The Smoke-Scented Girl

by Melissa McShane

  “Because we have many experienced magicians in Home Defense, and all of them are stymied by what’s in those papers. You have a flexibility of mind that they lack, something I know from personal experience of all the times your cleverness has gotten me into trouble. And you clearly need a new challenge.”

  Evon scowled at him, but turned over the pages and began scanning. Almost immediately, he said, “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am very serious.”

  “There’s no mystery here. Fires start all the time. Particularly in parts of cities built with a great deal of wood and very little space between buildings. There doesn’t have to be some supernatural explanation for it. And I see here that some of this information has come from the Weekly Gazette. They claimed last week that the King of Dalanine is really a woman with a hairy chest. I think their reliability is questionable.”

  “A great many men and women in Dalanine’s government, sober people with very little sense of humor, are taking it very seriously indeed,” Piercy said, and there was nothing teasing about him now. “These fires are hot enough to melt stone and vaporize flesh—and have done, at every site we’ve investigated. Whatever this phenomenon is, if we can harness it, it could tip the balance of the war in our favor. And I don’t mind telling you that the Despot is pushing forward faster than anyone thought possible a year ago.”

  “Yes, I know; did I mention I have a deadline?”

  Piercy waved that away. “We need this, Evon, we need to know who or what is causing it, and I think you’re the man to figure it out.”

  “I—that’s praise indeed, Piercy, but I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  Piercy tapped the sheaf of papers. “This is all the information we have to date. Places, times, deaths, anything our agents could learn. Find a pattern. See if you can identify the magician behind it.”

  “Are you certain that there is an intelligence behind it? It could be some naturally occurring phenomenon.”

  “Find that out, too. Whatever it is, the government wants to know.” Piercy grinned, once again the carefree man about town. “With you working on fire-resistance spells, who knows? It might turn out to be related to your work after all. Now, put your clothes on. I refuse to be seen in public with you in this state. Besides, you’d freeze in just your shirtsleeves. It’s snowing again, did you realize?”

  “I can’t leave now. If I don’t solve this problem in the next two days—”

  “If you do not rest, dear fellow, you won’t be solving it at all. You know I’m right. Home, bath, food, bed, possibly not in that order, and a fresh start in the morning.”

  Evon sighed, but buttoned up his waistcoat and tied his neckcloth, then submitted to Piercy retying it for him properly. Now that he thought about it, he was very hungry and a little cold now that he wasn’t lighting fires every ten minutes. Perhaps he needed food, and some rest. He glanced down at the papers. Mysterious fires. Melted stone. If Piercy was right, and this wasn’t simply sensationalism, it would be a fine challenge indeed.

  It was, in fact, snowing rather heavily outside, and Evon turned the collar of his overcoat up against the fat flakes and filled his lungs with cold air that cleared away the last funk of hot wax and fire that clung to him. In the wintry light, the businesses lining both sides of the wide, well-traveled street looked gray and tired, upper stories jutting out above lower ones, threatening to overbalance entire buildings. He glanced at the neatly-painted letters on the leaded window above him, lit from within despite the morning sun. ELLTIS & CO., FINEST MAGICS. Someday he intended it to read ELLTIS, LORANTIS & CO. or, if he really dared to dream, LORANTIS & CO. He buttoned his overcoat and said, “Where are we going?”

  “I told your mother I’d bring you home like the little lost lamb you appear to have become,” Piercy said. They proceeded up the street, stepping aside when a carriage rattled past on the rough cobbles, throwing up a fine spray. By evening the carriages would be sending up waves of filthy water to douse unsuspecting pedestrians. Evon nodded and tipped his hat at a pair of young women whose full skirts were already a little dirty from the road. They glanced at him and giggled as they passed, and he felt his face grow warm. How disheveled must he be, to inspire such a response? He knew himself to be reasonably attractive, even handsome according to more than one young lady, but at the moment he felt like a hideous creature out of myth, something the legendary hero Alvor might have slain with his equally legendary mace. He self-consciously pushed his hair back behind his ears. He needed a haircut. He needed a bath.

