Age of Ash, page 35
Andomaka looked up, her eyes narrow. The call came again, and then other voices took it up. Fire, fire, fire. The pale woman grew paler.
“Stay here,” she said to Alys. “Guard her. I’ll be back.”
Andomaka turned and strode out of the room, the guard at her heels. When the door closed, Alys sank to the ground. Sammish, arms still bound behind her and blood sheeting her mouth and chin, met her eyes. “She was going to kill me.”
“Yeah.”
“What a shithead.” Sammish shifted, twisting at the shoulder, and her hands came loose. She wiped the blood on her sleeve. “We’ve got to get after her.”
“Can I wait until my heart stops trying to crawl up my throat?”
Sammish’s grin showed blood on her teeth. “No.”
Alys, to her own surprise, laughed. Sammish stood first and helped haul her up. Outside the window, the traffic of ankles was thicker, and the clatter of horses freed from their stalls joined the chaos of voices raised in alarm.
“Let me take lead on this,” Sammish said. “I’ve been through this place before a little. I have an idea where she may be going.”
“Fine,” Alys said, and pushed the door. It didn’t open. She pressed at it, but it wouldn’t budge. Squinting at the crack where it met the frame, she saw the shadow of a bar. “They shut us in.”
Sammish took the thin knife from her sleeve and held it out to her. “Lift the bar.”
“There’s not enough room.”
“Then we have to break it,” Sammish said, desperation in her voice. “She’s going to get where we can’t find her.”
Alys looked at the bare, sad room. The weary chairs and spindly table. The wooden rafters, still dancing with shadows.
“Can you fit that window?” Alys asked.
“How would I get there?”
“Come on,” Alys said, moving to the table. Together, they shifted it to the wall under the narrow, high window. The calls of fire were louder now, and the wind stank of smoke. Alys took one of the chairs and put it on the table, then clambered onto it. “All right. I’ll boost you.”
“What about you?”
“Come back for me,” Alys said, lacing her fingers together. “When it’s done.”
Sammish looked at her. They both knew how thin that sounded; how much more likely the other outcomes were and how terrible they would be. Sammish put the ball of her foot in Alys’s hands, and Alys strained to lift her. The chair trembled under their combined weight, its legs unsteady and old. Sammish rose, caught the window in her hands, and pulled. Alys felt the burden of her weight lift and pushed her up and out. Sammish writhed, squeezing through the window. It was almost too narrow to pass, but only almost. When she slipped out, Alys grinned.
Sammish’s head poked back in. Her distress was nearly hidden by the shadows. “I will be back.”
“I know,” Alys said. “I trust you.”
And then Sammish was gone, and Alys stepped back down to the floor. The wind that blew through the little window stank of smoke.
A man’s rough cry was first, and then horses. The woman sitting by the statue of the god stood up. The smoke was thicker now, and impossible to miss, even with the wind whipping it away. Great blossoms of it rose, black and greasy, from behind the wall. The carriage gate opened again, though at first no one came out from it. And then, a moment later, a young mare bolted out at full gallop, her eyes starting and wide, scattering the surprised people in the street.
“Fire!” the woman cried, and pointed at the Daris Brotherhood. “There’s a fire!”
The call moved through Green Hill like the ripple on a still pond where a stone has fallen, and panic followed behind it. The woman hid her relief. The plan hadn’t failed. Not yet, anyway.
Far down the street, she saw a group of men in the blue cloaks of the city guard running toward the fire, shoving people aside. Servants and merchants and the litters carrying those of noble blood paused to look, making a barrier of curiosity and flesh around the brotherhood that the guard had to fight to make paths.
At first, the sand-and-water effort was only the servants of the Daris Brotherhood, buckets and bowls in hand, running west to the canal and then back toward their burning stables, but in no more than minutes, others joined in. There were servants wearing the colors of half a dozen families and brotherhoods forming a line like ants to pass buckets up and down the street. Young men with spades and buckets of sand appeared, wet cloth over their faces.
