For once in my life, sprinting closer to the thing made the situation look less bad, rather than more bad. Though the smoke plume was thick enough to waft ash through the streets, most of the town itself was unharmed, albeit in a state of panic. Some of the Durkahn townsfolk were gathering their things and preparing to flee into the wilderness, while others looked on disaffectedly. Soldiers and local leaders, the owners of inns and wise elders and the like, went from place to place trying to organize the people, and a few had succeeded in creating fire barricades or small bucket brigades. The key factor was that, by and large, the fire was contained to a single part of Zrimash, though the fires and the smoke were intense.
The fire was in the northern portion of the town, not quite at the edge, but not too far from it either. It was a cluster of several buildings, maybe one source point and every structure neighboring that one, and like all the buildings in Zrimash, these were made almost entirely out of wood. Humans and Durkahns alike swarmed around the outskirts of the flames, many of them carrying wooden or iron buckets to toss onto the flames, but plenty others were just there to watch on and see how things went. The most distinct group was a cluster of Durkahns, surrounding the broad and clean-horned figure of Dinara Murahnok. I zeroed in on Sarnai immediately.
“You made it here quickly, even by your standards,” she said as I ran up to her group. “I’m impressed.”
I nearly collapsed, instead resting my hands on my knees while I took a moment to catch my breath. “Yeah, thanks. I saw shit was on fire and I came as quickly as I could.”
“If there’s anything dangerous and chaotic happening, you can count on Emma being stuck in the middle of it, trust me,” said Rook, wading through the crowd behind us. There were at least a dozen soldiers in a V-formation behind her.
“Is that a compliment or an insult?” I said, in between breaths.
Rook raised an eyebrow. “It is a statement of fact.” She turned to Sarnai. “What happened?”
“The whole damn place burst into flames, is what happened!” said Dinara, throwing her arms open. She was missing her trademark mug, though the pungent smell of distilled alcohol still hung around her like a shroud. “It’s a shame, too. Beautiful place, a masterpiece of craft. Highly flammable, though.”
“I had to drag her out when the fire started, but she was nearer to the entrance than any of the others,” said Sarnai, looking into the blaze. “There are others still inside.”
“Please be more coherent!” I said, finally regaining enough composure to stand up straight. “Everything is on fire and people’s lives are on the line, so tell us what’s going on!”
“Dinara offered to show the visitors from Bluerose, and the other two chanters, some of the best that Murahnok had to offer,” said Sarnai. “This used to be the site of a wealthy landowner’s private art collection, which she generously offered to display to the outsiders. Now it is kindling.”
I looked over at the flames. The bucket brigades and soldiers seemed to be doing a good job of containment, stamping out the little fires that started whenever an ember struck a neighboring building, but were making next to no progress with the main body of the fire. “There are people still in there, then?”
“Burnardor, Halflance, and Zaya Imzrai at the least, on top of several other guards and attendants,” Sarnai continued. “The flames are too intense to risk going back in, and Dinara’s safety is our priority.”
I was still looking into the fire, imagining the dying screams of the people still trapped inside as they burned alive, suffocated on smoke, or were crushed under falling debris. With a nod, I acknowledged what she had said. Then I started unbuttoning my shirt.
“What are you doing?” Sarnai said, concern and confusion creeping into her voice.
“Bullets can’t kill me,” I said. “Neither can impalement, disembowelment, long falls, concussions, or getting my rib cage crushed,” I continued, shooting Rook an irritated glance as I carefully folded my shirt and set it on the ground. “The flames may be too intense for you, but I really doubt that they can do much to me.”
Sarnai averted her eyes. Dinara did not. “And you are stripping because…?”
“Because I want to still have something to wear when I’m done, and I’m running low on outfits,” I said, taking off the last of my clothes. I tried to ignore the fact that I was very naked and very in public while doing so, focusing on the fire and on getting people out of there alive.
The closest entrance that hadn’t collapsed or been completely engulfed with flames was the gap between two buildings a bit to the left of all of us. The heat was already feeling pretty intense… so I went for it. I dashed forward into the flames. All at once, the sound of the crowd faded away, overwhelmed by the near-deafening crackle of the dozens of tons of burning wood around me, my focus drawn to the searing heat on my skin.
Even without stepping into the actual flames, the heat was almost unbearable. The hottest day I’d ever felt was one time going to visit Caltech in the heat of August, and that was what it felt like in there, hot enough to give me a sunburn in minutes, hot enough that the air hurt my lungs. But after a few seconds, the pain started to fade behind a sheen of adrenaline, my lungs and skin healing from the burns as quickly as they formed. That was when it finally sank in that I could actually do this.