  “How have I come to this?” he muttered under his breath.

  Piercy had very good ears. “Do you mean your current physical condition, or the extremely prestigious employment that caused it? I am certain that Elltis woman is grateful for your tendency to become absorbed in solving a problem to the exclusion of all else, but when you’re not obsessed with your work, you can be quite charming. Those young ladies certainly thought so.”

  Evon reddened again. “I think they were more amused by whatever odor I’m emitting.”

  “You have never been good at interpreting the intentions of the fairer sex, Lore. You are, in fact, almost as bad at it as you are at recognizing when your own heart is engaged. As I recall, I had to tell you that your interest in Velena Torenter was non-platonic because watching you moon about in unhappy ignorance was more painful than I could endure.”

  “I’m at least capable of knowing when my condition is less than appealing to anyone, let alone women. I swear, Piercy, I won’t let myself go this seedy again.”

  “You almost certainly will. Come now, Lore, why so despondent?”

  “Piercy, I’ve been working at this problem for days and I feel I’m no closer to the solution than I was at the start. Yes, I know, I need to think about something else, give my thoughts time to come together, but I’ve...I realize it’s arrogance, but I’ve never encountered a magical problem I couldn’t solve before.”

  “You mean you haven’t faced a challenge that hasn’t bowed down and kissed your boots in ten seconds before. I have tremendous faith in your abilities, old friend, or I wouldn’t have brought you my little problem.” He tapped Evon’s breast with his walking stick, making the papers tucked inside rustle.

  “You’re trying to distract me.”

  “No, I’m selfishly trying to get you to work on something that could mean a promotion for me if I can bring in a solution. I know you can read and walk at the same time. It gives you an undeserved air of studiousness that as I recall usually concealed your planning some kind of mischief.”

  “You never complained at our exploits, though you probably should have done.” Evon sighed. “I can’t read and walk in this weather. Why don’t you just tell me the essentials?”

  “I was rather hoping not to do quite so much work, but if it will halt your slide down the slope of despair, then I will make the sacrifice. What do you know about these fires?”

  “Nothing, since until twenty minutes ago I believed they were naturally occurring events strung together by superstitious thinking.”

  “Harsh, Lore, very harsh. As I said, they burn so hot as to melt stone—our agents, who are as unimaginative as men can be and still walk upright, have visited the sites and confirmed this. That alone should tell you that we are not dealing with a mundane phenomenon.”

  “I believe you.”

  “More significant is that with a single exception, all the fires have had exactly the same dimensions—a rough circle ten feet in diameter. The anomalous event was more than one hundred fifty feet in diameter and destroyed fifteen buildings.”

  “Was it the first event?”

  Piercy looked at him narrowly. “You’re thinking whoever is behind this might have had trouble controlling the spell initially.”

  “I was. Though I think it is a mistake to assume there’s a person behind it. Go ahead.”

  “Molten stone, identical dimensions...there’s no regularity to the timing of the e
vents, and they are always within cities.”

  “Unless there are fires your people don’t identify as part of the phenomenon because they happen where there are few witnesses.”

  “You’re already thinking further than we have, Lore.” Piercy wiped a clump of snowflakes from his eye. “Most disturbingly, there’s always at least one body—or the charred bones and ash of a body—within the circle of devastation.”

  “That suggests the possibility that these people are spontaneously combusting.”

  “That occurred to us, too. And then there are the eyewitnesses, who are as reliable as eyewitnesses ever are. Some claim they saw a person fleeing from the fire, despite its being so hot that nothing could survive within it. Others say a dark-robed figure walked up to the victim and struck him or her with a ball of liquid fire. Don’t ask me how they knew it was liquid. And of course there’s the inevitable Alvorian conspiracists.”

  “I don’t believe ‘conspiracists’ is a word.”

  “Well, it is now. They believe Dania caused the fires as a harbinger of Alvor’s return.”

