Cold Fire (28 page)

She even reached Everall Bridge in time to race Nia home: she lost. When Nia teased her as they glided into the boat basin, Daja replied loftily that Nia had taken unfair advantage of her, because she was laden down with parcels. She would have added more, but the sight of the refugee children housed by the Bancanors stopped her. They had gone still beside a snow fort they built near the alley. Daja looked at the packet of chestnuts, still warm in her hand, then offered it to them. One boy accepted it, never taking his eyes off her, then ran back to his friends. Daja and Nia removed their skates in silence. Once they’d left their outdoor gear in the slush room, they went upstairs to meditate.

After they finished, Daja went to her room. A maid found her there. “Viymese,” she said, bobbing a curtsey, “Viymese Salt has come, and requests a moment of your time. She is in the front parlor.”

“Doesn’t she want Frostpine?” Daja asked, confused. “He’s at Teraud’s.”

The girl shook her head. “Viymese Salt requested you.”

Daja sighed and went downstairs. The front parlor was not a room for a big girl who was most comfortable in a smithy. The delicately carved and painted furnishings were cushioned in bright yellow and white striped silk; porcelain and crystal figures were on tables and shelves everywhere. The windows were paned in costly glass, and protected by gold and white brocade curtains.

Heluda Salt sat in one dainty chair, looking like a market woman in the empress’s sitting room. Her gown was sensible black wool, old-fashioned, with long sleeves. A white blouse with a round collar rose above its neckline. The veil on her strawlike dyed blonde hair was solid, sensible wool like her gown, black, with a tiny white embroidered border. The tea glass in her soot-streaked hands looked simply ridiculous. At her side was a large leather bag that Daja supposed contained her mage kit. It looked just as out of place as Heluda did.

“Don’t they use proper mugs around here?” she demanded of Daja.

Wary as she felt, Daja had to smile at that. “No more than they must,” she told her guest. “It makes their teeth hurt, or something.”

Heluda set her glass on the table next to her. “Daja, I have news, and some questions. This concerns the explosion and fire on Airgi Island.”

“I saw,” Daja said grimly. “They told you Frostpine and I think they used boom-dust?”

“They did. I didn’t get to the site until this morning-I was out past midnight over a double murder in Blackfly Bog,” Heluda explained, and sighed. “Why the idiots didn’t just pick up the husband right away… it’s usually the husband, or the lover.” She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “Never mind. The thing is, I’ve had a chance to go over the area. Most traces of the crime-of the criminal-are destroyed in explosions and fires, of course. But some traces are too strong to be wiped clean by fire. I found traces of your magic.”

Daja felt as if her spirit had stepped back to leave her body as a seated shell. Traces of her power? She and Frostpine hadn’t even tried to stop the fires. All they had done was muscle work, not magic.

Heluda finished her tea and poured herself another glass. “Some of my colleagues wanted to look at you and Frostpine. The sheep-brains thought that since black powder comes from the south, and you two are from the south, and the most suspicious fires began after your arrival, well! The matter was solved. They were going to bring you in for questioning.”

Daja wasn’t that detached from her body: she felt her skin creep. Not even law-abiding citizens heard the phrase “brought in for questioning” comfortably. Unless they had a mage skilled in interrogation spells-such mages were usually expensive to hire-lawkeepers used crude, painful means to question people.

“Don’t worry. They’ll be good little cow pats for now.” Heluda smiled, a flinty look in her eyes. “They don’t understand character as I do.” She sipped her tea. “I want you to take a mage’s look at something, though.” She reached into her open bag with both hands and pulled out a heavy object wrapped in silk magically treated to protect its contents. Gently she put the object on the table between her and Daja and opened the silk to reveal a curved, twisted iron bar covered in soot.

Daja did not want to touch it. She already knew she wouldn’t like what she learned. It was fire-blistered, its shape warped: everything about it made her twitch.

She looked up to find kindness in Heluda’s eyes, “If I had another way to do this, I would,” the woman told her quietly.

Daja lifted her right hand and held it over the iron. She was trembling. “Must I touch it?” she asked. Heluda nodded.

Daja laid her plain hand on the iron bar. It was solid-no wonder Heluda had needed both hands to lift it. As she wrapped her fingers around it, Daja was slammed with feelings. She was the bar. Violent force rammed her from behind, blowing her off the vast iron shield she was welded to. Fire raced in her wake. She plunged into cold snow that hissed and shrank from her.

