by Jay Lake
My instinct was to descend to whatever level lay beneath the floor—storage, I presumed—but I feared being trapped there. So I sprinted out of the shadows and into the courtyard beyond.
At least the stable had not faced the outside. Instead of a whole street’s-worth of people, there were only a dozen men gathered, already organizing into a bucket brigade. And none of them were Street Guild.
“You bastards!” shouted one of the men. He charged me, swinging his bucket for a bludgeon. I ducked the heavy wood and caught at his arm to pull him around. I did not need to fight these men.
“The fire!” I screamed back at him. “We’re here to help you, by the Wheel.”
He paused, confused even in his rage. I grabbed the bucket out of his hand and raced for the well pump that was already being furiously operated by one of his fellows. Mother Argai followed, pushed the man aside with a nod, and continued working the handle.
Whatever rough justice was intended for us was postponed in the face of fighting the fire. The stable was not inside the buildings of this court, unlike the Poppet Dancers’ stable, but was rather a separate structure backing against the rear wall of the enclosing buildings. The roof already smoldered, well out of our reach.
Racing back toward the fire with my own bucket, I realized the men weren’t trying to dampen the flames already burning. Rather, they were throwing water on the face of the surrounding structure, where the stable met the building wall.
That made sense. I had an idea, and grabbed at the leader. “Do you have a team of oxen?”
“Here?”
“Anywhere! We can pull the stable down into the court, away from the buildings.”
He nodded, realization dawning on his face.
There had been all sorts of tack and equipment inside. I’d raced past it without looking. Mule harnesses were not normally an interest of mine. But if rope or chains hung there …
I handed my bucket off to a new volunteer and headed back into the stable. Smoke was settling from above, oozing out the top of the doorway.
Inside, I saw no sign of Firesetter or Fantail, but the glow from the loft was much worse. The little fires down below had caught and were trying to combine. The air was acrid, thick, foul. I found it hard to see or even think.
Still, my purposes were simple.
And both chains and rope were present.
I wrapped chains around the two wooden pillars that rose beneath the leading edge of the loft. They were the central support of this part of the roof. Taking a rope thicker than my thumb, I bound the chains together. Another, longer rope, I tied off in a T to the cross-line, then paid out toward the door.
“The building will fall down,” I called, or tried to, but the effort of speaking loudly in the thickening smoke made me cough so hard, I started to cry.
I stumbled out with the rope in hand to drop it, then began retching. It was as if I’d been poisoned. I was miserable, too. We were going to lose both Firesetter and Fantail to something so pointless as this. They would be dead. My best path to our missing hostages would be closed off.
It made me want to scream with frustration, but my throat was too raw.
Mother Argai knelt beside me. “Are you going to be well?”
Unable to speak, I nodded furiously.
“This would be a good time to pray up the tide, if you can.”
That made me laugh, which was painful. This far from the waterfront? I could only imagine what the ocean would do to the city if I somehow called its finger down upon myself once more so distant from Street of Ships.
Finally I managed to stand. Someone was hup-hupping at a team of four very reluctant oxen. They weren’t going near the fire. My rope had been joined by a longer chain, which meant another brave soul had run at least briefly into the stable. Two boys were flipping the paired rope and chain over and over, spinning a simple braid for strength, while another man signaled the ox-driver to get his team into position.
This time it was not Oceanus or Time or whichever titanic had sent the waters to me that I needed to address in prayer now. Endurance, my ox god, would surely see this as a sacrament of his power.
Still the Red Man and his apsara had not appeared. The stable was going to be a total loss, flames now reaching up out of the poorly shingled roof. The building behind was already being singed. And the stench was overwhelming.
If it spread, I realized, the whole block could burn.
Something rumbled, like Firesetter’s voice but much bigger and deeper. I looked up above the top of the burning stable to see clouds swirling.
Not my doing.
But I could do something now, while my body shivered and my lungs ached and my throat was too raw. I closed my eyes to focus.
Endurance, I thought, for there was small purpose in praying aloud and my ragged throat would not have tolerated it well in any case. You are far away from this place, but this is the country of our birth. Yours and mine. Give strength to these your mute brothers, and courage, too, as they work to save what should not have been destroyed in the first place. Help us help ourselves remedy this wrong. And if you can, spare a blessing for Firesetter and Fantail lost this day.
When I opened my eyes, the team was hooked up. The oxen faced the gate to the street and needed no encouragement to walk away from the fire. The twisted rope and chain tightened, then lifted.
If my knots broke, or the chains I had set on the wooden posts within slipped, this would all be in vain. It was fortunate that I’d spent enough time aboard ships to have learned something of the art of securing a line.
This would be my test. The collapsing embers would be the memorial for my two new friends and allies, already lost to me. I began to cry for them, then as swiftly fought back the tears.
The men of the bucket brigade—and, I noted, several women now—backed well away from the stable, toward the forward wall of the court. The rope-and-chain line tightened further, creaking so loudly, it could be heard above the crackle of the fire. The swirling clouds overhead thundered again. The acrid reek of burning threatened to deaden all our senses.
