Chương 195: 26.Traitor 1

My heart dropped hard. Quartermaster killed first. Throat cut. Then the chest moved. This wasn't a fire with opportunistic murder. This was surgical—cut the vital point, then use the entire building as a rag to wipe the evidence clean.

"West-side wine cellar. How do we get there?" I gripped his shoulder tighter. He coughed twice from the shaking, then raised a blackened finger.

"Out—back along the main corridor, west—through the inner dining hall—there's a descending stone stair at the back—but—but they were herding people in that direction—""They?" I pushed immediately. His lips trembled.

"More than one—I only saw their backs—wearing Governor's staff livery—but they moved wrong—not like servants—like—like trained soldiers—" Ignicia stood in the doorway, firelight pulsing behind her, her silhouette like a statue that had stood in flames long enough to find the temperature insufficient.

"Get him out," she said to me.

"Me?"

"Would you prefer we both stay and chat with him?" She raised an eyebrow.

"Drag him to the door, hand him to the garrison outside, come back." … Reasonable. Still delivered in a tone that deserved a retort. I bit down on whatever I was going to say, hauled the clerk to his feet, and took most of his weight on my shoulder. The man had been half-suffocated and was barely functional. Every step back down the corridor felt like walking against a current. As I went, I had a moment of genuine reflection about the expanding scope of my professional responsibilities. Diplomacy. Naval combat.

Spy pursuit. Forensic examination. Fire rescue. At this rate, was I going to be drafted into port tax reform consultation next? Ignicia, predictably, had no interest in my career anxieties. She walked point, batting aside a burning door frame with one hand like clearing inconvenient steam. I followed with the clerk, each step costing more than the last. The fire-ward talisman kept me from being cooked directly, but had no opinions on what my very human respiratory system was supposed to do about the smoke.

By the time we reached the entrance colonnade, two garrison soldiers converged immediately.

"Alive!" I coughed out.

"Second-rank clerk! Watch him closely—don't let him die, and don't let him touch his own mouth!" The soldiers blinked—then, clearly remembering what had happened on the scaffold, their expressions shifted. They took him between them with considerably more care than they might have otherwise. Ignicia hadn't paused.

"Move," she said.

"We're going to the cellar now?"

"Unless you're waiting for the fire to deliver the chest to us." …She really had a gift for ending conversations. We went back in. Deeper this time. Worse. The western section of the main corridor had been banquet and administrative territory—thick woven carpets, wall hangings that were now scorched black and peeling from their frames. All of it had become fuel. Fire tracked along the carpet's pattern like a red-black serpent threading through smoke. Two breaths in and I was coughing again.

"Cough—cough— can this talisman—not also—block smoke—" Ignicia didn't look back. She pulled a half-melted bronze wall lamp from its bracket and tossed it aside.

"You have very high expectations of a talisman."

"Because I have consistently high expectations of remaining alive!"

"Then talk less and breathe more."

"Those two objectives are in direct conflict—!" She laughed softly ahead of me. Infuriating. In a burning building, she could still laugh. More infuriating: she genuinely looked like she was having a reasonable time. Fire lunged at her and she walked through it like entering a greenhouse. Heat hammered against her like a warm breeze. When a red-hot iron door bolt blocked the path, she crouched, picked it up, and turned it between her fingers as if assessing the craftsmanship.

I watched from behind and felt my eye twitch. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Your Highness."

"Mm?"

"You're genuinely damaging to mortal self-esteem." Ignicia tilted her head, gold-red eyes catching light between smoke and flame.

"You're finally admitting you're mortal?"

"I have always admitted it! You're the one treating me like a consumable!" She laughed again—two genuine sounds that rang through the burning corridor with complete disregard for the atmosphere.

"You're adorable, Cedric." She swept aside a burning door panel fragment.

"I am a fire dragon. My flames run hotter than volcanic magma. What kind of fire dragon gets burned by ordinary fire?" And then, as if to provide a demonstration, she pressed her palm flat against the glowing red iron handle of the door beside her and pushed it down. Sizzle— Metal shrieked against charred wood. Her expression: completely undisturbed. Not even a twitch of the brow. I was quiet for half a second.

"…Right. Forget I asked."

"You should have reached that conclusion earlier." We found the first real evidence of deliberate killing when we passed through the inner dining hall. Tables overturned, silver platters and wine cups scattered across the floor—the chaotic aftermath of someone colliding with the room at speed. But what sent cold down my spine wasn't the chaos. It was the man on the floor. A male servant, collapsed near the archway leading to the western passage. No significant burns on his body.

Lying in a burning building with no burns. Which meant— The fire hadn't killed him. I moved quickly, crouched, pressed two fingers to his neck. Found it immediately: a thin, deep cut along the side. Clean. Deliberate. Not the frantic hacking of someone panicking in a fire—the precise work of someone who had come up from behind and ended it in one motion.

"Throat," I said quietly. Ignicia glanced once.

"Second one," she said, cold and flat.

"Second?"

"The clerk said the quartermaster was cut first. Now this." Her gaze moved toward the deeper western section.

"They weren't killing opportunistically during the fire." She paused.