A coachman staggered out of the carriage gate, his flesh bright with blood or burn, and sat in the middle of the road, stunned or dying. The woman stepped forward, heading in toward the open gate. No one stopped her. She reached the line of buckets, bowls, and water, took one that was offered to her, and walked into her enemy’s home as if she were saving it.
The stables, the carriage house and carriages, the feed store—all of it was in flame. The wall where she had thrown her little lantern was a blackness. A solid stretch of char. The heat was assaulting. The wind whipped around her, pushing acrid smoke in her mouth and nose, leaving her choking a little.
It was everything they’d needed and hoped. All eyes were turned to the conflagration. She took her bucket of water, chose a place in the flames, and threw a bright and powerless spray onto it like she was spitting. The fire didn’t lessen.
A man shouted words she couldn’t make out, and the line of water buckets shifted, leaving her alone by a burning carriage. For a moment, she was confused. That all those men and women struggling to tame the fire should leave in the same moment was like something from a dream. But no, they hadn’t left, only shifted toward the main building. She thought, still confused, that there must be a cistern in the house, that they were pulling from it instead of the canal.
Then she looked up through the smoke and sunlight. High above her, two windows fluttered brightly. And then a floor below them, a third.
The fire had spread.
Sammish ran, but that didn’t matter. Everybody was running.
When she’d planned it, she’d imagined herself ghosting along behind Tregarro, who would have seen her for the first time in that moment. She meant to blend in with the servants the way she had before. And she’d imagined Adric at her back. Or Alys. Or someone, anyway. Instead, she was wiping her own blood on her sleeves and chasing alone after the thing that had seen her through Timu’s eyes. And as much as she tried to tell herself she was just looking for her pan or trying to find her cousin or any of the other thousand lies that could have cloaked her, the only thing that would fit in her brain was: I have to find Andomaka.
The private temple was the obvious place for her to go, and it wasn’t that far from where Sammish was now. From where she and Alys had been taken. She crossed a courtyard of flagstone where an apple tree’s branches were studded with tiny green fruit no larger than her thumb. The light was wrong—yellow and filthy. Sunlight through smoke.
A thin-faced girl—Hansch, but a servant—ran through a wooden colonnade to her right, and Sammish ran after her, shouting. The girl stopped and turned back. Her eyes were wide with panic.
“Lady Andomaka,” Sammish said.
“What?”
“Andomaka. The pale one who’s in charge of everything. Have you seen her?”
“What?”
“Have you seen her?”
The girl flinched like Sammish had struck her, and shook her head. When she ran again, Sammish didn’t try to stop her. The hallways looked different than when she’d snuck in before. Either they weren’t the same places as the map in her mind, or she wasn’t the same girl who’d seen them. Both seemed possible. The private temple would be to the west. She was sure of that. She put the morning sun behind her and went as fast as she could.
People were everywhere. Some were carrying armloads of cloth or embroidered chairs. Some were weeping. A few were carrying buckets of water and sloshing so much out as they went that there’d be nothing left by the time they found a fire. Sammish scanned the pandemonium. There was only one thing she needed to find.
She stumbled into a hall that she was sure she knew. Yes, there was the path leading to the window she’d jumped through. The private temple was ahead.
And, brief as lightning, a pale face and hair that passed through a doorway at the end of the corridor. Sammish caught her breath. Her body was rushing like a river at flood, even standing still. She walked down toward where Andomaka had been, telling herself that she was only looking for her cousin at the same time she pictured what she knew of the maze of wooden passages that led to the stone altar at its heart. If she was right, if her memory held, that was the direction Andomaka was going.
She held the little cutter’s blade in her hand. It seemed inadequate now, but it was sharp as a razor. She pictured herself pushing it between the pale woman’s ribs. Or drawing it across her throat. She was almost certain she could do it. She reached the passage where Andomaka had been, turned down it.
