Chương 194: 25.Blazing House 2

The heat inside the Governor's residence's main entrance was not something the word hot adequately described. It was more like someone had installed a full blast furnace inside the building, sealed the doors from outside, and then very helpfully said: after you. The moment I followed Ignicia through the entrance, the wall of dense smoke hit me hard enough that I nearly staggered back out. The smell was overwhelming—scorched wood, burning fabric, burning paper, and underneath it all, that oily chemical bite.

One breath dragged it into my lungs and made my chest feel like it was considering catching fire in sympathy.

"Cough—cough—!" I pressed my arm over my nose and mouth, gripping with my other hand the fire-ward talisman Ignicia had shoved at me earlier. It was called a fire-ward talisman, and it did, technically, work. At minimum, I currently felt like something being slow-smoked rather than something being actively incinerated. Progress. The issue was— Not dying and not suffering were apparently not the same thing.

"Your Highness," I wheezed, squeezing words out between coughs, "you call this fire protection?" Ignicia walked ahead of me without turning, dark red cloak billowing in the hot updraft, hair lit amber by the firelight.

"What else would you call it?"

"I feel like meat that's been pre-marinated and is waiting to go in the pot!"

"Then the talisman's working," she said, with the serene tone of someone who deserved to be argued with.

"You still have the composure to make analogies." … Infuriating. Also technically correct. The interior was worse than the outside had suggested. The front hall's main beam had burned black across half its length. The carpet edges had curled and were hosting a colony of crawling embers. The right wall panel was cracking and spitting, burned lacquer falling in flakes. The entire corridor was white with smoke—visibility bad enough that I had to squint to make out Ignicia's outline ahead.

And that outline— Was moving through the fire with the relaxed confidence of someone taking a stroll through a garden. No—garden was too modest. She moved like someone who had come in for a hot bath and found the temperature about right. Heat hammered against her and didn't slow her down by a fraction. When a burning drape dropped toward her, she raised one hand and swept it aside—the same casual gesture as pushing a curtain out of the way. I watched from behind and felt something twitch near my eye.

"Hold on," I said, unable to stop myself, "can you just—touch that?" Ignicia glanced back at me. That look said: you have had a lot of questions today. Then she reached out and pressed her palm flat against a nearby iron candleholder that was glowing red with heat, and shoved it sideways. Sizzle. Metal on charred wood. A spray of bright sparks. Her hand: completely unharmed. I stared. She caught my expression and tilted her head.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"What are you looking at?" I swallowed.

"Your Highness… you genuinely can't be burned?" Ignicia heard that and actually laughed—a full, bright laugh that rang through the fire with a quality that was somehow both outrageous and infectious.

"You're adorable, Cedric." She batted aside a burning fragment of door panel without breaking stride.

"I am a fire dragon. My flames run hotter than volcanic magma. What kind of fire dragon gets burned by ordinary fire?" … In principle, that line should have sounded incredibly cool. The problem was that she immediately followed it up by grabbing a red-hot door hinge with her bare hand and wrenching the half-collapsed charred door out of the corridor.

I stood behind her, talisman clutched in one hand, throat dry from heat, eyes stinging from smoke, feeling like a human being who was one bad breath away from demonstrating spontaneous combustion. Compared to her the steam in here is rather pleasant energy— The gap in our circumstances was genuinely offensive. We were both alive. We were both in the same burning building. Was this level of differential treatment really fair to either of us?

"Stop standing there," Ignicia said.

"East-wing study is on the right. Find survivors first."

"I'm looking—cough cough cough—!" The sentence died as a fresh roll of black smoke hit me directly in the face. The fire-ward talisman handled the flames, but it had no opinions about what my very human lungs were supposed to do with this. My chest felt like it had been scrubbed raw with hot sandpaper, every breath sharp and wrong. Ignicia glanced back at me.

"Want me to carry you?"

"No!" I answered too fast. Reflexively fast. The kind of fast that bypasses the brain entirely. The corner of her mouth curved.

"Backbone."

"I'm an envoy, not luggage."

"In a place like this, the difference is academic."

"It's a very significant difference—!" She made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite dismissal, then picked up her pace toward the right-side corridor without further comment. … Unbelievable. Even here, she finds time to use me for entertainment. Truly a dragon. We crossed a floor of split planks and scattered documents, turning into the east-wing passage. The fire was denser here than in the front hall—a section of ceiling had already collapsed in one corner, flames licking steadily downward.

The row of bookshelves along the wall was burning entirely, pages curling into black wings that drifted and fell in slow spirals. I glanced at those shelves and felt something drop in my chest. If the ledgers had been kept here, they were long past saving. But Ignicia stopped abruptly and raised her hand.

"Quiet." I shut up immediately. Calling for quiet in a burning building was technically absurd—the whole structure was groaning, cracking, breathing fire. But I did it anyway. And then I heard it. Very small. Very faint. The sound of someone pinned under something, forcing air through a throat that had nearly given up.

"…Help…" Coming from the right. Where a side room's entrance had been blocked by a collapsed cabinet and half a fallen crossbeam. Fire was tracking along an oil trail toward the gap. Another few minutes and whoever was inside would be past the point of smoke inhalation being their primary concern.

"Someone's alive!" I called.

"I heard it before you did." Ignicia stepped forward, lifted one foot, and kicked the blackened cabinet. Not kicked open. Kicked through. The entire cabinet slammed into the opposite wall at an angle, exploding into burning fragments. My scalp prickled watching it. She then reached for the crossbeam blocking the doorway. It was red along its entire surface. It was actively on fire. She gripped it anyway—fingers steady as if she were picking up a length of ordinary timber—and threw it aside.

I tried very hard not to make the face that said this doesn't make physical sense. I don't think I succeeded.

"You're staring again," she said.

"…I just realized I might be somewhat redundant here."

"You're not." Completely matter-of-fact.

"You handle the talking." … Fine. At least the division of labor is clear. The moment the doorway was open, I ducked inside. A man was huddled against the far wall. Middle-aged, wearing the grey-blue robe of a Governor's office clerk, one side of his body pinned under an overturned table leg. His face was black with smoke, and he was coughing with the dedication of someone trying to expel an entire lung.

His arms were locked around a document box that had already been reduced to charred fragments and scorched paper scraps. I crouched, gripped his shoulder.

"Hey. Can you hear me? Who are you?" His eyes were unfocused—he spent several attempts before he actually found my face. Then he looked past me at the figure standing in the doorway, perfectly relaxed in the middle of a burning building, and his expression went through several fascinating phases simultaneously. Good. Brain still operational.

"I—I'm… second-rank clerk… second-rank…" He coughed twice, voice scraped raw.

"Don't—don't burn me… I didn't take anything…"

"That's not what I'm asking!" I kept my voice low and sharp.

"Where are the ledgers? Who came into the study? Give me what matters!" The clerk flinched—clearly reacting to Ignicia, who had materialized in the doorway behind me. Fire rolled behind her like a living backdrop. She looked less like a rescuer and more like a red calamity that had arrived to collect something. She spoke without inflection.

"Answer slowly and you stay here to keep cooking." …I understood she was accelerating the interrogation. I also understood this was not a medically recommended approach to trauma patients. The effect, however, was immediate. The clerk's eyes went wide as plates.

"It's not an accident—!" he rasped.

"The quartermaster—the quartermaster was cut first—his throat—the blue-sealed iron chest—they moved it to the west-side underground wine cellar!"