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he had learned to sleep in camp, beat down the overstuffed pillow, and slept.
He woke coughing, smoke acrid in his throat. Rolled from his bed, to thud onto all fours, almost
strangling with the force of the cough. Sonn shuddered with the coughing, but beneath the shuddering,
everything in the room shimmered in the layered smoke and heat.
He snared the shoes from under the bed, spilled the water pitcher from his table down over his head and
shirt, and pressed the soaked shirt to his face to filter the smoke. He was already disoriented. No point
feeling the door before he opened it; to open it might be to burn, but to remain was to suffocate.
He did not burn, and the smoke was thinner on the landing. He heard women coughing; men, too. Sonn
laced the stairwell. He worked his way down the stairs, halting above the mill of two dozen partly
dressed whores and overstayers.
Someone shrieked overhead, a cry far too brief for its intensity. The house shook and scattered stinging
debris. A man said near him, in a remarkably calm voice,  Next door s roof must have gone. Whole row
must be ablaze. We don t have long.
One of the women said shrilly,  If we go outside, we ll burn.
The man said,  We need to get into the basement. These old row houses used to connect through the
basements. Maybe we can make our way ahead of the fire; surely the Lightborn will come to our aid.
There was a moment s desperate babble of hope and despair that the Lightborn were their only hope of
succor. Ish did not add to it. The Lightborn fire service would assemble to fight the fire, and the mages
themselves would intervene if they could not control the blaze, but it would take time for them to ready
the magical forces needed to damp the fire or conjure a rainstorm. Working with the elements was
extremely demanding.
The whole mob crowded down the stairs, the madam and the man who had suggested the basement
leading, Ish lagging. Without gloves, and with his shirt dragged up around his face as a shield against
smoke, every touch would sear him with someone else s terror. Within a press of half-naked, panicking
people, he would lose his wits utterly. As the men began to tear away the paneling over the connecting
door between basements, Ish probed the recess beneath the stairwell with his sonn. The houses on the
Rivermarch dated from the earliest years of the city, when the main streets used by the Darkborn had run
underground. With time and the aging of their infrastructure, underground thoroughfares had become
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more difficult to keep dry, and the Darkborn had become more trusting of the Lightborn s willingness to
contain their light and share the streets. Eventually the tunnels were abandoned and the entrances bricked
or boarded up. However, over the years, some of the houses on the Rivermarch had harbored trade less
reputable than brothel keeping, and some of those forgotten entryways had been reopened. If Ish were
not imagining the draft he felt on his sweating skin, then they might be able to get deeper yet and make
their way clear of the fire along the old thoroughfares.
Across the room, men s voices cried in triumph and women s with relief as the panels cracked. Ish,
crouching in the recess, sonned them as they pushed through the shattered door. He ducked back out of
the recess, meaning to draw breath and call their attention to the other, and perhaps ultimately surer,
option and at that moment, with a great hot thunder, the house above them began its collapse. The
ceiling overhead held, for the moment, but a fiery rain of fine debris stung his skin, and something struck
him, hard and searing, on the shoulder. Across the room someone screamed,  The door! Bar the door!
In the mad miasma of smoke and dust, he could no longer sonn the other exit. He knew himself
committed to one choice or the other now, and made his decision. He ducked back into the recess,
strangling on smoke, his head scraping the underside of the stairs. His groping hands met brick, met and
measured the cleft; for a moment he thought it could not pass him, stocky as he was, and then he thrust
himself into it, trapped heart beating on brick, brick scouring his burned back and shoulders, and hauled
himself through with the power of his arms alone. Air blasted past him, dragged by the furnace overhead.
He found himself hanging out of the side of a long tunnel, above the rubble that had once sealed the
entryway and before that been the stairs up to it. He managed to lever himself out and get his feet under
him before he half fell, half skidded down the tunnel s side into the foot of foul water in its base. Its fetor
was kinder to his lungs than the smoke, its filthy cold poisonously soothing on his burns. He struggled up
to his knees in it, supporting himself on rubble as he drained soundness from his bones into his lungs and
throat. Only as much as he dared and not nearly as much as he needed, but still enough to let him get to
his feet. He could hear voices, distorted by the tunnel and by a panic mounting toward madness: the other
refugees, trapped, or realizing that they could not break down doors faster than the fire could travel. The
fate he now realized he had, without knowing it, feared. He started toward the voices, skidding on the
slimy, uneven footing of the drowned flagstones. The voices grew clearer, and by that clarity he found
another former doorway in the wall. He tried to call to them, but nothing came from his raw throat but a
cough that had him tasting blood. The stairs were nearly intact here, so he started up them, when from the
far side of the cleft there came a rumbling roar that built until it almost masked the screams, and a blast of
smoke and heat through the cleft. He launched himself from the stairs and sprawled his length in the
water, scarcely believing for a time that sunlight had not speared through and burned him. The living
sounds from the other side continued for a little while longer, though they had ceased to be recognizable
as man or woman, or even as Darkborn. He would hear them in his nightmares for much longer still.
Shuddering, Ish pushed himself to his feet once more, and made his way onward.
Five
Telmaine
Telmaine woke to the sound of her daughter, her Flori, crying, and to a certainty of horror. There was
smoke in her throat, the roar of fire in her dreams. With pounding heart she sat upright on the bed beside
her sleeping husband, sweeping the room with her sonn.  Flori . . . Olivede stirred in her chair beside
their bed. Amerdale did not, where she slept curled up against Balthasar, whom she had refused to leave.
 Something s happening, Telmaine whispered.  Something bad.
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  I know, murmured Olivede.  I sense it, too. The shared awareness shimmered between them, and
then Olivede fully awoke and Telmaine remembered where she was and to whom she spoke.  I must
have been dreaming, she said, panicked at so near a self-revelation.
The smoke was gone, the roar of fire gone. Only the presentiment of disaster remained, throbbing like a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]