As I said, I remember little about the night that was odd or untoward. At one point Thom Regin — who I thought was not happy about Doras keeping company with another man, but had not said so straightly, recited a bit of poetry about a man who beds a fairy-princess and wakes up in the morning to find that the Twilight People have ensorceled him and that his companion is a sow. Sommerle for some reason took exception to this foolish rhyme and threatened Regin with a dagger, although the knife was never actually produced. Arvald the tavern-owner intervened, and only Doras’ tearful pleading kept him from ejecting John Sommerle from the Mint on the instant.
The three hooded men took little interest in this brawl, as far as I could see.
Later in the evening, while I was busy playing potboy and thus did not see what happened, Sommerle and the woman Doras fell into a disagreement for some reason and Sommerle left the Quiller’s Mint. He did not come back, at least while the tavern was open.
When the bell rang in the temple of the Trigon and closing hour came round, the Jellonian woman and Thom Regin seemed to have been reconciled. She was fondling his face and lovingly tweaking his beard while he recited her some bit of doggerel, this one a tale of women who give their hearts to fairy-princes. Since he seemed to be likening himself to such an immortal and magical lover, I thought he was overbuilding himself a bit — Regin was not the most presupposing of men. In any case, that was the last time I saw him. Arvald called for those who were present to empty their scoops. He had not locked the doors yet, and a few of the patrons were still in the tavern when he sent me to my bed. That was the first thing in the evening that felt odd to me, since Arvald generally kept me at my labors until every tankard was rinsed and every bench and table wiped.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by a woman’s voice raised in a scream. My nostrils were instantly full of the harsh scent of smoke. Tripping over the other inhabitants of my shared room, who were slower to wake than I, I made my way to the stairs and started downward. Between the ground floor and the first story I almost ran into a dark figure. It was the woman Doras, her hair and clothes in disarray, looking as though she had just been pulled from bed, although whether also from sleep would have been another question.
“Where is my Riggin?” she said, her Jellonian accent making it hard for me to understand what she was saying. “My Rig, where has he gone?”
I shoved past her and made my way down to the tavern. A fire was burning, not in the fireplace, but in the straw floor on the opposite side of the main room. Lying beside this new blaze but not in the flames was a dark shape. I leaned over to see the poet Regin with his forehead caved in like a broken eggshell and blood running from his nose and mouth. He was lying near one of the room’s wooden ceiling-pillars. I suppose that if he had been running across the room, not looking where he was going, he might have hit the pillar hard enough to crack his poll that way. I am not certain I believe that, but I cannot say it is impossible.
In any case, I had no time to think about it then. The fire was already spreading across the straw and in a moment more I would be surrounded and hemmed in by the blaze. I tried to drag the poet’s corpse with me, although I knew he was already dead, but he was too heavy. It must be remembered that at the time I was only a stripling, and Regin must have carried almost twice my weight.
I ran out of the tavern then and through the inn, shouting for Arvald, calling out that there was fire in the house, fire! Soon the halls and stairwell were full of confused guests and tavern patrons — apparently Arvald had allowed a card game in his own chambers after the main room was closed. I saw Arvald trying to enlist the help of some of the scurrying cardplayers to go to the lagoon to fill buckets of water, but no one paid him any attention in the smoke and shouting and darkness lit only by flickering flames. One man was killed in the crush at the front door, trampled until his ribs cracked and pierced his heart, and several more had broken limbs and other injuries trying to get out. As the fire swiftly spread, some had to leap out of the upper stories into the ordure of Squeakstep Alley. It was only due to the mercy of Zoria, I believe, and of Honnos who watches over travelers, that more were not killed inside the tavern.
But many others did die as the fire spread to some of the nearby roofs, and to the tenement houses on Tin Street where hundreds of people lived in each single three- or four-story house. All told, something more than two dozen folk were killed in the terrible Quiller’s Mint fire and hundreds more lost their homes. The conflagration would have burned far more of the city had not two sides been blocked from spreading by Skimmer’s Lagoon, and one side by the city wall itself.
There was not much strange in the events of that evening, as I said, but there was much that was strange that happened afterward.
Arvald, the owner of the tavern, disappeared within a few days after the fire. Some said that was because there was nothing except an expensive and pointless salvage to detain him in Southmarch any longer and so he had gone back to the Vuttish islands, others suggested it was because his conscience was something less than clean. Why he should have set a fire in his own tavern, though, has not yet been convincingly explained even by those who suggest his guilt.
When Thom Regin’s body was brought out of the ashes, it was naught but black bones and charred meat, and thus nothing I said would have made any difference, so I told no one of how I had found him. I was young and not keen for the eye of authority to fall on me in such an unflattering situation. I might have spoken up if John Sommerle had remained, but he too had vanished, never seen again after Arvald shoved him out of the Quiller’s Mint front door. The Jellonian woman Doras was little help in answering questions. She could never speak of the evening without bursting into tears, and the pox took her within a year or two in any case.
Was it simply by chance that the Mint burned down? It matters little, I suppose, because a new tavern was soon built on the ashes of the old, and because the oldest parts of the place are in any case below ground or in the city walls and thus went unscathed.
It still seems odd that the fire should have started on the opposite side of the room from the fireplace, on a damp night, and that I should find Thom Regin’s corpse on the ground near the place where it had caught. But if John Sommerle came back to murder Regin and set the fire to cover his deed, why did he not simply drag the poet’s corpse out through one of the side doors and leave it in an alley instead? Regin would have been thought only the most recent in a long line of Quiller’s Mint patrons who never made it back to their homes through the Lagoon District’s sometimes inhospitable streets.
There are even wilder speculations, most based around the reputed presence of the man who would someday be our King Olin, but I have never heard one of these tales yet that did not sound to me like the ravings of a madman. The idea that a king who has always shown kindness even to his lowest and poorest subjects would instruct his guards to set a deadly fire simply to hide the fact that he was visiting a tavern… well, there is just no sense to it.