The Smoke-Scented Girl (6 page)

A portly man with wisps of white hair flying
from his round head looked up as Evon entered. “Can I help you with
summat, gent?”

“My friend and I would like rooms for the
night,” Evon said.

The old man frowned. “Ain’t got but the one
room, though it’s got two beds. That do for you?”

So it was a tavern, not an inn. Evon was just
grateful he wouldn’t have to share a bed with Piercy, who he knew
from their nights in the school dormitory was a restless sleeper.
“That would be excellent, thank you,” he said.

“Upstairs,” the man said, and led the way
through a dark doorway and up a narrow, unlit flight of stairs to a
room that seemed to comprise the entire second floor. It did have
two beds, and was remarkably warm and smelled of soup and mutton
and fresh bread. “Hope you don’t mind it’s over the kitchen,” the
man said.

“Not at all. It smells wonderful. When do you
serve supper?”

“Half past six, in winter. Nothing fancy,
just good plain fare.” He turned and left the room without another
word, leaving Evon gaping in the middle of another question. He
closed his mouth and looked at the two beds. The blankets were
thin, but there were several of them, and the mattresses didn’t
seem infested. He set a light to bobbing over his shoulder to
illuminate the stairs and went to fetch Piercy, who had recovered
enough to support most of his own weight as they ascended the
stairs. Piercy collapsed onto one of the beds and flung his arm
over his eyes, letting his walking stick fall from his other hand
to clatter and roll under the bed. “If I die here, don’t let them
bury me in the pig pasture,” he moaned.

Evon knelt to reach under the bed after the
walking stick and nearly dropped it from its unexpected weight. So
Piercy wasn’t carrying it just for show. “I don’t think they have a
pig pasture.”

“Of course they do. Anywhere this far away
from civilization must be awash in pig pastures. What is that
smell?”

“Supper, I think.”

Piercy moaned again, but more quietly. “I
must be feeling better, because it actually smells quite delicious.
Not to be rude, dear fellow, but would you mind terribly taking
yourself elsewhere? The sound of your breathing makes my head
throb.”

Evon descended the stairs and almost ran over
a young woman with large, pretty brown eyes and a thin face. She
wore a coarse brown wraparound apron and a white kerchief that
completely covered her hair. “Oh! Beg your pardon, gent, but I
didn’t see you comin’ down there.”

“No, it was entirely my fault. Please excuse
me.”

The girl blushed. “Don’t you talk fancy,
there! Mam sent me to see if the young gents wanted to order aught
special for supper. Only there’s mutton, and soup, or mam could
kill a chicken.”

“Mutton’s fine. Thank you.” The girl blushed
and made a half-bow, half-curtsey. “Wait,” Evon said as she turned
to go. “Can you direct me to the home of Corlis Fullanter?”

The girl’s expressive eyes went cold and she
crossed her arms over her chest. “Ain’t no home left. Burned to
cinders, it was.”

“I know. I wanted to see what was left.”

“Ain’t naught left but smoke. You one o’ them
city gents comin’ here to make mock of us?”

It was the first he’d heard of anyone coming
to gawk at the site of an event. “No,” he said in an indifferent
tone, “I’m investigating the...fire...to determine what caused
it.”

“Ain’t a mystery,” she said. Her eyes were
still cold and angry, but she let her arms drop to her sides. “The
Gods struck Mr. Fullanter down, him and his evil ways.”

“What ways are those? If you don’t mind my
asking. I promise I’m not here to mock you.”

The girl pressed her lips together into a
thin white line. “We all knew what he did,” she said in a tight
voice. “All the mams knew to keep their littles away from his door.
Was evil, he was, and the Twins took note and burned him where he
stood.”

“Did you see it?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “But we
all heard the sound, and Mr. Lenter’s house near took fire though
it’s nigh fifty feet away.”

“Did anyone see it? Or see anything strange
afterward?”

