18

The Administrator glared at the Chief Magistrate then looked at Mallory, then the Matriarch, and back at the Magistrate. He put one hand on the table and ran the other hand through his hair. The Administrator hesitated in that position for a moment more and sat down hard in his chair, looking at the ceiling. He sighed deeply before looking back at the Magistrate. The whole room was watching him. Only the Administrator could adjourn a trial once it had begun, and Mallory wondered if he would. Were his plans for usurping power more important than attending to the news of a fire? Then she began to wonder what had started the fire—had Alex and Caleb been able to activate the fire sprites? Or had someone else?

She could hear the murmuring crowd behind her, and the repetition of the word “fire” burning through their ranks. The murmuring grew to become like thunder, and she knew that the crowd was leaving the Governor’s District to see what was happening in the market. She desperately wanted to run back out the double doors and follow them, but she kept her curiosity in check and kept her eyes on the Administrator.

The Chief Magistrate stepped up beside Mallory then. “Father,” he implored. “I know it’s not ideal, but members of this Council are needed in the market.”

The City Services Manager began to stand, and the Administrator shot up out of his chair. “Sit down, Jake Carpenter! No one has excused you!” The big man fell back into his seat, nearly toppling over backwards in the process.

The Governor stood up then and yelled at the Administrator over the head of the Matriarch, “James, what are you doing? We have to go; the city needs us.”

The Administrator squirmed and sneered. “No, the city needs to see justice served!”

“What good is it to see justice served if the marketplace is burning? If it spreads to the crops on top of the skyscrapers, well . . . “ The Governor narrowed his ice-blue eyes. “We will take a recess; we’ll come back and hear the matter after the fire is resolved.”

The Administrator was not so easily cowed into following orders. “No, we must finish what we’ve started! The trial is in motion.” He sat down heavily at the head of the table.

The Matriarch burst up out of her chair and shoved her finger down into the Administrator’s seated chest, “You mean to say that your coup d’état is in motion! What is this trial meant to distract the Council from, James?”

The Governor put his hand on her shoulder, “Sarai, please!”

She swiveled on him, “Don’t ‘please’ me, William! How long have you known about his plans, and how long have you been conspiring?” She turned in a wide arc around to the Council. “And how many of you have staked your claim on one side of these two or the other? They’re about to destroy what’s left of the city, Dikaió or not: magistrates on one side,” she pointed at the Administrator, “and fire sprites on the other,” she said pointing at the Governor, who looked down with a pained expression.

The Administrator jumped to his feet and raised his hand in the air, knocking over his chair and causing the Matriarch to step back. He seemed ready to strike her, but after noticing the eyes around him, he pointed at Mallory instead. “Your daughter already wrought the very destruction you are now accusing us of.” He looked at the Council. “How can we let this stand? The city demands justice, and it demands it today!” He slammed his fist hard on the table.

The Matriarch laughed. “So that’s where your son gets it. He struck both me and my daughter on the way here. Neither of you understands justice, hitting unarmed women and trying to excise the Triad and the City Council for your own selfish gains. You care nothing for the integrity of the Dikaió!”

The Administrator sneered, “The Dikaió is gone, and you’re just a priestess serving a dead god, Matriarch.”

The Sprite Master raised her hand timidly to interrupt the heated exchange, and all three members of the Triad glared at her. “Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt. As necessary as these conversations are, I just want to know—did I hear something about fire sprites?”

The Administrator was again frozen, hunched over and blinking with his fist still solidly planted on the table, staring daggers at the Sprite Master.

The Governor looked from the Sprite Master to the Matriarch. “Yes, what was that part about fire sprites when you pointed at me?”

Mallory spoke then, “Caleb and I found the fire sprites in the dark woods. At first, we thought they might be able to help fight back the woods, but then Caleb told us about the Administrator’s takeover, and we thought they could help with that too. Alex helped us get the sprite book that shows how to build them from the Administrator’s house.”

“My house?” The Administrator reeled; fear registering in his eyes. “How was that cursed book at my . . .” He steeled himself again and shouted across the room, “This trial is in recess! Daniel, call all the magistrates to the city marketplace. Bring all available weapons and ammunition.”

