The tall man with the side of beef loped up and set the meat on the ground where it rolled about, moaning. “Ice,” said the tall guy.
“Perhaps I will redeploy my forces,” suggested Fire Chief Cinder under his breath as he edged back out of the way. Very well; he was finally willing to admit it, it was time to put in for a transfer. Wraith District clearly had the better of him. He had lasted longer than his immediate two predecessors, by at least two months. That should be good for something, if not a full month-long rest cure.
“He doesn’t look real useful to me,” said Favored, inspecting the charred yet still-writhing form of their recent adversary Dortonn.
“We spoke during our journey from the water,” Svin told him. “He may be stronger than he looks.” Svin bent down and hauled Dortonn effortlessly to his feet, then shook him out. Dortonn persisted in his moaning. Svin brought his own face close and addressed him with his deepest, most resonant voice, which was resonant and deep indeed. “Dortonn, the time to act is now.”
“Well, I’m gonna do this pass with the chemical,” Favored announced. Gears clanked, vapor whooshed, and the ball lurched again into the air. “Remember your master Pod Dall,” Svin was exhorting Dortonn.
“Screw Pod Dall,” Dortonn mumbled through his cracked lips, but he clenched his teeth and raised his arms anyway, in a slow sequence of stiff jerks. The blackened claws at the ends of his hands began to unknot, showing raw flesh at the charred joints.
Tildamire Mont drifted aimlessly back and forth at the far side of the street. Too much, it was all too much. Roni was gone, and all her husband could do was pass out on the ground, and all her idiot brother could do was stand there playing his harmonica. It was like a convention - that creature flying around in his machine, now with orange dust cascading out of it above the fire, the firemen loading a taut water bladder that must have been eight feet in diameter onto a winched-back catapult, even that barbarian fool Svin steadying that other person who couldn’t be anything other than dead. And there was still no sign - and likely never would be again - of Senor Ballista, who had rescued her from the bridge and then sacrificed himself to save her from the Creeping Sword. But of all of them, she was the one left with nothing to do, however futile, however insane. She never should have left home. When her father, the former Lion of the Oolvaan Plain, heard about this, he’d never take her seriously again. He’d know; even back in Roosing Oolvaya, he’d know. She’d failed when people had been depending on her. She never should have -
SPROING! The water bomb left the catapult and arched overhead. Favored banked over its landing spot and dumped the final bag of fire retardant over the side, noticing as he did that a layer of mist seemed to be spontaneously condensing out of the air around him. Then it was more than mist, it was a cloud, water, rain, being wrung out of the humid sea atmosphere as though it were a mopping cloth. A sudden deluge washed over Flotarobolis, then something more solid; hail, ice. The ball shuddered and Favored felt the craft begin to lose altitude.
“There, are you satisfied?” croaked Dortonn at Svin, watching his ice sheet drop toward the fire, already breaking into steam. “May I die yet?”
“Is not your master Pod Dall a god of Death? Would you not just be delivering yourself to him, and with your mission not accomplished?”
Dortonn grunted. “Are you a barbarian or a lawyer?”
Abruptly Svin picked him up by the neck and shook him. “Are you performing sabotage?”
“What? -” The flying machine was falling into the steam clouds, tumbling erratically, most of its vents frozen closed. Dortonn made a creaky pass, easing back on the thermostatic regulator, as the vehicle was lost to sight in the mist.
Fire Chief Cinder felt increasingly morose as he watched a new gout of flame arch up through the huge billows of steam. A tremendous quantity of liquid had been thrown at this block, enough to reduce any normal fire to soggy mush, yet still it burned; still it kept flaring. Something had to be leaking energy into it, probably the same something that had socked those magicians out cold on the ground. So why was this other magician, the charred walking cadaver, still functioning? “Excuse me,” said Chief Cinder, moving just barely into conversational earshot, “do you detect a malign influence keeping this conflagration alive? I would suggest not probing directly,” he added hastily.
Only Svin was close enough to hear Dortonn mutter his usual complaint before bending himself to the task. What was he saying now, the best way to fight fires was to never touch them directly? Well, that apparently had been his strategy; not to probe the fire at all, merely to drop liquids on it from above. “‘Malign influence,’ he says,” rasped Dortonn. “‘Malign influence’ - phaugh! Fuzzy-headed thinking, misuse of - huh!”
“What?” Svin demanded.
Dortonn was concentrating more than Svin had seen him since they’d arrived. “Not ‘malign,’ but indeed an influence. Fairly powerful -”
In a rapid fan outward from the fire-wracked buildings across the street, the cobblestones of the pavements began riffling upward and hurling themselves into the air, the ground beneath them hissing and lashing. Svin thought he might have heard Dortonn change his last remark to “very powerful,” but that could have just been his own mind’s own reaction to the latest development. Perhaps a dozen feet worth of cobblestones had left the ground when the prodigy suddenly ceased; at the same time, in fact, that some of the airborne stones could be observed to be coming apart into pebbles, gravel, sand; and other stones were flowing and melting like cobble-shaped molds of gelatin or perhaps loosely constituted rubber. Then the transfigured stones began to rain back to earth. “I did not cause this,” stated Dortonn, bending down and covering his head with his arms.
Everyone in sight was trying to cover themselves, those who were not actively fleeing the scene or standing gape-mouthed frozen in amazement. Or those who were still playing their harmonicas. Maybe the real problem here isn’t the fire at all, Jurtan Mont was thinking, doing his best to ignore the fragments cascading around him, and especially those few (fortunately small) pattering onto his head; he had the fire’s meter and key and didn’t want to lose them. But perhaps the real danger was related to those other dancing harpsichord runs, the ones he’d been trying to ignore as a distraction, the ones that had come to their most coherent life in a rippling rush perfectly coordinated with the unusual behavior of the pavement just now. Jurtan made his focus shift...
- and suddenly felt as though he’d tossed his line into a bucket and hooked a whale! His head shrieked at him, his vision blurred behind a wash of smearing green, he felt a knife-stab pain in first one ear and then the other, the harmonica bashed itself against his gums like a thing possessed - and the only thought in his mind was the irrelevant observation, “You’re in the big time now, Jurtan.”
But he was, he clearly was, and damned if he was going to let whatever-it-was get the better of him.
What is the Mont boy doing? Svin wondered, straightening up again and letting rocks cascade off his back. He had been sheltering Dortonn with his body; the other Mont had unfortunately been too far back for even him to reach in time, although that had also put her out of range of the worst of the sudden downpour of solids. Had Jurtan been bashed once too many in the head? He was jittering like one of those multi-jointed puppets on an elastic string, blood pouring from both ears and running freely over his shoulders, still clutching of all things his absurd instrument. And not merely clutching, playing, although as with most of the music he attempted, it sounded (to be charitable) as though he was merely following one small part in a large orchestral score. But this time he had clearly lost his mind.