Cold Fire (31 page)

Daja thrust hard against the ice, yelling for those ahead to clear the way. Many were sightseers, but others too were skating hard to bring help. On the street that rimmed Bazniuz Island and on Rider Street, the edge of the Pearl Coast, large and small sleighs alike were in motion, racing toward the hospital, their normally musical bells setting up an urgent clatter.

Daja lowered her head and stroked harder. Her thighs, knees, and ankles set up a first, warning throb. Later, she told them. Punish me later.

Even with more people bound for the fire, Jung Canal was so wide that there was plenty of room at the center. Those few skaters coming toward Daja eased away from the girl with the fire in her hand. She locked her free arm behind her and pushed off in long, steady strokes, cold air freezing the hairs in her nose. An icy thread of it wound through a crack in her scarf to sear her vomit-and-smoke-scoured throat. She clenched her lips rather than slow to adjust her scarf and labored to breathe through her nose. When her hat blew away, she let it go.

At the intersection called the Whirligig she struck a ripple in the ice. Before she could fall, hands caught her free arm and supported the outstretched one, lifting her clear of the bumpy stretch. Two skaters, swathed like Daja in scarves, carried her onto smooth ice and set her down easily. They were gone, speeding toward the hospital, before she could gasp her thanks. Now Daja called her fire globe in through her palm, using it at last to warm herself and to ease her throbbing legs. Yorgiry Hospital was all the beacon she needed: the entire top floor was in flames.

I bet they stored things in the garret, she thought grimly as she wove through the skaters as fast as she dared. Nice, dry things that would burn. I bet he went straight up there.

Rather than battle onlookers, she skated wide around them, headed for the soup kitchen’s dock. She glided in between sleighs and people with hand-towed sleds as they lined up on the ice. These picked up as many people from the hospital as they could carry at the dock, and took them to safety.

Silvery light shone. Daja shaded her eyes. A mage of some kind crouched on the muddy ground under the dock. Magic radiated away from her, into the ice. A melted puddle of water on the surface, slippery as grease to skater and sleigh, froze. The mage was a weather-worker, drawing cold from the ground into the ice around the dock. Hot as the nearby fire was, the ice would remain safely frozen for the sleighs.

Watching the mage, Daja hit one of the dock’s piers shoulder-first. At least I was almost at walking speed, Daja thought, grinding her teeth against pain. Even through all her layers of clothing, it hurt. Worse, she heard the ice-mage cackle with amusement.

She didn’t linger. Instead she stripped off her skates, slung them around her neck, and climbed a ladder to the dock. A double line of people stretched between it and the kitchen, handing the sick, injured, and young to the waiting sleighs.

Jory stood beside the open kitchen door. Like every worker in this line she had a wet length of the muslin normally used to strain cheese wrapped over her mouth and nose to strain out smoke. She yelped when Daja hugged her from behind, then gasped with relief as Daja pulled off the scarves that hid her face. “I don’t suppose you’d want to get yourself to safety?” Daja asked her.

Jory coughed. “I’m safe right here,” she insisted. “Ravvot Ladradun’s still evacuating the nursery-we need every hand to get the little ones out.” She took the scarves Daja offered her and wrapped one around the shrieking, coughing, half-dressed infant that someone passed to her from inside the building. Jory gave Daja’s other scarves to the workers on either side; they draped the next two children in them. Daja removed her outer coats and handed them over.

“Ravvot Ladradun’s dead,” shouted a man, giving Jory a last infant. “They said the roof just caved in on the nursery!”

Jory’s eyes flooded and spilled over, tears cutting through the ash and soot on her face. Automatically she grabbed the next patient to come out, a man with only one leg, and wrapped him in one of Daja’s coats before passing him on down to the sleighs.

“Potcracker’s still inside?” Daja asked.

“She’s holding the fire,” Jory croaked. “Somehow it got into the cellar storerooms, and the oil jars blew out the back of the kitchen.”

“Try to stay alive,” Daja told Jory. She plunged into the kitchen thinking, somehow it got there, my eye. Ben likes to mix oil and fires.

