Circle Opens #03: Cold Fire Page 12

  “Daja, welcome,” said Ben. His office was crammed with a large desk, account books in cases, maps on a worktable, and pigeonhole shelves into which rolled pieces of paper were thrust. One wall backed a large cupboard. The wall beside his desk was covered with large slates that looked to be shipping schedules. A corner stove threw off a small amount of heat, enough that he didn’t wear his outer coat. He did wear his indoor coat buttoned all the way up. Somehow she didn’t think he was that much warmer than his clerks.

  She reached again for the earth’s heat, letting it spread from her this time in a pool of warmth. She doubted the ability of the stove to hold what she could bring to it. Testing it with her power, she saw the joint weldings were cheap work that only fused the edges of the attached pieces. Moreover, the iron sides were uneven in thickness. It was better to radiate the heat from her own body.

  As the air warmed, Daja shed her outer coat, rested her staff against the wall, and opened her satchel on the worktable. She watched Ben from the corner of one eye. In this room, with its inkwells, slates, books, and stacks of patterns on heavy parchment, the hulking Ben seemed like a bear in a pit, resigned to having starved dogs dropped in to harry him. The contrast with his behavior at the boardinghouse fire pinched her heart. He ought to be outside, facing danger head on, not trapped with clerks and furriers.

  “You won’t be comfortable,” Ben warned as she doffed her inner coat. Despite his words, he’d begun to fiddle with his own collar buttons. “We get a daily allowance of coal for the stoves, and I’m out.” He tried a smile. “Mother says people get lazy if they’re too warm.”

  He took Daja’s inner coat from her hands and folded it neatly before he set it on his desk. “I spoke to the magistrates’ mages about the boardinghouse fire, by the way. They say they’ll look into it, when they have time. Of course, a fire in Shopgirl District isn’t at the top of their list of priorities.”

  Daja, remembering the counterfeiting case that was at the top of their list, and its potential for national disaster, nodded.

  Ben unbuttoned his coat. “What do you need me to do? It must be about to snow — it’s warmer in here, don’t you think?”

  Daja took the metal rods from her satchel. That afternoon she had cut them to fit the lengths shown in her tracings of Ben’s arms. “It is snowing,” she told him. “Could you make a clear spot on your desk?”

  He shifted stacks of paper and accounting books. When he finished, Daja had him sit with his arms flat on the desk. “I thought you’d just mold them on me like clay, or maybe sew cloth gloves?” Ben asked.

  Daja shook her head. “I need to make a metal form, like a dressmaker would use, only for gloves,” she explained. “And I have to be sure of all the dimensions in your hands and arms. Otherwise you’ll be fighting the gloves to hold things when all your mind should be on the fire.”

  Ben commented, “So when I have to push burning material aside, I won’t cook the back of my hand again.”

  “Exactly,” Daja replied. She positioned two rods on either side of his forearms, leaving room for him to wear the gloves over his outdoor coat. Taking the elbow and wrist rods, she channeled the earth’s heat up through a sheath of magic to shield the wood around her. She used it to warm her rods to the point where she could handle them like clay. It was tricky work. She had to add enough heat to the elbow and wrist rings both to make them curve around his joints, and to fuse them to the side rods, all without burning the man or his clothes.

  “Raise your forearms until they’re straight up, palms facing out,” she said quietly. Ben obeyed, lifting his hands. Now Daja closed the elbow and wrist rings, heating them until the ends merged without a seam.

  As Ben sat patiently, she added rod after rod to the forearm model, heating the ends and molding them around the rings. He remained silent and steady, a rare virtue. She’d had to stop using Briar as a model for this kind of thing because his ability to sit still was limited unless he worked his own magic. Then he had a tree’s patience.

  “Do you need a rest?” she asked when the forearm and wrist segments were finished. “Move your arms?”

  “I’m fine.” Ben said. “It’s soothing, in a way. You’re much better than the maid who fits my clothes. She chatters about silly things until I want to scream. What happens next?”