The smoke and flames meant that there was almost no visibility, so the best that I could do was to pick a direction and stick to it, focusing as hard as I could on looking out for signs of people in need. And I did find them, thankfully. Several people had passed out, either from heat exhaustion or smoke inhalation, often right out in the open. My training with Rook had paid off, and I found it, while not easy, vastly more physically possible to carry the weight of an adult human being than it would have been for me a month or two earlier. One at a time and with no real order to it, I dragged out as many people as I could, rolling them into the street where the bucket brigades would take them and do their best to heal them.
It was on maybe the fifth or sixth run that I found the first real challenge. I had run into one of the buildings near the center of the conflagration, a still-burning shell that was so badly damaged that I had absolutely no idea what it was supposed to have been previously. I was prioritizing speed over depth of the search, scanning each room for no more than a few seconds, when I found her. She was scorched and bruised but still breathing, wearing the soot-stained remnants of a formal suit. More importantly, she was pinned under a mostly-unburnt piece of structural support beam.
I dashed over to her side in an instant, first trying to yank her out from under the beam. No dice, and even if it had worked, it probably would have killed her. Pinning my shoulder against the beam, I pushed with my entire body, just to shift it a few inches off of her. My muscles tensed and strained and I probably pulled something… to no avail. I stopped for a second, taking in a breath of burning hot air, then noticed who it was that I was actually trying to save.
Lady Genesis Burnardor was still unconscious, though she stirred slightly every so often, as if she were asleep. She was not an innocent bystander; she was a racist colonialist politician, a religious zealot, and a complete asshole. I let go of the beam and took a step back. I could come get her later, I figured. Besides, if she did die, it would probably make forming a peace between the two groups a little bit easier. I turned around and started walking towards the gaping hole in the wall I’d used as an entrance. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed another beam that had fallen onto the floor, this one thinner than the other, and partially on fire. A plan started to form.
“What the hell am I doing…” I muttered to myself, grabbing the beam. It hurt like hell, and I could instantly smell cooked meat.
Gritting my teeth against the pain and locking my hands around the beam, I lifted it off the ground and half-dragged it over to where Burnardor still lay. As I rapidly lost feeling in my hands, I jammed one end of the beam under the one trapping her, then shifted my grip over to the far end.
“If this works and you don’t die, you so owe me one, you absolute bastard.”
I lifted with everything I had. It hurt. Skin burned, joints complained, muscles strained, I felt faint. With an angry creak, the debris covering Burnardor shifted, then a moment later fell mostly off of her. I dropped my makeshift lever and collapsed onto my knees, gasping for breath as all of my burn wounds slowly healed. What I could have really used was about fifteen minutes to rest with a can of Coke and a fan, but fifteen seconds on the hot ground had to do.
For the first time in my entire life I found myself thinking positively about one of Burnardor’s traits, in this case her skeletal figure, which made her remarkably easy to pick up and carry around.
“You owe me one, you asshole!” I said to nobody in particular. “No, scratch that, you owe me like fifteen! I hope Bluerose has a fucking life-debt tradition like Star Wars so that I can order you around as fucking payment for this.”
I didn’t mean it, I promise. Getting burned and spraining several muscles makes me say unreasonable things. After carefully maneuvering the two of us through the hole in the wall, the hot air of the outdoors, still laden with smoke, felt like a pleasant breeze. Apparently Burnardor thought the same, because she jolted into consciousness. I dropped her, not that I wanted to, as she started coughing and thrashing around.
Once she was done with that, she looked up into my eyes with hate and loathing. Then she looked at the rest of me, before going back to looking into my eyes with confusion and bemusement.
“Didn’t want my clothes to burn off,” I said. “The way out is that way, and if you’re capable of moving you should go. Smoke rises, so stay low.”
Burnardor crawled away on her hands and knees, probably recognizing what this meant. I didn’t stop for long either. The sound of buildings finally beginning to collapse in under their own weight was louder even then the flames; I was running out of time.
Moving further away from the streets and crowds that I hoped were still safe, the flames got hotter, the smoke thicker. I was still healing through it. I could manage. It was at the center, or near the center, of the flames that I found the biggest building in the area, a steep-roofed structure that looked like an old church from the dark ages, with flames licking up the sides. The fact that it was still standing meant either that I was incredibly lucky, or that this thing was built like a tank. I stopped to take a breath and consider the implications of that while trying not to pass out, when I heard the voices from inside. Fuck.
