by Hilari Bell
“It’s not just one old men’s home, young man. This is the office for all the Ropers’ Guild’s charities. They’re good and responsible men, as these accounts attest.”
They paid her salary too, but I wouldn’t have dared say it aloud. The elderly doorman’s comments had led me to expect a massive matriarch, but the woman who confronted us was shorter than I and pleasingly plump. Or she would have been pleasing if she hadn’t been so stiff. Apron, cap, spine, and expression were all so starchy, they looked as if they’d crack if she bent. I doubted Mistress Mapple ever cracked anything, and my sympathy for the old ropers increased.
“My name is Fisk, Mistress, and this is Michael Sevenson, a knight errant and associate of mine.”
Mistress Mapple blinked, unsure how to take that mad statement. Michael looked resigned. Jimmy suppressed a grin.
“Master Sevenson received a note earlier this evening, asking him to meet someone here at the second hour.”
“A note? From whom?”
“’Twas unsigned, Mistress.” Michael handed it to her, and her eyes widened as she read.
“Those fires? Someone knows who set them?”
“So they say,” said Michael. “Do you recognize the writing?”
She frowned over it. “It looks a bit like Joe Spinner’s. I’ll go wake him. This is a serious matter—it must be resolved.” She sailed off to do so, and I hoped Joe Spinner wasn’t at the dice game.
“If this Spinner wrote the note, then we’ve something new to deal with,” said Michael. “We’ve not come across his name before.”
“No, but every sixth name in those books is probably Spinner. Or Weaver. Lots of rope makers go by one or the other.”
A distant eruption of shouting made me wince—the dice game had been discovered.
Sure enough, when Spinner finally appeared in Mistress Mapple’s stern wake, smelling of rum and clad in a bed robe and worn boots, he was surly and obviously blamed us for spoiling his sport. But he answered our questions readily.
No, he hadn’t sent any notes this evening. Why would he do a fool thing like that? He blinked in surprise at the writing, and said it looked like his but he hadn’t written it.
He didn’t know anything about the fires.
He’d never heard of Yorick Thrope.
He’d heard of Max, of course, but had never dealt with him and had no personal feelings one way or the other.
Michael asked if he knew a balding man in his early thirties, and Mistress Mapple shifted impatiently from foot to foot. It was clear that we were chasing greased pigs, and I was worrying about what might be happening back at Max’s house when Jimmy said, “Sir?”
His voice was soft, but something in it froze us in our tracks. We stared at him, but he was staring at the fireplace. Smoke wisped over its back wall and up the chimney, which it obviously shared with a fireplace in the room beneath us. Where there was a fire. Obviously.
“It’s been getting bigger for several minutes,” said Jimmy. “I just wondered…”
“The downstairs parlor is off-limits,” said Mistress Mapple. “If they’ve started a dice game there…”
A puff of smoke too large for the chimney to handle burst into the room, and the soft crackle of fire came with it.
Michael ran for the stairs, Jimmy behind him, followed by Mistress Mapple and me with Joe Spinner bringing up the rear.
When he reached the front hall, Michael paused, unsure which of the doors concealed the room he wanted. He turned to the first and threw it open on darkness and silence.
Mistress Mapple knew where she was going. She came off the stairs like a charger, yanked open the third door, and leapt back as heat and light poured into the hall. Fire flowed up the walls, up the draperies at the long windows, over paintings and shelves, but the floor was not ablaze. There was no way it could have started at the base of every wall like this unless it was set, and in the second before Michael slammed the door shut, I saw several oil kegs lying empty by the hearth.
“Mistress Mapple,” said Michael crisply. “How many servants sleep here?”
“Just two men and the kitchen girl.” Mistress Mapple backed away with little, mincing steps, as if someone else controlled her feet. Her eyes were fixed on the smoke puffing under the door. “We had to let two of them go, when the rev—”
“Fine. I want you to wake the men to fetch us buckets from the well, while you and the girl get everyone out. Jimmy can raise the alarm. We may be able to keep the fire in check till help arrives.”
