by Dale Lucas
She shouted for him, reached for him, but the current of the crowd was too powerful. As Indilen was dragged backward by the fleeing throng, Rem felt himself yanked in the opposite direction. It did not matter than most of the bodies were dwarf-size, and that she and Rem towered above the majority of those caught in the mad dash—the rip was still too strong to resist. In moments Indilen had been swept down a side street, and Rem, driven back, lost sight of her.
Rem cursed, rage and panic rising in him. He began to shove and kick, forcing his way bodily through the crowd. He felt sick with himself for moving so aggressively—so carelessly—but only one thing mattered at that moment: he had to get off this street and find his way back to Indilen. He could not abandon her here—not in the middle of all this violence.
There, off to his right: a narrow alley, barely a breezeway. Rem forced his way out of the rolling throng that shoved and jostled him and dove in, its width barely sufficient to allow him through. Awkwardly he shuffled along the winding little path until it opened onto a parallel street, this one covered by a rippling canopy of canary-yellow silk. All around him he saw and heard the signs of flight: swirling bodies, boots pounding mud, screams, curses, the names of lost loved ones shouted above the din. Merchants and tradesmen busily drew in their merchandise and set to locking up their shops, keenly aware that the coming storm would sweep over and engulf them in moments. Rem searched the chaotic scene, desperate for some sign of Indilen.
Someone suddenly took a handful of his coat’s mantle and yanked. Rem spun, fists up, ready to bare-knuckle it and leave the fool intent on ambushing him bleeding in the mud.
When Indilen saw his raised fists, she screamed and threw up her hands.
“Just me!” she cried.
“Fuck all, girl!” he shouted back, then threw his arms around her and squeezed her hard enough to make her yelp. “You scared the living piss out of me!”
“We should go,” she said in his ear.
“Yes, we should,” he agreed, then broke their embrace, took her hand, and led the way. The noise was behind them now, while the path ahead looked clear. In just a block or two, they’d be safely out of the Warrens. He could still hear raised voices, the approaching cry of watchwardens’ whistles, and the vague, soft sound of wood thumping flesh.
“So what now?” he asked as they went. “Lunch?”
Indilen threw him a glare, the sort that said, I know you’re joking, but now’s not the time. Rem kept his mouth shut after that.
CHAPTER SIX
“So there we were,” Rem said, never breaking stride, always keeping pace with Torval beside him, “suddenly surrounded on all sides by this mess—riot, protest, whatever the sundry hells you’d call it. One minute people are flinging words, then it’s mud, then it’s fists and blood and screams and everyone’s running.”
“Huh,” Torval said, an emphatic but noncommittal grunt.
“I lost her for a moment, you know. It terrified me.” Rem shook his head, shrugged. “Made me sick, losing her in that moment, fearing what might befall her … right down in the center of me.”
“Mmm,” Torval said.
Rem studied his partner, trying to get a good look at him in the spotty post lamp light as they strolled along on their nightly patrol. The dwarf kept pace, and he seemed to respond at the right intervals to Rem’s story, but something was amiss. The old stump wasn’t in the moment, that was clear. His mind was somewhere else. The great puzzle for Rem was, where could it be? He’d never known Torval to be so preoccupied or lost in silent contemplation before. Certainly the dwarf had a right to such moments—Rem didn’t begrudge him a little brooding—but it was decidedly out of character. As such, it filled Rem with a mix of idle curiosity and brotherly worry.
They were on the west side of the Fifth, near the riverfront but not on it, their patrol taking them past street-level shops and live-aboves interspersed with a few better-than-average trade-class tenements and multiroom boardinghouses. The neighborhood was closely packed, well kept, and lively, even at this late hour, approaching the midnight bells. As they tramped along, Rem saw moving shadows in all the leaded windows of the local taverns and taprooms, and where the drinking houses were too crowded to accommodate all comers, there’d be small knots of citizens in the street outside, usually warming their hands over a fire built in an iron brazier or a clay pot. The night air was bitter, but the ale they quaffed, the fires before them, and their laughter seemed to keep all these street-side revelers amply warm.