Olennika stood before a wall of flame where the back of the kitchen had been. The dark-haired mage looked embattled. Her black hair tumbled wildly from its pins. Her sober gown was ripped, charred by debris, and smeared with soot. Sweat coursed down her face. Her black eyes were serene, her hands clasped lightly in front of her. About to yell in her ear-the roar of falling beams, fire, and screaming people was deafening-Daja remembered a way to talk that wouldn’t distract Olennika from her barriers on the fire below. She placed her hand lightly on the cook-mage’s arm.

As she’d hoped, their shared bond with fire made it possible to speak. Do you need help? asked Daja.

Olennika smiled crookedly. I’m fine-I must hold this so they have another exit for the patients, she replied. You’ll waste time if you try and hold the fire inside the hospital. There’s too much. You’ll be overwhelmed.

Remembering Jossaryk House, Daja shuddered. She’d do it again if necessary, but it was like surviving a tidal wave. She didn’t want to have to try it twice.

Olennika picked up her thoughts. So you learned you can’t beat everything, she thought, her inner voice as wry as her speaking voice. So you found you’re human. How sad. Listen to me, girl-mage-as soon as they don’t need this exit anymore, I am leaving. I know when I’m against something bigger than me.

I can help, Daja replied. There are patients still inside. I’ll see if—

Wait, Olennika said when Daja would have let go. There is a thing… if you’re not afraid.

What? Daja asked.

Olennika’s thought flickered, as if she herself doubted. Then she told Daja, On the far side of the hospital, straight through that door on my left, there’s a locked wing. The mad ones are there. Most are docile. We drug them nearly all of the time until the healers see if they can be helped. No one’s tried to get them out.

Daja faltered. Like most people she was afraid of insanity. She saw mad folk everywhere, those whose families were too poor for expensive healing that would bring them happier lives, or those who simply couldn’t be helped.

It’s all right, Olennika told her. You might try the second floor—

Daja was afraid, but she knew what Lark and Sandry would do. Straight across the building from here? she asked.

Through the door. Olennika pointed to it. They’ll obey simple commands. Simple, mind. I brew the drug myself and I made it that way.

Daja nodded, then ran for the door they’d discussed and the hall beyond. Large wards opened off either side of the hall, disgorging escapees. She was shocked at how many people were still inside, but at least those who could move were there to help those in trouble. She dodged two girls supporting a very old man and caught a toddler when the woman who carried him dropped the child.

“I’d forgotten they were so heavy,” the gray-haired woman said and coughed ferociously. “He’s the last of the little ones. Some fellow named Ladradun went in for more, and the roof caved on him. We’ll get no more babies out.” She accepted the child from Daja and continued on her way.

Daja used her senses to check the fire. The garret and the fourth floor were gone, and most of the third. A full story lay between this floor and the blaze-that was bad. She had to hurry.

At the end of the hall she found a large double door with heavy iron deadbolts to secure it. Above the bolts she noticed a small window with a sliding shutter. Daja opened it and peered inside. Most of those she could see sat on cots, weeping. She prowled. A man with very short dark hair, seeing her face, attacked the door, trying to grab her through the peephole. “Get us out!” he screamed, then coughed. “Out, get us out!”

So the drug doesn’t work for all of them, Daja thought grimly. She wrestled the bolts out of the locks, thinking bad thoughts about the workers who hadn’t tried to move these people. Then she felt guilty; she had hesitated at the thought of dealing with crazy people in a firestorm herself. Grabbing both doors, she yanked-them back.

The man who had yelled at her tried to shove by. Daja grabbed his arm and hung on. “If you’re awake enough to know you’re in trouble, you’re awake enough to help me,” she snapped.

“The questioners-the governor’s questioners-they’ll come for me,” he insisted, fighting her grip. “They don’t dare let me go free with what I know. They’ll pry my secrets from my mind and they’ll kill me.”

Daja thought fast. “Pretend you’re a healer,” she told him. “They won’t notice you!” She took a green worker’s robe hanging on the wall outside the ward and threw it at him, then let him go and marched into the room. There were thirty beds. Most of the occupants were the sitting-and-weeping sort. “Come on,” Daja said, dragging the closest to her feet. “Walk out of here. Follow the others.”

The man stared at her wide-eyed, wringing his hands.

“Go!” Daja cried, shoving him at the door. “Walk out of here!” She did the same with the next patient, and the next. The fourth was curled up on his bed. He did nothing when Daja shook him.