She shook her head. She looked as if she were
gearing up to ask some questions of her own, so Evon said, “Thank
you so much for your help. Would you mind pointing me toward Mr.
Fullanter’s...well, where his house used to be? I’ll need something
to tell my superiors back home,” he added with a smile and a wink,
and the girl blushed redder than before. Maybe Piercy was right,
and he did have a little charm at his disposal. He couldn’t
remember the last time he’d accompanied a young woman to a play, or
a lecture, or even down the street. The way he’d been going, it was
unlikely any woman would have consented to go anywhere with him. He
shrugged away the self-pitying thought. Perhaps, when this was
over, he would ask Piercy to make some introductions for him.
Piercy never seemed to have a shortage of young women fluttering
around him. He could probably be induced to part with a few.

The girl ducked her head and gave him a shy
look through her eyelashes, but said, “Out the taproom door and to
the right. Follow the road and you can’t miss it,” then bobbed
another half-curtsey, half-bow and retreated toward the kitchens.
Evon followed her instructions, nodding at the few patrons seated
in the taproom. They watched him openly, their faces blank as if he
were a new specimen of bird and they weren’t sure which way he
might flap. At least they weren’t hostile.

Evon’s top boots were only slightly better
for walking across muddy roads than Piercy’s custom-made footwear.
He watched his footing carefully, avoiding the deep ruts filled
with icy slush and the occasional pile of half-frozen animal waste.
Villagers stopped to stare at him as he passed, and he nodded at
them, though he wasn’t sure how friendly he looked, what with how
hard he was concentrating on not falling. They did look as if they
were accustomed to strange gents from the city wandering around
their village. Evon sidestepped a particularly large turd and
glanced around. He had walked nearly half the length of the village
and passed half a dozen depressed houses. He felt a little
depressed himself, looking at them. He hadn’t realized how much a
creature of the city he was until that moment.

He nodded again, this time at an elderly
couple who were walking toward the tavern, hand in hand, and felt
unexpectedly jealous. When this was all over, he was going to take
a leave of absence—he was certainly owed one—and go to the theater,
and the menagerie, and the Royal Gardens, with…his imagination
stuttered to a halt. It had been six years since graduation; all
the young women he’d known at school had returned home, or gotten
married, or any number of things that put them beyond his reach. He
drew in a deep breath of frozen air that tasted of snow and mutton,
and moved on. It could wait until later. Right now, he had a
mystery magician to find. About a hundred feet ahead he saw
winter-dead yellow grass give way to blackened turf, and shortly he
stood before what was left of Fullanter’s house.

It hadn’t burned entirely. The outer walls,
made of large river stones, still stood, though the roof was gone
and the wall over the doorframe had collapsed, leaving a fall of
stones for Evon to step over. Inside, the packed dirt floor was
black with char that stirred as Evon walked through, sending up a
bitter smell of old fire and dead earth. If Fullanter had owned any
furnishings, they hadn’t survived the fire. Snow drifted shallowly
against the inner corners of the cottage, clean and white against
the burned stones.

The cottage had originally been bisected by
another stone wall. Now that wall lay in a heap in the center of
the cottage, not a heap of stones but a pile of what looked like
fossilized mud. Evon touched it with his finger. It felt like cold
stone, exactly as it should, except stone wasn’t supposed to flow
like water. He crouched so his eyes were level with its top and
examined it. It looked a little glossy, as if it had been polished,
and the grain seemed finer than that of the stones in the wall. He
laid his palm against it, not sure what he expected, but nothing
happened. It might as well have been sculpted into this bizarre
shape.

Evon stood and brushed his hands off on his
coat, then reached into his inner pocket and pulled out a quizzing
glass with a smooth brass handle. He’d scratched runes along the
frame of the lens, which gave it a seedy look, but Evon didn’t
carry it to show off. He polished the lens with the lining of his
waistcoat, then passed his open palm across the glittering crystal
and said,
“Epiria,”
and held it to his eye.

He was nearly blinded by the glow of residual
magic the glass revealed. Blinking hard to keep from tearing up, he
turned away and looked at the stone pile from the corner of his eye
until his vision adjusted and he could see clearly. Even then, it
was almost too bright to bear. The revelation spell showed the
remnants of the fire spell as flying, twisting ribbons of
blue-white light that left afterimages printed on Evon’s eyes.
Runes scrawled up and down the ribbons, as blindingly dark as the
ribbons were light. He leaned in to examine one more closely and it
drifted away, as if, impossibly, it was aware of his interest. No
matter how he approached, the memory of the spell stayed just far
enough away that he couldn’t make out the runes. After a few failed
attempts, Evon stepped back to look at the spell as a whole, and
realized it had a larger pattern.