Andomaka was no more than a dozen feet ahead, her back to Sammish. A guard in the uniform of the brotherhood was talking with her. Sammish didn’t wait to hear what they were saying. She turned back around the corner and pressed herself to the wall. It was a struggle to hear anything over her heartbeat, but the sound came. Footsteps. Someone was moving. She risked a glance around the corner in time to see Andomaka vanish. She followed, but the guard was in her way, grabbing her by the shoulder.
“You have to go,” he said. “Get out now.”
“I will. I just have to get something.”
“You don’t understand. They’re giving up the house. We can’t save it. The sand-and-water crew is just trying to keep it from spreading. We have to get everyone out.”
“All right,” she said, and the guard turned and left her, believing that she’d go. It was going to work. She’d only meant to put a little fear into the captain, but this was best. If the house was coming down, they had to save the knife.
But she wasn’t moving forward. She wasn’t chasing her prey, and she didn’t know why she wasn’t. All she could see was Alys. Alys, in the barred room. Alys, saying I trust you.
“There’s enough time,” Sammish said aloud, as if hearing her own voice would convince her. “You can do both. But you have to move.”
Caught between impulses she could not master, Sammish didn’t move.
The private temple was empty when the thing that called itself Kithamar entered it for the last time. The tapestries hung as they always had, still and solemn against the walls. The stone altar squatted, the game board on it unplayed. The lanterns marked their sacred geometry. It was all fated for the fire. There was no stopping that now. But it didn’t matter. Everything would be fine in the end.
As it strode to the altar, it pushed away the memory of being Ausai in this same place. Of reaching for the sacred blade and finding the locked safe cache empty. Whatever this was, it wasn’t that. The blade would be there this time. The dangers of the present weren’t the dangers of the past. At the altar, it pushed the game board away. The carved wood crashed to the ground. Glass beads hissed and skittered. It knelt and undid the lock with trembling hands. The thief girl had been here once before. Been at this same altar when it had worn the Bronze Coast boy. But it had been careful since. Karsen, the friend of its enemy, had come and left the knife untaken. Had he only been getting the lay of the land? Was he behind this? No one could have snuck in and taken the knife.
Except that someone had before.
The mechanism turned, revealing the sacred cavity beneath the altar. With trembling hands, it reached in and clutched at the darkness. It felt the leather sheath and pulled it out. The knife was there, but the thing that called itself Kithamar drew it. It had to see the marks on the blade itself to be sure. It had to feel the subtle hum of its power. And when all was as it should have been, it let out a soft cry in relief and bowed its head.
Everything else could be redone. The altar would have to be retrieved, but no fire could break it. Even if the brotherhood burned to the ground, the stone would wait beneath. Once it took its rightful place as prince, there would be laborers and mules and ropes enough to dig down to the bones of the world if it needed to.
It rose, collecting itself. The panic it had felt only moments before seemed shameful now. It fastened the blade to its belt, tying it in place with leather thongs and knots that would not slip.
It had faced a hundred moments of crisis before. Sometimes, it had died in them. As long as there was an initiate who knew how to call it back and the tools to accomplish the rite, it feared nothing. Its mind grew more focused and clear. The way forward was the palace. Even if Byrn a Sal and Halev Karsen had lit this fire, Tregarro would still be there. It had drawn itself up from nothing before, and it had much more than nothing now.
Something roared in the distance and a wave of human voices cried out in alarm. A wall collapsing, perhaps. The air in the private temple had grown murky with smoke. It was time to leave.
It strode toward the corridors, the courtyard beyond them, and then the city.
Slowly, over the long and terrible minutes, Alys came to understand exactly how much trouble she was in.
At first, she paced in the dim light from the window, her throat thick with excitement and fear. She imagined all the things that might be happening with Sammish and Andomaka—Sammish captured, Andomaka killed, the fire put out too soon and guards returning to open the barred door and demand to know how Alys’s prisoner had escaped.
The sounds from outside grew louder. Voices raised in alarm. For a time, she took comfort in them. As long as there were calls of alarm, the attention of the compound would be on that and not her. The wind pushed the scent of smoke in, and the shadows of ankles and carts and heavy buckets flickered above her.
