I bet they stored things in the garret, she thought grimly as she wove through the skaters as fast as she dared. Nice, dry things that would burn. I bet he went straight up there.
Rather than battle onlookers, she skated wide around them, headed for the soup kitchen’s dock. She glided in between sleighs and people with hand-towed sleds as they lined up on the ice. These picked up as many people from the hospital as they could carry at the dock, and took them to safety.
Silvery light shone. Daja shaded her eyes. A mage of some kind crouched on the muddy ground under the dock. Magic radiated away from her, into the ice. A melted puddle of water on the surface, slippery as grease to skater and sleigh, froze. The mage was a weather-worker, drawing cold from the ground into the ice around the dock. Hot as the nearby fire was, the ice would remain safely frozen for the sleighs.
Watching the mage, Daja hit one of the dock’s piers shoulder-first. At least I was almost at walking speed, Daja thought, grinding her teeth against pain. Even through all her layers of clothing, it hurt. Worse, she heard the ice-mage cackle with amusement.
She didn’t linger. Instead she stripped off her skates, slung them around her neck, and climbed a ladder to the dock. A double line of people stretched between it and the kitchen, handing the sick, injured, and young to the waiting sleighs.
Jory stood beside the open kitchen door. Like every worker in this line she had a wet length of the muslin normally used to strain cheese wrapped over her mouth and nose to strain out smoke. She yelped when Daja hugged her from behind, then gasped with relief as Daja pulled off the scarves that hid her face. “I don’t suppose you’d want to get yourself to safety?” Daja asked her.
Jory coughed. “I’m safe right here,” she insisted. “Ravvot Ladradun’s still evacuating the nursery — we need every hand to get the little ones out.” She took the scarves Daja offered her and wrapped one around the shrieking, coughing, half-dressed infant that someone passed to her from inside the building. Jory gave Daja’s other scarves to the workers on either side; they draped the next two children in them. Daja removed her outer coats and handed them over.
“Ravvot Ladradun’s dead,” shouted a man, giving Jory a last infant. “They said the roof just caved in on the nursery!”
Jory’s eyes flooded and spilled over, tears cutting through the ash and soot on her face. Automatically she grabbed the next patient to come out, a man with only one leg, and wrapped him in one of Daja’s coats before passing him on down to the sleighs.
“Potcracker’s still inside?” Daja asked.
“She’s holding the fire,” Jory croaked. “Somehow it got into the cellar storerooms, and the oil jars blew out the back of the kitchen.”
“Try to stay alive,” Daja told Jory. She plunged into the kitchen thinking, somehow it got there, my eye. Ben likes to mix oil and fires.
16
Olennika stood before a wall of flame where the back of the kitchen had been. The dark-haired mage looked embattled. Her black hair tumbled wildly from its pins. Her sober gown was ripped, charred by debris, and smeared with soot. Sweat coursed down her face. Her black eyes were serene, her hands clasped lightly in front of her. About to yell in her ear — the roar of falling beams, fire, and screaming people was deafening — Daja remembered a way to talk that wouldn’t distract Olennika from her barriers on the fire below. She placed her hand lightly on the cook-mage’s arm.
As she’d hoped, their shared bond with fire made it possible to speak. Do you need help? asked Daja.
Olennika smiled crookedly. I’m fine — I must hold this so they have another exit for the patients, she replied. You’ll waste time if you try and hold the fire inside the hospital. There’s too much. You’ll be overwhelmed.
Remembering Jossaryk House, Daja shuddered. She’d do it again if necessary, but it was like surviving a tidal wave. She didn’t want to have to try it twice.
Olennika picked up her thoughts. So you learned you can’t beat everything, she thought, her inner voice as wry as her speaking voice. So you found you’re human. How sad. Listen to me, girl-mage — as soon as they don’t need this exit anymore, I am leaving. I know when I’m against something bigger than me.
I can help, Daja replied. There are patients still inside. I’ll see if—
Wait, Olennika said when Daja would have let go. There is a thing … if you’re not afraid.