He walked briskly around the table toward the door, and then paused. He turned back and in the same tone he had used at his house the night Mallory came to visit Alex, he said, “Mallory Knenne, there is no punishment worthy of the evil you’ve inflicted on this city.” Then more broadly, he addressed the Council, “None of you are competent to run this city. When this fire has been subdued, this trial will extend to the lot of you!” With that he ran out the door, followed by the Chief Magistrate.

The Governor watched him leave and said darkly, “Caleb received no direction from me to build fire sprites. This is the first that I’ve heard of them, but if that’s what is starting fires in the city, we all need to get down there and try to stop them.”

Mallory shook her head, “I don’t see how it could be the fire sprites. Without the Dikaió, we could not birth them. However, the accelerant we were going to use in them was all missing this morning, so someone may have used it to start the fires.”

The Governor walked around the table, “Whatever it is, we need to take action now. Jake, are the hydrant sprites ready?”

The City Services Manager nodded and stood up, “Yes, I’ll get them to the site right away.”

The Governor spoke to the Culture Master then, “Andrew, the Culture Guild has quite a bit of water on top of the buildings in the marketplace, right? Is there a way to get the hydrant sprites up to the top, so they have an easy way to reload?”

The Culture Master looked up at the ceiling as though weighing the hydrant sprites in his mind. “We’ve had to rejig the grain elevators to run on a pulley system. It takes quite a few of us to lower crops down and raise an empty elevator back up to the top. Depending on how heavy the sprites are, we could probably get them to the top if the City Services men were working together with us. Otherwise, it would be the stairs—and that’s going to be a lot more work.”

The Governor nodded, “You and Jake see what you can do. The rest of us know what worked well, and what did not, with City Hall. Let’s activate the bucket brigade, and we’ll all meet in the marketplace.”

The Matriarch ran around the table and grabbed Mallory’s arm. “C’mon, Mallory. Let’s go get some buckets at the house.”

The Governor’s District was deserted when they ran out of the Governor’s house. Mallory looked toward the marketplace, and there above the houses and the tree line was a column of black smoke roiling into the sky. The size of the plume concerned her—what if the fire was too big to be put out? Could this fire threaten the entire city? Was this all part of the Administrator’s plan? To set a fire and blame it on her for building the fire sprites? She had all but admitted her guilt on that front, but she had implicated both the Governor’s son and the Administrator’s granddaughter in their construction. Surely, the old usurper would spare his own granddaughter from the trouble that would come from constructing fire sprites?

And where were Alex and Caleb? They had left her house hours ago in search of the fire sprites, and they had not attended the trial. Alex had said she would be there to testify on her behalf or suffer the same consequences whatever they might be. Mallory began to run through possibilities of why they might not have come, and none of those reasons were comforting: They might have run across the magistrates and been detained, or worse; they might have been caught in the fires that were now raging; they might have been part of the conspiracy of both their families to usurp the city for the Governor or the Administrator, respectively. And really, was her mother right in pointing a finger at the Governor for doing the same thing as the Administrator? And had members of the City Council chosen sides? And if they had, why had no one chosen the Matriarch’s side? Was the Matriarch really just a priestess in want of a deity?

The Knenne family ran to the side of the Matriarch’s house and began to fill silver-colored buckets from the water spigot on the side wall. The buckets were one of the Governor’s recent initiatives after City Hall burned. He had suggested that, in addition to the modifications to the hydrant sprites, the city should have a bucket brigade, so every household could bring water to help extinguish fires if the need arose. They had been cast from sprite steel at the Rookery and delivered to every residence, one for every hand.

When all the buckets were full, Mallory and her parents began the trek to the marketplace. At first, the buckets were not too hard to carry, but by the time they got to the end of the yard, the muscles in Mallory’s arms screamed at her to put the heavy things down. The Governor and his wife met them at the intersection with Silver Street, and they all began the steep decline toward Main Street and the marketplace. The pillar of smoke to her right continued to rise high into the sky, and at this time of day, the sun was on the other side of it, casting an eerie red glow over this part of the city. Black and gray pieces of ash were floating in the air like gray snow, and it was getting harder to breathe.