“That’s good. But I’ll go.” Her steps grew more decisive, as she headed toward the front door. “I’ll raise the alarm. Go for help, yes, go for help, that’s what…” She ran into the street and vanished.
Michael clutched his hair. “All right, Jimmy, you go get everyone out. Find—”
“I know where Croft and Marky’s rooms are,” Joe Spinner volunteered. “I’ll fetch them, and some of the stouter lads, and we’ll make you two a bucket line.”
He hurried off, and Michael looked less harassed. “Jimmy, you get folks out. Start at the top floor, open every door, and don’t let anyone stop to dress or pack anything. Get them out.”
Jimmy nodded. He looked frightened, but there was sense and purpose in his face as well. He took the stairs two at a time. Michael turned to me, but I was already heading out the front door, looking for…yes, there it was, with worn blankets piled beside it. Everyone sets out water barrels on Calling Night.
Unfortunately, it was outside, and the fire wasn’t. The full barrel was far too heavy for the two of us to lift, and there was no lid, though we threw the worn blankets in to contain its splashing. The only way we could move the barrel was to tip it onto its edge and roll it. Once we figured that out it moved fairly quickly, but it took all our strength to roll it up the two steps to the front door, and a wobble on the second step cost us a quarter of the contents. We took a moment outside the parlor door to wet our doublets and dip our heads in the barrel to drench our hair.
The blankets were completely soaked. We used my knife to cut strips off one of them to tie over our mouths, and Michael had the sense to cut another to wrap his hand in before he touched the doorknob.
I was surprised when it didn’t hiss.
Water trickled from Michael’s flattened hair. He took a deep breath and opened the door, and the fire inhaled and belched out a wave of heat that seared the exposed skin around my eyes like a sunburn.
Flames rippled over the walls. The empty oil kegs by the hearth sent up a pillar of fire, and golden ghosts flickered and vanished in the carpet fringe. But the floor was still clear and the ceiling was just beginning to burn.
Michael grabbed an unburned section of the carpet’s fringe and started to roll up the rug, denying the fire easy access to the floor. I left him to it and attacked the blaze around the door, for I’d no mind to put out the fire on the far wall only to find our escape cut off.
The flames hissed and vanished when the wet blanket struck them, and hope flared in my heart. I put out the flames on one side of the door and turned to the other side, but by the time I’d finished that, orange tongues were licking up the wall I’d first drenched. I remembered the empty oil kegs and swore.
My blanket was drying, so I stepped into the hall to wet it again. The coolness of the air made me realize how hot the burning parlor was. My eyes itched. I plunged my blanket into the barrel, then my head. I was blinking water from my eyes when Michael backed from the room, coughing, and I went back in to tackle the walls again.
I made some progress, but the blanket didn’t hold enough water and I was wondering if we had any chance at all when a stranger ran into the room and pitched a bucket of water at the flames. I forget the two menservants’ names, but I’ll never forget their faces. With four of us wielding buckets and blankets, we actually did some good until the water barrel was emptied.
Then the servants organized a bucket line with a few of the strongest inhabitants, drawing t
he heavy buckets from the well, but they didn’t come fast enough, couldn’t come fast enough, and the fire was gaining on us.
The whole ceiling was ablaze. While water thrown at a wall runs down to douse the wall below it, water thrown at the ceiling douses little but the thrower…except when Michael threw it.
The first thing I noticed was that he had frozen, staring up at the ceiling. My immediate thought was that it was about to come down—a persistent fear that kept me ready to leap for the door at the slightest creak of timber. I grabbed his arm to drag him out, but there wasn’t anything wrong with the ceiling. In fact, the fire had died in the blackened patch he stared at.
His muscles were hard as wood under my hand.
“Michael?” He couldn’t hear me over the roar of the flames. “Michael!” I shook him and he turned slowly, his reddened eyes dazed and…fearful?
Not that fear wasn’t an intelligent reaction. I was terrified. But Michael wasn’t usually that sensible.
