Cora’s words meant I expected to find the entire building in rubble. It wasn’t that bad—but it was more than bad enough. I heard later that somebody threw a grenade through an upstairs window. At the time, I only saw that there was glass everywhere in the street, and then smoke billowing out of the northeast corner of the second floor.
The very same room where, just that afternoon, we had placed the tablets of the epic for safekeeping.
It wasn’t coincidence, either. A painted message was splashed across the pavement in front of the annex: BURN THEIR HISTORY BEFORE THEY BURN OUR CHILDREN.
I don’t have any proof. But I guarantee you that if Zachary Hallman didn’t throw that grenade himself, he handed it to the man who did. A Hadamist slogan, and a bomb thrown into the room where the epic was held: they were trying to destroy the evidence. Without the tablets, all our accusations of smuggling would be worth less than bone dust.
Kudshayn screamed. Even I forget sometimes that he’s related to dragons; he has wings and scales and claws, but he’s a kind and intelligent creature, better than most of the humans I know. The sound he made, though . . . it raised all the hairs on the back of my neck, a high-pitched, raw-edged keen no human throat could ever make. He lunged toward the building, wings spread, but even out there we could feel the heat; the air was hazed with smoke. It drove him back, coughing and staggering, and he fell to his knees in defeat.
And I—
I can tell you my reasoning, but I don’t think I consciously went through it at the time. It was like . . . sometimes, when I am translating, I get far enough into the rhythm and patterns and logic of the Draconean language that it doesn’t even feel like I am translating. I just understand the text, as if I can see it all at once. Last night I saw, in my mind’s eye, the entire situation.
The night watchman at the street corner, cranking the call box for all he was worth, summoning the fire brigade.
Cora shrieking at her uncle, slapping Gleinleigh’s hands away as he tried to reach for her.
The tablets. They’re fired clay; they don’t mind a little extra flame.
But they do mind being broken. By grenades, by collapsing ceilings, by the water used to fight the fire.
The world seemed incredibly sharp, and at once both very close and very far away. I looked up at the smoke surging out of the broken windows, and I knew that if anything remained, I had to save it.
Only one person there knew me well enough to guess my thoughts, and was close enough to intervene. Aaron Mornett grabbed me by the arm, hard enough to leave five perfect bruises. “Audrey, you can’t! It isn’t safe!”
I got out of his grip and put him in a wrist lock for good measure, dropping him to one knee. My own voice sounded like a stranger’s, and strangely calm. “You may be a liar and a thief, but I thought you at least had enough integrity not to destroy artifacts. Apparently I was wrong.”
Then I let go of him and ran toward the annex.
The downstairs wasn’t so bad. There weren’t many lights on, because it was night and no one had been there when the explosion happened except the watchman and Cora, but the air seemed fairly clear. I could feel it change around me as I ran up the stairs, though, growing palpably hotter, and I damned the two of them for not trying to put out the fire before it got so large.
My momentum faltered as I reached the upstairs hallway. The air was substantially hotter, and I could taste smoke on the air. The lights here had gone out, but I could see the door I wanted by the glow coming from around its edges.
I was about to push on when I heard footsteps behind me.
You would think a joint lock and the most crushing condemnation I’m capable of delivering would be enough to deter a man from running into a burning building after a woman who hates him, but apparently not.
Mornett stopped a few steps below me, holding something out like a peace offering. After a moment I realized it was his dinner jacket, sopping wet—he’d soaked it in a horse trough outside. “Put this over your head,” he said. “It may help.”
I gaped at it like a landed fish.
With the only real light coming from below him, I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were rigid. “I didn’t know she was going to do this,” he said, his voice almost too low to hear. “You have to believe me.”
Under any other circumstances I would have tried for a smart response. Instead I took his jacket, draped it over my head and shoulders, and advanced down the hallway.
Mornett stuck to my heels like a limpet. When I reached for the door handle, it was hot to the touch, but I was braced for that; after all, there was a fire on the other side. But I didn’t fully realize what that meant.
Aaron did. He suddenly lunged for me and dragged me to the floor, just as the door swung open.
A searing wind passed over our heads, as the cooler air of the hallway got sucked into the room and the heat of the fire blasted out above. If Aaron hadn’t pulled me down, I would have taken that full in the face.
When I lifted my head, I realized why the blaze had spread so quickly. I love you dearly, Grandmama, but it is your fault: the grenade went through the window right next to the specimens you so kindly donated to the exhibit and shattered all those glass jars, spilling formaldehyde everywhere. I have not forgotten the warning you delivered when I was seven and tried to hold a bit of embalmed flesh up to a gas light to see it better—it is very nearly tattooed on my brain—and so I understood immediately why that entire end of the room was in flames. There was nothing anyone could have done to stop it, short of the fire brigade itself.
I forced myself into the room. The heat was like a living thing, a monster beating at me and snarling that I should flee while I still could. The very air seemed to eat at my eyes and my lungs. The grenade had made a ruin of the entire place, splintering nearby shelves and knocking more distant ones over; I could barely work out where the tablets ought to be, and stumbled over things in my path. The only mercy was that with all the windows shattered, most of the smoke was going outside, rather than staying to blind me.
And I saw the tablets.
The grenade had blown them clear off their shelf and into the aisle, where they lay in a heap of fragmented clay. I wept with fury at the sight, but the tears evaporated before they could fall. And how was I going to get them out of there?
A surge of heat made me flinch, turning so Mornett’s rapidly drying jacket was between me and the worst of it. I saw he’d followed a few steps into the room, no farther.
I suppose most people would say a gentleman ought to have hurled himself forward, rather than letting me lead the way. But honestly, I think better of him for not trying to play the hero for my sake.
“Audrey!” he shouted, one arm up as if that would protect him from anything. “It’s no good! We have to get out of here!”
My answer to that was to lunge deeper into the room, toward the tablets. One of them had skidded mostly intact across the floor; I managed to grab it, hissing at the touch of hot clay, before sheer animal instinct dragged me back toward relative safety. I shoved the tablet into his hands and said, “Make yourself useful.”
He tried to protest even as he took it, but I wasn’t listening. I told myself that the fire was all the way at the other end of the room, that I just had to stiffen my spine a bit and I’d be able to rescue all the pieces before they could be damaged any worse—