By my reckoning, the arsonist might strike in any of fifteen places. It was sheer luck, if that's the right term, that I'd chosen to guard the right location.
When it happened, it happened fast. One moment, I was prowling the cramped recesses of the tiring house of the Azure Swan Theater. Painted actors frantically changing costume squirmed past me, glaring at the intruder obstructing the way. Their ill will didn't bother me half as much as the flowery rhetoric being declaimed on stage. That night's play was
Try not to think things like that. One never knows what gods are listening.
An instant later, I heard a boom. Some of the audience cried out, and the forty-year-old ingenue ranting on stage faltered in mid-lament. Something began to hiss and crackle. I scrambled to the nearest of the rear stage entrances, looked out, and saw that a patch of thatch on the roof of the left-hand gallery was burning.
Then the straw above the royal family's empty box exploded into flame. The two fires raced along the roof like lovers rushing to embrace. At the same time, they oozed down the columns into the topmost of the three tiers of seats. I peered about, but could see no sign of the enemy I'd been hired to stop.
Shrieking people shoved along the galleries toward the stairs. Others climbed over the railings and dropped into the cobbled courtyard, where they joined the stampede of groundlings driving toward the exit at the rear of the enclosure. In half a minute, the passage was jammed.
It was plain that not everyone would make it out that way. There was a stage door in the back of the tiring house, but none of the audience had come in that way, nor was it visible from any of their vantage points, so none of them thought to use it.
Abandoning my efforts to spot the incendiary, I ran forward past two wooden columns painted to resemble marble to the foot of the stage. Though the blaze had yet to descend past the highest gallery, I could already feel the heat. 'This way!' I shouted. 'There's another exit!'
Nobody paid the least attention. Perhaps, between the roar of the fire and the panicky cries, no one heard.
I jumped off the platform, grabbed a strapping, tow-headed youth with bloodstained sleeves—a butcher's apprentice, I imagine—and tried to turn him around. 'Come with me!' I said.
He snarled and threw a roundhouse punch at my head. I ducked and hit him in the belly. He doubled over. I manhandled him toward the stage. 'I'm trying to help you,' I said. 'There's another way out. Go behind the stage. The door will be on your right. Do you understand?' Evidently he did, because when I let him go, he clambered onto the proscenium.
I induced several other people to head backstage. Eventually, others noticed them going, and followed.
Which soon threatened to create a second crush, at the rear stage doors. I sprang onto the platform and dashed back there to manage the flow of traffic as best I could, with pleas when possible and my hands when necessary.
By now the air was gray with smoke. I kept coughing. The Heavens—the machine room above me, the underside of which was painted to resemble the sky—started burning. Sparks and scraps of flaming debris rained down.
At last the stage was clear. My handkerchief pressed to my face, I scurried toward the exit. The ceiling burst. A windlass, used to lower the actors portraying gods and their regalia, plummeted through the breach and struck where I'd just been standing. The impact shattered the floorboards.
When I escaped the playhouse, I trotted some distance away, not only to make sure that I was out of danger but to better survey the overall situation. Turning, I noticed something strange.
Fortunately, the Azure Swan stood on a spit of land that stuck out into the river. It wasn't close to any other structure. For a while, the flames enveloping the building swayed this way and that, as if groping for some other edifice they could spread to. At times they appeared to move against the breeze.
Two candlemarks later, those of us who had sought to defend the theater regrouped in a private room in a nearby tavern. This council of war included several blades of the Blue political faction, which vied with the Reds, Yellows, Blacks, and most bitterly with the Greens for control of Mornedealth, an equal number of their retainers, Draydech the sorcerer, and myself. And a singed, grimy, malodorous, and surly lot we were, too. Also present was Lady Elthea, widow of a middling prominent Blue leader, owner of the three businesses that had thus far burned, and my employer. Though elderly and infirm, she'd insisted on venturing forth from her mansion to view the site of the latest disaster.
'All right,' I said, 'we searched the Swan beforehand, without finding any incendiary devices. Did anyone see a figure on the roof? Or any flaming missiles?' The other men shook their heads. 'Then it's magic kindling these fires, Lady Elthea. That's the only logical explanation.' I looked at Draydech. 'Do you concur?'
The warlock was a short fellow in his late thirties, younger than I, though with his wobbling paunch, graying goatee, and the broken veins in his bulbous nose, he looked older. He'd served his apprenticeship living rough with the nomadic Whispering Oak wizards of the deep forests. Afterward, he'd embraced the amenities of civilization with a vengeance. I'd never seen him eat a raw piece of fruit or vegetable, drink water, or go out in inclement weather. Nevertheless, he'd lost none of the skills he'd mastered in the wilderness. He was particularly adept at sniffing out mystical energies, and, despite his exorbitant fees and extortionate habits, I retained him whenever that kind of witchy bloodhound work seemed likely to be in order.
Now, however, raising his eyes from the chunk of amber he'd been staring into while the rest of us glumly guzzled our wine, he said, 'Certainly it's magic. Judging from the appearance of the conflagration, someone's conjured a salamander, a being from the Elemental Plane of Fire, to do the job. But I can't
I scowled. 'Old friend. This is not the time to angle for more gold.'
Lady Elthea extended her trembling hand. Her skin was like parchment, her knuckles, swollen with arthritis. 'Sorcerer, I beseech you. Some of our fellow citizens died tonight. More could perish tomorrow. If you can help prevent this, don't hold back.'
Jarnac, one of the Blue blades, rose from the trestle table. 'I'll take care of it, Lady Elthea,' he said. He was a lanky, sandy-haired youth, dressed lavishly but not tastefully in a sapphire- and ruby-studded particolored doublet with intricately carved ivory buttons. At his side hung the latest rage, one of the new smallswords, this one sporting a golden hilt. Smallswords looked elegant, and were adequate for fighting another gentleman similarly equipped. But they were apt to prove too flimsy against a heavier weapon or an armored foe, which was why I was still lugging my broadsword around.
As might have been inferred from Jarnac's ostentation, he was New Money, with a parvenu's eagerness to parade his wealth and sense of style; unlike most of his cronies in the room, he couldn't claim kinship with one of the Fifty Noble Houses. Not that that mattered to me. My birth was considerably humbler than his.
He dropped a fat purse on the table. Coin clinked. 'Take it, magician,' he urged. 'And rest assured, there's plenty more where that came from.'
Draydech gazed longingly at the money. I fancy he came close to licking his lips. But at last he shook his head and said, 'I can't take it, sir, because I'm not sure I can earn it. Despite Master Selden's slander—' he shot me a reproachful glance, which, given our shared history, failed to inspire any remorse, '—I wasn't trying to inflate my price. Rather, I was attempting to explain that something odd has happened.
'We all should have seen the salamander. They're not invisible, quite the contrary. Even if its summoner veiled it in a glamour, / should still have spotted it. But I didn't.
'What's more, I've been sitting here scrying, and I can't pick up its trail. Apparently someone's developed a cunning new type of cloaking spell.'
Sensing that he was telling the truth, I said, 'And until you work out how to pierce the charm, you can't banish the spook, or guide us to its master either. Is that about the gist of it?'
'I'm afraid so.'
