5

James clicked his fingers. The corpse bolted upright, its head lolling to the left. Yellow fluid oozed out of her ears, her nose. Her eyeballs seemed half-melted, oozing out of their sockets.

“The primary tether is taken,” said James.

“What do you mean?” the woman asked innocently.

“This cadaver was discarded by its previous reanimator.” Sam said. “This increases the difficulty of subsequent reanimations.”

“Intriguing, isn’t it?” the woman beamed. “No one else knows she’s dead.”

“I didn’t come up here to play your games,” James snapped. “I’m leaving.”

“She left you a proprietary device in her will. Why did she do that?”

James left the room before she could get in another word, Lucia on his tail. Sam, caught off-guard, hurried after them, but the Maestro had slammed shut the door, and mahogany was heavy.

“Samantha, come here a moment,” said the woman.

The sound of her own name terrified her. “I…no…sorry.”

“I oversee the auditions. Every apprentice who seeks to raise the dead must do as I say.”

Sam wanted to scream. All she had planned to do today was show up for five minutes at a stranger’s funeral. “What do you want from me?”

The woman’s voice was music, her eyes gentle and amused. “Men are naïve. They think they know everything there is to know about the world, but when they glean the abyss they cover their eyes and run back home, and they gather up all the money they have and count them. Wealth, power – these intangible fantasies goad them into committing the most heinous crimes, and they are willing, because their attention is diverted from the terror of their pointless lives. How about you, Samantha? Would you like to see?”

The half-congealed eyes of the First Progenitor quivered in their idle delirium. The Green effervesced from the corpse’s fingers like a parody of souls. There was ink under its fingernails. Its thumb was twitching.

Sam could picture herself in that chair. The boss of all pyromancers. A hundred thousand firebugs, under her command. Her house – a cathedral; her pastime – looking out the window and marvelling at her domain. With a stroke of a pen, she could turn a Floor into a sea of fire.

Jack Finley would send her a letter, telling her how many pyros to send to which Floor, and she would follow his orders. Field teams will be led by the necromantic apprentices, who knew nothing about alchemy or combustion, who on a good day could barely walk ten miles. So, what was the Progenitor’s job, exactly? Officiant? Creditor? Those were diversions to hide the fact that she was a rubber stamp, sitting in a big house, twiddling thumbs and waiting for the next mandate from people who knew no better than she did yet were by all standards superior.

Without the Houses, hers would be a niche guild at best, relegated to garbage disposal and demolitions. This opulent office, this massive desk – they were ingots of gold shackled to her ankles as she drowned. Those who had died in the shelters, who had watched their homes set alight and their dreams turned into digits in a Maestro’s ledger – how would they see this room? The throne of a lord, or a slave?

“Was she happy?” Sam asked.

The woman gave her a look. “What a strange question.”

“Did she enjoy this…this?” Sam waved at the mahogany shelves, the big window, the view. “Every time she sat in that chair, did she think, ‘If I am going to die, let it be here?’ Would she have preferred…I don’t know, a family? A father who loved her? Or was this the only place she had? I sit in my room, sometimes, when things are slow, and I look out the window. The people down there – do they look up and see my face, and think, how lucky she is, to be up there, looking down at us? Does she know how good she has it?”

The woman was annoyed. Nothing showed on her face, but Sam could tell anyway. “You seem confused, Samantha,” she said. “I am not your friend.”

The doors banged open. Lucia barged in with Jack the pyro under one arm. Jack was sweating. His abyssal eyes were bloodshot, almost mad. He glanced at Sam and gave his best smile. The flamespitter was slotted into a harness on his arm. “The Maestro knows best,” he said, and notched the slider all the way down.

A stream of blue-fire poured over the mahogany desk with such force, it went flying even as it turned to ash. The throne and the corpse of the First Progenitor were thrown into the window, and with a crack like thunder broke through in a ball of fire. The spire shook from the shockwave, the massive bookshelves jittering as if breaking into dance. The tomes that fell out had blank covers and blank pages. Props.

The windblast lasted but a split second. Every sound was dulled as Sam’s ears popped from the pressure wave. Everything glowed in extreme clarity. She could make out every single strand of the woman’s hair. Black they were, and frozen in place. The shockwave sent her tumbling but her hair remained impeccable, and when she stood up she was giggling. Her face was dirty but unbruised.

