then I listened to what I was thinking. Horrified at myself, I resolved I should never see her again. It was when I realized how much I would miss her that I knew I must leave Caelrhon at once and become a hermit.”
“You can’t be a hermit,” I said weakly before the intensity of his gaze. “You’re the bishop.”
“And in my misery and sin,” he said, looking away at last and seeming to pay no attention to anything I said, “I thought this afternoon to walk to the hermitage in that deep valley at the east end of Yurt. If I started now, I told myself, I could be there in two days. I would leave my vestments and episcopal ring for the Romneys to find. If they kept the ring for themselves-well, it had become too tainted for the next bishop to want anyway. Naked I would reach the valley and beg the hermit with tears of penitence to accept me as a novice.”
The picture of Joachim walking naked across two kingdoms in order to shave his head and become an apprentice hermit was almost too much for me. Shoulders quivering, I managed to suppress hysterical laughter. The bishop would probably only consider it appropriate punishment for me to laugh at him on top of everything else, but I could not let it out. The thought of the hermit of the shrine of the Cranky Saint, a man who had been a ragged apprentice hermit himself when I first met him years ago, did not help.
“That was why I was so startled when you walked up to me, Daimbert,” Joachim continued after a moment, looking out to what was shaping up into a rather fine sunset. “You appeared like the voice of conscience, telling me by your very presence that a bishop cannot walk away from his duties without even telling anyone that he is going, and that to escape without confessing my sins would be only to embrace them. My true penitence must come in facing my cathedral chapter. They will be surprised when they hear that their bishop-who, I have led them to believe in my own sinful complacency, is a virtuous man-has fallen so far.”
I knew I had to talk him out of it if I could only think of what to say. Somehow my own insanity this morning must have infected him. “Don’t do anything you may regret without giving it proper thought,” I said inadequately and out of my own experience.
Joachim turned, and we started slowly back toward the city. The sun had slipped behind the horizon, and the whole world now was shadowed. “Would it be better to tell my chapter this evening, in a privacy that would not disrupt the simple faith which Christians have in their priests,” he asked, “or would it be best to announce it publicly at the high altar tomorrow morning? Would my sins be more truly atoned for if I suffered public humiliation, or am I only taking a perverse pride in how far I have fallen?”
Considering that I did not feel he had fallen at all I had trouble answering him. But then a light flickering in the distance before us caught my eyes.
It was not a lingering ray of the sun remaining on Caelrhon when gone from the rest of the land. Quickly I shaped a far-seeing spell. At the same time the sound of the alarm bells, one high and desperately urgent, one deep with a note that seemed to enter the blood, rang out from the cathedral tower and across the meadow grass toward us.
“Come on!” I cried, lifting from the ground to fly. “The city’s on fire!”
PART FOUR — CYRUS
I
Even before we reached the city walls I could hear the roar of the flames. It was the bellow of a gigantic animal, a wordless, implacable voice, above which human shouts rose insubstantial and confused. Over all rang the unceasing note of the alarm bells.
Flying, I reached the city gates before the bishop but only by ten yards. The fire had taken hold in the shops and inns lining the high street, just within the gates. The street was jammed with onlookers who had to keep dodging sparks. Flames licked from windows in upper stories, and exploding bottles shot high. The bishop said something beside me, but I could not hear him. A roof went with a roar, the collapsing blackened timbers silhouetted against the lurid light.
Not the cathedral, I told myself desperately, not the artisans’ quarter where Theodora lived, not the castle where the twins were staying. Joachim was no longer beside me, but I had no time for him anyway. If I could somehow restrict the fire to this street-
The people who lived here must already have emptied the big barrels kept at every corner, for they had formed a human chain to bring more water up from the river in buckets. Ordinary school magic, the magic of light and air, was useless here. I braced myself against a gatepost and tried instead to find in the magic of fire something to slow this blaze.
Originally I had learned fire magic from Theodora. It was slippery and dangerous, bringing one into contact with vast and inhuman primordial forces. Lighting and controlling fires could usually be done by such simple, ordinary methods that wizards stayed away from these perilous spells. But I deliberately left the well-worn tracks cut through magic by generations of wizardry to venture where few successfully went, to skitter through magic’s four dimensions and try to find a way to rein in flames now rising twenty feet above a ruined roof.
And found another mind trying to do the same thing. Theodora! I touched her thoughts for a fraction of a second, unsure where her body was but more confident than I had any right to be with her magic joined to mine.
She was still better at fire magic than I was, even though most of her experience lay in lighting candles and cooking fires,
And then, suddenly, we turned a flame whose tip had leaned toward an untouched thatch roof. The men and women with buckets threw water at the flame’s base, and the water evaporated into hissing clouds of steam. But more water kept coming. The flame’s tip wavered again and moved backwards, shrinking, no longer threatening the next house across the street.
The dark evening sky had become orange above us. I took a breath of air that could have come from an oven and tried again. There, and there! Dancing through spells in the Hidden Language, twice almost being sucked so deeply into the forces of magic that I might never have found myself again, I sought a way to turn the next flame, then the next-
I came back to myself with a thump as my legs collapsed beneath me. Hard magic is physically exhausting. Rubbing a bruised hip, I looked up with no idea how much time had passed. But the townspeople had the fire in check. Clouds of white steam still rose with every bucket of water poured, but no more flames flickered in the windows or out the roofs, and the great roar of a lion the size of the cathedral was no more than a growl.
Then I looked around at those people not actively involved in fighting the fire, the groups watching disconsolately the destruction of what had once been their businesses or homes. Many were blanket-wrapped children, staring in horrified fascination. The city mayor was there, grubby and without his chains of office, but I heard him announcing that the covered market would be open for anyone who needed shelter.
I saw Joachim then, speaking to people and helping pass out the bread and ale that someone had brought from elsewhere in the city. The cathedral would doubtless buy much of the food for the families forced in the next weeks to live at the covered market. I wondered, too tired from hard magic to give the idea much consideration, if the bishop still intended to resign, and whether he might decide this fire was somehow punishment for his own sins.
Again I found Theodora’s mind. She was as tired as I. “I’ll be by later,” I told her. “Much later, I’m afraid. Get some sleep. Thank you.”
Pushing myself away from the gate, I started walking, finding back alleys to dodge around the area where the fire still lingered. The houses now appeared more black than orange, but it would be midnight or later, I knew, before the last coals were extinguished, and none of the structures was salvageable. People were talking now of how the fire might have started, several men saying confidently that they had heard the problem began with a chimney fire, others speculating whether a child left alone might have allowed a fire to spread beyond the hearth.
A voice stopped me. “I’ll bet you it was the Romneys.”
