Cold Fire (27 page)

Daja stared at Frostpine. Then the humor of it struck her. “Me and Ben?” she asked, amused. “Never mind that he’s old-“

“Early thirties is not old!” protested Frostpine.

“Old, and a widower, and-really, Frostpine!” She chuckled.

Frostpine grinned. “All right, I knew I was wrong almost right off, but I had to make sure. You’re wise for your age, but you aren’t experienced in what goes on between men and women.”

“While you have too much experience,” Daja pointed out. “One of us has to be restrained.” He’d managed to make her feel weepy: he was looking out for her like a father or a brother.

“I’ve heard no complaints about my conduct,” Frostpine informed her wickedly. More seriously he added, “When I find someone to share my bed, I try to ensure that no one gets hurt or lied to. It’s another kind of friendship, though not what I’d recommend to someone just beginning to find out what love is.”

Daja grabbed a fistful of his beard and tugged gently “Since I’m not starting that sort of thing, particularly with Ben, you can relax, oh watchful teacher.”

Frostpine stretched, like the panther she sometimes imagined he was. “I don’t think he’s interested in your body or your heart. But… ” He combed his fingers through his beard. “Daja, something’s not right there,” he said at last. There was concern in his dark eyes. “I don’t know what it is, but it worries me.”

“I think so too, sometimes,” Daja admitted. “But he’s complicated, Frostpine, and his mother-Bookkeeper, don’t log this against me, but I think his mother is a monster. And more than half cracked, if she’s talking that way about me and him.”

Frostpine hugged Daja to his side. “Maybe it’s just as well he’s going away for a while. Come down to the kitchen. Anyussa wants victims for some pastry experiments.”

Wearing the gloves to help him think, he arrived at something that would be not a lesson but a test, and chose Airgi Island for it. When he’d presented his plans for firefighter training, their council decided that he asked too much in funds, people to train, and training time. When his demands were more reasonable, they told Ben, they would be happy to hear him again. They sounded like his mother. Airgi Island had to learn that lessons were always far more expensive than was preparation for the future. Their council had to learn that it was folly to turn Bennat Ladradun and his hard-earned expertise from their doors.

He left home an hour and a half before sunrise and walked to Threadneedle Canal, where he donned his skates. A hard wind cut into those parts of his face not covered by scarves. To avoid it he kept to the walls of first Threadneedle, then Kunsel Canal. He held a lantern on a pole just ahead of him to light his way. A sense for pebbly ice let him skate without accident. The gloves, slung on his back in a bag, would do him no good if he fell, cracked his head, and froze to death. Airgi Island wouldn’t learn this necessary lesson.

At least the wind kept lawkeepers and watchmen in their shelters. The crews who leveled canals and moved snow were still locked up for the night. No one saw him glide between islands.

He’d wanted to do this on Watersday, as soon as she’d left him with the gloves. It had taken iron control to keep from rushing straight out to try them. He had to be careful. He wanted to set any fire, without planning, just to watch the sheep scramble and bleat for their lives. That would never do. The gloves meant he had to plan more carefully, not less. Cloth, hair, even skin couldn’t be tracked by mages if they burned, but magic left traces. The more powerful the magic, the better chance that a trace would remain. Any surface he touched with the gloves must be completely destroyed by the fire.

He’d waited and planned for four, nearly five, mortal days, though he’d thought he would explode with impatience. The trip to Izmolka gave him a reason to be away. He arranged to meet his escort at the Suroth Gate the hour after dawn. If he timed what he did exactly, everyone would believe he was on the road when his newest creation unfolded. It meant he couldn’t watch, but no plan was perfect.

In Izmolka, perhaps, he could experiment with the gloves and fire before he came home.

The city’s clocks struck the hour before dawn. He stopped at the second stair that led from Airgi to Kunsel Canal and unbuckled his skates. The staff at Asinding Bathhouse wouldn’t stir until dawn: he had to be on the ice when they began their day. His prize would heat as they began to shovel wood onto the night’s embers, building the fires to heat the huge pools over the furnaces. Once the fires were roaring, his gift would open, its clay outer layer shattered by heat, its thick leather wrappings drying until they burned. When they did, his surprise would explode. The merchant who had sold him five pounds of the new invention called “boom-dust” thought Ben was a farmer, looking for a quick way to clear stubborn tree stumps from his land. In a way Ben had not lied: this boom-dust would clear quite a large piece of land.