  “Dania, as in Alvor’s magia? How can anyone believe that?”

  “It’s been almost a thousand years since Alvor and his companions are supposed to have destroyed the warlord Murakot and then disappeared. Some people believe he’s destined to return to save the country from the Despot.”

  “Dalanine can save itself, I think. With the help of hard-working magicians like myself.”

  “I agree, but these conspiracists see Alvor’s hand in everything. And one of the rumors is that a bald woman stands near the fires and watches the victim scream. You might recall that one of the legends has Dania shaving her head to use her hair to capture Murakot’s chief lieutenant and force him to give up Murakot’s weakness.”

  “I admit I don’t know much about Alvorian myth, but I don’t recall Dania being so coldblooded as to simply watch a person burn to death.”

  “I don’t recall Dania being a real person.”

  “There’s always a kernel of truth in these legends. After all, Murakot was a real warlord, though probably not a creature of magic. And I imagine there’s a kernel of truth in these stories as well.”

  “So what do you think it is, if I may take the liberty of assuming you’ve already made some conclusions, clever fellow?”

  Evon side-stepped a rivulet of water running toward a nearby drain. “I believe there is a person behind all of this,” he said. “Unless there is something in these papers you haven’t told me, not one of the witnesses declared that the victim had simply gone up in flames. That’s the sort of thing people would remember. We are dealing with some individual who is capable of creating fires far hotter than any spell we know can manage.”

  “That’s unsettling. I might even say, frightening.”

  “It is indeed.”

  They crossed the street into a neighborhood of narrow, tall houses that stood four and even five stories above the quiet street. All were built of black stone and in the light of the wintry day looked foreboding, what with the beds of frozen, snow-covered flowers and the bare trees that lined both sides of the street. The only cheerful note was the brightly colored doors, reached by short flights of stairs, red and purple and green set off by the golden brass of door latches. Evon and Piercy had the street to themselves, shrouded in the strange hush that was the sound of millions of soft flakes drifting to the ground. Their boots left prints on the sidewalk that immediately began to fill with snow.

  Evon turned to ascend the stairs of the fifth house on the right. “Will you come in? Mother will undoubtedly want to thank you for escorting me home. She believes I’m flighty and easily distracted, which I find amusing since you’ve told me I’m the opposite.”

  “I have a dinner engagement, so please give your mother my apologies.” Piercy tipped his hat at Evon, causing a small avalanche to fall from the brim. “Good luck, and my thanks for tackling that somewhat knotty problem. And, Evon?” This as Evon had put his hand to the latch. “You’re not obsessive. You’re simply very focused. Try to keep that in mind?”

  Evon smiled and shrugged. “If I must be very focused, I promise to turn that focus on your problem rather than my own. At least for the day.”

  He shook the snow from his hat and brushed off the shoulders of his coat before entering his home. The blue door creaked a bit, as it had for the last seven years; his parents always said they’d have to do something about it, but it remained unoiled and continued to make a sound somewhere between a squeak and a moan. It was better than a doorbell for announcing one’s presence. Even so, no one appeared to greet him as he entered and shucked his overcoat. Well, Father would be at work at this hour, and Aunt Mayda and Uncle Findlay would be at the tea shop, and his odious cousin Jessalie would be at school, thank the Twins, and Mother might be at the church supervising preparations for the upcoming winter fete. He had the house to himself. The idea made him feel lonely.

  The entry, unfurnished except for the coatrack, was painted a plain white and bore only portraits of long-dead Lorantises; the doors to his father’s study and the dining room were both closed. It felt empty and as silent as the snowy street. Evon shivered a little and ascended the stairs to the fourth floor and his bedroom. The fire was unlit, the logs cold on the andirons, and that combined with the pale blue wallpaper and the winter sunlight filtering through the falling snow made his room feel frozen. “Forva,” he said, snapping his fingers at the fireplace, and fire sprang up golden and cheery from the thick logs. The word left a taste of hot metal in his mouth and made the knot of tension in his spine twinge as it tapped his nearly depleted reserves further.