“Torval, are you listening to me?” Rem asked.
“You there!” Torval suddenly shouted, addressing a group of drinkers huddled around a crackling brazier outside a brightly lit pub. “Move that firepot farther into the street! You’re too close to the eaves and like to set the whole damned place ablaze!”
One of the drinkers rose and stepped toward the oncoming dwarf. “See here, old stump,” he said, clearly trying to be friendly, “the lee of the pub’s keeping the wind off. We drag that fire into the street, we might as well not have it at all. It’s bloody cold out tonight!”
Torval, without breaking stride, hove right up to the brazier and its crackling fire, took hold of its hot edges in his bare hands, and upended the whole thing into the muddy street. The burning wood scraps spilled onto the mud, swirling trails of embers and ash winding down the street under the ministrations of the rushing wind. The drinkers stared, gape mouthed, as their previously roaring fire slowly died on the cold, packed earth of the street.
Torval carried on right past them. Rem scurried around the pile of cinders and ash now in his path in an effort to keep up with his partner. “There you are!” Torval shouted back over his shoulder. “No more fire, no more threat. Huddle under the eaves all you like.”
“Casca’s tits, that’s a fine way to behave!” the man who’d approached Torval shouted. “I’ll have your badge, you stunted little bastard!”
Torval gave an annoyed wave of his arms and kept walking. Rem kept pace. Part of him wanted to circle back and apologize for his partner’s enraged response, but that would do little good at this point. The more important question was, what in all the sundry hells was eating at the dwarf? Rem had never seen him be so gruff—so unfairly rude—to a citizen who wasn’t even breaking the law.
“What was that about?” Rem asked. Was Torval’s pace increasing? It was becoming harder to stay abreast of him.
“I warned him,” Torval said, almost to himself.
“That’s not an answer,” Rem said, and hurried forward so he could get in front of Torval. He started walking backward—a risky gambit, true, but he wanted to see his partner’s face as he questioned him.
“Tell me what’s eating at you,” Rem pressed. “You’ve barely been listening to me all night, and now you’re flying into berserker rages without the slightest provocation.”
“Berserker rage,” Torval huffed. “Did you see that brazier? So close to the walls and the eaves? Fire hazard, plain and simple.”
“Enough!” Rem shouted, and did something he’d never expected to do: he laid one hand on Torval’s chest and stopped his forward motion. Torval snarled and tried to move round him, but Rem stepped into his path. He was hardly surprised when Torval suddenly gave him a great shove and tried to advance again. What surprised him more was his own determination to stay on his feet and in Torval’s path. He wouldn’t let him go so easily.
“I’m warning you,” Torval said through gnashing teeth.
“No, old stump, I’m warning you,” Rem countered. “You need to talk to me, right now. I’ll not take another step until you tell me what’s bedeviling you. Was it something I did?”
Torval looked genuinely annoyed at that, but also a little apologetic. He shook his head and waved his hands emphatically—dismissive, flustered. “Nothing, lad. Nothing to do with you at all, just … It’s just …”
“What?” Rem asked.
“It’s not for you,” Torval said. “I’ve got things wei
ghing on my mind and heart, but there’s not a damned thing you can do to fix or change them, so there’s no use shrugging them off on you. Just let it lie.”
“I won’t,” Rem said, quite proud of his determination, but also secretly hoping Torval didn’t decide to wallop him headwise in the next instant. Such a response was not beyond him. “I’m your partner, and I thought I was your friend. If something’s troubling you, I’d like to hear about it.”
Torval’s face seemed to curl in on itself in an expression of pained reticence and severe annoyance. Rem had seen that expression before, but actually took it as a good sign. That was usually the face Torval made just before he was about to relent and undertake an unpleasant task he’d tried to avoid. Finally the sour countenance sagged into a sort of weary indifference. Torval sighed and searched the street. After a moment he found what he sought and waved Rem toward it.
It was a small, cozy inn, crammed between two taller tenements. Its leaded windows were gold with lamplight, and although shadowy forms moved within, it didn’t seem terribly boisterous or crowded.
