Dragon's Mage (An Advent Mage Novel), The - Raconteur, Honor (27 page)

“Well, now, about that.” He leaned his elbows on the counter so that he was more eye level with us. “I just had a thought. You said that firefighting conditions were worse in the air, right? But I can’t imagine it’s much better on the ground. If I were to make more goggles and protective jackets and breathing masks for the other firefighters, would they sell?”

Mari and I looked at each other, not quite expecting the question. But it was a good thought, at that. The man had the soul of a businessman and the instincts of an entrepreneur. “I think they would.”

“I think they would too,” Mari agreed thoughtfully. “I mean, none of us really enjoy the irritable eyes or the raspy throats that go with the job. Of course, that depends on how much you charge for them?”

“That depends on how many I can sell,” he countered. “If I’m selling these in bulk, say to a city or city-state’s firefighting department, I can make them cheaper individually.”

True. That was Economics 101.

“And if I have
your
endorsements,” he added with a devious light in his eyes, “I bet they would sell even better.”

I now saw where he was going with this. I jerked a thumb in Mari’s direction. “Her endorsement would do you more good than mine.”

Grosvener tsked me, waggling an admonishing finger. “Never underestimate the power of a mage’s name. I want yours too. But that’s not quite enough to balance the scales, so I want one more thing.”

I couldn’t imagine what else I would have that he would want, but I waved him on.

Like a child asking for a favor, he asked eagerly, “Can I have a flask of dragon’s saliva from your familiar?”

Um. Come again? “Well, I suppose, but why?”

“Oh, dragon’s saliva has amazing medical properties,” he assured me, almost bouncing in place. “The last bits of it that we have stored up are preciously hoarded. No dragons around, after all. But since I have access to
yours
—”

“—you might as well take advantage of it,” I finished dryly. “Well, Grosvener, I have a counter-offer for you. As it happens, my Kaya loves fiery barbecue sauce. I guarantee you that if you feed her a rack of barbecue ribs slathered in that spicy sauce, you’ll get
more
than just a flask of saliva.” Since she drools all over the place when she eats it. “How does that sound?”

He stuck out a hand instantly. “Deal.”

Trying not to laugh, I accepted the handshake with a firm grip and pumped it once. “Deal.” 

Chapter Nineteen: Arson Investigations

We showed up at the Hall of Records just after breakfast, barely giving them time to unlock and open the doors. The place felt like a library, which I suppose made sense. It took up a city block all by itself, two stories tall, although I understood it also had a basement section to it. The doors, solid constructions of dark walnut wood, were wide open and facing the ocean. Hoping for a cooling ocean breeze? Although with this thick stone construction, I couldn’t imagine that it would get very hot in this building.

We stepped up the short flight of stairs and entered into a tiled foyer that would put any mayor’s office to shame. A reception desk sat directly in front of us, manned by two middle aged women that gave professional smiles of welcome. Mari headed straight for them, reporting in with a crisp, “Mari Wangsgard, Coordinator for the City of Mellor, Osmar State. This is Fire Mage Haikrysen, also of the Firefighting division in Mellor. We need to see the fire reports for the past two decades.”

Upon hearing my name, both women flinched slightly, eyes darting nervously to me. But they didn’t protest or say anything, although their smiles became strained. One of them cleared her throat and after a false start managed, “O-of course. All of the reports are on the second level in the far back corner. Take the stairs behind us and turn left, then continue to the first door on your right. It’s clearly marked. If you wish to have a copy of report made, we can do that for you, but no report is to leave the building.”

“Thank you.” Mari smiled, pivoted on one heel, and led the way toward the stairs.

I followed her up in a sort of grim resignation. So, the majority of people here had obviously heard the story of Remcarparoden. It wasn’t just the rumor flying about in magical circles. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be met with that nervous suspicion because the firefighters in every section had heard entirely different rumors about Kaya and me and were usually
glad
to see us.

As soon as we were up the stairs, and walking down a very narrow, paneled hallway, Mari came in close and whispered, “Why did they act like that?”