  Now that he was home, exhaustion sank into his bones and his eyeballs, and he could almost hear the bed calling to him. No. He was too filthy. Bath first. He removed his frock coat and unwound his neckcloth, which suddenly felt stifling, tossed both on a chair, and went down the hall to the bathroom and turned on the tap. It had been his first magical gift to his family, years ago, when he’d first learned to enspell the water tank to produce hot water and installed the filter that purified the waste water before it reached the street. He’d won the gold medal at Houndston School for it. He was fourteen. And now here he was, ten years later, trying and failing to keep things from getting too hot. He stripped off the rest of his clothing and sank into the hot water. Two days, or he would—no, he wouldn’t lose his position, he was too valuable to Elltis and Company, but— He sank further under the water until only his nose and mouth were above it. He wasn’t going to think about it. He’d promised Piercy.

  So. Someone capable of producing fire on a scale no one had ever seen. No, that was wrong. If there was a kernel of truth in legend, it was fire on a scale no one had seen for centuries. He didn’t know very much about the stories of Alvor and his companions, except that they’d gone on a quest to find a way to defeat the warlord Murakot, who’d supposedly had great magics at his command. Including powerful fire spells. That can’t be the answer, though, he thought, sitting up and making the water splash over the edge of the tub, then lathering up to keep from falling asleep in the wonderful, warm, soothing embrace of the bathwater. I might be convinced that some creature from a thousand years ago exists and is present in this time, but there’s never been any evidence that magic was somehow different in the past. Someone’s discovered a new spell.

  He scrubbed at his hair. It took two rinses before he felt truly clean. His cheeks burned to think of how he’d let himself go. Focused, Piercy? I really think ‘obsessed’ is the better word. An unexpected pang of loneliness struck him; he was suddenly conscious of how isolated he’d become, how alone he’d managed to make himself even in the midst of his large family. And yet he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten this way. At school, he’d been a top student, but he’d always had time for sport and courting young women and, of course, getting Piercy into trouble. He’d been popular, damn it, and now he hardly ever saw his friends from those days, excep
t Piercy, always had his head down over some work project or other. It couldn’t be healthy. And it’s not making me happy, he thought with some surprise. Satisfied, maybe, content, possibly, but there was definitely something missing in his life.

  He dried himself and ran back down the short hall, naked and clutching his clothes in front of him because he’d forgotten his dressing gown. Safely in his room, he put on a clean shirt and trousers and collapsed onto his bed. He was starving now, but he was more tired than he was hungry. His bed was the best bed that ever was made by human hands. He began to drift off. No more fires of any intensity. Just his sleepy brain putting up a soft barrier between himself and—

  His eyes snapped open. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? Not rigid; flexible. He leaped out of bed and began rummaging in his desk. So many odds and ends, broken pieces, discarded spell components—there was a cowrie shell, no idea how it had gotten there but it would have to do. Nothing fireproof, nothing fireproof. He finally found an old silver snuffbox, which was puzzling because he didn’t use the stuff, and scrabbled at his coat pockets until he found the piece of coppery chalk no magician was ever without. Carefully he drew a single straight line and a wavy one on the surface of the snuffbox. The chalk filled the grooves of the snuffbox’s engraved top as if it were liquid rather than powder. Evon shoved the papers and other detritus of work to one side of his desk and set the snuffbox down in the center of the clear spot. He laid the cowrie shell beside it, then took his penknife and cut a chunk of candle off the ancient taper on the windowsill and put that next to the other objects.

  Now he needed oil. He used magic to light his room, a globe hanging from the ceiling in a translucent glass basket, but there had to be oil somewhere in the house. He thundered down the stairs all the way to the ground floor and into the kitchen, where he startled a shriek out of the cook. “May I have some cooking oil?” he demanded.

  “Mr. Evon, sir, whatever d’ye need cooking oil for?” she said, her eyes wide.