“Who is it!” I screamed. “Is somebody in there?” My throat was raw before, and now I was sure it was bloody.
Someone, or maybe a few people at once, called out a response, but the crackling of flames and the intervening wall muffled it too much for me to make out what they were saying. That there were people in there to say anything was more than enough. I did a lap around the outside of the building, looking for some way in, and finding nothing. Fuck. There were still voices coming from inside. So I ran around it again, this time looking desperately for any way that would provide even a slight hope of getting me inside of there. I found one, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
One of the windows had collapsed in from the heat, leaving an opening that had then burned just large enough for me to fit through. But the entire passageway was engulfed in flames, hot enough that I had to stand back a few feet to not burn myself, like someone had spilled fuel on that exact spot. Still, flames or no flames, it was an opening.
I took a deep breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to remind myself that any injury I took would heal. It was a thin assurance. My first attempt was abortive, a lunge that didn’t actually carry me more than a foot forward before I psyched myself out. Second attempt and I realized that I wouldn’t be able to do this if I had any idea what was happening. I walked ten or so feet backwards, my eyes locked on the flames, made sure that I was pointed in the right direction, and closed my eyes.
“This is the dumbest shit you’ve ever done,” I whispered to myself. Then I ran, and jumped at the last possible second.
You might not know this, and it probably doesn’t need to be said, but: being set on fire is the worst. The first flash of pain over my entire body was awful, but faded quickly as every nerve cell died in an instant. I inhaled sharply, letting the flames into my lungs, which suddenly felt like they had melted. Everything was white-hot agony and I couldn’t even scream because the muscles necessary to do so had charred away. I was blind, deaf, my tongue a chunk of ash and my skin essentially gone. Nothing. Blackness and void.
The first sign that I was healing was the pain returning, followed by my ability to hear and feel the dusty wood that I was resting against. Vision came back to me in a flash of white, just in time to see the charred remnants of my skin flow back onto my body, fusing back into patches of dermis over my burnt muscles. It hurt. Mentally and physically. My advice is just not to get set on fire, even if you are immortal.
Though there was a big gap in my memory where all of the fire should have been, a quick look at my surroundings made it obvious what had happened. I had leapt though the fire, collapsed onto the floor immediately, and rolled around until my muscles stopped working, which was thankfully enough to put out most of the fire on me. Standing up after all of that was not a trivial task, but the knowledge that there were people who needed my help drove me forward.
I limped from room to room, weakly calling out for them. They were in the largest room, near what I started to recognize as the main doorway. About eight to ten people in burnt clothes, skin stained with soot, clustered around that door, desperately trying to open it before the encroaching flames consumed them.
“I’m here to help!” I said as loudly as I could with healing lungs and throat. “We don’t have much time, and we all need to work together if I’m going to get you out of here.”
One of the members of the crowd turned around. She was tall, wearing black formal clothes, and had a grim expression on her face. “Emma? What are you doing in here? Where are your clothes?”
Of course I had to meet Lady Halflance. Of course. “My skin regenerates, clothes don’t,” I said. Halflance took that as enough of an explanation, though I heard a few of the people she was stuck with make mumblings of confusion.
“What we need is to get out of the building,” Halflance said. “All of the windows are too hot to pass through, and the door is sealed. How did you get in?”
“Window. But I don’t think anyone else would live through being set on fire like that.” I jogged forward, examining the rubble in front of the door as best as I could. “Wait a second, is that a—”
Before I could finish that thought, my foot landed in the exact wrong place. The sound of cracking wood reverberated through the floor like an oncoming subway train, followed a second later by the much more immediate and unpleasant sounds of the boards immediately beneath me collapsing into a cloud of splinters and sawdust. I went down like I’d just stepped into a pool, feeling a second of incredible weightlessness before slamming into a stone floor, a shower of wooden fragments landing on me. At least this time nothing broke.
I rolled over and stood up, brushing dust off of my skin. The basement had been dug directly into the earth, and lined with stones and mortar along the walls for integrity, but was surprisingly unharmed by the flames, at least so far. Sarnai had said that this place was the home of a famous art collector, or something like that, so it would make sense for there to be a basement. There were a few of the things one might expect from a rich person’s basement: locked boxes, dust-covered art sitting on the floor, stashes of bread and meat and butter in jars, etc etc. What did not make sense were the roughly two dozen barrels right in the middle of the room.