What? Daja asked.
Olennika’s thought flickered, as if she herself doubted. Then she told Daja, On the far side of the hospital, straight through that door on my left, there’s a locked wing. The mad ones are there. Most are docile. We drug them nearly all of the time until the healers see if they can be helped. No one’s tried to get them out.
Daja faltered. Like most people she was afraid of insanity. She saw mad folk everywhere, those whose families were too poor for expensive healing that would bring them happier lives, or those who simply couldn’t be helped.
It’s all right, Olennika told her. You might try the second floor —
Daja was afraid, but she knew what Lark and Sandry would do. Straight across the building from here? she asked.
Through the door. Olennika pointed to it. They’ll obey simple commands. Simple, mind. I brew the drug myself and I made it that way.
Daja nodded, then ran for the door they’d discussed and the hall beyond. Large wards opened off either side of the hall, disgorging escapees. She was shocked at how many people were still inside, but at least those who could move were there to help those in trouble. She dodged two girls supporting a very old man and caught a toddler when the woman who carried him dropped the child.
“I’d forgotten they were so heavy,” the gray-haired woman said and coughed ferociously. “He’s the last of the little ones. Some fellow named Ladradun went in for more, and the roof caved on him. We’ll get no more babies out.” She accepted the child from Daja and continued on her way.
Daja used her senses to check the fire. The garret and the fourth floor were gone, and most of the third. A full story lay between this floor and the blaze — that was bad. She had to hurry.
At the end of the hall she found a large double door with heavy iron deadbolts to secure it. Above the bolts she noticed a small window with a sliding shutter. Daja opened it and peered inside. Most of those she could see sat on cots, weeping. She prowled. A man with very short dark hair, seeing her face, attacked the door, trying to grab her through the peephole. “Get us out!” he screamed, then coughed. “Out, get us out!”
So the drug doesn’t work for all of them, Daja thought grimly. She wrestled the bolts out of the locks, thinking bad thoughts about the workers who hadn’t tried to move these people. Then she felt guilty; she had hesitated at the thought of dealing with crazy people in a firestorm herself. Grabbing both doors, she yanked them back.
The man who had yelled at her tried to shove by. Daja grabbed his arm and hung on. “If you’re awake enough to know you’re in trouble, you’re awake enough to help me,” she snapped.
“The questioners — the governor’s questioners — they’ll come for me,” he insisted, fighting her grip. “They don’t dare let me go free with what I know. They’ll pry my secrets from my mind and they’ll kill me.”
Daja thought fast. “Pretend you’re a healer,” she told him. “They won’t notice you!” She took a green worker’s robe hanging on the wall outside the ward and threw it at him, then let him go and marched into the room. There were thirty beds. Most of the occupants were the sitting-and-weeping sort. “Come on,” Daja said, dragging the closest to her feet. “Walk out of here. Follow the others.”
The man stared at her wide-eyed, wringing his hands.
“Go!” Daja cried, shoving him at the door. “Walk out of here!” She did the same with the next patient, and the next. The fourth was curled up on his bed. He did nothing when Daja shook him.
“He won’t budge,” said the man who feared the governor’s questioners. He stood beside Daja, the worker?
??s robe sagging on his bony frame. “He’s that way most of the time. They put a diaper on him. And the others are still here.”
Daja looked back. The three patients she had ordered to leave stood at the door, huddled together, bewildered. She looked at her companion.
“Lead them like horses?” he suggested.
Daja grabbed a sheet from an empty bed and cut it in strips with her belt knife. “Why aren’t you like them?” she wanted to know.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t work the same for everyone. I’m not mad enough, I think. That helps.”
Common sense from a madman, Daja thought desperately. This day just gets worse by the minute.