Something inside the building cracked with a noise like a large firework. The towline twitched as one of the oxen stumbled. Wood groaned, fire hissed, and the front of the stable began to lean forward, toward the middle of the courtyard. Boards popped free from the upper part of the wall, above the door. More smoke poured out of them in black arms that swiftly blended with the cloud-dark night sky above.
The groan intensified to a noise like a hinge the size of the city. The building began to slump just as the clouds overhead dropped pattering, sizzling rain upon us. With a mighty crash, the stables died, disintegrating from a building to a high-piled jumble of burning wood being soaked by sudden, heavy rain so that steam hissed and billowed all around.
Without the shooting flames, the courtyard was much darker.
So much for the funeral pyre of Firesetter and Fantail.
I lurched to my feet, intent on finding escape before we were rounded up either as arsonists or for whatever reward the Street Guild might be offering for us. My eyes were still light-blinded and filled with tears, and I could not spot Mother Argai.
A man loomed out of the darkness—the bucketeer who’d first attacked me. “Next time you run into the fire, cover your mouth and nose with a wet cloth,” he said.
It was such an oddly prosaic comment for such a difficult moment. All I could think to do was thank him.
He grabbed my arm. “Did you set it?”
“N-no,” I gasped, finally finding my voice, raw as it was. It was hard to talk loudly enough over the pounding rain that now soaked us both. “We were hiding f-from the Street Guild.”
“Those bastards tried to burn you out?”
Now there was a convenient lie, and it had not even passed my own lips. I nodded furiously. “We lost two of our fellows inside, to the fire.” Then I added, “You know the Street Guild.” Neither of which statements were actually untrue.
So far as it went, everybody knew the Street Guild. Maybe if I inspired sufficient anger in these people, they would send some Street Guild dead off to guard Firesetter wherever the souls of dead Red Men went.
The man who’d addressed me turned back to his crowd of helpers, who were drifting together in a knot. “We need to—,” he began, but was interrupted when the woodpile screeched and set up a shower of sparks visible even in the dark and rain. Every head turned that way in horrified fascination as the top of the ruined mound unfolded like a charred, steaming flower.
“Oh, by the gods and their Wheel,” someone nearby muttered.
That was when I learned something I should have seen for myself all along. The Red Man pushed his way out of the pile of ash and char and smoldering lumber to stand atop it. He was visible even through the rain in the light of the glowering coals exposed by his exit from the collapsed mess. Firesetter surveyed us as if he were the victor on a field of battle. Victory at cost, as it always was, for he held a small body in his arms as a mother might carry a lost child.
No, I thought. I could not decide if it was worse that he had survived or that she had not.
Greeted by absolute, frozen silence, he climbed down off the mess that had been the stable. By the time he reached the foot of the mound, Firesetter was little more than a large, dark shadow moving through the courtyard. I fell in behind him as he walked out the gate. Mother Argai joined me. She kept one hand on my elbow as if to steer me forward.
Was I that badly taken by the smoke?
The rain was less powerful in the street beyond. Many more folk stood there, watching the spectacle. Firesetter picked his path among them, walking with his back straight and his head high into the deeper night. We continued to follow him while the sky above wept for Fantail.
Of course a Red Man of the Fire Lakes would come through a holocaust unscathed. But an apsara…? She was no creature of fire, after all. Not like him.
I wept some, too, and walked with the tense shoulders of a woman who expects a Street Guild arrow in the back. No one shouted, no one shot, no one followed, and so we stalked away from the scene of our crimes.
Lives in the Face of Fire and Blood
THE NEXT MORNING they let me sleep long. I needed it, the Lily Goddess knew. Someone had taken my babies before their fussing woke me, though it was the aching in my breasts to feed them that finally did bring me back to consciousness.
Light filtered in through the shuttered windows of my room. My hair and body stank of fire and blood, and my wounds stung. At least they were not deep enough to ache. I lay in the soft, warm sheets and stared awhile at the painted ceiling. I did not know all the gods and legends of Kalimpura as I did of Copper Downs, for my education here had been of a more practical nature, but I realized this morning that what I’d always taken for a mural of a coal demon amid a setting of battle was in fact a Red Man. Was he trying to slay the Kalimpuri heroes who faced him in their bright, silk-wrapped armor, or was he trying to succor them?
Memories of the previous evening were both bruise-tender and cut-sharp. They were all too clear to me in the moment. Finding and losing my hoped-for ally, then finding him again. Following him a while through the streets until Mother Argai had plucked at his arm and set a course for our home. Exhausted past the point of wariness, we had not bothered with secrecy or slipping over the wall here, but simply used the servants’ gate again. I wondered if she had bothered to reset the seals.
The last time I’d seen Firesetter, he was in the kitchen with Fantail, who had been laid out on one of the long work blocks there. I’d stumbled off to feed my children and collapse. The memory of his stricken face would stay with me the rest of my life.
She had been so still. And, very strangely for someone who’d been through both a fire and the collapse of a building, unmarked.
There was much I did not understand. I would not understand it, either, unless I found my feet and rejoined my little circle of friends. Selfishly, I was glad that we might still have Firesetter’s advice and experience. Even so, I did not imagine for a moment that he, or any of the rest of us, considered that worth the price.
