The Smoke-Scented Girl (3 page)

“Nothing, since until twenty minutes ago I
believed they were naturally occurring events strung together by
superstitious thinking.”

“Harsh, Lore, very harsh. As I said, they
burn so hot as to melt stone—our agents, who are as unimaginative
as men can be and still walk upright, have visited the sites and
confirmed this. That alone should tell you that we are not dealing
with a mundane phenomenon.”

“I believe you.”

“More significant is that with a single
exception, all the fires have had exactly the same dimensions—a
rough circle ten feet in diameter. The anomalous event was more
than one hundred fifty feet in diameter and destroyed fifteen
buildings.”

“Was it the first event?”

Piercy looked at him narrowly. “You’re
thinking whoever is behind this might have had trouble controlling
the spell initially.”

“I was. Though I think it is a mistake to
assume there’s a person behind it. Go ahead.”

“Molten stone, identical dimensions...there’s
no regularity to the timing of the events, and they are always
within cities.”

“Unless there are fires your people don’t
identify as part of the phenomenon because they happen where there
are few witnesses.”

“You’re already thinking further than we
have, Lore.” Piercy wiped a clump of snowflakes from his eye. “Most
disturbingly, there’s always at least one body—or the charred bones
and ash of a body—within the circle of devastation.”

“That suggests the possibility that these
people are spontaneously combusting.”

“That occurred to us, too. And then there are
the eyewitnesses, who are as reliable as eyewitnesses ever are.
Some claim they saw a person fleeing from the fire, despite its
being so hot that nothing could survive within it. Others say a
dark-robed figure walked up to the victim and struck him or her
with a ball of liquid fire. Don’t ask me how they knew it was
liquid. And of course there’s the inevitable Alvorian
conspiracists.”

“I don’t believe ‘conspiracists’ is a
word.”

“Well, it is now.
They
believe Dania
caused the fires as a harbinger of Alvor’s return.”

“Dania, as in Alvor’s magia? How can anyone
believe that?”

“It’s been almost a thousand years since
Alvor and his companions are supposed to have destroyed the warlord
Murakot and then disappeared. Some people believe he’s destined to
return to save the country from the Despot.”

“Dalanine can save itself, I think. With the
help of hard-working magicians like myself.”

“I agree, but these conspiracists see Alvor’s
hand in everything. And one of the rumors is that a bald woman
stands near the fires and watches the victim scream. You might
recall that one of the legends has Dania shaving her head to use
her hair to capture Murakot’s chief lieutenant and force him to
give up Murakot’s weakness.”

“I admit I don’t know much about Alvorian
myth, but I don’t recall Dania being so coldblooded as to simply
watch a person burn to death.”

“I don’t recall Dania being a real
person.”

“There’s always a kernel of truth in these
legends. After all, Murakot was a real warlord, though probably not
a creature of magic. And I imagine there’s a kernel of truth in
these stories as well.”

“So what do you think it is, if I may take
the liberty of assuming you’ve already made some conclusions,
clever fellow?”

Evon side-stepped a rivulet of water running
toward a nearby drain. “I believe there
is
a person behind
all of this,” he said. “Unless there is something in these papers
you haven’t told me, not one of the witnesses declared that the
victim had simply gone up in flames. That’s the sort of thing
people would remember. We are dealing with some individual who is
capable of creating fires far hotter than any spell we know can
manage.”

“That’s unsettling. I might even say,
frightening.”

“It is indeed.”

They crossed the street into a neighborhood
of narrow, tall houses that stood four and even five stories above
the quiet street. All were built of black stone and in the light of
the wintry day looked foreboding, what with the beds of frozen,
snow-covered flowers and the bare trees that lined both sides of
the street. The only cheerful note was the brightly colored doors,
reached by short flights of stairs, red and purple and green set
off by the golden brass of door latches. Evon and Piercy had the
street to themselves, shrouded in the strange hush that was the
sound of millions of soft flakes drifting to the ground. Their
boots left prints on the sidewalk that immediately began to fill
with snow.

Evon turned to ascend the stairs of the fifth
house on the right. “Will you come in? Mother will undoubtedly want
to thank you for escorting me home. She believes I’m flighty and
easily distracted, which I find amusing since you’ve told me I’m
the opposite.”

