Page 52 of A Trade of Blood

“Perhaps so. Though I cannot imagine the reason!” She turned to Tauri. “Sir—please continue with your labors here and wring every grain of truth out of that dead girl. Din—acarriage, please, and then let’s fetch Seriv. I don’t care what time of night it is! I intend to kick Burilis Burav out of bed and force him to answer my fucking questions!”

—

Princeps Seriv provedeasy to rouse, for he’d not been sleeping at all. “Find it hard to sleep these days,” he told us haggardly as he climbed into our carriage, “given the feeling of something festering behind my eyes.” When we reported all we’d discovered to him, he reacted with beleaguered dismay: “Then it’s as we feared. The man who fashioned the weapon has been wielding it in secret. Let’s see which way he jumps.”

“I admire that attitude, Princeps!” said Ana. “But take care—if he jumps for a whistle or pipe, we must be ready.”

We rode south and then west, along the Great Spoke Road. I had not ridden in a destrier-driven carriage before, and though the wheels were cunningly wrought of a special fretvine to make the ride feel smoother, the steeds pulling us were far more advanced than the fretvine. The experience was like being stuffed in a box that was then shoved off a cliff. Seriv kept attempting to put his pipe in his mouth for a puff, and missing; I kept falling asleep and getting awoken as my head cracked the back panel; and Ana, of course, just sat hunched and muttering. Whether her rocking was caused by the carriage, her own metronomic twitching, or both, I did not know.

Then she went still. She sniffed once, then twice. “What’s that?” she asked sharply.

“What d’you mean, ma’am?” asked Seriv.

“That smell!” she snapped. “I smell a fume on the air! What is that?”

I sniffed the dank air. Immediately, my nose burned so badly I was forced to sneeze. At the precise same time, our carriage began slowingto a halt, and I heard our carriage pilot crying out, calling to his mounts to stop, stop.

“Something is wrong,” said Ana. “Something is quite wrong…”

Frowning, Seriv opened the shuttered window and stuck his head out. The moment he turned his face to peer southwest, his features lit up with a hellish, bright orange luminescence, and his eyes opened wide with fear.

“Oh, hell,” he whispered. “It all burns! Fire!Fire!” The carriage came to a stop, and he flung open the door and leapt out.

“Din!” said Ana sharply.

“I am to it, ma’am,” I said, and followed.

I felt the heat the instant I moved beyond the walls of our carriage, a low, soft wall of warmth settling over me like a flickering blanket. My eyes burned greatly, and for a moment I saw only the moon above, which had the look of an aging tea-stain hanging in the churning, smoggy sky. Then I turned and beheld the lands to the southwest.

We had been coming to the entrance of the Burav main spread, I saw; two tremendous fretvine pillars rose up on either side of the road ahead. Set between them was the gentry-gate. Its high, slender trellises framed the road stretching through, wandering amid the open, mown lawns—and then there, some two leagues down its length, stood a burning mountain.

No, not a mountain, I saw: a building, a structure, one that had been enormous, five or six stories tall, with two high towers on either end. Black smoke poured from the building’s windows like velvety curtains pulled out by the wind, and all the air about it danced with sparks and twirling cinders. Then the night filled up with the ringing of bells: warning bells, tocsin bells, signaling to the populace to awake, awake and take heed.

I absently rubbed tears from my face. How often had I heard the tones of tocsin bells in my service—but I’d not ever expected to do so in the safe, protected third ring of the Empire.

“Din!” hissed Ana’s voice from the carriage.

I tottered over to her, vaguely aware that Seriv was commandeering a destrier from our carriage pilot and intended to speed toward the inferno.

“Is it the Burav estate?” she asked. “Is that what burns?”

“I…believe so, ma’am,” I said faintly.

She cocked her blindfolded head, listening to the tolling of the bells. “Well!” she sighed. “This, I shall say, is quite a fucking complication!”

III

Calm, Calm

Chapter 15

It took nearly the wholeof the night to manage the fire at the Burav estate. I assisted as best I could in the water line, passing along bucket after bucket of silty dreck from the stream near the main house. The smoke settled on our shoulders, wrapped about our necks, and smothered our faces, but I heard only quiet words of encouragement, and never a complaint. My arms and back ached and my face grew dark with soot, but still we labored, for still the house smoldered. Yet eventually our buckets of stream water shifted from being used to extinguish the blaze to containing it: the house was deemed lost, as was all within, and now we were to keep it from spreading.

Some spoke softly as we worked, sharing half-heard news. Nobody knew how the blaze had started, nor who had escaped and who had perished. Yet one thing that the folk of my bucket line agreed on was that the fire had begun inside the house. This produced many glances, both somber and suspicious.

Morning trickled through the smoke-wreathed skies. I spied Princeps Seriv stalking about with his custodi, his face more haggard than ever: because he was part of the canton peacekeeping force, the task of fire management fell to him. To see him away from the heart of the blaze suggested that he felt it was contained.

I left the bucket line, approached him, and asked the status.