The lock on the door through which wood was carried to the cellar was easy to open. He had a set of master keys, granted to him by the governor’s council when they’d agreed to let him start training programs. With them he could enter all public buildings-the bathhouses were run by the city, not the island, council.

Inside the cellar, he closed his lantern and put it down, then waited for his eyes to adjust. Gratings in the huge furnace released dull orange light, enough to see by. He found the main furnace door, two slabs of iron with thick iron handles. Attendants used heavy gloves and iron pry bars levered under the handles to drag the doors open. Even with the fire at its lowest the metal was hot enough to cook on. Ben didn’t use the tools: they were nowhere in sight. The point in any case was to try out his gloves.

He took them from his sack and slid them on. They fit perfectly over his knitted gloves and the heavy sleeves of his coat. Gripping the iron handle that opened one furnace door, Ben pulled. He’d counted on his size and strength to make up for the lack of a pry bar. They did, though he needed both hands and wrenched a muscle in his back. Slowly the iron door, taller than he was, swung open.

A desert of embers lay in the furnace, heat rippling over them. Reaching into his sack, he brought out his device, a globe twice as big as his head. There was no need to make this one so it would take forever to burn, giving him hours to get clear. The furnace would hatch this egg for him soon. He kissed the dry clay surface and pitched the ball deep into the heart of the glowing embers. He tossed the sack and the lantern in after it.

Overhead a door slammed. Voices echoed against the tiled surfaces of the bathhouse proper. Ben thrust the open furnace door shut, hanging onto it desperately at the last until he eased it to. A slam would bring the sleepy attendants down here on the run.

He stuffed the metal gloves down the front of his coat and climbed out of the cellar. The attendants entered at the far side of the building-he had watched their morning routine for two weeks that fall. He doubted they would hear as he used the axe to smash the lock from the outside. If this entrance survived what was to come, the lawkeepers would think someone had broken in to sleep warm.

He ran to the canal and strapped on his skates, fingers trembling as he secured the buckles. The clay was getting harder and drier on the embers. The attendants would be on their way to the wood stores, to stoke the furnace to wakefulness. Time was running out; the eastern sky was showing red.

He lunged onto the ice. Three strokes and he went sprawling, the price of skating with his mind on other things. He took a breath and forced himself to stand carefully. He’d fallen beside a wood pile. Quickly he cut off his boot covers, pulled them out of his skate straps, balled them around his knitted gloves, and thrust them under a few logs. He always carried a vial of oil and flint and steel in his pockets: he poured the oil over the logs that concealed his clothes, then set it to burn. Then he kept his eyes on the ice and skated off slowly.

Near Joice Point he turned to watch the eastern sky. Those who liked to take steam before work would be lining up at the bathhouse doors. Some might already be inside. Ben sighed. It was hard to judge how long each device took to do its job. Black powder boom-dust was particularly unreliable, though effective when it finally worked.

He heard a muffled thump, then a booming roar. A geyser of water, fire, wood, and who knew what else blew into the sky. Ben’s breath caught in his chest as oily black smoke and fountaining water soared above the buildings that stood between him and the bathhouse. It was beautiful. He shook with the need to go back. How much would be left? How many would be alive?

He bit his lower lip until it bled. His eyes stung; he was sweating ferociously. He must not do it. He had to follow his plan. He could not be seen here.

Somehow he forced himself to turn and skate on. He and his escort must be out of the city before word reached Suroth Gate of the disaster on Airgi Island.

On the day Ben left, Daja practiced combat meditation with Jory and puttered about after her bath, repairing jewelry for Matazi’s friends and mulling over the living metal suit. She was inspecting a triple chain like a white gold waterfall when she heard loud voices below. Curious, she went to the servants’ back stair, closest to the noise.

“All those old fur throws, and I mean all. Don’t argue anymore, you put me out of patience.” That was Matazi, sounding unusually crisp. “Tea, kettles. Yanna preserve us, I’ve never seen such a thing, never. Aloe balm, all we can spare. Don’t stint. Muslin and linen for bandages. Make up beds in the cow loft and the storage rooms - we can take twenty people if they don’t mind crowding. Half of Stifflace Street is in flames.”

