Cold Fire (32 page)

When she was done, she lurched to her feet and walked toward the blazing hospital. A guard yelled for her to come back, but it was a scarecrow-thin figure in a flapping green robe who ran up and seized her arm.

“They say I’m mad,” the man cried. “You’re not even locked up!”

Daja gently pried his hand from her flesh. “You’re right, but not like you think you are,” she said.

The man blinked. His eyes were large and pale, the color impossible to guess in the flame-lit dark, fringed by long, heavy black lashes. He looked like a madman, or a prophet, she thought. “That made my head hurt,” he complained.

“I’m sorry. An account has come due. Debts must be settled,” Daja told him. “I’ll be fine.” She patted his shoulder and continued her walk into the hospital’s inferno. Once more she was reminded of pijule fakol, the fearful Trader afterlife for those who did not pay what they owed. Ben probably deserved to spend eternity in pijule fakol, but Daja could not help him escape what he owed in this life if it meant he would burn forever. If she did not stop him now, the Bookkeeper might also log the deaths Ben made with her creations to her account.

With no one else to worry her, she let her magic flow out to open a tunnel through the fire. Within moments her non-Sandry clothes had burned away. Her mirror she tucked into the breastband her friend had made. She wasn’t sure how long even Sandry’s work could last: firewalking in a small boardinghouse was one thing, the holocaust of the hospital and soup kitchen another. For dignity’s sake she hoped she would keep her clothes, but the important thing was to find Ben.

He could have died when the nursery roof collapsed, as she had been told, but she doubted it. At first she had thought that he’d slaughtered his mother, then chosen to kill himself by rescuing children from the hospital he’d set ablaze. She didn’t feel that way now. He’d leave a bolt-hole for himself. Ben didn’t want to die. He wanted to build more fires, not to become one.

Her path took her into the heart of the inferno. Beams fell all around her; walls caved in. She had to be careful not to get struck-a cracked head would kill her-but the fire itself warned her when a large object was about to fall.

In the center of the blaze she stopped. She held her left hand palm up and let the magic in its living metal pour from her fingers like a waterfall, seeking anything like itself. It rolled through the burning hospital and the ground beneath it, questing like a hound. There, about a quarter of a mile away. She pulled the living metal’s power into a ribbon that stretched between her left hand and the gloves she had made. Following it brought her to a trapdoor in a burning storeroom. It was open: she looked down and saw a ladder.

Raising a hand, she called a piece of fire to light her steps. With her free hand she gripped the ladder as she descended. She came to level ground about fifteen feet below the storeroom.

She padded along on bare feet: her boots and stockings had burned as she walked through the hospital inferno. She kept one hand cupped over the fire seed that lit her way. He would get as little warning of her arrival as possible. While she could track him if he kept her gloves-and he would never give them up, even if he guessed she could follow him through them-she would rather finish this now. That he’d betrayed her was bad, but she’d been betrayed before. She could survive it. She could not allow him to use her work to ruin more lives.

The tunnel began to rise. Soon she heard movement, and soft humming. The hum stopped as he coughed briefly, then spat. Daja sucked her light into herself. A cold draft rolled down the tunnel: she was near the surface. On she went, the earth icy under her bare feet. She sent warmth into them to ward off frostbite.

The tunnel flattened, then opened into a small wooden shed. He sat on a bench just outside, checking the fit of a pair of skates by the light of a lantern hung on a hook by the door. She watched as he rebuckled his right skate. With the lamp between them, he couldn’t see past its light into the shack.

He wore the fur-lined, embroidered coat of a caribou herdsman from the north, as well as a blond wig in the herdsmen’s style. A fat pack rested beside him. She wondered if he’d kept it ready somewhere before this, or if he’d packed after his mother’s murder.

He still wore the living metal gloves. It seemed he couldn’t bear to take them off any sooner than he must.

He’d have to conceal them to flee Kugisko, but he would wait until the last minute to remove them.

She sighed. He jerked around, shading his eyes to see past the lamp. “Daja,” he whispered. “Of course. Of course you would come. Fire is your element.”

If she was going to talk nonsense with a madman, she preferred her scarecrow in his borrowed robe. He at least had a heart. “You aren’t leaving, Ben,” she informed him. “You have accounts to settle. Time to pay what you owe.”

