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, not in trying to hold back flames which had now consumed a city block and were roaring in anticipation of the next one, flames that could have come straight from hell. Slowly, almost delicately, our minds worked together, darting carefully into the forces of magic, pulling back just before we had gone too far.
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.”
I made my legs start walking again, but this man, whoever he might be, was not alone. By the time I left the streets surrounding the area where the fire had raged, I had heard four more people speculating that it was not simply an accident but arson by the Romneys.
Why them? I asked myself, hurrying toward the little castle on the far side of town. They had done nothing to hurt the people of Caelrhon, except perhaps beat them in sharpness of horse trading.
But they came from the Eastern Kingdoms, spoke their own language, and were not Christian. Those were, it seemed, sufficient reasons to suspect them.
No one appeared to have gone to bed in the city. The smoke had permeated all the streets, and rumors and reports of the progress of the fire ran up and down around me. Celia, who met me in the same hall of the castle where we had spoken earlier, seemed the only person not concerned about it. She set down her Bible and came forward to grip my hands with an excitement that had nothing to do with the fire. In dim candlelight her eyes were featureless smudges against her fair skin.
“This evening, Wizard,” Celia said with great solemnity, “Cyrus came as he promised and taught me what he had learned in seminary today. So my education as a priest has begun!”
I thought of asking what good it would do her to have the training if she still could not be a priest, but maybe it would be better to have her think of that herself. My immediate question was more urgent. “Where is Cyrus now?”
“Probably in the dormitory with the other seminary students, if he is not at prayer in the cathedral.”
“And Hildegarde?”
She shrugged. “I think she went to join the bucket brigade.” So at least word of the fire had reached here. I might have passed Hildegarde among all the shadowed, soot-darkened people and not even recognized her.
I excused myself and hurried away. She stood in the doorway to watch me go, her Bible in her hands again. Celia was here in Caelrhon in the first place because of me, which probably made me responsible for her, too, even though her acceptance of this miracle-worker and her eagerness to follow him made her useless as the spy I had intended her to be.
Carefully I picked my way through the construction site in front of the cathedral. The workmen’s huts were empty and dark. But through the stained glass windows of the church I thought I could see lights faintly burning-unless it was only the reflection of the last of the flames.