Daja pelted downstairs. Matazi stood in the hall to the slush room, hands to her temples, as servants hurried to do her bidding. Maids bustled to and fro, building piles on either side of their mistress: the chest of medicines that Matazi kept for emergencies, cheap tin mugs, bowls, and tableware, and bottles of spirits used as stimulants and soothers in open crates. Footmen emerged from a storeroom with rolls of canvas used for shelters over their shoulders; a houseboy followed with a collection of long tent poles.

Daja looked at Matazi. “What happened?” she asked. “Can I help?”

Matazi’s dark eyes were haunted. “I was visiting one of Kol’s aunts. She lives on the other side of Kadasep. We were to go shopping. We… ” Matazi’s lips trembled. She put her hand over them, trying to compose herself. Maids arrived with more supplies; the footmen carried them outside. “We heard the fire bells, of course,” Matazi said. “There’s-there’s a bathhouse on Airgi Island, a big one, where Stifflace Street and Barbzan Street come together. They said the furnace exploded-it’s just a crater now. The whole block around it is burning.”

Daja clenched her hands. She didn’t want to do this again, but… surely it would be better than Jossaryk. And maybe she could send the fire somewhere-into what was left of the bathhouse, that might work.

“Daja? Are you all right?” asked Matazi.

Daja rested a hand on Matazi’s shoulder. “If there’s fire, maybe I can help,” she reminded her hostess. “Do we know where Frostpine is?”

“Right here.” He came from the kitchen, tying his crimson habit over breeches and shirt. “Matazi, we need horses.”

By the time Frostpine and Daja reached the fire zone, the blazes were contained inside the streets around the destroyed bathhouse. Most were out, having consumed every house near the center of the destruction. Rather than fight them, now that no one or nothing else could be saved, Daja and Frostpine let them alone. Instead they joined the volunteers who cared for the survivors and moved them as quickly as possible onto sleighs that carried them to hospitals or families who would take them in. Daja and Frostpine labored until mid-afternoon, when the last victims alive were taken away. Now the wagons for the dead arrived. The bodies had been placed in one street under pieces of canvas. The thought of loading them on wagons made Daja’s eyes fill with tears. She tried not to look relieved when the lawkeepers ordered them home. They said others would finish up.

They didn’t leave immediately. Instead they walked to the deep black gouge in the earth that was all that remained of the bathhouse.

“Shurri defend us,” Frostpine whispered, taking the sight in. “Does this look familiar to you?”

Daja nodded. In her first summer at Winding Circle, pirates had attacked the temple city and neighboring Summersea. They brought with them a new, terrible weapon, a substance packed in baked clay balls and lit with fuses. Wherever the boomstones and the black powder they carried hit, they exploded. Their mark was a distinctive sunburst pattern in blackened ground and scorched wood.

“Maybe the furnace blew up, but it was helped along,” Frostpine said grimly. “This wasn’t an accident.” He went to the nearest lawkeeper and spoke to her. As Daja waited for him, something caught her eye. A freak of the explosion had driven a triangle of glazed tile like an arrowhead into a chunk of wood: it was embedded there. She tried to pry it loose, until a thought intruded: Was she doing as Ben did, taking mementoes of a fire?

She released the tile as if it were a viper, wiping her fingers on her coat. Her skin crawled. How could Ben do that? How could he do it even after a fire where he’d saved lives and homes? It was like hoarding pieces of bad luck.

At least he’s not here for this, she thought dully. It would break his heart.

Frostpine returned. “Let’s go,” he told Daja, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Someplace where fire isn’t the enemy.”

The next day, Firesday, Daja could not stay still: if she did, the image of rows of the covered dead haunted her. She couldn’t even concentrate on the living metal suit. At last she decided to skate to Alakut Island to visit the fancy stores on Hollyskyt Way. She had forgotten the confectioner’s shop, or the hole where it had stood, was there. Seeing the charred gap ruined her desire to look at other smiths’ jewelry. Instead she skated to Bazniuz Island. There she wandered the open air markets on Sarah Street, buying her midday from dumpling and grilled meat carts, washing it down with cider. She bought notepaper to write letters on, then new quill pens to write with, and a packet of roasted chestnuts to eat while she wrote.