“Money-grubbing Trader talk,” he retorted scornfully. “You’re above that.”

“I am a Trader and proud of it,” she reminded him. “We know that some accounts are written in blood and can be paid only in that. You have blood debts to settle.”

“I owe no one anything,” he snapped. “I did them a favor. I slaved to teach them how serious fire was. When they were too stupid to learn, I gave them lessons that would stick.” He seized his pack, and ran the few steps to the canal, balancing on his skates. Daja let him reach the ice. She even let him set the pack on his shoulders. He was three yards away when she sent heat into his skates. They immediately sank an inch deep into the ice: Ben went sprawling. Daja walked toward him, trying not to slip as ice melted around her own bare feet.

Ben scrambled onto his knees and lunged up again. This time she sent a harder burst of heat into the metal skates, fusing them together. Down Ben fell. When he pushed himself up to see what had happened, she reached for the power in the living metal gloves and smacked her palms together. The gloves fused, shackling Ben’s arms from fingertip to elbow.

He fell again, then rolled onto his side to stare at her as she approached. The wig was falling off: he’d cut his red curls short to make it fit better. “Daja, please,” Ben said. He’d gone dead white, the shadows cast by the great fire rippling over his pale skin. “You can’t do this. You’re my friend.”

There was nothing she could say to that. Instead she looked toward the hospital-they weren’t that far from the soup kitchen dock. People were still there. She took out her mirror and fed it enough heat to make it shine brightly. Raising it, she flashed it at the crowd.

“Do you know what happens if I’m accused of deliberately setting fires?” he asked, as if he thought she still might believe his innocence. “Do you? They’ll burn me alive.”

Someone in the crowd waved a torch overhead, once, twice. Daja responded with two quick flashes of her mirror. A sleigh turned from the dock and drove toward them.

Daja looked at Ben. “I know they will,” she told him. “And I will be there, to pay off my account to you.”

Kugiskans wasted no time in bringing an arsonist to trial, not one who had killed over 150 people and injured hundreds more. Four weeks after the destruction of Yorgiry’s Hospital, Daja stood before three magistrates and a packed hearing room to tell of her friendship with Bennat Ladradun, from their first encounter to their last meeting on the ice off Blackfly Bog. She listened as Heluda spoke of her discovery of the garret workroom where Ben had created his devices, and heard the tales of people at the hospital, bathhouse, and Jossaryk House.

Throughout it all Ben sat in an iron cage, built to protect him from the vengeance of those he had harmed. He stared blankly at his hands without ever looking at anyone.

No one doubted how the magistrates would decide, and they surprised no one: execution by fire. Namornese law dictated that a criminal’s execution take place on the site of his greatest crime. The healers and directors of the hospital refused to allow it: as worshippers of Yorgiry they would permit no murder, even one approved by the state, on ground just reconsecrated to life. Bennat Ladradun would burn to death the week before Longnight, at the Airgi Island bathhouse.

Nia insisted on going with Daja, though her lips trembled as she announced it: she felt that someone ought to witness for Morrachane. Daja went because she had promised Ben she would face what she had done by capturing him. Frostpine came without saying why. He didn’t need to; Daja knew he’d come to help her. Room had been saved for them at the front of the execution ground. When they arrived, they found their space was shared by Olennika Potcracker and Jory, the councils of the islands who had suffered Ben’s fires, and the families of the slain. Heluda and the magistrates’ mages, wearing black coats with gold and silver trim, stood at a right angle to their group. Before them was the stake, its large base of stacked wood and kindling topped by a platform. Opposite Daja’s group, on the far side of the stake, waited the governor, the city council, and the officials who served the courts and the lawkeepers. Beyond those three banks of witnesses stood the crowds: those who had come to see justice, or just to watch a horrible spectacle. They were oddly quiet as they waited.

Soon they heard the beat of a drum, somber and hard. Up the stairs that led to the canal came the execution party. Ben, in a rough sacking robe, was flanked by the black-robed priests of Vrohain, who oversaw every execution, and their attendant lawkeepers. A condemned prisoner could have a priest of his own faith, but Ben had chosen none. He stared at the ground as he shuffled forward. The loudest sounds were the drum, the flap of cloth in the hard wind, and the clank of the shackles secured to Ben’s wrists, ankles, and neck.