I shoved a full bucket at him. He took it with his right hand and almost dropped it—he’d been using his left hand to spare his wrist. But then he turned and hurled the bucket’s contents into the flames above him, and another black patch appeared.
Bucket after bucket came through the door, and we pitched them up. In my case it wasn’t much use, but Michael’s buckets worked better. Too much better. So much better that even as my hair dried and began to scorch, and the flames crept down the walls, I noticed and wondered.
Michael worked like a man possessed. When I heard the crack of timber I’d been waiting for, I grabbed his arm again to pull him from the room. He actually fought me for a moment, but then the ceiling creaked and he heard it. We leapt to the door and stumbled out together, slamming it behind us.
The hall was no longer cool, and the top half was full of smoke through which nightshirted old men drifted like wraiths. The fire bell tolled in the distance.
“You can’t go back!” Jimmy perched on the bottom stair, barring the way up. His voice was hoarse. “You gotta go outside. Outside, gaffer. Out!”
“But I want to get my whittling knife. You hustled me out so fast, I didn’t have a chance—”
I gripped the old man’s shoulders and shoved him toward the door. “Out!”
“Humph. No respect these days.” He wandered off into the smoke, muttering.
“Did you get them all out?”
Jimmy took a breath and coughed. “We cleared the upper floors, but we can’t get ’em out of the building. They can’t see the fire, so they don’t—”
The crash of the falling ceiling shook the room. The parlor door exploded open, and fire billowed into the hall. The old men scattered, then shuffled for the street door. Michael stood, staring into the blaze.
“Can the ropers get upstairs anywhere else?” I had to shout now, to be heard over the flames.
“No,” Jimmy yelled. “Joe and the kitchen girl are on the other stairs.”
The last of the old men filed through the door. “Come on, then.”
I grabbed Michael’s arm on the way past, and this time he didn’t resist as I hauled him into the raucous cold of the night. The fire bell was louder out here, and the local fire-team leader had arrived and was shouting chaos into order. We tumbled down the steps and moved to one side, pulling the clean, sweet air into our lungs.
Fear still sang in my blood, but I now had time to realize that my face, hands, and arms stung, and my throat felt as if someone had taken a file to it. I also realized that I was holding a full bucket of water, though I’d no memory of picking it up.
The room next to the parlor started to burn, light welling from its windows. Half a dozen of the fire crew had stopped working and were staring at me. No, not at me. At Michael.
Michael stood, firelight glaring on his exposed face as the gazed into the burning room.
“Michael.”
He didn’t move, but a low growl rose from the men who’d seen him, and they started toward us.
“Michael, run!”
I shoved him away. His astonished glance took in the men coming toward us, and for once in his life he did the sensible thing and fled.
I used the only weapon I had, dousing three of them with a sheet of cold water as they passed. It was more effective than I’d expected, for all three forgot about Michael and turned on me. I knew better than to resist.
Unlike Jimmy, who sprinted after them and grabbed one of the leaders. “He didn’t do it! Listen to me! I was with—”
The man tried to shake him off, then grabbed Jimmy’s shoulders and shoved him away. He stumbled back, and his head hit the building behind him with a thud that made me flinch. But his hands clutched the bricks as he slid down the wall, which I hoped was a good sign. The chase had taken him away from the burning building, so he was in no danger of being trampled.
The road Michael had taken sloped down, and I thought I saw an eddy in the crowd several blocks away.
Standing on tiptoe, I could see all the way to the river. On any other night it would have made little difference, but on Calling Night the streets were almost as bright as day. Michael was ahead of the pack, but he was still bruised from his last encounter with a mob, and the work he’d put in this evening had taken its toll—they were gaining on him.
If it had been dark, he might have slipped away, but with torches and candles blazing from all sides he didn’t have a chance. So he ran for the river. And the river began to burn.
I could see only a thin wedge of it between the buildings, but I grew up in this town. When the first small raft of blazing, pitch-soaked timber came floating past, I knew what would follow.