On a whim, I slowed down for a moment to investigate what the deal with all the barrels was. Each one was about chest height, and must have held hundreds of gallons of liquid. As I got up close with them, two things stood out to me. The first was that they were the only objects in the room, including myself and the floor, not covered in dust. Which meant that they must have been new. The second was a mixture of something almost herbal or woody with the harsh smell of high proof alcohol, like absinthe or brandy, two smells that I was absolutely not familiar with. For a few seconds I was confused about what an art collector would be doing with hundreds of gallons of alcohol, until I remembered the other thing that you can do with it.
Thoughts and images snapped together in my head. The windows were all ablaze, as if someone had poured fuel on them, because someone had poured fuel on them. The same someone who had made sure to place an enormous amount of highly flammable alcohol in the basement of the building, the same one who had started this fire in the first place, the same one who had set free the chargerthing! And of course Lady Halflance was caught in the epicenter of the disaster, because whoever this mysterious assassin was seemed to know the every movement of the delegates.
I dashed up the stairs and into a side room of the manor, completely engulfed in flames. Escaping that place with only a mild baking, I found Halflance and the rest of the group still fruitlessly trying to get through the main doors, with the flames several feet closer than when I had fallen through.
“We need to get out of here right now,” I said, “because someone’s put enough flammable liquor in the basement to turn this whole place into a charcoal kiln.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Halflance. “Would you happen to know how to get us out of here?”
She had a point. “Is there no back door or anything like that?”
“Nothing that is not shrouded by flame and sheltered by rubble,” muttered a familiar voice, stepping through the crowed. It was the first time I had spoken up close to Zaya Imzrai, and I was somewhat blown away. Despite her bent posture and bony frame, she still stood head and shoulders over me, her walking stick easily large enough to break bones. “We have been putting all of our effort to breaking through the main gate, as it has not yet been consumed. Yet it refuses to open.”
“Yeah. That would be a problem,” I said with a nod.
The door was mostly clear of any debris, though a few huge beams had still fallen around it, which Halflance’s group was still intermittently trying to shove out of the way, to little effect. The fire must have already damaged the doors entirely too much for it to be opened. I stepped past Zaya and a bit back, giving myself the space to look at the entirety of the twelve-foot double doors.
“Which way do they open?” I asked.
“Outwards, to the street,” said Zaya.
My eyes traced out the locations of all the support structures, my best guesses for where the hinges would be. My physicist’s brain, woefully under-utilized for the last several weeks, kicked into high gear. If I could just identify all of the forces at play, I knew, there would have to be some way to knock it all down with a minimum of effort. Except that after several seconds of this, I realized that none of it made any sense. All logic said that the door should have been able to open, unless…
“It’s barred from the outside!”
“What?” said Halflance, turning her attention away from four women trying and failing to move a beam out of the way.
“This fire was clearly set up, with all the extra fuel on the windows and in the basement. Of course an arsonist would want to prevent her victims from escaping, and what’s a good way to do that? Barring the main door from the outside!”
“You mean that we are doomed, then?” said Halflance. Her and all of the others were looking at me, now, their faces a mix of despair and determination.
“No, of course not. It just means that we have to be precise about it…” I licked my cracked lips, still trying to work out the best avenue of approach. Then it hit me, and a few seconds later I hit the door. At a full sprint. With my shoulder. It hurt like hell, but I could hear a slight rasping note as the door gave in a fraction of an inch.
“Not this shit again,” Halflance muttered.
“You have a very interesting idea of precision, Emma Farrier,” said Zaya.
I backed up from the door as far as I could, waiting a moment for my bruises to heal before readying for another charge. “Look, if you were tiny, fast, and effectively immune to injury, you’d do this all the time too. And I am being precise. I’m being precise with where I apply force and for what reason.”
“The last time you tried something like this it brought down the entire fucking building on both of our heads,” said Halflance.
I sighed. “Which is why this time I’m not doing it to any structural support members. Besides, the building is coming down soon regardless of what I do.”
Zaya nodded sagely. “I am now understanding the stories Sarah Halflance has told about you. That they were all true is surprising.”
“You’re very welcome,” I said, and charged again. My shoulder rammed into the exact point where the two doors met with shocking force, and a loud crack could be heard under my grunt of pain. Part of the door had broken, but it wasn’t enough. While the others watched on with bemused horror, I stepped back and charged one more time.
I was almost becoming inured to the pain, especially after it had had a few seconds to fade. That was nice, but also somewhat worrying. More importantly, as I stepped back and stretched the cricks out of my shoulder joint, I realized that the door had given by just an inch, with a narrow gap showing between the doors. The air outside was still well over a hundred degrees, but the breeze flowing in felt like heaven anyway.