The priests helped him up the steps to the platform. They chained him to the stake, then climbed down. Ben stared across the sea of people as if his thoughts were years away.

The drum went silent. A herald read Ben’s name, his crimes, and his sentence. Then the priests of Vrohain brought their torches. They thrust them between gaps in the logs into oil-soaked kindling. The kindling blazed.

For a long time nothing changed. Ben stood expressionless. Below him the logs caught, and began to burn. They gave off little smoke, Daja realized: he would not be allowed to suffocate before the fire reached his flesh.

His image quivered as her eyes filled with tears. She suddenly remembered the Ben she had known at first, a rare non-mage who understood fire as she did, someone as eager and alive as any member of her foster-family.

Ben shifted, suddenly, as if he were uncomfortable. He lifted first one foot, then the other. The first darts of flame slid through the boards of the platform. Daja’s eyes spilled over and continued to spill. This was the law he’d broken, the death he’d given so many. Surely it was right, to give him that same death?

Suddenly flames ran up his sacking robe. Ben flinched aside, trying to crush the fire out on the pillar. His shackles were too tight. His face worked. In a moment he would scream.

She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t. She didn’t care about the law. Daja jammed her power deep into the ground, past bedrock, into the white-hot flow of molten rock and metal below. She summoned a single, overpowering, burst of heat and threw it all into the fire. Let the Namornese punish her, she thought. She couldn’t watch him slowly burn to death.

Then she saw it. The silver fire of directed magic roared out of Frostpine and Olennika. It rushed in a silver thread from Jory. Logs, platform, man, and stake turned into an immense, roaring column of flame that shot thirty feet into the air. For a moment it was so hot Daja’s face felt tight; she smelled burned hair close by. The column lasted only a breath of time. Then it vanished, out of fuel. A few black flakes drifted over the spot where Kugisko had decreed Ben would die. Smoke rose in discouraged wisps from the freshly charred ground where the stake had been.

Daja looked at Heluda Salt, defiant, expecting the mage to be furious. Instead Heluda stood with a hand over her eyes, shaking her head. Daja couldn’t be sure if Heluda was disappointed or resigned. After a moment it occurred to her Heluda might be both.

Someone in the governor’s party was more than disappointed or resigned. A man who wore the gold sunburst of a commander on his silver-trimmed black lawkeeper’s coat advanced toward Daja’s side of the square, his face dark with rage. He beckoned to a group of lawkeepers. “I want-” he began furiously.

Heluda stepped in front of him and put her hand on his chest. She said something; no one heard what it was. The lawkeeper commander glared down at her and opened his mouth. No sound emerged from it; she spoke again, quietly.

Frostpine tugged on Daja’s arm. “Let’s go,” he said, beckoning to Nia, Olennika, and Jory. “Heluda will settle him. It’s not like their cursed sentence wasn’t carried out.”

Five months later, word came to Bancanor House that the southern mountain passes were open. A week after that, Heluda, Kol, and Matazi accompanied Frostpine, Daja, their mounts, and three packhorses across Bazniuz Island and over Kyrsty Bridge, all the way to the construction site for Yorgiry’s new hospital and soup kitchen. While building had only started a month before, carpenters and masons risking the occasional late snow or ice storm to begin the new project, preparations had been underway all winter. Matazi and Kol had been in the forefront of the fund-raising, with donations from their own fortune so large they had shamed fellow rich Kugiskans into granting large sums. Less wealthy families of the merchant and laboring classes had donated cloth, pottery, cooking gear, herbs and oil for medicines, even food. Daja had sold plenty of jewelry and given the money to the new hospital. She, Frostpine, and Teraud had labored all winter on bolts, door latches, hooks, and endless supplies of nails, as had many other smiths. Carpenters set aside wood; weavers made blankets and sheets; herbalists and healers compiled medicines by the vatload.

Now the travelers, Kol, and Matazi sat on their horses, looking at the busy scene before them. Masons labored in cellars and on ground floor hearths as carpenters framed the inner wards and outer walls. The soup kitchen was in business already. Olennika presided over a line of cauldrons from which exquisite smells drifted. Jory, wearing a single plain gown like her teacher, her skirts and petticoats hanging just an inch below her knees, dumped an armload of chopped turnips into a kettle and walked over to them, her calf-high boots squelching ankle-deep into black mud with each step.