A sound came. A steady rumble, like wooden wheels on cobblestone, only constant. Alys listened to it growing under the voices, not sure what could be making it. A carriage, maybe, but a carriage that didn’t fade with distance. The wind, maybe, catching some niche in the architecture and playing the house like blowing across a bottle. Only, when the wind shifted, the rumble didn’t shift with it.
Fewer shadows came. Fewer buckets of water. And the rumble grew louder. It was almost a roar when she understood. It was the voice of the fire, and then all other thoughts were blown from her mind.
Alys started screaming. She clambered up the table and chair, cupped her hands around her mouth like a horn, and shouted. I’m down here! I’m locked in! Let me out! If anyone heard her, they didn’t reply. A thousand childhood nightmares flowed into her. Stories of the times the wooden houses of Longhill had fallen, of the bones in the ash. But this was Green Hill. They built with stone. But the heavy wood above her would burn. The carpets. The shutters. The stones would fall, and she’d be trapped in them like a cat.
Her voice grew hoarse, and the shadows of running legs vanished. Another kind of flickering took their place, and the air began to grow thick and choking. Wisps of pale smoke began shifting along the dark ceiling above her like ripples on water, and she found herself gasping, fighting for air that the fire wanted.
When a scraping sound came from the door, she didn’t know what it was. The frame shifting, maybe. Wedging itself further in place or preparing to collapse. Then it came again, and the clatter of a bar falling to the floor on the other side. Sammish pulled the door open and stepped in. The blood was mostly gone from her face, though her nose looked thick and bruised. Her forehead and cheek were smudged with soot.
“Did you get it?” Alys said. “Where’s Andomaka?”
“I didn’t, and I don’t know. We need to get out of here.”
Too close by, something large collapsed, the cacophony of stone followed by a wave of voices calling out in alarm. Sammish took Alys’s hand, turned back to the smoke-filled corridor, and together, they ran.
Alys didn’t know the way. By herself, she would have been lost in the wide, dark halls. Sammish tugged her forward, and the only choices were follow her or die here. The roar of the fire seemed to come from just overhead, and her chest was working like a forge bellows. When they tried to run, she grew lightheaded and began to lose herself. The world became Sammish’s hand in hers, and the next step forward, and nothing else.
She tripped on the stairway before she knew they had found stairs. It wasn’t the way they’d come down. These were thin and wooden, crawling up inside the walls of the brotherhood like a secret. Servants’ stairs. The top of the flight was lost in thick grey smoke, like an inverted river.
Her panicked mind tried to find the words If we go up there, we’ll drown, but her tongue didn’t work. Sammish dragged her up. Expecting death, she followed, and the smoke took them in. It was hot and choking. She thought she heard Sammish weeping, but she wasn’t sure.
And then Sammish kicked open a door, and they stumbled forward into fresh air, and collapsed.
Alys retched, crawled a little forward, and rolled onto her back. Above her, the Daris Brotherhood bled fire from every window. Smoke rose up into the wind and made the blue sky a filthy grey.
“Where are they?” Alys said, her voice thick and gravelled. “Why aren’t they putting it out?”
“It’s gone too far,” Sammish said. “They’re just stopping the spread of it. If they can.” She sat up, levered herself to her feet. “We have to get to the street.”
Alys forced herself up and followed. With every clean breath, she felt her mind returning, and each bit of coming back to herself was a shock at seeing how far down she’d been. Another few smoke-poisoned breaths, and she and Sammish would have died in the darkness. Or worse, the light.
A line of bluecloaks stood in the street, keeping a crowd of onlookers from approaching the spectacle. And there was red among the blue. The palace guard. They let Alys and Sammish pass, and as soon as they had, a familiar face swam up. Saffa took Sammish’s shoulder and pulled her into a tight embrace. Alys stepped back.
“We didn’t get it,” Sammish said. “There wasn’t time.”