Mallory’s muscles continued to burn, and the worse they got, the more she noticed that the incline of the street and her awkward steps caused the water to slosh out of the bucket. The adults around her seemed to be able to keep the water in their buckets while they walked, but her water continued to slop out onto the street. She wondered how much water she would even have left once she got to the bottom of the street. She looked down at her feet and realized part of the problem was that she was still wearing the sparkly heels that went so well with her blue dress, which she was also still wearing. She quickly slipped off the shoes and continued down the hill, much more stable with her buckets now, though losing the shoes did little to alleviate the muscles aching in her arms. Fighting a fire in her fancy blue dress was going to ruin it, just like her clothes that night in City Hall. The thought of City Hall made her heart beat fast, and her breathing picked up, making her cough slightly in the ash-filled air. The thought of facing another fire in such close proximity was nearly unbearable; she felt like dropping the water buckets and running away.

Then somewhere in her rational mind the thought occurred to her that building fire sprites was bound to result in fires. It did not make any sense to be so scared of getting burned when she had literally been playing with fire for days. The dark humor in this dichotomy made her chuckle out loud, and all four of the adults looked back at her with some weird mixture of fear and disgust—she recognized the familiar disapproval that adults often give teenagers, especially the boys when they were being rambunctious—but the girls got the disapproving looks often enough for her to recognize it.

The anxiety about facing a fire faded, but as the fear faded, the urge to run away intensified. When these fires had been burned out or put out, they would go back to the trial, where she would very likely be sentenced to execution. Even if Alex went through with her plan, she would join her in death, not pardon. Mallory realized that the fires presented the perfect opportunity to run away. No criminal had ever run away from the Administrator before—where could one go to hide in the city? The light had made sure that no one could get beyond its borders, and eventually the criminal would be found, so everyone just accepted the Administrator’s judgments without question. But without the light, Mallory could leave the city—and who would be able to find her? And maybe leaving would be the best option anyway; she did not want to make her parents and friends have to deal with her death. She did not want Alex to join her in that outcome either. But if she could find a way to survive in the dark forest, she would at least have a chance for life, and her family and friends could keep some hope not knowing whether she was alive or dead. She thought it was a pretty good solution.

Then her grandmother’s voice sounded in her head: “You are the Matriarch who is a Chorus that will save the city.”

Mallory growled and spoke back to the voice in her head defiantly, “Some savior I turned out to be.” She stared at the smoke plume ahead. “Looks like I’m doing a pretty good job destroying the city. The Administrator may not be a good man, but he’s certainly right about one thing—your curse was the worst thing that ever happened to this city. I am the worst thing that ever happened to this city.”

Mallory felt like her grandmother’s voice in her head had a response to her argument, but as the voice was just Mallory’s own, Mallory muffled it. She had spent so much of her life trying to live up to that prophecy, and all it had ever done was cause everyone around her pain. She was done trying to save the city. With saviors like her, who needed destroyers?

Suddenly, Mallory’s self-deprecating thoughts came to a screeching halt. She heard them before the group rounded the corner and saw them: the sound of large, metal discs scraping against each other.

It was impossible. How could they have been birthed without the Dikaió? Yet, when the Knennes and Aiworths turned onto Main Street with their buckets of water, there in the street were the unmistakable shapes of three fire sprites spraying hot death all around them. The three sprites were quite far down the street, and if they were not twelve feet tall, they would have been hard to make out. Between them and the fire sprites stood the crowd of citizens from the Governor’s District.

The Governor walked into the crowd with his buckets of water, screaming at the top of his lungs, “What are you all doing? Go! Get your water buckets! Let’s put out these fires!”

Mallory followed behind him, every thought of escape forgotten with the weight of what she had unleashed on the city. At first, she did not want to meet the eyes of the citizens while she weaved between them in the Governor’s wake, but then she began to be curious why none of them seem to be responding to his orders. She looked around her, and she saw the same blank, gaunt faces from the night they had tried to throw her into the bonfire: They did not have the energy to care that giant sprites were destroying their city. Instead, they stared ahead at the fire sprites, watching with dull eyes and limp hands. They were no longer brown-eyed, blue-eyed, and green-eyed citizens—all that was left were empty husks of orange-eyed humanity, the fire of their own demise reflecting in their corneas.

Mallory could not bear looking at these people any longer, so instead, she looked up at the skyscrapers where the remainder of the city’s food was located. So far, the fires did not seem to be taking to the glass and steel structures, but if it did, the populace would starve completely. Somehow, these monstrosities needed to be stopped.

