by Dale Lucas
Someone barreled up to Rem and shoved a pair of water pails into his hands. He did not see who, nor did he ask what they wanted of him. This was the routine. Take the water, toss it into the flames, hurry back for more. Rem mounted the temple steps, rushing toward the framework of what would be, in time, one of the lesser chapels of the main sanctuary. He upended one bucket, then the other, then turned to run back down the stairs to fetch more water.
That’s when he saw Torval. His partner moved right in the midst of the fire, far off to Rem’s right, darting among a jungle of looming support beams and imminent scaffolding, all engulfed in a ferocious blaze. The dwarf was searching the ground as if for someone trapped or wounded. As he went, he kept calling his son’s name.
Could the boy be trapped among the fire and falling debris? What might he even be doing here?
But there Torval went, still pushing his way through that garden of smoke and flame, threatened by a hundred louring trusses and support beams, all licked with hungry flame and creaking toward final collapse.
“Tavarix!” Torval cried. “Tavarix!”
Rem heard a series of terrible cracks akin to the sound of oncoming rock slides in the Ironwalls or calving icebergs in the great northern seas. He saw a spiderweb of truss work near Torval buckle and split, spewing swirling embers in a hot golden rain upon his desperate, searching partner.
“Torval!” Rem cried, and sprinted up the temple stairs. He shouted his partner’s name all the way, but Torval couldn’t hear him.
This is going to get me killed, Rem thought absently. Yet still he ran. The smoke seared his lungs, the flames forced his eyes shut, made his body shrink instinctively from the sweltering heat.
There was Torval, just a short distance away. There were the trusses—shrieking, cracking, toppling, leaning into an inexorable fall. Were people screaming somewhere? Shouting his name? Urging him to get the hell out of there, now?
Rem could no longer hear them. He could hear only the roar of the flames and Torval’s insistent cry as he searched for his son. “Tavarix! Tavarix!”
Rem hit Torval at full speed. He tackled the dwarf and put him on his back just as the supports above them toppled and crashed into the space they’d just occupied. For a moment the world was nothing but heat and light, fire and smoke, choked breath and stinging tears. Vaguely Rem heard Torval cursing. Rem hurt all over, but he wasn’t burning, and he wasn’t dead.
Struggling to see through tears and smoke, Rem rose and tugged at Torval’s prone muscular form. The dwarf struggled against him, but they were moving now, inching clear of the collapsed scaffolding, the deep, bright heart of the inferno. Moments later Rem’s burden seemed to lighten, and he realized that he was no longer alone. Someone else—someone he could not see—helped him drag Torval clear of the flames.
When they were safely away, out of the inferno’s gaping, hungry, red-hot maw, Rem let himself collapse onto the cool mud. He hugged it like a needy lover. Blinking, he searched the murky world around him and saw something like the outline of Torval, bucking against grasping hands, shadows bent over him like surgeons in a field hospital.
“He’s here somewhere!” the dwarf cried. “My boy! I know it!”
Rem wanted to assure Torval that he was mad—Tavarix was nowhere nearby. Why would he be? But he didn’t have a word left in him.
Then it all went black.
Rem regained consciousness a short time later. Nearby, Torval told those attending him—a few watchwardens and people Rem did not recognize—that he was just peachy and they should get the hell away from him and let him get back to work. Unfortunately, when Torval tried to rise and rush back toward the fire, he fell to his knees, racked by a horrible coughing fit. Rem fell into a fit of his own, his half-seared lungs trying to expel all the smoke and soot they’d absorbed. For a while that’s all there was for the two of them: coughing, punctuated by sips of water and prodding by a local barber-surgeon eager to make sure they weren’t more profoundly injured. Only after what felt like an eternity of painful hacking and interminable poking did the two of them manage to breathe normally and chase the barber away.
As they sat there, side by side, propped against an empty horse trough, a pair of dwarves went dashing by. They held buckets of sloshing water and were heading right for the flames.
Torval all but leapt at them. “You there! Hallirwelk!”
One of the two dwarves skidded to a halt and looked back while his companion kept running. When he saw that it was one of his own kind addressing him, he approached.