  “I do the same thing, but with your hands. That’s trickier,” she explained, warming the shorter rods. “I have to work around the joints, so there are lots of little pieces to fit. Don’t worry, this is just the boring part. The finished gloves will feel like your own skin.” The short pieces for the palms were ready. As she began to attach them to each wrist ring, she said, “I saw that burned-out warehouse on my way in.”

  “That,” he replied contemptuously. “It happened a month ago. Losing it was a blessing. It just held old furnishings and nonsense. I would have cleaned it out years past, but Mother saves everything. Mind, this was the first fire we’d had in the city since spring.” He smiled ruefully. “You’d think I’d be glad for a summer without fires, but …” He shook his head.

  “You keep waiting for the black ship to dock,” suggested Daja, working away.

  “Black ship?” asked Ben.

  “Sorry — a Trader thing. A ship with black sails carries bad news,” she explained.

  “That’s a vivid image. A black ship — I’ll have to remember that. Yes, I suppose I was waiting for it. Expecting it, really, only it never came. And the longer we went between fires, the lazier the people I was training to fight them got. It was maddening.”

  Daja nodded, most of her attention on her work. In a corner of her mind not fixed on her creation, she thought it a pity that a man couldn’t take up firefighting as employment. Ben’s heart wasn’t in trade. And Teraud was right, a little: it was odd that Ben had gotten entangled with the thing that had destroyed his early life.

  “May I ask something?” he inquired as she checked the gaps between her framework and his body. Living metal didn’t stretch. If she didn’t leave plenty of room for clothes, he’d have to remove his coat to use the gloves against some fire and risk freezing outdoors some bitter night.

  Daja nodded.

  Ben tapped one metal-framed arm against the brass on her left hand, making it clink. “How did that happen? Doesn’t it hurt you?”

  “Oh, that,” she murmured, stretching a thumb ring gently. “Remember the fire I told you I was in? I was holding my staff with that hand and the cap melted all over it. I guess it mixed with the magic my friends and I were using, and, well, there it is. Now that I’m accustomed to it, I don’t mind. You should see my foster-brother’s hands. They’re strange. He tried to tattoo them with plant dyes, and now ink plants bloom and grow all over his hands.” She eased each form off, setting them on the desk while Ben rubbed his hands and arms. “My thanks. You were very patient.”

  Ben smiled. “It’s all to my benefit, after all. Surely my sitting for a short time isn’t too high a price to pay.”

  Daja stowed her materials and the iron sleeve forms in her satchel, pulled on her coats, and picked up her staff. “I’ll send word when I have something to show you.”

  Ben shrugged on his outdoor coat and lit a spill from his stove. In the outer hall he used it to light a lantern by the door. He took it from its hook. “I’ll walk you to the street. Are you hiring a sleigh to go home?”

  Daja smiled. “I’d as soon jump off a bridge. Besides, I like walking in the snow.”

  Ben frowned. “It’s a long walk, Daja.” Together they went into the courtyard. “Why don’t you wait until Mother comes from shopping, and ride with us?”

  The thought of sharing a sleigh with the sour-faced Morrachane made Daja shudder. To change the subject without offending Ben, she glanced at the mess of the burned warehouse. “May I take a look?”

  Ben obligingly led the way through snow that fell in fat, steady flakes. “I could hardly believe it when it happened,” Ben remarked. “The place went up like a torc
h. Usually most of the ground floor walls are left, but not this time.” The wreckage inside the huge, cluttered rectangular pit that was the cellar of the old warehouse was nearly two feet deep in accumulated snow.

  Daja sighed and hunkered down with her staff against one shoulder. She was annoyed at having to deal yet again with Namornese winter. In civilized places winter arrived as rains, obscuring the ground only if the water collected into a pond. She called a burst of heat up, jamming it through her outstretched, spread fingers to blanket the ruin. This heat-wash was far quicker than those she’d used in the Ladradun offices, and far hotter. She didn’t hear Ben’s soft gasp as the snow within the walls of the ruined building shrank, collapsed in on itself, and trickled away, melted completely.

  “That’s better,” Daja commented with satisfaction. She stood. “Now we can see. May I have your lantern a minute?”

