Alex Bledsoe - Burn Me Deadly

Shapes suddenly appeared out of the darkness behind him, loping down Ditch Street toward us. The firelight revealed them to be short, thick-bodied men wearing those red head scarves. I had not seen them emerge from the Lizard’s Kiss building; they just appeared as if from out of the ground and stopped well short of the intersection, clustered together like a press-gang.

The white-haired man paid them no mind. He watched the fire with more trepidation than most, and of course I immediately wondered if he might be the arsonist behind it; not for a moment did I agree with Gary that Hank had gotten careless enough to burn down his own barn. Hank was a fourth-generation blacksmith and farrier; he wouldn’t make such a dumb mistake.

Without taking my eyes off the old man, I nudged Liz. “See that old guy over there?”

She looked and said, “Where?”

“On the street outside the alley by the cobbler’s shop.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That’s our mysterious visitor from the hospital. Go grab him. Gary and I will check for Hank.”

Liz nodded and immediately moved into the crowd. I felt a momentary thrill of pride that my girl, my girl, could be counted on to handle that sort of job. Plenty of men I’d known couldn’t be.

Then I realized Gary was glaring at me. “The hell we will,” he said.

“You owe him money,” I reminded him as I pushed him toward the fire. “If we don’t try to find him, people will think you set it to get out of the debt.”

“Why would they think that?”

“Because that’s what I’ll tell them.”

“I don’t care!” Gary wailed, but by then we’d reached the stable doors. Even the metal hinges were smoking as they baked off the grease that lubricated them. I tried the handle, but the bolt had been locked on the inside. I slid my sword between the doors and, using it for leverage, popped a plank free enough to get a hand in and slide the bolt. The heat scalded my knuckles.

We jumped aside to avoid the belch of flame that shot out. “This is crazy,” Gary said, pressing a kerchief to his face. The inside of the barn looked like the very mouth to hell. “I’m not going in there.”

“Yes, you are,” I said, grabbed his arm and pulled him into the stable after me.

The smoke’s odor immediately told me more than hay was burning. The place had been deliberately torched, most likely with oil or alcohol, so there was even less time than I initially thought. The blaze was at that liminal point where the stable looked like a line drawing rendered in flame: every edge and straight line glowed, and in moments they would all crumble and collapse. Even above the mingled roars of crowd and fire, I heard the creaking protests of beams about to snap.

“Hank!” we yelled, but our cries were too muffled to really be heard. The heat sucked the air from us and replaced it with foul, acrid smoke. Crouching low and skirting the burning debris, we made our way to the rear of the stable. Gary hid behind me just as Hank’s son had done behind his father.

All the horses, including the ones owned by Argoset and his henchman, had been cleared out. Only a young stallion barely out of colthood remained, kicking futily at the gate of one of the rear stalls. I unlatched the gate and the wide-eyed horse rushed toward the front door. The animal was already badly singed, and so terrified that he didn’t even pause before he dashed through a fresh sheet of flame into what he supposed was freedom outside.

“He’s not here,” Gary said. “Let’s get out while we can!”

“We haven’t checked the back,” I insisted.

“It’s on fire! The front’s on fire! The sides are on fire, and look! The ceiling! Guess what? It’s on fire! ”

The heat grew so intense I was sure my beard would combust. I danced around several blazing clumps of hay that filtered down from the loft through widening cracks in the ceiling. We reached the back of the barn where the door led into Hank’s house. I pounded on it with my sword hilt, but it was bolted from the other side. That meant someone had been alive to lock it, and I had a moment of relief before I turned and suddenly felt a chill despite the blaze.

Hank Pinster was pinned to the wall by a pitchfork through the torso. His hands, already burned down to blackened talons, uselessly clutched the smoldering handle. His feet barely touched the floor; whoever had killed him had been stronger and taller. The ends of his hair burned slowly toward his skull.

Gary and I looked at each other, neither of us with the extra air to speak. We both knew this meant arson, and murder.

Then the ceiling above Hank gave way, and we barely avoided the surge of flaming wood, hay and debris that burst out from the impact. The hayloft was disintegrating above us, and the whole structure would collapse at any moment.

We dashed for the front doors, but a fresh pile of burning hay and crossbeams thundered down. Gary’s watery eyes opened wide in a panic, and I think he would’ve made a break for it just like the colt if, at that moment, Argoset’s huge lackey hadn’t emerged from the smoke and fire behind us. He had a rag of some sort wrapped around his head against the smoke, and only his size let me recognize him. He scooped each of us up under one enormous arm like two rowdy children and toted us through the now-open door to Hank’s home, out another door and into the street. Even though it was summer, after that inferno the air felt like a blast of ice water. He dumped us unceremoniously before his boss.

Coughing so hard I expected a lung to land in the dirt beside me, I looked up at Argoset in amazement. He wore clothes coated in road dust and held the reins of their two horses. His muscleman unwound the cloth from his face and wiped at the soot streaking his bare, sweaty arms.

“Are you two all right?” Argoset asked, and offered me his hand. “You’re really lucky, you know that? Marion had just finished making sure no one was left in there, and then one of Magistrate Bunson’s deputies said you’d gone in the front door. He volunteered to go back in and get you.”

I looked at the big, implacable face with the unlikely name of Marion. “Thanks,” I said. He nodded.

Gary remained on his knees, bent double in a convulsive coughing fit that seemed like it might snap him in half. “Water,” he choked out, and Argoset nodded to Marion, who took a canteen from his saddle. He handed it to Gary, who could barely swallow between coughs.

I took the canteen and drank gratefully. Even now the fire was beginning to chew its way into the Pinsters’ living quarters. It progressed more slowly, though; that part of the structure hadn’t been doused with whatever had been used on the rest of the building.

Argoset stared up at the stable’s burning roof. “It’s going up pretty fast.”

“Hay and wood,” Marion grunted.

Argoset nodded. “Glad you made sure no one was in there.”

I kept the reaction off my face-not hard, the way I was coughing-but I couldn’t miss the fact that Argoset had twice mentioned that the barn was empty. It would be hard for anyone with working eyesight to have missed Hank pinned to the wall, and Marion was certainly big enough to have killed him in the way we saw. But why would he? And did he know we saw the body before he found us?

I continued to gulp as much night air as my lungs would accept, and returned the canteen to Marion. Gary was still on the ground. Much of the crowd had dissipated now that the initial excitement was over and the hard work of cleaning up would begin. I looked around for Liz, and spotted her at the end of Ditch Street where I’d previously seen the old man.

She wasn’t looking my way; instead, she shoved the old man ahead of her up the street away from the crowd. They were talking animatedly almost like old friends as they turned down an alley between Jack Talon’s herbalist shop and the Lizard’s Kiss.