“You all right?” the water-carrying dwarf asked.
“Are you one of the temple masons?” Torval asked him in return.
The dwarf nodded.
“Tavarix—one of the apprentices, a fosterling—have you seen him?”
Rem was astounded when something like recognition dawned on the other dwarf’s face. “You’re the boy’s father? The watchwarden?”
Torval leapt to his feet. Rem had never seen him so eager, so helpless. “I am! Where is he? Tell me!”
“Back at the dormitories with the others,” the dwarf said. “They were already in for the night when the fire started.”
Torval nodded. “My thanks, friend. Truly.”
The dwarf looked as if he wasn’t sure how to respond. Finally he nodded and backed away. “Don’t worry about him,” he said, then turned and hurried away.
Rem thought that sounded rather strange. Don’t worry about him, the dwarf had said. Emphasis on the last word. What was going on here?
Torval turned back to Rem. There were fresh tracks cut through the soot on his face—moisture of some sort. Rem supposed it could be rivulets of sweat, but those tracks looked more like tears.
“We should get back in there,” Torval said. “They need all hands.”
Rem nodded and rose. Whatever was happening with Tavarix … he’d just have to wait for an explanation. Without further words they hurried back to the blaze.
They bent to it again, shuttling buckets, aiding in the digging of a firebreak, and generally doing whatever was needed as the fire raged through the night. When at last the inferno waned and the first gray light of morning crept into the world, Rem surveyed the scene and noted that almost all of his hundred-odd Fifth Ward comrades were present and accounted for, covered in soot and ash. Even Ondego and Hirk—their prefect and master sergeant—were visible in the milling crowd, just as filthy and exhausted as everyone else. All in all, nearly a thousand Yenarans—watchwardens, the volunteer fire brigade, concerned citizens, and sadistic pleasure seekers—choked the square around the half-finished temple.
A few nearby buildings had succumbed in the course of the night, but the damage was, to Rem’s great amazement, largely contained by morning. The temple itself and its great quarried stones survived the blaze intact. A few in-progress arches and vaults collapsed when their wooden supports burned out from under them, but by and large, the structure looked much as it had before the disaster, though now blackened and littered round about by debris. There was only the curious impression that, now littered with ash and smoldering beams and fallen stone, the yet-to-be-completed Panoply resembled not a thing unfinished, but a thing long ruined—ancient and abandoned, racked by the depredations of time and the elements.
Filthy and wasted, Rem and Torval retreated to a nearby fountain in sight of the ruin. Many of their fellow watchwardens were already there, rinsing away the soot and grime with the icy water, tending wounds acquired in the course of their battle, and slaking their considerable thirsts with the same cold and blackening waters they employed for bathing. Rem wondered if he would ever get the smell of smoke out of his nose, the taste of char and ash off his tongue.
Eriadus, their watch quartermaster, moved among the watchwardens alongside Minniver, one of the healers often employed to tend their most acute injuries. They practiced their separate arts when and where they could, and when they encountered more severe injuries, they made sure those victim
s were rushed to the Sisters at the Houses of Healing.
Rem studied Torval under the wan light of dawn. His watchwarden’s winter coat had been long abandoned in the course of the fight, and every bare inch of skin exposed—his face, his forearms, his bald pate—seemed to have some small measure of bruising, abrasion or blistering upon it. The injuries looked painful, but Rem supposed they were marginal in light of what they’d been through. He wondered how he himself looked.
“Thank you,” Torval said suddenly, then dunked his head under the frigid water in the fountain.
Rem waited until Torval came up for air to respond. “You’re welcome. What the bloody hell were you doing up there? You could’ve gotten yourself killed. Or me.”
Torval looked more than a little ashamed. He couldn’t seem to look Rem in the eye. “I feared Tav was hereabouts somewhere. He’s been working here, you see, as an apprentice stonemason. When I saw the fire, I feared the worst.”
Well … that explained Torval’s curious exchange with that dwarf earlier.
“So,” Rem said, “you know he’s safe now. Feel better?”