Then she saw two tiny streams of water began to spray off the top of one of the skyscrapers. Mallory could only just make out two firefighters holding the nozzles of a hydrant sprite, directing the streams of water just like she had imagined it working. Against the fire sprites’ onslaught, the hydrant sprite seemed almost completely ineffectual—at least, Mallory could not see the streams of water extinguishing any of the flames.

On the other skyscrapers, she saw small platforms slowly ascending the buildings: Ropes on the sides of each platform were being pulled by four men, and in the center of the platform stood a hydrant sprite. She did a quick count, and there were about eight platforms ascending. She was not sure how many hydrant sprites there were in the city, but she could tell they would be little help against the fire sprites. She could feel the water in her buckets sloshing onto her bare legs, and she knew these buckets of water would do little to help, either. If they could just stop new fires from forming, maybe then they would have a chance to put out the existing ones.

As they got closer, they could see a line of magistrates firing their weapons at the fire sprites. Just like the stories that their grandparents had told, the magistrates’ weapons seemed to be having no effect on them. At this distance, Mallory could see that the sprites were in nearly the same state of repair as when she had left them. The one she had completed was moving along quickly, spraying fire in steady, accurate streams. The half-completed one was a bit more haphazard, but still causing plenty of destruction. The third one had just been piles of parts yesterday, and it did not look like much more than that now. It lumbered along in uneven steps, trying to spray fire out of rotted hoses and rusted nozzles, which were just dripping the fire down on itself so that it looked more like a bumbling ball of fire than a fire sprite. There was a trickle of fire coming from its nozzles that was catching bits of odds and ends on fire, but most of the destruction it was causing was from crashing into things, destroying them with the force of its weight and momentum while simultaneously catching them on fire.

They were about halfway through the crowd when the bumbling sprite bounced off the corner of one of the skyscrapers and went stumbling through the line of magistrates and into the crowd. Suddenly, the orange-eyed masses dissolved into multi-colored terror. The crowd turned and began to push back against itself. Mallory was jostled to the left and right. She tried desperately to cling to her buckets of water, but she dropped both of them when, in a moment of self-preservation, her body decided that clinging to useless buckets was less important than staying upright in the mad rush of the crowd. Her body also seemed to decide that pushing forward against the crowd would not work, and that going backwards was not an option either, so through much mashing and shoving, she managed to make it inside a skyscraper to her left.

Mallory turned to watch the crowd scramble past the buildings. Her adrenaline was pumping, but as it subsided a little, she felt some stinging pain in her feet. Her feet were still bare, and her toes were covered in blood. The toenails had been cracked and broken by the boots of the mob as they scrambled past her. Her dress was torn in several places as well. Mallory was not sure exactly what to do about all of it. Should she run back up to her house and change clothes and get some shoes? In the midst of this thought, a lumbering pile of fire smashed against the windows in front of her: It was the animated jumble of sprite parts.

She was surprised that it could move at all. The parts were barely connected; wires dangled, balls moved in and out of sockets, and toothless gears spun pointlessly inside the rusted holes in its hull. The thing looked almost as if it had been roughly pushed together rather than connected by skilled hands, and Mallory wondered if it was possible that this abomination was the handiwork of the other two fire sprites.

She did not have time to wonder long because the sprite backed up, and then ran hard into the skyscraper again. The windows shattered as their steel frames bent. That’s when Mallory determined that the fire sprite was not ambling aimlessly: Its red, glowing eyes were set on her. It lowered both nozzles in her direction, and the sound of metal scraping metal enveloped the air around her. She could see the sparks of the flint wheels inside the fire sprite, and she could see the mechanism inside the pumps leading to the nozzles begin to move: It was going to spray her with liquid fire.

She stepped backwards and felt glass slide into the bottom of her foot. She squeaked quietly but knew there was no time to deal with pain; it would be better to have her feet cut to ribbons than be roasted alive by this homicidal sprite.

Then out of nowhere a silver flash hit the top of the sprite, and Mallory watched as the rusted bits of the fire sprite collapsed in on the moving parts. The flint discs went topsy turvy, and the sprite’s arms bounced up just as the accelerant pumped out of the nozzles. Paraffin shot into the air above the fire sprite, and it collapsed on the ground. As the liquid fuel ignited, the fire sprite’s tanks exploded, knocking Mallory backwards onto the glass-strewn floor.