“Think, Mari. Most people only know what a Fire Mage is because of the insane one that had to be stripped of his magic.”

She stopped and whirled on me, protesting indignantly, “But you’re nothing like him!”

“Well, I know that, and you know that, but
they
don’t.” I let out a year’s worth of sighs. “Look, there’s only four Fire Mages in the known world, all right? Two of them very few people know about because they've spent the majority of their time in either Coven Ordan or Strae Academy. So really, people only know about two of us. One of us was mad. The other one is so new to his magic that people give it 50/50 odds that he’ll turn mad eventually like the other one did.”

Mari got madder and madder as I talked, to the point that steam almost came out of her ears. “I really don’t like that.”

“That’s part of the reason why I don’t like travelling around with Kaya.” In fact, I blessed the fact that she was having so much fun fishing in the sea that she chose to stay out there today instead of hanging around the city. That might have been bad. “My reputation with the common people is already rocky. Add a dragon to the mix, and it just gets more complicated.”

“But surely the story will spread about you coming to help save Mhazzaekul Forest,” she protested.

“Given enough time, sure. But it’s only been a few days since that happened. It hasn’t had time to spread here yet.” I gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s fine. I’ll prove it to the world that we can be trusted. It’s just not going to happen overnight.”

Grumbling, clearly unhappy about the world in general, she stalked down the rest of the hallway. I just followed her and let her rant under her breath. She’d calm down and see I was right. Eventually.

The ladies downstairs were right. The door was clearly marked with a little sign that jutted out near the top of the doorway. Mari pushed the door open and stepped inside, with me on her heels. I stopped in the threshold and looked around in dismay. Row upon row of very talk bookshelves were lined up neatly along each side of the room, going back to the very back wall. It looked, from here, like a tunnel of doom. There were simple wooden tables and chairs at intervals in between the shelves, but this whole room didn’t have a lot of walkway space. Everything felt squeezed in.

I looked at the rows upon rows of reports, and I swear they doubled in front of my eyes. Swallowing hard, I asked in a small voice, “Mari? Tell me you have a way to weed this down quickly.”

She patted me reassuringly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. I do. Every research room is divided first by area, then by year, then by HDS.”

Turning slightly, I gave her a blank, “HDS?”

“Heat Driven Source,” she explained, already moving past me. “In other words, what sparked the blaze? What drove it so that it grew out of control? What were the contributing variables?”

Hmm. I thought I saw what she was getting at. “So if the fire was sparked in an area that had a lot of toxic gases, or in a place with high room temperatures….”

“Then it would be clearly marked as such on the outside of the report and we can rule it out automatically.” She flashed me a quick smile as she went from one end of the shelf to the next, reading the labels. “This is part of the reason why I wanted to come to Merton. They’re better organized.”

Praise all the gods. Otherwise we’d still be wading through this mess in the next century. “So what exactly am I looking for?”

“If there’s a tag on the report that says either ‘A’ or ‘PO’ then pull it.”

Solians and their acronyms, I swear… “And those stand for?”

“Accelerant and Point of Origin.” Mari didn’t look at me as she walked down the aisle, already heading for a promising section of reports. “Stancliff was right in that we can’t always tell what causes a fire. Not like you can, at least. We can take a good guess from the environment around it, because usually something nearby started the blaze, but it’s just an educated guess. That said, we
have
figured out a few things over the years. If the building isn’t completely destroyed in the fire, we have a chance of tracking down the cause by the burn patterns.”

I’d thought I learned about the nature of fire and how it behaved, but clearly what I knew paled in comparison to what Mari did. I followed her down the row.

“Really. Give me an example.”

“The ‘V’ shape, for instance.” She started yanking reports off the shelf and stacking them in my arms. “Did you realize that fire will create a burn mark in a v shape, starting at the point of origin and spreading up and outwards from there?”

I hadn’t paid that much attention to the damage done, actually. But now that she mentioned it… “Are there other patterns?”