Torval nodded, but it seemed a half-hearted gesture. Maybe the dwarf was just tired. Rem certainly knew he himself was. Nonetheless, he had the vague sense that Torval was still keeping something from him—something deep and worrisome. But they’d had a long night already, hadn’t they? No need to push the issue—not now.
Rem slumped against the fountain and turned toward the ruins. He saw members of the Panoply conclave—a tight knot of priests in variously colored robes and vestments, each servant to a different god or goddess—pressing through the crowd toward the disaster site. They were accompanied by a group of soot-covered dwarves—probably the stewards of the masons’ guild overseeing the construction, joining their employers for a survey of the destruction. As the intrepid little group of dwarven craftsmen and human priests picked a path through the wreckage, Rem studied them.
There was an old man in scarlet and saffron robes—obviously a priest of Honus, the sun god—accompanied by two women. One of the women was middle-aged, a fact made clear by her time-lined face, while the other was much younger—probably a recently vested priestess just beginning her ascent in the temple hierarchy. The middle-aged woman wore the orange, brown, and yellow vestments of Belenna, goddess of the hearth and home, while her younger companion was swaddled in blue, white, and silver silks, the colors of the lunar and harvest goddess, Yerys. Trailing behind these three clerical aristocrats were a pair of younger men—novice priests or temple acolytes—wearing gray robes indicating that they had made no formal declaration of patronage.
While the dwarves and human clerics stumbled slack-faced among the ruins, the middle-aged priestess of Belenna—clearly more curious than aggrieved, to Rem’s eyes—broke away from the group, mounted the soot-blackened temple steps, and began a slow, methodical perambulation of the scene. From his place on the cold stones beside the fountain, Rem watched her. Someone—he could not say who—handed him a wet rag. Without bothering to search out who had handed him the offering or thank them, Rem merely accepted it and set to scrubbing his face and soot-blackened hair in a vain attempt to make himself feel slightly less like a chimney sweep fresh from his filthy duties. As he did so, he kept his eyes on the mourning clerics and the lone, probing priestess.
“What’s she after?” Rem muttered, entirely to himself. Torval grunted beside him and shrugged.
Up among the wreckage, the priestess froze. Her eyes seemed to have locked on something of note. “I need strong hands!” she suddenly called. “A pail of water! And rags!”
A few watchwardens close at hand answered her summons, breaking from the throng about the temple and mounting the steps, pails and rags in hand.
Rem looked to Torval. Torval shrugged again, still at a loss as to just what the woman had been searching for and what she might have found.
“I’ll check it out,” Rem said, and rose stiffly to do so.
“Not without me,” Torval rasped, and struggled to his feet.
The two of them mounted the temple steps, followed by other curious parties, all the while keeping their eyes on the priestess and the impromptu crew now gathering around her. A few of the men worked in concert to cast aside a tangle of blackened beams, clearing a path toward a certain span of stone wall that seemed to have drawn the priestess’s attention. Another pair hurried forward. At the priestess’s insistence, they emptied their water pails against a half-finished wall. After dousing the wall, they set to scrubbing away the scorching.
Rem and Torval drifted nearer. Even at this distance, Rem could see the puzzled and astonished faces of the cleaners, the grim countenance of the priestess; they had washed away the soot that blackened a certain collection of fitted stones, revealing something of import beneath. The priestess sought out her ecclesiastical peers and waved them nearer.
Rem and Torval began to pick their way through the debris to the section of wall that had drawn the priestess’s attention. From the corner of his eye, Rem noted a familiar figure and turned to see who had joined them. It was Ondego, along with a few other officers of the watch and fire brigade leaders—all eager to see what the priestess’s probing curiosity had uncovered. Torval drew Rem aside in an effort to both clear the way for officials higher up on the chain of command and get a better angle on what the priestess and the men with the water pails had uncovered.
It was a message, painted onto the temple facade in large white letters. The paint must have dried and clung fast to the stone before the flames had covered it with a film of soot. Now that the black scum had been washed away, the graffito was clear for all to see, painted in tall, sloppy, but legible characters.