“He won’t budge,” said the man who feared the governor’s questioners. He stood beside Daja, the worker’s robe sagging on his bony frame. “He’s that way most of the time. They put a diaper on him. And the others are still here.”

Daja looked back. The three patients she had ordered to leave stood at the door, huddled together, bewildered. She looked at her companion.

“Lead them like horses?” he suggested.

Daja grabbed a sheet from an empty bed and cut it in strips with her belt knife. “Why aren’t you like them?” she wanted to know.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t work the same for everyone. I’m not mad enough, I think. That helps.”

Common sense from a madman, Daja thought desperately. This day just gets worse by the minute.

Something on the floor overhead caught fire: she felt the surge as the blaze fed, and the sigh of nails as they melted. Daja thrust a wad of linen strips at her companion. “Tie them together by one hand,” she ordered, going to the next bed. “Like a string of horses. Get as many as you can, and lead them out. Hurry!” She grabbed the young man in the next bed by his wrist and tied one end of a strip to him. “Get up,” she ordered. He obeyed. She seized the old woman in the next bed and pulled her to her feet, then tied one of her wrists to the young man’s. Towing them along, she added three more to her string.

The next, a middle-aged man with a head shaved bald, threw himself at Daja, shrieking. He clawed her cheek with ragged nails, then got his hands around her throat. Daja let go of her string of docile patients and ran him into the wall, slamming him against it as she called heat from the fire above into her skin. He didn’t notice. She rammed him again and called for more heat until he screamed and let go, waving burned hands. He ran from the room. Daja gasped, coughed, and propped herself against the wall as she sent the heat she’d used back into the inferno overhead. She couldn’t worry about that fellow running loose. On the second floor, she felt the ceiling give way. It hit the ceiling over her head; the wall under her palm warmed. The timbers overhead groaned under the weight of burning walls and roof. Smoke leaked through the cracks.

Daja roped five more patients into her string and dragged them into the corridor. From the rolling smoke that filled it came her green-robed madman. Someone had given him a soaked cloth to hold over his nose and mouth. Daja passed him her string of patients and plunged back into the ward.

She had four more roped together when the beams above them moaned a second, longer time. Smoke shot down in streams through cracks that broadened as the ceiling began to tear loose from the walls.

There was no time. She grabbed two more docile patients, one in each hand, and towed them to the wall along with her string of people. With one gigantic pull of her magic she yanked all the nails in the wall to her right from their moorings. They shot across the ward like arrows.

With a magical shove Daja thrust both the iron grating on the sole window and the metal in the shutters over it into the night. She turned, still clutching her patients, and rammed herself back-first into the wall. Planks and crossbeams dropped free like rotten teeth. Daja dragged her six people through the tangle of lumber into the night’s cold, then towed them toward the ring of guardsmen who held the crowd back.

Hearing wood crack behind her, she turned, still clutching her linen rope and two patients’ wrists. In a slow burst of flames, smoke and embers, the ground floor walls collapsed. The madmen’s ward fell in. She thought she heard screams from those she’d been forced to leave behind, but told herself fiercely that was just the fire’s roar of triumph. It had won.

People were tugging her hands. She jerked away, then realized they wore the green robes of hospital workers. She let them take charge of her patients.

A second roar: the central part of the hospital collapsed. A third: the soup kitchen. Daja scrabbled in her belt pouch, coughing, and brought out her mirror. She pressed it to her forehead, trying to breathe slowly. What of Olennika? Jory?

Sheer exhaustion made her calm enough to summon an image. When she did, her knees went straight to jelly. Down in the muddy slush of the open ground she went, not caring in the least. In the mirror Frostpine helped Olennika to drink from a long-handled ladle. The cook-mage was wrapped in a blanket; as far as Daja could see, Olennika had fled once her clothes burned off. Olennika looked terrible, but she was alive. Beside them Jory bent over, coughing. Someone thrust a bottle at her: Nia. Matazi and Kol were nearby, helping people into the Bancanors’ sleigh.

Relief poured over Daja. For a moment she swayed, wanting to cry.

But she had work to do yet. Grimly she felt in her pockets until she found the bottle Nia had given her at the house. Her stomach rolled in protest as she eyed it, then tried to reject its contents when Daja gulped them down. Two minutes later she was coughing and vomiting, her stomach in revolt against the strong-tasting fluid, her lungs expelling their latest load of soot-black phlegm.