My feet were where I had left them at the end of my legs. Somewhat unsteadily I rose, wrapped myself in the old furniture cover I’d been using for a robe, and stumbled coughing for the kitchen.
* * *
I fed the babies, a contented moment against my larger distresses. My leathers needed cleaning and repair, my wounds needed seeing to, and I should make some accounting for the latest of my dead, but I was not yet ready for those tasks. Mother Argai sat before the empty fireplace looking glum. She was certainly the most phlegmatic of us all, and so I did not find this an encouraging development.
No one else was about. Fantail’s body was gone from the long table. I could not decide if that was alarming or relieving.
“Is there kava?” I muttered, shifting Marya to a better position. The habit had become more appealing of late.
A shrug. She looked at me, her face set. “Last night was not so well done.”
“I know.” We sat in silence until the children were finished and my breasts felt not so swollen. Setting the babies on a borrowed rug laid here for that purpose, I puttered, finding some cold tea in a pot. How we had become accustomed to our little oil stove. “We have found our allies, and lost one. By now everyone in the city knows of it.”
“You were craving secrecy.” She sighed before lapsing into a deeper silence.
I could only agree with her regrets. Nothing we had done yesterday was worth Fantail’s life. And what must Firesetter think of us? We would be fortunate if he only confined himself to a sullen hatred.
Bedeviled by dark thoughts, I drank the cold tea, ate a bit of roast pigeon that was just as cold, then left Marya and Federo with Mother Argai while I padded out into the sheltered area of the garden where we’d permitted ourselves exercise and sunlight outside the house.
The Red Man knelt by the scummed-over ornamental pond. He might as well have been one of the Poppet Dancers’ statues. Mother Vajpai sat in the shadows closer to the house, watching him with a thoughtful expression on her face. The burning smell was stronger out here—not on me, then, after all. And definitely from a building aflame. The pungent scents of tar and paint and other things mixed with the honest tang of burnt wood.
I wondered if the fire from last night had somehow spread despite the rain.
“What is he doing?” I asked Mother Vajpai in a quiet voice. My nose itched, and the smell reminded me that my breathing still ached.
“I do not know.” She nodded, indicating that I might step forward and look.
With a glance around to see if anyone was staring over our garden walls, I walked up next to Firesetter.
Fantail lay within the pond before him. The murky waters obscured her face, so she seemed almost a ghost staring up from the overgrown shallows.
This cannot be a funeral rite of the Fire Lakes, I thought wildly. Did the Saffron Tower bury their dead in water? So to speak …
I brushed my fingers across his shoulder. He was solid to the touch, and colder than I expected.
He spoke, which surprised me. “There is a burning.” Though Firesetter’s lips parted to grudgingly release the words, the rest of him remained stock-still.
Once more I sniffed. “I’d thought it to be smoke on me.”
“Not my fire.”
Of course not. He would know. I stared down at Fantail again. A few bubbles marked the surface of the pond. The next question welled up inside me and carelessly escaped my lips. “Whose fire is it?”
“Not mine.”
He lapsed into a silence far more stolid than even Mother Argai’s had been. I retreated to Mother Vajpai’s side. Already I had been exposed to view too long. “What burns?” I asked her.
“Did you not set the fire?”
“He says it is not his.” I glanced back at the immobile Red Man. “If anyone should know, it is him.”
Mother Vajpai grunted, then pointed at the sky. “Even the sun is hazy.”
I had not looked up at all on coming out of doors, but she was right. Whatever had burned was substantial. My heart froze in my chest. The target of any vengeance arson seemed obvious to me, given Surali’s nature and the fundamental lawlessness of the Street Guild. “Not the Temple of the Silver Lily—”
Our eyes met in a brief flare of mutual panic. Mother Vajpai shook her head slowly. “Would you not have known in your heart if our goddess had lost Her altar?”
“Yes.” Maybe. “But now I must go see, to be certain.”
“Take Mother Argai with you.”
I nodded, not truly listening, and stepped swiftly back inside to don my damaged leathers and take up my weapons. My other duties would have to wait.
* * *
Mother Argai and I did leave the compound together, Ilona watching over the babes in my stead. We went our separate ways out on the street. I wore another shapeless servant’s robe and a Sindu veil in hopes that the thin disguise would do me some good. She ran as a Blade, being able to still walk openly in Kalimpura.
At least, I hoped she could still walk openly after yesterday’s misadventures. For my own part, both my breath and body protested.
As I walked, I found that the business of the streets continued unabated. Of course, if the plate of the world should crack and all the waters of Creation come rushing in, the people of this city would still be buying and selling until the darkness had closed around them for the last time. Even so, there was a current of unquiet nervousness.
I listened as I pushed through the increasing crowds closer to the docks. I wanted to see the Temple of the Silver Lily for myself, but so long as we’d troubled to go out, I wanted to see the rest of that part of the city, too.
Arguments raged, far louder and uglier than the usual aggressive street-corner posturing and vicious bargaining. Fisticuffs as well. And twice outright street battles between the retainers of this Court and that Guild.
Everyone was on edge. Decidedly including me.