Everything in a two-degree arc was obliterated. The desk, the body, the chair, the window – all turned to ash or ejected onto the streets below. Jack casually restored the slider and shook the canister like a can of beans. “Still got some left,” he said. The fire seemed to have restored him to his former self. His smile was smug, his posture relaxed even as he wriggled under Lucia’s armpit. “Here,” he handed Sam the flamespitter. “The Maestro would –”

He bit his tongue as Lucia dropped him onto the floor. Sam managed to grab her satchel before Lucia picked her up and kicked down both doors on her out. The woman called out after them. “See you soon, Samantha! Nice to meet you!” but Lucia was already in descent, leaping twenty steps at a time.

Sam found herself laughing all the way down.

James was waiting for them in the atrium, surrounded by a gaggle of pyros. He pointed at the staircase. “Go, quickly. The Second Progenitor needs your help.” The pyros dispersed at his gesture, half of them not even pretending to go where he intended. The Maestro smirked at that.

Lucia propped Sam on a bench and patted the creases out of her coat. “Wait with me,” said the Maestro. “Here, have a bagel.”

How James had acquired pastry was about the furthest thing from Sam’s mind. It tasted like salt.

“Sorry for leaving like that. I had to act like I was offended,” he said.

“There was a quill under her chair,” Sam said between bites. “Ink under her nails. The bread inkwell thing is Ingel’s idea. You are supposed to replace the bread every day, to show how rich you are.”

“And how long would you say it has been out, pastry expert?”

“A week.”

“And I thought I taught you how to examine corpses.”

The gates of the cathedral swung wide open. A dozen fusiliers, marching in single column, made a beeline to the hidden staircase. Pyromancers of all ranks swarmed around them, shouting and jostling and arguing. They specifically avoided paying James any attention.

“What happens now, apprentice?”

“They’ll think you killed their boss.”

James laughed. “My professional acquaintances all seem to think that I am brewing some scheme to…I don’t know, upset the established powers. Do I give that impression?”

Sam watched the fusiliers disappear into the alcove. The pyros stayed behind to gossip. The atrium was full of them. Voices reverberated under the disapproving gaze of the Prime Progenitor, loud and indecipherable. “A little bit,” she said.

“The woman from the Palace Above. How did you like her?”

“She said she is in charge of the audition.”

“She is in charge of nothing, not even her own life.” A pyro tried to approach them, a sheepish look on his face. James stopped him with a glance. “The Palace Above doesn’t care – about anything, not even themselves. They play detective because this world is a game and they are bored.”

“She knew you’d come.”

“She wanted me to come. She knew I’d be entertaining. Did you know there are sixteen Second Progenitors? It’s an executive candidacy. The most suitable is chosen by ballot to succeed the First. Jack was never winning that vote.”

“No,” agreed Sam.

“But now he might. Look.”

A large procession of pyros – thirty, forty men in white robes and flame-patterned masks – approached the Maestro from every direction. They walked slowly, afraid of stepping in front of each other. Still, they came all the same. An old man with a doughnut bald patch cleared his throat and extended his hand. “Maestro Cowen.”

“Pleasure,” said James, not offering.

“Stars Beyond Twilight. Do you like it?”

“The what? Oh, the mosaic? Yeah, sure. I love art. I’m a patron of the arts. It’s beautiful. Was thinking of getting one for my lab. Show off to my clients.”

The pyros laughed nervously. The old man wrung his hands. “Maestro Cowen, I’m afraid we…we might have to ask you to…remain with us for a while, on account of the…incident.”

“The Progenitor can tell you what happened.”

“Yes, he…he is quite adamant that your ambler here –” the pyro glanced at Lucia with plain terror. “– was the instigator.”

“I am quite busy, you understand. I have a large batch coming in tomorrow morning on the Floor of Three. Need to be there.”

“Yes, yes of course…but I’m afraid…”

“You don’t imagine you could keep me here.” Lucia stepped forward a single step, and the pyros retreated three.

“No no, we’d never dare –”

James laughed. His voice boomed across the atrium. The eternal flame sputtered. “I’m kidding. I will stay until this matter is resolved. You have rooms?”

Palpable relief washed over every pyro’s face. “Certainly. Rooms. The best. This way, if you would allow me. And your apprentice –”

“Stays with me.”