to find a storehouse of full oil jars, pulling other flames with it. "Nia, you can't come in!" Daja gripped the flames hard and tight, holding them from a bounty of oil by less than a foot.
Nia's face dripped sweat, but her eyes were steady. "You can't search alone – you'll never find her in time," she said. "It's an awfully big house. I know the inside."
Daja groped for something Nia would understand. "I don't think we'll find her alive. Ben Ladradun did this. He's as mad as a rabid rat. She's probably dead."
"We're wasting time," Nia insisted.
Daja drew breath to argue, and felt her hold on the cellar fire tremble. She tightened it. If it reached the oil – she couldn't let it reach the oil. "Let's go," she said. "Hold your scarf over your nose and mouth – wet it, if you get the chance. Feel a door before you open it. If it's hot, don't open it."
The girl nodded, pulled her scarf up over her nose and mouth, and plunged into the house, Daja behind her. They searched room after room, with the exception of the kitchen, where smoke rolled out of the cracks around the doors. Like the cellar fire Daja gripped it with her power; it wasn't going anyplace, but it was foolish to stick their heads in there.
"Aunt Morrachane!" cried Nia. "Aunt Morrachane!" Her courage made Daja feel small. She knew Nia was terrified, but she had forced herself to come in to save a woman she pitied.
Once they'd checked the ground floor, they ran upstairs. "Her bedroom's here," Nia said, running to a closed door. She yanked it open. "Aunt Morra – "
Daja stopped beside her. Morrachane was on the bed, but she would not be leaving with them. She would beat no more servants, torment no more sons.
Nia fainted. Daja barely caught her in time to keep the younger girl from cracking her head. She managed to drag Nia into the hall and to slam the door on that dreadful sight. Then she went to an ornamental jar on a hall table and vomited until nothing came through her raw throat or streaming nose.
Daja's grip on her concentration wavered: the cellar and kitchen fires surged ahead a handful of inches. For a full minute she trembled on the verge of releasing them to wipe away that room and the body in it. Only the knowledge that a fire might spread to the neighboring homes stopped her.
She knelt beside the younger girl. "Nia," Daja said, patting the girl's ashen cheeks. "Nia, please, we have to get out." Was Ben still here or had he fled? Surely he'd escaped.
Nia groaned: she was coming to. Daja wished she had smelling salts to hasten the process. No doubt Morrachane kept –
She stopped that thought where it was. Nothing could make her go back into that room. Instead she slung one of Nia's arms over her shoulders and stood, dragging the half-conscious girl to her feet. The blaze in the cellar was getting bigger, searching for cracks in her control.
She hauled Nia down the back stair, sweating so hard the drops pattered onto the wooden steps. More tendrils of the cellar fire escaped her grip, straining greedily for those oil jars. She released the fires in the wing opposite them. Her quickest escape would be the way they'd entered, which took them past the kitchen. She would need all her strength to hold that and the fire in the cellar just below it.
Something changed: Nia had control over her feet. She trembled, but she took most of her weight off Daja. Relieved, Daja forgot to watch where she was going. She tripped and went sprawling on the ground floor, yanking her support away from Nia. The other girl dropped to her knees with a yelp.
Daja's attention broke as she fell. A rope of flame wrapped itself around a jar of oil below. It shattered; the cellar fire roared.
Terrified, Daja shoved it and the rest of the fire into the earth under the house, down through a crack in the underlying rock. Following the crack, the blaze roared into an underground chamber filled with the unfrozen Syth. The water surged up into the crack, turning to steam as it hit the fire and boiling its way to the cellar. All it needed was the slender path the fire had made: the water's force enlarged it fast.
Daja heard a rumble in the ground. It grew like an onrushing tidal wave.
"Run!" she yelled, scrambling to her feet. She hauled Nia up. Together they raced down the hall to the slush room. They charged out through the ruined door just as the underground part of the lake shot through the crack in the cellar floor. Daja released fires with a gasp of gratitude as the icy Syth sprayed into the cellar, then rammed through its ceiling into the kitchen. Steam from the doused fire blasted with it, smashing the ground floor ceiling, then that on each floor, all the way up through the roof.
In the rear courtyard hands grabbed Daja and Nia as they stumbled into the open. Firefighters had come. Daja sagged: she didn't need to hold any fires. Now people moved back, taking the girls with them, as water dropped from the fountain jetting into the sky. It would turn to ice, Daja knew, but it would also douse the fires.