I say to you, this is your inheritance, your kingdom, your domain, it said.
The sacred scrolls, Rem immediately realized. The Scrolls of Derivation, all about the creation of the first man and woman, Edath and Yfrain, and their commission to quell the Maker’s other wayward creations.
Below the words was a strange symbol, also painted in white, but with a giant scar-like swath of red painted over it diagonally. Rem tried to make sense of the symbol that had been crossed out but was at a loss.
“What is that?” Rem asked.
“It’s an ancient symbol,” Torval said, “a battle standard from the Great Furor, in the time of the Plague of Storms.”
“Whose standard?” Rem pressed, not recognizing it.
“My people,” Torval said. “Dwarves.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The dayshifters were already gathered when Rem, Torval, and the other night shift watchwardens arrived back at the watchkeep shortly after dawn.
Rem and Torval—and all their fellows on the night shift, for that matter—had very little commerce with the dayshifters, so anytime a long night stretched into the early-morning hours and forced the two teams to cross paths, the world seemed—to Rem anyway—strangely off-kilter. He often forgot that the Fifth Ward was patrolled by anyone while he and his companions slept their days away.
But here they were, a hundred-odd souls—male and female, human, elf, and dwarf—all gathered in the watchkeep administrative chamber for a preshift briefing by their prefect, a hard-faced woman in trousers named Torala. Both shifts were in shock as they mingled, the nightshifters regaling the day shift with tales about the horrors of the fire, their own favored possible causes, and their personal experiences at the fore of fighting it. Rem supposed such tale swapping and self-mythologizing was all part of a watchwarden’s life, especially when something so out of the ordinary invaded it.
Sure, I was there during the flood of the Black Autumn! Remember it well …
I knew that one—the watchwarden turned outlaw. Always a good mate, from where I sat. But I was never entirely sure about him, either …
Fight the fire? Boys, I was right at the forefront! I had to be dragged off before one of those burning scaffolds crushed me! Nearly lost my skin …
Tales
were told, lore expounded, near misses and unlikely triumphs added to the well of communal memory. Rem could see, all around the room, how the dayshifters receiving the stories from their nocturnal fellows-in-arms all had one of two looks upon their faces: earnest concern or jealous amazement. Rem, for his part, had no energy left for celebrating his exploits through the night. He wanted nothing more than to be home, in his bed.
And clean. How he would love to be clean!
Torval leaned against a nearby desk, shoulders slumped, lost in thought or just plain tuckered out. Rem edged nearer.
“Are we here for a reason?” he asked. “Or can we call it a night?”
Torval was about to answer when someone else, at Rem’s elbow, beat him to it.
“We’re to wait,” that silky voice said, and Rem felt his whole body stiffen suddenly in shock. He spun and found Queydon once again skulking nearby.
“Would you please stop that!” Rem said, beseeching. “Announce your approach? Ring a bell? Something?”
She gave a deep nod. “My apologies, Watchwarden Remeck. I keep hoping—against hope, apparently—that your awareness finally catches up to my own natural stealth.”
Torval clearly wanted to laugh, but didn’t have the energy. He simply smiled and shook his head.
Rem decided to change the subject. “So,” he said, “is there going to be some sort of announcement?”
Queydon nodded in answer. She opened her mouth as if to reply, but she was interrupted by Ondego’s emergence from his office. As he shuffled along, he wiped soot and grime from his face and hair with a cloth that looked as if it had been retrieved from a mine shaft. A similarly filthy Hirk followed, along with Prefect Torala and her own second—a tall, stone-faced fellow with a lantern jaw and ice-blue eyes whose name escaped Rem presently. As they moved en masse toward the center of the room, every conversation in the room ceased.
Ondego cleared his throat. “Prefect Torala’s given me kind permission to address you all,” he began. “You’ve heard about the fire at the temple. Before you start asking questions, I’ll address the meat of it. Yes, it was as bad as everyone says. Yes, there were injuries—some serious—though thankfully, our watch nor the gentle public hasn’t lost anyone yet. And yes, we think it was no accident.”