Biting her lower lip, Daja released the iron. Sometimes she felt a thing bearing down on her like a storm just over the horizon. She sensed that now. If she turned the full weight of her power on this piece, curved and twisted half around by an incredible burst of heat, her life would change. She could put it off. She could. She could be safe a day more, a month more. Sooner or later, the accounting demanded in this metal bar would come due and she would have to pay it, but she did not have to do that today.

“Are you done?” Heluda inquired.

Daja shook her head and set her right hand on it. Then she flexed her left hand, feeling the brass that coated it grip her flesh. She reached out, seeing the hand as a stranger might: bright golden metal, dark brown skin, trembling fingers. She laid her metal palm on the twisted bar, and clenched both hands around it.

She was inside the iron and on the inside of her own skin. Somehow her hands were bigger. They had strange bumps in the joints. No, they weren’t hers, exactly. There was a man in her skin, a big man. He strained to pull the iron bar, his sweat oiling her skin from the inside.

Didn’t he understand about the iron stick, the bent one that men used to open the furnace door at her back? Why didn’t he use that instead of hands? The crooked, heavy bar was a quicker, easier way to help her do her job.

He dragged, and dragged, and dragged, until she did as she was supposed to. She drew on the massive iron door that shielded her from the fire on the other side, pulling it until the shield moved, letting a wash of heat pass her. She felt the heat inside the furnace, steady and calm, as it always was during the coldest hours. The fire didn’t fool her. She knew how quickly it could roar up when men tossed wood onto it.

The hands that were her and not her let go, leaving a taste of her brass skin on the iron handle.

Daja plunged into the furnace of her power, drawing strength to reach to that image of her brass hands. One of them held a large round thing. That hand tossed the round thing into the furnace. Then both brass hands gripped Daja-the-furnace-door-handle, pushing her and the iron door at her back slowly into place, between the fire and cold air. Daja’s brass hands released her iron self and vanished.

As the iron handle, she didn’t have long to wait until her people came to open the door at her back. They never grabbed her with their weak hands: she would have seared them to the bone. Instead they used the crooked pry bar to lever her and her door open.

They threw wood past her, into the heat, then began to close the doors against the rapidly growing blaze. There was a thwap that made her entire world shudder. A very hard thrust knocked her clean off her door and twisted her around on herself. She blasted through a man’s body. On she flew, into the open air and cold snow.

Heluda was talking as Daja pulled free of the iron. Daja barely heard. She tried to moisten her lips with her tongue, but it too was dry. She blindly felt for a tea glass.

“Let me,” Heluda said. Picking up Daja’s glass, she muttered in Namornese. She went to the door and flung it open to reveal the maid who sat there waiting for any request. “Get me some proper mugs, and a cloth soaked in cold water.”

Daja heard those words as if they were spoken at a distance. Her face was numb. A chasm had opened in her belly; she swayed on its edge. In her mind she saw Ben as he knelt before his stove, sifting embers in a gloved hand. She saw a black bone hand with a gold ring, and a half-melted figure of a local goddess. “Not-” she croaked.

“Hush,” ordered Heluda. “I don’t want anyone to overhear.” When the maid returned with a tray, the magistrate’s mage took it. “Back to the kitchen,” she ordered. “Don’t come within a week of this room, understand?”

Heluda closed the door and set the tray on a table. With a hand movement she threw a magical barrier over the door. Then she took the wet, folded cloth and laid it across the back of Daja’s neck. The coolness made Daja shudder, and straighten. She had been sitting folded over, as if kicked in the stomach.

Heluda poured tea into both mugs. “Here.” She thrust Daja’s mug into her hands and folded the girl’s fingers around it. “It’s not sweetened.”

Daja sipped carefully. Hot and strong, the tea burned its way down to that chasm in her belly. She took another sip, then a third, and a fourth. At last she put the mug down and shifted the cloth on her neck, holding the ends against the pulse points under her ears. Like the tea it helped to clear her head, but neither cloth nor tea stopped the quiver of her lips or the sting in her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” she told the woman. “It-it’s iron, and metal can’t lie to me, but-it makes no sense.”