“Come on,” Torval said. “Let’s talk over something warm.”
The inn, known as the Chimney Sweep, was cozy, welcoming, and blessedly calm. The few patrons present were all engaged in quiet pursuits—card games, easy conversations, solitary musings over spiced wine or frothy ale. Torval asked the innkeeper for two ales, but the innkeeper—an old man with well-trimmed gray whiskers and a round, rosy face—was so pleased to have watchwardens in his public room that he insisted on something special, without elaborating on just what “something special” might be. He bustled away and returned moments later with two steaming clay mugs and presented them with bright, beaming eyes and a wide grin.
“Specialty of the house,” he said. “Hot buttered apple brandy, with some spices mixed in. Hope you love it, gents.”
Torval accepted the two mugs, handed one to Rem, then cocked his head sideward. Apparently he wanted to drink their buttered brandy and talk out back. Rem followed dutifully, stealing a sip of his beverage as they went. It was absolutely stunning—just what he needed on such a cold night.
Torval led him through a narrow back hallway, through the kitchens, and out into a little courtyard formed by the walls of the neighboring tenements and the stable out behind the inn itself. While it was cold out here, the shelter provided by the high neighboring buildings and their proximity to the inn’s kitchens seemed to keep the winter wind from biting too aggressively. And, of course, the brandy helped immensely.
Rem sipped, the brew still too hot to guzzle without searing his mouth and tongue. Torval, to his great surprise, gulped down a great mouthful of the stuff as if it were tepid. For a long time they sat in silence. All around them Rem heard the sounds of an ordinary night in a quiet neighborhood: the vague susurration of distant conversations, an intermittent laugh, a called name, dogs barking at passersby, cats mewling as they screwed in dark back alleys. They were comforting sounds—prosaic and familiar—unlike Torval’s pensive silence.
“Talk,” Rem said, trying to be both forceful and friendly at the same time—to assure Torval that he wanted to hear it, whatever it might be.
“It’s foolish,” Torval said.
“Let me be the judge of that,” Rem said, and sipped again. The mug warmed his cupped hands nicely.
Torval took a great deep draught from his own mug, then opened his mouth to speak. Rem waited for the tale to come … but nothing came. A moment later Torval closed his mouth and sniffed the air.
“Do you smell something?” he asked.
Rem leaned forward and breathed deep. He could smell the cinnamon and nutmeg in his brandy, the rich ordure of the nearby stables, and the buttery scents of baking bread and stewing onions from the kitchens at their backs. But there was something else, wasn’t there? Something acrid and foul.
“Fire?” Rem asked.
Torval leapt to his feet and hurried back into the inn. Rem followed, gulping down his brandy as they went. They weren’t likely to sit here and have a quiet conversation now, and he couldn’t let the stuff go to waste.
Torval left his mug on the bar and Rem did the same as he passed. Both of them then crossed the public room and burst out of the front door into the street. They strode right to the center of it and stood, sniffing, scanning the gloomy cityscape around them for some sign of smoke or flames.
Torval was looking back toward the tavern they’d passed earlier. Rem suspected the dwarf thought those street-side drinkers might have rebuilt their fire in its brazier, right under the low-hanging eaves. But there was no sign of trouble in that direction.
Yet the smell was getting stronger, wasn’t it?
They scanned the street, the buildings, the sky for any sign. Off in the east, toward Suicide Hill, a column of smoke rose into the night above the rooftops, lit from beneath by an angry orange light.
“There,” Rem said, pointing.
Torval was already off and running.
The quiet night was forgotten. Torval’s unspoken troubles were forgotten. The silky, spicy taste of that buttered brandy on Rem’s tongue was forgotten. The world now rushed past Rem, wind in his ears, heart hammering in his chest. Torval had taken off at a dead run and left him behind, swift little bastard that he was. So, driven and determined, Rem raced on, zigzagging through the labyrinthine streets, dodging curious passersby who stopped to scan the sky and an ever-growing number of frightened townies fleeing westward, toward the river, ahead of the blaze.