“Of course. There’s a cone shape, and protected areas, and clean burns, and rundown burns, and ignitable burn patterns.” She gave the stack in my arms a judicious look. “Let’s start with those.”

Start with? I had at least thirty reports in my arms! “And what year are these reports from?” Not waiting for an answer, I looked at the label stuck on the report that had been literally crammed under my nose. “This is from twenty years ago!”

“Arsonists tend to start small and build their way to bigger targets, remember? We have to go back that far to see a pattern. If we don’t find something in Hawthorn, we’ll look at Seagun.”

We retreated back out of the rows of shelves and to a lonely table that stood in the center of the room. As I carefully set the reports down on the surface, I suddenly felt like I was back in the academy. This looked suspiciously like homework to me. Mari’s non-professor robes helped to dispel the image some. Her sensible tan pants, high boots, and dark green shirt with the Mellor City patch over the shirt pocket reminded me silently that I came here for work, not study.

“All right, since you know more about this than I do, what’s some quick ways to weed through this pile?”

“Well, there’s a few things.” She perched on the table, close enough so that her leg almost brushed my arm, and took a report off the top of the stack. “Here. You see the first page? It’ll list the HDS, the weather conditions that day, and the report of vandalism in the area during that season. If there’s a known accelerant, it’ll list that too.”

The quick summary on the front of the report would save us a lot of time. I read through it, head tilted sideways as she didn’t hold the report square on. “So this one was during a hot, dry spell, in a building listed as High HDS with an accelerant of…fertilizer?”

“Fertilizer, under the right conditions—or I should say under the wrong conditions—is very combustible.” Mari shrugged. “You put enough of it in a building with poor ventilation, and on a hot day, it’s bound to catch fire.”

You learned something new every day. “All right, so this incident obviously isn’t from an arsonist.”

“Right. Tell you what, since I know what I’m looking for, why don’t I scan through these and you take notes?”

That sounded like a fast and efficient method. “Just as long as I don’t have to either pull reports or put them back. That system still doesn’t make much sense to me.”

With a nod of agreement, she set that report aside and picked up the next. “All right then, let’s dig in.”

Countless hours later, the table became an unstable mountain of reports, ready to avalanche at the slightest provocation. We’d weeded through twenty years of reports for both Hawthorn and Seagun. My hand was cramping, my shoulders were tight from bending over a table, and my eyes were starting to cross.

“Mari. Let’s take a break. And eat.”

“Sounds good,” she sighed, setting the report in her lap and rolling her head around on her shoulders. “How long have we been at this?”

“Too long.” Other than that, I didn’t know.

“Any patterns appearing for you?”

“A few suspicious fires scattered over twenty years, which could or could not be an arsonist. But I don’t think it’s anything that a madman would do. More like, someone who was disgruntled and set a fire.”

“Really?” Mari leaned over my shoulder to see my notes and let out a disgusted sound. Then, without either rhyme or reason, she smacked me in the back of the head with an open palm.

“Oww!” I ducked to the side, putting a defensive hand against the back of my head. “What was that for?”

“Why are you taking notes in Chahirese?” she demanded of me in exasperation. “You know I can’t read that!”

Oh. Whoops. “Um, habit?”

She pointed an authoritative finger down at the page. “Start translating, buddy.”

Seeing her point, I straightened back up in my chair and pulled a blank sheet out in front of me. I more or less remembered what I’d written, so I did little more than glance at the notes before transcribing it over into Solish.

Perching on the edge of the desk, she watched me in silence for a moment before saying, “Now that I think on it, it’s odd that you know Solish so well. Why do you?”

“Hmmm?” I glanced up at her before continuing my translation. “Oh, I knew when I first started my training that I had to be very marketable. My magic doesn’t lend itself to a lot of different tasks, so the only way to make sure that I could work would be to prepare myself to live in different countries, right? And the place that has the most outbreaks of fires is Sol. So I made sure to learn it at the Academy.” Fortunately, one of the professors there knew the language and had been able to teach me. Otherwise I wasn’t sure how I would have managed that.

“So you learned it in, what, two years?”