“I saw the gloves here,” Heluda explained. “You smith-mages, you’d no more start a fire to destroy than you would beat a dog to make him vicious. Either I am well past my game and I never spotted you as a danger, or something you made left the mark of your magic on the furnace door. If that piece hadn’t blown clear, we might never have picked up the trace of your power. Of your gloves, used by the person you made them for.”

“No,” Daja said woodenly. She refused to believe it.

“I began to wonder at Jossaryk House,” Heluda continued, her voice inflexible. “The fire that came after Ladradun was slighted by the island’s council. Burning one of their houses-we would have questioned Ladradun at the very least. He was careful. Burning the home of one of their mistresses… tricky thinking. In my work, coincidences are suspicious. And Ladradun said he agreed with you that fires were being set. He had to say that, because you had already told me. Otherwise I doubt he’d have drawn the magistrates’ attention to it. Ladradun knows every inch of the city. He had the governor’s leave to explore as he trained his brigades. And after a long summer with no big fires, a Ladradun warehouse burns. The Bazniuz mages slipped up there. They should have questioned him, and they didn’t.”

So much didn’t make sense, Daja thought. That collection of blackened, foul mementoes… “Someone tired of being ignored,” he’d said during a very odd conversation. “Are you giving up on me?” he’d asked.

“I won’t believe it,” she insisted, trying to sound forceful. “He’s a hero. He’d never burn a houseful of people because he was angry with someone barely connected to them.”

“I’m thinking as he thinks,” Heluda replied gently. “You learn how to do that, you’ve been at this as long as I have. Don’t look at him as a friend. Look at him for who he is, Morrachane Ladradun’s son. Killers like Bennat, they’re sad when they’re little, when someone knocks them about like toys, but not when they grow up. The only way we learn how adults act is from the adults who raise us. The children of monsters become monstrous, too.”

She leaned forward and held Daja’s eyes with her own as she took Daja’s hands in her dry ones. “Morrachane was fined ten times by the island council for beating servants. Her younger sons fled the city as soon as they were able; her husband died young, probably shrieked to death. And Bennat? The first time in his life he got kindness and attention was when his family died in an accidental fire. The second time was when people he trained saved lives in another fire. And so it goes, burning after burning. People are saved, houses are saved. Councils hear him with respect. He isn’t Morrachane Ladradun’s idiot burden of a son-she called him that in front of a room full of people-he isn’t that when something burns. Except he does his job too well. He’s gotten rid of too many fire hazards. People get accustomed to his work, and the number of big fires drops off. Respect, attention-he only gets those if the fires get worse. If there are no fires, well, if he starts one, and saves everybody, there’s no harm done, practically.

“So he sets a fire. Then a bigger fire next time, then a bigger one. People die. And he is given a tool that will let him shape huge fires.” Heluda stopped. Fumbling in a pocket, she pulled out a handkerchief and thrust it at Daja.

Only then did Daja realize that tears ran down her face in steady streams. “You don’t know,” she whispered. Even in her own ears she sounded weak.

“I think I do,” Heluda replied quietly. She pointed to the twisted iron handle. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me he didn’t use your gloves to pitch something loaded with black powder boom-dust into the furnace, something to protect the boom-dust for half an hour or so. When the morning’s business started, his creation exploded, taking the entire furnace with it. Thirty-three dead right now, from the bathhouse and the homes around it that burned. Sixty-eight are in hospitals all around the city. Some won’t live. It’s his handiwork, isn’t it?” She leaned back in her chair and laced her hands over her stomach.

“He’s my friend,” Daja told her.

“He’s the fire’s friend,” was the brutal reply. “It’s the only thing he loves.”

Daja wiped her face, then ran a warm hand over the linen. When she returned the handkerchief to Heluda, it was dry. “He did it,” Daja said. “He used my gloves-gloves I made to help people-he used them to blow people to pieces and burn them alive.” A tear rolled down her cheek. She swiped it away with an impatient hand. “I made something good, something bright, and he, he dirtied it. This piece of iron tore through a man’s body when the furnace exploded. I lived that.” She had to stop, and drink her tea, and eat a cookie, and wipe her eyes on her sleeve again. Through it all Heluda Salt waited, drinking her own tea, her eyes not leaving Daja.