Something on the floor overhead caught fire: she felt the surge as the blaze fed, and the sigh of nails as they melted. Daja thrust a wad of linen strips at her companion. “Tie them together by one hand,” she ordered, going to the next bed. “Like a string of horses. Get as many as you can, and lead them out. Hurry!” She grabbed the young man in the next bed by his wrist and tied one end of a strip to him. “Get up,” she ordered. He obeyed. She seized the old woman in the next bed and pulled her to her feet, then tied one of her wrists to the young man’s. Towing them along, she added three more to her string.
The next, a middle-aged man with a head shaved bald, threw himself at Daja, shrieking. He clawed her cheek with ragged nails, then got his hands around her throat. Daja let go of her string of docile patients and ran him into the wall, slamming him against it as she called heat from the fire above into her skin. He didn’t notice. She rammed him again and called for more heat until he screamed and let go, waving burned hands. He ran from the room. Daja gasped, coughed, and propped herself against the wall as she sent the heat she’d used back into the inferno overhead. She couldn’t worry about that fellow running loose. On the second floor, she felt the ceiling give way. It hit the ceiling over her head; the wall under her palm warmed. The timbers overhead groaned under the weight of burning walls and roof. Smoke leaked through the cracks.
Daja roped five more patients into her string and dragged them into the corridor. From the rolling smoke that filled it came her green-robed madman. Someone had given him a soaked cloth to hold over his nose and mouth. Daja passed him her string of patients and plunged back into the ward.
She had four more roped together when the beams above them moaned a second, longer time. Smoke shot down in streams through cracks that broadened as the ceiling began to tear loose from the walls.
There was no time. She grabbed two more docile patients, one in each hand, and towed them to the wall along with her string of people. With one gigantic pull of her magic she yanked all the nails in the wall to her right from their moorings. They shot across the ward like arrows.
With a magical shove Daja thrust both the iron grating on the sole window and the metal in the shutters over it into the night. She turned, still clutching her patients, and rammed herself back-first into the wall. Planks and crossbeams dropped free like rotten teeth. Daja dragged her six people through the tangle of lumber into the night’s cold, then towed them toward the ring of guardsmen who held the crowd back.
Hearing wood crack behind her, she turned, still clutching her linen rope and two patients’ wrists. In a slow burst of flames, smoke and embers, the ground floor walls collapsed. The madmen’s ward fell in. She thought she heard screams from those she’d been forced to leave behind, but told herself fiercely that was just the fire’s roar of triumph. It had won.
People were tugging her hands. She jerked away, then realized they wore the green robes of hospital workers. She let them take charge of her patients.
A second roar: the central part of the hospital collapsed. A third: the soup kitchen. Daja scrabbled in her belt pouch, coughing, and brought out her mirror. She pressed it to her forehead, trying to breathe slowly. What of Olennika? Jory?
Sheer exhaustion made her calm enough to summon an image. When she did, her knees went straight to jelly. Down in the muddy slush of the open ground she went, not caring in the least. In the mirror Frostpine helped Olennika to drink from a long-handled ladle. The cook-mage was wrapped in a blanket; as far as Daja could see, Olennika had fled once her clothes burned off. Olennika looked terrible, but she was alive. Beside them Jory bent over, coughing. Someone thrust a bottle at her: Nia. Matazi and Kol were nearby, helping people into the Bancanors’ sleigh.
Relief poured over Daja. For a moment she swayed, wanting to cry.
But she had work to do yet. Grimly she felt in her pockets until she found the bottle Nia had given her at the house. Her stomach rolled in protest as she eyed it, then tried to reject its contents when Daja gulped them down. Two minutes later she was coughing and vomiting, her stomach in revolt against the strong-tasting fluid, her lungs expelling their latest load of soot-black phlegm.
When she was done, she lurched to her feet and walked toward the blazing hospital. A guard yelled for her to come back, but it was a scarecrow-thin figure in a flapping green robe who ran up and seized her arm.
“They say I’m mad,” the man cried. “You’re not even locked up!”
Daja gently pried his hand from her flesh. “You’re right, but not like you think you are,” she said.
