Wardragon by Paul Collins

merchantmen are?’ Daretor asked.
    ‘Or where they come from,’ Zimak added. ‘They just appeared over a couple of weeks, throwing their money around like they had their own secret mint. They’ve also bribed their way into the King’s court and purchased positions of power.’
    ‘All this in such a short time,’ Jelindel pondered. ‘What is the word on the streets?’
    Zimak gestured helplessly. ‘As I said, those charmvendors and cauldron witches left complain a lot. Some say the gods have turned their backs on the old magic.’
    Jelindel laughed. ‘The old gods gave up their interest in humans millennia ago.’
    That night Jelindel and Daretor lay in bed watching rain spatter against the window. She snuggled closer to him. ‘This isn’t exactly what we had in mind, is it?’ she said.
    Daretor snorted softly, almost asleep. ‘A holiday is what I wanted.’
    ‘You? A holiday?’
    ‘People change.’
    ‘Next you’ll tell me Zimak wants to rush off into deadly danger.’
    ‘ Some people don’t change.’
    They talked some more but the pauses between answer and question grew longer, and soon the room was filled with soft regular breathing as they fell asleep.

    Around three in the morning something awakened Jelindel. She sat up straight, peering around with darkened eyes, eerily alert. Seeing and hearing nothing she put on a nightrobe, slipped on buskins, and went out to the landing. She could hear faint snoring coming from Zimak’s room down the end of the hall. Nothing was amiss there, at least. She crossed to the balcony railing of the mezzanine floor, and gazed down to the ground level, which was cloaked in shadows.
    Jelindel stood a moment longer, then shrugged. Obviously Zimak’s stories and hints had affected her nerves. She started back to her room, and stopped. It was not a sound that made her freeze, it was a smell.
    Smoke.
    She rushed in and woke Daretor, told him to get Zimak up, then grabbed her sword and dashed down the stairs. She flung open the kitchen door and lurched backwards as a wall of flame surged out into the corridor.
    The heat was intense. She covered her face with her arm and felt the hairs on her skin shrivel at the very thought of being singed. Daretor came rushing up behind her but he too backed away.
    That was when Jelindel noticed something very odd. The flames did not consume what they touched. She caught glimpses of the inside of the kitchen as the fire ebbed and surged, but as far as she could tell, nothing had been harmed. Still, the inferno raged. Now it was in the corridor, licking the ceiling, now skimming across the walls, reaching for the rug.
    Smoke filled the air, making them cough violently. Zimak dashed up with a pail of water and threw it on the nearest flames. But instead of being doused, or at least dampened, they surged forward even more hotly than before.
    ‘It’s no ordinary fire,’ Jelindel yelled above the roaring noise. ‘It’s mage work.’
    ‘Can you counter it?’ Daretor shouted back. His face was already blackened with soot, in spite of the fact that the fire burnt nothing. Jelindel wondered, in one of those idle moments that always come in the midst of danger and panic, whether she too looked as ridiculous.
    ‘I’ll try.’
    Blue light flickered about her lips then leapt the intervening space to assault the fire. At first, the flames reared up and retreated, as if they were a living thing, suddenly afraid. Then they swept back, sending out a tongue of flame that lashed at Jelindel and would have burnt her badly had Daretor not jerked her away in time.
    ‘In the shop,’ she yelled. ‘There’s a tub of powdered bane’s wood. Fetch it.’
    Daretor hurried off and returned moments later with a small barrel of greenish powder. Jelindel started throwing handfuls of the stuff at the flames, muttering charms of suppression as she did so. Slowly, the flames retreated, leaving behind an awful stench. It took more than an hour to finally quench