  Ben handed it over. Daja opened it and took a pinch of flame, then closed the lantern and returned it to him. She let the pinch of fire roll into her palm, then called again on the earth’s heat. Her fire seed bloomed to brighten the entire courtyard. She held her hand out before her to see the wreckage clearly now that she had cleared it of snow. The hole in the ground showed the remains of charred floors at its edges. Inside fragments of the outer walls she could decipher the way the upper floors had dropped through the lower ones until everything came to a stop in the cellar. At the very rear of the pit she discovered a gaping hole.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it.

  Ben squinted to see what she meant. “It’s a loading tunnel,” he explained. “All the canal-side businesses have them. In the summer the boats tie up in front of the tunnels, and the hands can then carry supplies right into storerooms and warehouses.”

  “Very tidy,” said Daja, impressed. “Were the doors to the canal open last month?”

  “Yes,” Ben replied with a puzzled frown. “We keep them open all winter, or the freezing in the ground warps, even breaks them. Why?”

  “It’s the key to how the warehouse burned so fast,” she explained, walking around the wreckage to get a closer view of the open tunnel. Sure enough, she felt a cold draft rising from it.

  He stared at her. Even the bright light she held didn’t bleach his features enough to hide that he was plainly startled. “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “It comes of being a smith.” Daja let the seed of fire sink into her palm. It made her hand glow orange, lit from within, until she thrust it into the ground. She forgot to sheath it in her power: the instant the unguarded heat entered the earth, the snow melted and she sank into slush to her ankles. Daja climbed out of the puddle with a sigh and shook her booted feet off.

  “We pump air with the bellows through a channel under the fire. That makes it even hotter, and that’s why this place” — she pointed to the shadowy depths of the ruined warehouse with her staff— “went up so thoroughly.” She walked back to him. “How did it start? Was it deliberately set? All this is too perfect to be an accident.”

  Ben shrugged “Why go to so much trouble for a worthless building? I assumed some beggar got in there to sleep out of the wind, and his cookfire or candle set it burning by accident. Frankly, I didn’t care. I’ve been after Mother for years to pull that firetrap down. At least it gave my local firefighters a chance to use their training, after months of no fires at all.”

  Daja nodded, impressed. That was so like him to worry that, without chances to work, his people might not be ready for a true disaster. Only Ben would think that more important than the loss of a second-rate warehouse.

  A gust of wind made him shiver. Here she was, keeping this man out in the cold. “I’d best be going,” she told him.

  “I wish you would wait for Mother,” he complained. “It’s on —”

  “Ben!” a hard voice cried, interrupting. “Lamps are lit in the cutting room with no one there!” Morrachane Ladradun walked out of Ben’s office — Daja guessed she had entered through the store on Cashbox Street. “Where are the Dancruan accounts? And your office is far too warm.”

  If Morrachane had a mirror, thought Daja, it had to be metal. Silvered glass would break every time Ben’s mother showed that face to it. As it was, Daja bet the metal had to be flattened at regular intervals. Continued exposure to Morrachane’s face would warp the best metal from time to time.

  Ben sighed faintly and went to his mother. Daja followed.

  “Who is with you?” demanded the older woman. She peered through the swirling snow at Daja. “Oh. Ravvikki Kisubo.”

  “Ravvi Ladradun.” Daja said with minimum politeness. Even that was for Ben, not for this unpleasant female who refused to call her by her mage title. “I was just going.”

  “Daja, wait and leave with us,” Ben said. “We have plenty of room, and it’s a miserable night.”

  Morrachane’s lips crept upwards at the ends. Daja winced. She had forgotten — happily — the unfortunate results of Morrachane’s attempts to smile. “I am happy to offer a ride to the twins’ friend,” she informed Daja. “Particularly the one who revealed their magical talents. I always suspected it, of course, but having no familial ties, I couldn’t very well get them examined by a better mage than those the Bancanors hired.”

  Daja opened her mouth to reply to the implied insult to Kol and Matazi, then closed it again. The mark of a born Trader was to know when persuasion and discussion were useless. Instead she bowed to Ben, then to Morrachane. “I thank you, but I’ve been at the forge all day. I need the walk. Good night to you both.” Rather than risk Ben arguing with her, she walked briskly to the gate on the street.