The man blinked. His eyes were large and pale, the color impossible to guess in the flame-lit dark, fringed by long, heavy black lashes. He looked like a madman, or a prophet, she thought. “That made my head hurt,” he complained.
“I’m sorry. An account has come due. Debts must be settled,” Daja told him. “I’ll be fine.” She patted his shoulder and continued her walk into the hospital’s inferno. Once more she was reminded of pijule fakol, the fearful Trader afterlife for those who did not pay what they owed. Ben probably deserved to spend eternity in pijule fakol, but Daja could not help him escape what he owed in this life if it meant he would burn forever. If she did not stop him now, the Bookkeeper might also log the deaths Ben made with her creations to her account.
With no one else to worry her, she let her magic flow out to open a tunnel through the fire. Within moments her non-Sandry clothes had burned away. Her mirror she tucked into the breastband her friend had made. She wasn’t sure how long even Sandry’s work could last: firewalking in a small boardinghouse was one thing, the holocaust of the hospital and soup kitchen another. For dignity’s sake she hoped she would keep her clothes, but the important thing was to find Ben.
He could have died when the nursery roof collapsed, as she had been told, but she doubted it. At first she had thought that he’d slaughtered his mother, then chosen to kill himself by rescuing children from the hospital he’d set ablaze. She didn’t feel that way now. He’d leave a bolt-hole for himself. Ben didn’t want to die. He wanted to build more fires, not to become one.
Her path took her into the heart of the inferno. Beams fell all around her; walls caved in. She had to be careful not to get struck — a cracked head would kill her — but the fire itself warned her when a large object was about to fall.
In the center of the blaze she stopped. She held her left hand palm up and let the magic in its living metal pour from her fingers like a waterfall, seeking anything like itself. It rolled through the burning hospital and the ground beneath it, questing like a hound. There, about a quarter of a mile away. She pulled the living metal’s power into a ribbon that stretched between her left hand and the gloves she had made. Following it brought her to a trapdoor in a burning storeroom. It was open: she looked down and saw a ladder.
Raising a hand, she called a piece of fire to light her steps. With her free hand she gripped the ladder as she descended. She came to level ground about fifteen feet below the storeroom.
She padded along on bare feet: her boots and stockings had burned as she walked through the hospital inferno. She kept one hand cupped over the fire seed that lit her way. He would get as little warning of her arrival as possible. While she could track him if he kept her gloves — and he would never give them up, even if he guessed she co
uld follow him through them — she would rather finish this now. That he’d betrayed her was bad, but she’d been betrayed before. She could survive it. She could not allow him to use her work to ruin more lives.
The tunnel began to rise. Soon she heard movement, and soft humming. The hum stopped as he coughed briefly, then spat. Daja sucked her light into herself. A cold draft rolled down the tunnel: she was near the surface. On she went, the earth icy under her bare feet. She sent warmth into them to ward off frostbite.
The tunnel flattened, then opened into a small wooden shed. He sat on a bench just outside, checking the fit of a pair of skates by the light of a lantern hung on a hook by the door. She watched as he rebuckled his right skate. With the lamp between them, he couldn’t see past its light into the shack.
He wore the fur-lined, embroidered coat of a caribou herdsman from the north, as well as a blond wig in the herdsmen’s style. A fat pack rested beside him. She wondered if he’d kept it ready somewhere before this, or if he’d packed after his mother’s murder.
He still wore the living metal gloves. It seemed he couldn’t bear to take them off any sooner than he must. He’d have to conceal them to flee Kugisko, but he would wait until the last minute to remove them.
She sighed. He jerked around, shading his eyes to see past the lamp. “Daja,” he whispered. “Of course. Of course you would come. Fire is your element.”
If she was going to talk nonsense with a madman, she preferred her scarecrow in his borrowed robe. He at least had a heart. “You aren’t leaving, Ben,” she informed him. “You have accounts to settle. Time to pay what you owe.”
“Money-grubbing Trader talk,” he retorted scornfully. “You’re above that.”