Daja smiled. “I’d as soon jump off a bridge. Besides, I like walking in the snow.”

Ben frowned. “It’s a long walk, Daja.” Together they went into the courtyard. “Why don’t you wait until Mother comes from shopping, and ride with us?”

The thought of sharing a sleigh with the sour-faced Morrachane made Daja shudder. To change the subject without offending Ben, she glanced at the mess of the burned warehouse. “May I take a look?”

Ben obligingly led the way through snow that fell in fat, steady flakes. “I could hardly believe it when it happened,” Ben remarked. “The place went up like a torch. Usually most of the ground floor walls are left, but not this time.”

The wreckage inside the huge, cluttered rectangular pit that was the cellar of the old warehouse was nearly two feet deep in accumulated snow.

Daja sighed and hunkered down with her staff against one shoulder. She was annoyed at having to deal yet again with Namornese winter. In civilized places winter arrived as rains, obscuring the ground only if the water collected into a pond. She called a burst of heat up, jamming it through her outstretched, spread fingers to blanket the ruin. This heat-wash was far quicker than those she’d used in the Ladradun offices, and far hotter. She didn’t hear Ben’s soft gasp as the snow within the walls of the ruined building shrank, collapsed in on itself, and trickled away, melted completely.

“That’s better,” Daja commented with satisfaction. She stood. “Now we can see. May I have your lantern a minute?” Ben handed it over. Daja opened it and took a pinch of flame, then closed the lantern and returned it to him. She let the pinch of fire roll into her palm, then called again on the earth’s heat. Her fire seed bloomed to brighten the entire courtyard. She held her hand out before her to see the wreckage clearly now that she had cleared it of snow. The hole in the ground showed the remains of charred floors at its edges. Inside fragments of the outer walls she could decipher the way the upper floors had dropped through the lower ones until everything came to a stop in the cellar. At the very rear of the pit she discovered a gaping hole.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to it.

Ben squinted to see what she meant. “It’s a loading tunnel,” he explained. “All the canal-side businesses have them. In the summer the boats tie up in front of the tunnels, and the hands can then carry supplies right into storerooms and warehouses.”

“Very tidy,” said Daja, impressed. “Were the doors to the canal open last month?”

“Yes,” Ben replied with a puzzled frown. “We keep them open all winter, or the freezing in the ground warps, even breaks them. Why?”

“It’s the key to how the warehouse burned so fast,” she explained, walking around the wreckage to get a closer view of the open tunnel. Sure enough, she felt a cold draft rising from it.

He stared at her. Even the bright light she held didn’t bleach his features enough to hide that he was plainly startled. “How do you know that?” he asked.

“It comes of being a smith.” Daja let the seed of fire sink into her palm. It made her hand glow orange, lit from within, until she thrust it into the ground. She forgot to sheath it in her power: the instant the unguarded heat entered the earth, the snow melted and she sank into slush to her ankles. Daja climbed out of the puddle with a sigh and shook her booted feet off.

“We pump air with the bellows through a channel under the fire. That makes it even hotter, and that’s why this place”-she pointed to the shadowy depths of the ruined warehouse with her staff-“went up so thoroughly.” She walked back to him. “How did it start? Was it deliberately set? All this is too perfect to be an accident.”

Ben shrugged “Why go to so much trouble for a worthless building? I assumed some beggar got in there to sleep out of the wind, and his cookfire or candle set it burning by accident. Frankly, I didn’t care. I’ve been after Mother for years to pull that firetrap down. At least it gave my local firefighters a chance to use their training, after months of no fires at all.”

Daja nodded, impressed. That was so like him to worry that, without chances to work, his people might not be ready for a true disaster. Only Ben would think that more important than the loss of a second-rate warehouse.

A gust of wind made him shiver. Here she was, keeping this man out in the cold. “I’d best be going,” she told him.

“I wish you would wait for Mother,” he complained. “It’s on-“

“Ben!” a hard voice cried, interrupting. “Lamps are lit in the cutting room with no one there!” Morrachane Ladradun walked out of Ben’s office-Daja guessed she had entered through the store on Cashbox Street. “Where are the Dancruan accounts? And your office is far too warm.”

If Morrachane had a mirror, thought Daja, it had to be metal. Silvered glass would break every time Ben’s mother showed that face to it. As it was, Daja bet the metal had to be flattened at regular intervals. Continued exposure to Morrachane’s face would warp the best metal from time to time.

Ben sighed faintly and went to his mother. Daja followed.

“Who is with you?” demanded the older woman. She peered through the swirling snow at Daja. “Oh. Ravvikki Kisubo.”

“Ravvi Ladradun.” Daja said with minimum politeness. Even that was for Ben, not for this unpleasant female who refused to call her by her mage title. “I was just going.”