Michael reached the bank as the first wave of flaming rafts burst into view, and the spectacle froze him in his tracks. Perfectly silhouetted against the luminous water, the idiot.
The mob responded with a hail of stones.
He staggered, almost falling, and my heart contracted with fear. Then he recovered and ran, splashing, into the river, which glittered at the disturbance like liquid gold.
He slowed to dodge a burning raft, and another hail of stones found him before he reached the deep water and began to swim. Michael was a strong swimmer.
The leaders of the mob raced into the river, then waded back out. A few more people hurled stones, but as the magnificent flotilla swept down the current, shuddering and jostling, the ripples of Michael’s movement were lost.
Michael was a strong swimmer, but given the temperature of the Nighber this time of year, he might have been better off to take his chances with the mob.
I settled back and unclenched my teeth from my lower lip. The chaos was finally getting organized, and one of those miraculous pumps was rolling through the street. The fire didn’t seem to have made too much headway. I was more concerned for Jimmy, who still lay in a crumpled heap against the wall across the street. Not a good sign.
Scanning the scene, I noticed another man doing the same thing. His face was turned away, but firelight gleamed on his bald crown. I sighed—and went to tell Sheriff Potter to send someone to tend young Jimmy.
Michael was on his own.
CHAPTER 11
Michael
By the time the implacable current swept me past the last of the buildings, I was so cold I could barely force my legs to carry me onto the shallow bank. For a time I simply lay there, shudders racking my body. Then, blinking water-fogged eyes, I saw that the fire had followed me. One of the burning rafts that had made the swim so hazardous spun lazily along the shore I’d washed up on.
I’d thought I couldn’t move, but now I saw that fire was life, warmth was life, and I wanted it the way some men crave rum or a woman’s body. I crawled several yards before I found the strength to stagger to my feet and into the shallows. One hand under a joint of the logs that formed the raft’s base sufficed to drag it out—four feet across and blazing like a bit of fallen sun. Another raft had come to rest half a dozen yards downstream. ’Twas a long way over
the mud, and the buried stones bruised my numb feet, for I’d pulled off my boots in the river. I dragged it over by the first one. Then I dropped between them, the fire so close, ’twas almost like being back in the burning parlor. But even that memory had no power to overcome my exhaustion; within moments I fell asleep.
The next time I woke the sun was rising, its light a benediction over all living things. The fire rafts smoldered sullenly, and the ground beneath me leached heat from my chilled flesh. Frost rimmed the brown grass, making it beautiful. I realized that I might die, but the thought held no urgency, and the aching cold that had roused me seemed distant. In fact it might be better if I died, freakish thing that I’d become. With a little groping my mind found the magic that had risen last night in response to the fire. Sometimes ’twas centered in the core of my body, sometimes it seemed to fill me to the extremities of my skin. If I opened my eyes, I knew, my changed sight would see its radiance about my flesh. I didn’t open my eyes.
I did try to use the magic to warm myself, for I sensed, or thought I sensed, that I might be able to do this. But it refused to respond to my will, and I didn’t know how to make it. Yes. Better to die.
I felt the hands that grasped and shook me and heard a voice babbling, but it was too much trouble to respond. I wished whoever it was would go away, for I wanted to sleep.
But soon I was dragged onto something soft, and sensed wood beneath it and to the sides. Soft cloth fell over me; then I felt the shifting instability of water. A boat. ’Twas as good a place to sleep as any.
My next awareness was of warmth. Too much warmth. I lay on a pallet covered with silky fur, with more fur above me—a lot more, judging by the weight. I stretched, enjoying the softness against my bare skin, even when my bruises protested. Then I felt a smooth stone against my belly, and my knee bumped another. Why were there rocks in my bed?
I opened my eyes and saw rows of sticks, well chinked with mud, like an orderly beaver’s den. The soft fur was rabbit, and atop that layer on layer of sheepskins. The stones, no doubt, had been heated and thrust beneath the furs. No wonder I was hot. Then I remembered where I’d seen such walls before.