The core of my logic was that there was no way that the arsonist would have had the time to actually nail the bar to the door or anything like that. Through the gap I could see that she’d used a thin steel tentpole from the Bluerose expedition, further confirming that idea. I pressed the palms of my hands together and slid them into the door gap right under the pole, then pushed upwards.
I had just about everything going against me. The position I was in meant that I couldn’t apply more than a fraction of my already-limited strength. My ability protected me from wounds and gave me vastly more endurance than I should have, but even I was starting to run low. The tent-pole was burning hot, and must have been jammed into place, because there was more than just weight resisting me.
While I struggled and strained, Zaya stepped forward. “Get your hands out of the way,” she said.
I did as she suggested, giving my hands a second to heal. Zaya gritted her teeth, and with surprising strength lifted her walking stick and jammed the tip of it into the gap, right where my hands had been. Her legs were shaking, and I couldn’t imagine that the old woman would be able to stand for much longer, but still she used whatever strength she had to push upward with the staff.
After a moment of confusion, I realized that she might have been onto something. I grabbed the walking stick with both hands and heaved, this time able to push upwards from my feet. For a second it seemed hopeless, both of us straining together, Zaya about to collapse, the flames so close now that the others were starting to crowd around us. I had tried my best, and was going to burn with the rest of them.
There was an explosive burst of movement as the resistance gave out all at once, sending both me and Zaya sprawling to the ground. Zaya’s staff had shattered a couple of inches from the bottom, leaving the end a crown of jagged splinters. For a second, I was crushed with deathly despair. Of course it hadn’t worked. Of course.
With a clang, the tent-pole hit the ground, having been just barely dislodged a moment before the walking stick shattered. I stared at it on the ground for a few seconds, almost not believing it was there. Slowly, the fact of my success seeped in, and I let out my breath.
“You just needed a bit of help,” said Zaya, sitting up next to me. “Though I might need some in return; my feet aren’t what they used to be.”
Almost instantly, two of the other women extended their hands to her, helping to pull her up onto her feet. Halflance and I pushed the doors open to little resistance, with the others close behind, and I tried to remember the safest way through the other burning buildings. The group stayed close together and couldn’t move much faster than a slow walk. We were still close enough to hear the roar of the basement exploding into flames a minute or two later.
The edge of the conflagration had been mostly extinguished by the time we made it out, with the town authorities having sorted out all of the bucket brigades and doctors and everything else you need for a disaster response. Burnardor had even regained consciousness, glaring right at me as I found my discarded clothes and got dressed again. Things seemed mostly under control, though the damage was severe and it was obvious not everybody had made it out.
As I was getting dressed, I noticed something odd out beyond the crowd. What at first seemed to be a weird black speck on the horizon soon resolved into a humanoid figure standing on a rooftop overlooking the chaos. She looked to be wearing a black jacket with a fur ruff, navy blue gloves and boots, a silky black mask. In other words, the same outfit as the woman who had saved me from the blankwolves all the way back in the mountain pass. She was looking in my direction, and only a few seconds after I saw her, she flicked that two-fingered salute at me and vanished over the far side of the rooftop.
My second objective after clothing was hydration, which I stole from one of the bucket brigades. River water was river water, and it tasted divine. Before I could attend to priority #3, that being making damn well sure that Burnardor knew what had happened, I heard someone calling my name.
“Emma! Emma! Where are you?” Dr. Amina Charcharias said through the crowd.
“I’m right over here!” I said.
Charcharias pushed through a wall of onlookers to find me. She smiled upon seeing me, showing rows of pointed teeth. “There you are, unharmed as ever. That’s good to see. I need you to come with me.”
“Um, shouldn’t you be treating all the burn victims?”
She shook her head. “This is much more important. I think I know the source of your regeneration.”
...no, the burn victims are still more important. The regeneration powers ain't going anywhere.
Maybe Halflance will start taking Emma's suspicions seriously.
Emma needs some major therapy. Sheesh. She keeps treating herself like mincemeat.
Also, she lost her hair, right? Tho she certainly hasn't noticed yet.
I’m going to assume as a plot contrivance that her hair length was not drastically affected by being on fire
@oinkymoo I stand corrected
I can't even imagine the horror and pain that must have been
Yeah, now that Emma knows that she can't die, she's going to go through a LOT.
Hero complex + immortality = Ouch
Thanks for the chapter