As Rem neared the conflagration, the acrid smell of char and ash grew ever more pungent in his nostrils. The streets he traversed grew more thickly enrobed in a tenebrous black fog and falling embers that swirled down like hellish snow. Amid the thickening smoke the crowds teemed and swarmed in a frenzy, the sounds of screaming women, crying children, and the pounding boots of volunteer bucket brigades already growing to a din in Rem’s ears.
The stench of smoke and char were acute now, almost sickening, and Rem’s eyes watered as the haze thickened. As he hastened on, Rem noted scattered squadrons of looters, sometimes consisting of whole families, using the chaos to smash storefront windows and flee with quickly seized prizes. Parasites! If he didn’t have more pressing business ahead, Rem would have challenged every single one of them.
At last, just as the crowds thickened and the swirling smoke coaxed deep, hacking coughs from his lungs, Rem rounded a corner and burst from the narrow streets he’d been threading into a broad, open square. He recognized this place, for he’d lost Torval to one of his strange reveries there that very morning: it was the high plaza overlooking the under-construction temple of the Panoply.
And it was that temple—its wooden scaffolds, working leantos, pulley systems, swiveling cranes, and ramps—that now burned. The Yenaran night was alight with a fearsome auric glow, something from a prophet’s vision of the hellish pits where the damned suffered, screaming, through endless eternities. The affrighted fled. The brave charged in. The perverse stood by and watched.
Rem pounded down into the main square, skirting the edge of the inferno and the chaos surrounding it. He saw bucket brigades already at work, shuttling water from nearby fountains in an effort to quell the blaze. Their efforts were valiant, but barely effective. Every little pail of water tossed at the foot of the rising wall of flames seemed only to tease or enrage the elemental abomination now loosed.
One crew, knotted close to a looming latticework of burning beams, broke and ran as the trusses above collapsed in flames and came crashing down onto the stone steps surrounding the temple. Moments after the truss collapsed, a half-constructed stone arch formerly supported by those beams disintegrated with a thunderous crash.
Gods, where was Torval? The little bastard had gone rushing off ahead of him, and now Rem wondered if he had joined a bucket brigade or if he was already buried under the burning timber. Rem was eager to join the fight, but his concern for his lost partner kept him from leaping in as he otherw
ise might have.
“You there!” someone cried out. Rem turned toward the sound of the voice, not sure if the call was meant for him or not.
A tall, fair-haired Kosterman stood just a stone’s throw from him, holding a full pail in each of his muscular hands. This was Hildebran, the very same Fifth Ward watchman who had arrested Rem six months earlier and inadvertently landed him in his present vocation.
“That you, Rem?” the barbarian asked, squinting. The bright-orange flames were behind Rem, and must have made his face quite hard to make out.
“Aye, that,” Rem said, hurrying closer and snatching one of the water pails.
“I didn’t even recognize you,” Hildebran said. “Where’s our little friend?”
Rem threw his arms wide. “Your guess is as good as mine. When we smelled the smoke and saw the flames, he took off running and I lost him.”
Hildebran shrugged. “Probably here already. Bend to it, then.”
Rem needed no further prodding. It was going to be a long night.
Time and again Rem scurried back and forth, took water pails from whoever offered them, tossed the water into the flames with almost no effect, then did the same all over again. He kept at it for some time—minutes, hours, he couldn’t say—before an insistent, familiar sound among all the noise and bluster caught his ears.
It was Torval’s voice, crying out in the night, again and again. The dwarf seemed to be calling for someone.
“Tavarix.”
His son’s name, over and over again. “Tavarix. Tavarix.”
Rem began to search the manic jostling around him, trying to pick out his partner. There were dwarves, but none of them were Torval. There were youngsters, but none of them were Tavarix. There were fire-brigadesmen, watchwardens, and everyday citizens, but his partner—the one person he desperately sought—was nowhere to be seen.
And yet he could hear him, clearly, calling into the night, screaming even. “Tavarix. Tavarix.” Where in the sundry hells was he?