“I have a dinner engagement, so please give
your mother my apologies.” Piercy tipped his hat at Evon, causing a
small avalanche to fall from the brim. “Good luck, and my thanks
for tackling that somewhat knotty problem. And, Evon?” This as Evon
had put his hand to the latch. “You’re not obsessive. You’re simply
very focused. Try to keep that in mind?”

Evon smiled and shrugged. “If I must be very
focused, I promise to turn that focus on your problem rather than
my own. At least for the day.”

He shook the snow from his hat and brushed
off the shoulders of his coat before entering his home. The blue
door creaked a bit, as it had for the last seven years; his parents
always said they’d have to do something about it, but it remained
unoiled and continued to make a sound somewhere between a squeak
and a moan. It was better than a doorbell for announcing one’s
presence. Even so, no one appeared to greet him as he entered and
shucked his overcoat. Well, Father would be at work at this hour,
and Aunt Mayda and Uncle Findlay would be at the tea shop, and his
odious cousin Jessalie would be at school, thank the Twins, and
Mother might be at the church supervising preparations for the
upcoming winter fete. He had the house to himself. The idea made
him feel lonely.

The entry, unfurnished except for the
coatrack, was painted a plain white and bore only portraits of
long-dead Lorantises; the doors to his father’s study and the
dining room were both closed. It felt empty and as silent as the
snowy street. Evon shivered a little and ascended the stairs to the
fourth floor and his bedroom. The fire was unlit, the logs cold on
the andirons, and that combined with the pale blue wallpaper and
the winter sunlight filtering through the falling snow made his
room feel frozen. “
Forva
,” he said, snapping his fingers at
the fireplace, and fire sprang up golden and cheery from the thick
logs. The word left a taste of hot metal in his mouth and made the
knot of tension in his spine twinge as it tapped his nearly
depleted reserves further.

Now that he was home, exhaustion sank into
his bones and his eyeballs, and he could almost hear the bed
calling to him. No. He was too filthy. Bath first. He removed his
frock coat and unwound his neckcloth, which suddenly felt stifling,
tossed both on a chair, and went down the hall to the bathroom and
turned on the tap. It had been his first magical gift to his
family, years ago, when he’d first learned to enspell the water
tank to produce hot water and installed the filter that purified
the waste water before it reached the street. He’d won the gold
medal at Houndston School for it. He was fourteen. And now here he
was, ten years later, trying and failing to
keep
things from
getting too hot. He stripped off the rest of his clothing and sank
into the hot water. Two days, or he would—no, he wouldn’t lose his
position, he was too valuable to Elltis and Company, but— He sank
further under the water until only his nose and mouth were above
it. He wasn’t going to think about it. He’d promised Piercy.

So. Someone capable of producing fire on a
scale no one had ever seen. No, that was wrong. If there was a
kernel of truth in legend, it was fire on a scale no one had seen
for centuries. He didn’t know very much about the stories of Alvor
and his companions, except that they’d gone on a quest to find a
way to defeat the warlord Murakot, who’d supposedly had great
magics at his command. Including powerful fire spells.
That
can’t be the answer, though
, he thought, sitting up and making
the water splash over the edge of the tub, then lathering up to
keep from falling asleep in the wonderful, warm, soothing embrace
of the bathwater.
I might be convinced that some creature from a
thousand years ago exists and is present in this time, but there’s
never been any evidence that magic was somehow different in the
past. Someone’s discovered a new spell.

He scrubbed at his hair. It took two rinses
before he felt truly clean. His cheeks burned to think of how he’d
let himself go.
Focused, Piercy? I really think ‘obsessed’ is
the better word.
An unexpected pang of loneliness struck him;
he was suddenly conscious of how isolated he’d become, how alone
he’d managed to make himself even in the midst of his large family.
And yet he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten this way. At school,
he’d been a top student, but he’d always had time for sport and
courting young women and, of course, getting Piercy into trouble.
He’d been popular, damn it, and now he hardly ever saw his friends
from those days, except Piercy, always had his head down over some
work project or other. It couldn’t be healthy.
And it’s not
making me happy
, he thought with some surprise. Satisfied,
maybe, content, possibly, but there was definitely something
missing in his life.