The twining ribbons outlined two human
figures, one much taller than the other. The taller one reached out
toward the shorter one with both arms, the shorter one raised its
hand above its head, then both dissolved into fluttering ribbons of
light only to come back together and repeat the strange dance. Evon
watched the little scene play out a few times, then lowered the
quizzing glass and said, “
Desini
.” Two people, present at
the center of the extraordinary spell. They had to be Fullanter and
the Fearsome Firemage. Standing in the wreckage of Fullanter’s
cottage, surrounded by the remnants of the most powerful fire Evon
had ever heard of, the whimsical name didn’t seem so funny. He
tucked the quizzing glass back into his pocket and dusted his hands
again, though they weren’t dirty, and licked his lips against the
dry taste
epiria
had left in his mouth.

He breathed shallowly, inhaling the scent of
char and snow and, distantly, someone’s dinner. He had no idea if
this next part would work. He’d worked it out by candlelight the
last two nights while Piercy muttered in his sleep, scribbling
notes and crossing them out and sketching the shape of a spell he
wasn’t sure was even possible. Tracking someone when you had a
piece of them, a hair or a drop of blood, that was a commonplace.
His quarry hadn’t left anything like that behind. But she had left
something else, if Evon could manage to find it. If it even
remained here. If the spell worked.

He chalked a rune on the back of his left
hand, then closed his eyes and let his mind wander. The bitter
brown scent of burned earth. The clear crystal smell of snow
melting. Mutton boiling over a fire, cold damp stone like ancient
caverns. He pinched his nostrils shut with his left hand, pressed
down on his eyelids with his right, and whispered,
“
Olficio
.”

Even with his fingers clamped over his nose,
the raucous clamoring of a thousand odors made him stagger. There
was a river—he remembered their coach passing over it—a quarter of
a mile away, and he could smell the water rushing past its banks,
throwing up the rougher scent of the rocks it wore away at. The
nearer smell of mutton drilled into his lips and tongue, warring
with the bitter coffee flavor of
olficio
and making him want
to vomit. He swallowed hard and kept his eyes shut. Trees with
green sap flowing through their veins waiting patiently for spring.
The sharp musk of a fox in its den. And somewhere, in all of this
olfactory noise, a scent that didn’t belong.

He became gradually aware of a more human
smell, the noxious odor of a body infrequently bathed and the warm,
slippery scent of greasy hair. It permeated the stones, but
faintly, as if the air was tugging it free and blending it with the
wind that blew through the wrecked cottage. Fullanter. Then, even
more faintly, the scent of smoke. Not the smoke of a campfire or
even of a burning building, but a darker, thicker smell, slightly
sour, as if someone had smeared grease on a hunk of ancient cheese
and then set it alight. Evon let it seep into his closed nostrils
and into his lungs. It wasn’t exactly an unpleasant smell, but it
made him uneasy, as though he’d invited something to take residence
in his body that might not be the most gracious of guests. But
nothing happened. He let the scent fill him to the core, then said,
“Desini,
” and the smells vanished so completely that even
after he lowered both his hands, he felt as if his sense of smell
had been surgically excised. Only the thick, sour smell of smoke
remained, trailing away out of the cottage and down the road south
toward Chaneston.

Staring down at the melted lump of stone,
Evon ran through his careful deductions in his head and realized
just how much guessing he’d done. Suppose he was right that
the...he couldn’t call her that name anymore, he’d have to say “the
unknown magician.” Suppose the unknown magician really
was
turning her devastating magic on people she believed deserved
punishment. That didn’t mean she was incapable of turning it on
innocent people. Or that she was incapable of turning it on
him
, even though he only wanted...well, what did he want? He
wanted to know how to wield that fire. He didn’t want to hurt her,
or stop her vigilante quest, he just wanted the fire. The
realization shocked him. Even if she was killing evil men and women
(and that was another guess he could be wrong about) innocent
people were being killed along with the guilty. Shouldn’t that
matter too? Evon shook his head to clear it. First, they had to
find her. Everything else could wait until then.