"They were clearing a path." I followed her line of sight and felt my stomach settle lower. Clearing a path. These people hadn't died because they happened to be in the way. They'd died because they were standing on a specific route that someone needed open. Removed like obstacles from a map.

"Who were they trying to drive toward the cellar?" I asked.

"Or," Ignicia said, "who were they trying to lock in it." That was worse than the first version. Because if they were only moving the chest, there was no reason to kill along the way. But if the plan was to put people and the chest somewhere that could be sealed and burned together—then every death made sense. We kept moving west. The smoke thickened. The stone floor beneath my boots had started to radiate heat. The wall hangings had burned to hanging black ribbons.

At one corner, half the ceiling had come down, and I had to duck and push through while coughing hard enough to nearly put me on my knees. Ignicia simply raised one arm. The falling debris—charred timber, cascading sparks—hit her forearm and slid aside, as though deflected by something invisible. My scalp prickled again. This was beyond immune to heat. This was elemental. She was fire. I was just a person working very hard not to be cooked by it.

"Still holding up?" she asked suddenly. I blinked. Honestly, I hadn't expected that.

"…Yeah. Still holding."

"Good." She nodded once.

"We're close." The tone was different from her usual sharpness. Something matter-of-fact in it that, strangely, made me less inclined to fall behind than anything else she'd said. The entrance to the west-side underground wine cellar was more hidden than I'd expected. Not in the main hall or outer corridor—tucked at the end of a passage so narrow it was nearly a crack, both sides stacked with overturned crates and barrels. The floor was covered in broken ceramic and spreading liquid. Some of which was burning.

Blue-white and orange flame wove together along the floor, crawling like a procession of ghost-lights.

"Don't step there." Ignicia put out a hand to stop me.

"I wasn't planning to step in fire."

"I mean the layer underneath." I looked down. Beneath the wine was something thicker, darker, more viscous. Accelerant. Of course. Even the path to the cellar had been prepared. This wasn't arson. This was someone who had drafted a complete disposal procedure and was executing it step by step. The iron door to the cellar stood half-open. A dark drag mark ran from the threshold inward—the kind left by something heavy being hauled across stone with considerable effort.

"Blue-sealed iron chest," I said quietly. Ignicia didn't answer. She pushed the door. It didn't move. She narrowed her eyes, pressed her palm flat against the surface. The next moment, accompanied by a metallic groan that made my back teeth ache, the warped and jammed iron door was forced inward. … I really needed to stop being surprised. The door swinging open released a wave of dense, trapped heat and alcohol fumes that hit like a physical blow.

The cellar wasn't burning the way the upper floors were—which somehow made it worse. All the heat had nowhere to go. Stone steps descended into darkness that looked like an open mouth. Ignicia went first. I followed, gritting my teeth. Each step down added weight to my chest. The fire-ward talisman in my palm had grown hot enough to feel, and I gripped it tighter—like gripping the last reliable thing I had. Halfway down, I heard something. Not fire. A person.

Very small, very suppressed—the sound of someone pressing both hands over their own mouth and still not quite managing to hold back what was leaking through. Ignicia and I stopped simultaneously. She raised her hand: don't speak. Then she turned and looked at me. The message was clear. Be ready. I nodded, hand finding my sword hilt. Though honestly, whether I could actually cut anything before the smoke finished what it was doing to my lungs was an open question. We reached the bottom.

The cellar was larger than I'd expected. Stone vaulted ceiling, two rows of wine racks knocked over and scattered, floor carpeted in broken glass and wooden stoppers. The fire hadn't fully pushed in yet, but hot smoke was pouring down through ventilation shafts and the open doorway, turning the space into a sealed pot being brought slowly to boil. And there, in the center of the cellar floor— A chest. Half my height.

Black iron throughout, heavy reinforcement at all four corners, blue wax seals across its surface—burned half away, but the impression of a royal document stamp still visible underneath. The blue-sealed iron chest. Found. But that wasn't what made my chest tighten. It was what was behind the chest, half-hidden by a toppled wine rack in the far corner— Three people. No—four. An older warehouse clerk. A young attendant. A woman with her hair loose and wild.

A middle-aged man with a bleeding arm, jaw clenched so hard it had to hurt, not making a sound. All of them coated in ash. All of them with terror so thick in their eyes it had almost solidified. They'd heard the door open and assumed whoever had come down the stairs was here to finish things. So they'd compressed themselves into the smallest possible shape and stopped breathing audibly. Until Ignicia stepped forward. Firelight angled down the stone stairs behind her, catching her outline and wrapping it in red.

She looked like something that had walked out of the flames rather than into them. The older clerk's eyes went wide. A sound escaped him—something between a sob and a prayer.

"Your—Your Highness…?" I stood behind her, one hand on the wall, dragging in air that tasted like a forge. My throat and lungs felt cured. My eyes stung. I was, objectively, in a worse state than anything else in this cellar that was still technically alive. … We had both entered the same burning building to find the same people. She looked like fire's sovereign. I looked like a human side dish that had nearly been smoked through. The gap between us was genuinely too large for envy to be a productive response.

But this wasn't the time for reflecting on biological performance differentials. The blue-sealed iron chest had been found. The second group of survivors—also found.