He dried himself and ran back down the short
hall, naked and clutching his clothes in front of him because he’d
forgotten his dressing gown. Safely in his room, he put on a clean
shirt and trousers and collapsed onto his bed. He was starving now,
but he was more tired than he was hungry. His bed was the best bed
that ever was made by human hands. He began to drift off. No more
fires of any intensity. Just his sleepy brain putting up a soft
barrier between himself and—

His eyes snapped open. It couldn’t be that
simple, could it? Not rigid; flexible. He leaped out of bed and
began rummaging in his desk. So many odds and ends, broken pieces,
discarded spell components—there was a cowrie shell, no idea how it
had gotten there but it would have to do. Nothing fireproof,
nothing fireproof. He finally found an old silver snuffbox, which
was puzzling because he didn’t use the stuff, and scrabbled at his
coat pockets until he found the piece of coppery chalk no magician
was ever without. Carefully he drew a single straight line and a
wavy one on the surface of the snuffbox. The chalk filled the
grooves of the snuffbox’s engraved top as if it were liquid rather
than powder. Evon shoved the papers and other detritus of work to
one side of his desk and set the snuffbox down in the center of the
clear spot. He laid the cowrie shell beside it, then took his
penknife and cut a chunk of candle off the ancient taper on the
windowsill and put that next to the other objects.

Now he needed oil. He used magic to light his
room, a globe hanging from the ceiling in a translucent glass
basket, but there had to be oil somewhere in the house. He
thundered down the stairs all the way to the ground floor and into
the kitchen, where he startled a shriek out of the cook. “May I
have some cooking oil?” he demanded.

“Mr. Evon, sir, whatever d’ye need cooking
oil for?” she said, her eyes wide.

“A spell. Quickly! I don’t need much. In a
cruet, if you can.”

The cook, still stunned, found a glass cruet
of oil and handed it to him, her hands shaking a little at his
intensity. Evon nodded his thanks and dashed back upstairs. His own
hands trembling, he dribbled oil in an awkward circle around
candle, snuffbox, and shell, then set the cruet far away on the
other side of the room and clenched his fists to steady himself.
This had to work. It was so simple. He closed his eyes briefly and
said, “
Presadi
,” feeling the all-too-familiar numbness pass
briefly over his tongue.

A silvery dome that looked like a soap
bubble, its surface slick with rainbows that sparkled rather than
gleamed, sprang up around the three objects. Evon held his breath.
It looked the same as any other shield. He exhaled, slowly, then
snapped his fingers and said, “
Forva.
”

A ring of white fire sprang up along the line
of oil, over a foot tall. Evon was several feet away, but the heat
parched his face and hands and crisped his hair. It felt as if all
the air in the room were being sucked into it. Evon shielded his
face and shouted, “
Desini!
”

The fire went out. So did the shield. He’d
need to be more careful about directing that command word. Evon
went forward, his lips still tingling from
desini
. Shell.
Snuffbox.

Candle. Completely intact.

Evon sucked in a breath, then shouted a
wordless cry of triumph. It worked. By the Twins, it actually
worked! He picked up the candle stub. Not only wasn’t it melted, it
was cool to the touch. So were the other two objects. He clasped
them to his chest and did a joyful little dance around the room.
Piercy had been right; all he’d needed was to think about something
else for a while. He stopped dancing and drew in several slow
breaths to calm his racing heart, set the spell components on the
desk, and sat down on the bed. Sleep was out of the question now.
He might as well turn his attention toward Piercy’s little problem.
It couldn’t possibly be as difficult as the one he’d just
solved.

Evon shivered and once again wondered why
Miss Elltis was so opposed to installing some form of heating in
her magicians’ offices. A series of metal grills with a radiant
heat spell cast on them, for example, would fit neatly under the
long row of windows and not interfere with the rest of the wall
space. He rubbed his hands together, then pressed the tips of his
index and pinky fingers together and whispered, “
Presadi,”
and the iridescent shield rose up around him, two inches from his
nose. He immediately felt warmer, felt his breath coming up against
the shield and rebounding to brush his face. His breath was damp
and warm and smelled slightly of hazelnuts, for no reason Evon
could imagine. After demonstrating the fireproof shield to Miss
Elltis and a handful of government officials from Home Defense,
he’d worked long hours coming up with the gestures that would
replace the runes and material components of his initial
experiments. The shield had turned out to be airtight as well,
which made it dangerous for long-term use. Eventually he’d have to
work out a solution for that, too, but at the moment he felt he’d
earned his bonus, as well as Miss Elltis’s grudging approval. They
both knew Evon was Elltis & Company’s brightest rising star,
though Miss Elltis behaved as if Evon were just another junior
member of the cooperative and Evon behaved as if he actually
thought of her as his superior.