Someone grabbed her arm. She looked up into Kol's face. "What did you hit?" he cried, pointing to the fountain of water.
Daja grinned at him, foolish with relief. "That's a very strong lake you have out there," she said.
"Let's take them home and call a healer," Kol told someone.
"How did you get here?" Nia asked Matazi as her mother helped her back down the alley.
"We heard the alarm bells," Matazi said. "We were just leaving your grandmother's."
They returned to Bancanor House, where Matazi’s calm gave way. She wrapped her arms around Nia, weeping, telling her never to frighten her mother like that again. Kol went for a healer as Matazi wrapped Nia and Daja in blankets and installed them on the book room sofa. Both girls began to cough: Matazi fetched Jory's lung-clearing potion and ruthlessly made them drink it. As they hacked and spat into a matched pair of crystal dishes, Matazi took the youngest Bancanors and the refugee children to raid the kitchen, a reward for their work at ringing the alarms.
As her lungs cleared, Daja retreated into a bubble of muted sounds and sights. Heluda was right. Ben was a monster. Daja hadn't quite believed; she'd thought there must be an explanation, somehow, until she saw Morrachane. Until she felt that blaze, with enough jars of oil there to turn the district into a firestorm. As soon as she pulled herself together, she had to find a lawkeeper. She must talk with Heluda. Ben had gotten wind of her suspicions, but how? It didn't matter. He'd worked it out, destroyed his home, and fled. He'd be miles away, free of everything but his fires. He could be found. As long as he had those gloves, Daja would track him. He must return to settle his debts.
Through her numbness she registered that a healer touched her. His power spread through her and through Nia in a gentle examination.
"Shock," he said when he finished. "You must have been quite frightened." Nia could only shiver and nod.
Daja stirred. She owed Nia something. "She didn't show it," Daja croaked, trying to sit up straight. She gave Nia a tiny smile. "I said that you'd find your courage."
"B-b-but I d-d-didn't," protested Nia. "I w-w-was t-t-terrified."
"Then you're wise," the healer said with approval. "Only a fool isn't afraid inside a burning house." To Daja he said, "Your body will be fine, but something burdens your spirit. Whatever haunts you, tell someone about it." He looked up as Kol came in. "I'll leave a throat soother for these two, but – "
Nia's eyes, bloodshot from smoke, popped wide open.
She grabbed Daja's arm. "Jory!" she cried and coughed. The healer laid a hand on her throat; Nia's voice emerged as a rasp. "Daja, Jory's in trouble!"
The twins had that bond; Daja knew it. Her numbness vanished. She tossed away her blanket and raced upstairs, knocking the healer, Kol, and even Matazi out of her way. Her scrying mirror lay on her worktable. Daja grabbed it and stared into its depths. She saw nothing.
Slowly she took a breath, counting. She imagined worry, fear, and grief rising from her skin like steam. She had to let them go. They would return, but for now they were in her way. Only when she was steady did she open her eyes and breathe onto the mirror's surface.
A blurred image rose from its depths and cleared: Olennika Potcracker's soup kitchen. Every set of double doors that led into the hospital was open; smoke roiled through them and along the ceiling. Jory and the rest of the staff shoved the long tables aside to clear a path for the streams of sick and hurt who escaped the hospital through the kitchen. Olennika Potcracker stood at the door to the cellar storerooms, her face covered with sweat. Daja knew she had to be holding back fire. Now Jory was at the water trough that ran along the rear wall of the kitchen, filling buckets and bowls as people brought them to her.
Ben walked in, a toddler on each hip. He handed them to a kitchen maid, turned, and plunged back through a smoky doorway. He wore the living metal gloves.
Daja thrust her mirror into her belt pouch and left her room. Matazi waited in the hall. "Jory?" she whispered, her eyes wide, her face ashen.
Daja rested a hand on Matazi's arm. "Get Frostpine. He and Anyussa went to some winter fair. Call the charity ladies together. People with sleighs, blankets, everything. Yorgiry Hospital is on fire."
Matazi rattled down the stairs in Daja's wake. Daja explained to no one else, but raced back through the house, to the slush room and her skates. She grabbed two coats and put them on, then added gloves, scarves, and a knitted cap. She would need all her magical strength when she got to Blackfly Bog – she couldn't afford to warm herself on the way.
"Daja," Nia croaked from the doorway. She offered a bottle of Jory's lung-clearing mixture in a hand that shook as if she had palsy.
Daja took the bottle with a nod of thanks and tucked it into a tunic pocket. Then she grabbed her skates and went outside.