Mallory lay there on the floor blinking, staring at the ceiling of the first floor of the skyscraper through smoke wafting in from the street. Copper ceiling tiles with alternating lilies and fluers-de-lis stretched across the room above her. The reflection of the fire flickering on the copper artwork amongst trails of smoke was surprisingly beautiful, like light-dragons dancing in cloudy skies. Her mind took her back to that night at City Hall when the backdraft had knocked her into the grass with Caleb. She could almost feel his protective weight again. She suddenly wondered how she had managed to live her entire life without being blown up, and now at seventeen, she had been blown up twice. She imagined the stained-glass Matriarch wearing non-flammable bubble-wrap armor over her gown, and Mallory reached out to pinch one of the bubbles and feel its satisfying pop. Her fingers closed over empty space.

She blinked. Hot, dry smoke filled with the stench of paraffin enveloped her as her eyes adjusted once more to the fiery reality around her. She pulled herself to her feet, trying to shake off the pain and disorientation of the explosion—but when she was fully upright, she felt herself gasping for air and quite dizzy. Her head throbbed every time she coughed. The walls in front of her were on fire now, and smoke had filled the air. She felt the fabric of her dress, thinking she would make a mask of it, but the dress was made of chiffon and was too porous to keep the smoke out. She considered crawling her way out, but the floor was littered with glass shards, and that same blue chiffon dress would offer little protection for her hands or knees. Walking seemed to be the only way to survive, and her bare, bloody feet ran the risk of further injury.

She bent down and began to tear strips of blue fabric from around the hem of her already torn dress. Then she tied the fabric around her feet like bandages, hoping that the delicate dress material would at least provide some cushion between her bare skin and the glass on the floor. Once her feet were covered, she waited for what seemed like an eternity—blinking, trying to clear her vision—before carefully picking her way forward to avoid more glass. She peered through the broken windows, trying to figure out what had hit the fire sprite, and she saw the glint of shiny silver steel amidst the flames: a hydrant sprite. The unstable fire sprite must have knocked it loose from the platform that was making its way to the top of the building. When the hydrant sprite fell, the nigh-indestructible sprite steel had gone through the fire sprite’s older, rusty steel like butter. It looked like the fall had ruined the hydrant sprite as well, as pieces of shiny, new sprite steel were sprinkled about, and its silver hull was now a mangled mess. She narrowed her eyes and thought to herself, “They can be broken after all.”

Limping gingerly out into the street, she was relieved that most of the crowd was gone, but there were still some people laying in the street. Mallory limped painfully over to the nearest woman to see if she was okay.

The woman had her face to the ground, and her hands were covering her head. Dark, deep burns traced up her arms and legs, and parts of her scalp were showing through her singed blond hair. Her yellow dress was now mostly black and smoldering. Mallory bent down and gingerly touched the woman’s back. The woman did not respond. Mallory pushed a little harder, and said, “Miss, are you okay?” There was still no response. Mallory shoved her hands under one side of the woman’s torso and pushed, starting to turn the woman over. As the woman’s face became visible, Mallory realized by the glazed eyes and gray color that the woman would never respond to anything in this life again.

Mallory dropped her and scrambled backwards as shooting pain radiated up from her feet. She wheeled backwards and nearly tripped over the limp form of a magistrate laying behind her.

Mallory spun around slowly; the streets were sprinkled with citizens that did not get away from the fire sprite fast enough. When her grandmother died, it looked nothing like this.  

She felt sick to her stomach.

The fire sprites she created were busy setting fire to whatever they could further up Main Street, and there were still some magistrates struggling behind them, ineffectually firing at them. She watched one of the fire sprites take aim at a magistrate that was too close, and the grinding metal noise carried across the wind, drowning out his scream. She turned away in horror, stumbling away from the fire sprites and bodies, limping hopelessly away from the destruction. Her eyes burned from smoke and the images of death. Her head throbbed. Her feet were full of glass spikes that pulsed into her legs like an electrical current. Her grandmother was wrong. Mallory was no Matriarchal savior. She was the mother of damnation, and she had birthed the death of the city and christened it with fire.