  In her wake she heard Morrachane tell her son, “It’s just as well. I want to review those accounts from the capital.”

  8

  Outside the Ladradun gate lamps burned, marking the edges of the road in the snow. Daja trudged down Sarah Street, looking around her. She didn’t care what Frostpine said: she loved freshly fallen snow, the way it clung to trees, fences, and ornamental carvings, softening even the jingle of sleighbells, muffling the clop of horses and the sounds of people going home. She loved the way it danced in the air, shaping globes of light around the lamps, swirling in and out of patterns. In the mountains between the Syth and Emelan snow was untouchable, hard, and deadly. Here people trudged through it, swept it, rode through its cutains and streamers, played with it. It made the busy Kugiskans into friendly people. Everyone she passed wished her a good evening, or smiled and said things like, “A foot or two by morning, at least!” Daja answered them with smiles and nods. She didn’t know enough about this white element to predict how much would come down before sunrise.

  She heard bells approach behind her and moved close to the lamp-posts to give the sleigh plenty of room to pass. She kept her head down, hoping the vehicle coming up on her wasn’t the Ladraduns’.

  “Viymese Daja?” a familiar voice called. “Is that you?”

  She turned as the Bancanor sleigh, Serg at the reins, drew up by her. Behind Serg Daja saw a lump of quilts and furs that had to be Jory.

  “Why are you afoot?” Serg demanded, reining up. “Get in. You’ll freeze.”

  Daja climbed up beside him rather than disturb the girl. They drove on in friendly silence until they turned into the back courtyard at Bancanor House. A stable hand emerged from the snow to take the sleigh as Serg scooped Jory off the seat, blankets, furs, and all. He carried her into the slush room, Daja behind him.

  After hanging up their own coats and boots, they unwound the sleepy Jory. She had ash on one cheek and flour on another; her apron was splashed with some kind of red sauce, and a gluey substance clung to the end of her braid. “She says Anyussa’s a good teacher,” Jory told Daja drowsily as they went into the kitchen. “She said I don’t have to unlearn things.”

  In the kitchen they saw Frostpine at one of the tables. He worked his way through a bowl of soup as he talked to Anyussa. Nia sat across from them, whittling buttons. Other m
embers of the household were gathered there, some with sewing in their hands, others giving pots and boots a thorough polish, still more just gossiping.

  “What’s going on?” Jory asked, sliding onto the bench next to her twin. “Why’s everybody in here?”

  On of the maids opened the door that led to the family’s part of the house. They heard a clear, commanding female voice: “— the day that one of my granddaughters would be spending any more time in Blackfly Bog than she might need to drop off a basket for the poor —” The maid shut the door again.

  “Oh,” said Daja with a wince. She had forgotten this was the night that Kol’s mother came for her once-a-week meal with her son and his wife.

  “‘Beware the matriarchs of Namorn,’” Frostpine said, quoting a proverb, “‘for they are queens without crowns.’”

  Daja grimaced. If Morrachane’s a queen, it’s of pijule fakol, she thought, placing Ben’s mother in the worst of the Trader afterlives, reserved for those who did not pay their debts.

  Frostpine eyed Daja. “You look all nice and rosy with the cold,” he remarked. “I suppose you’re going to tell me this weather isn’t so bad.”

  He looked so miserable that she went over and kissed his head. “I won’t say any such thing,” she promised him. Instead she laid her fingers under his beard, where she could feel the pulse in his neck veins. Slowly, carefully, she let heat trickle into his body to warm his blood.

  Frostpine sighed his gratitude. “Not that the food hasn’t thawed me out wonderfully,” he told Anyussa, who smiled.

  “Or that you’re practically sitting in the kitchen fire,” Daja added, feeling its heat on her back. She asked Nia, “How did it go, your first day?”

  Nia held up a wooden rod the width of Daja’s thumbnail, and gestured to a small saw, carving knives, sanding paper, and a heap of buttons and sawdust before her. “Arnen showed me how to make buttons,” she said with a shrug. “I’m to work on them at home, and he’ll check every week to see how many I do.”