Those thoughts flashed through her mind in an instant. She found the small door the servants used to admit themselves and persuaded the metal latch to open. Inside the rear courtyard she saw why those fires she gripped fought so hard. Every cellar entryway gaped; the doors under them would be ajar, too. That was why the garret shutters were open. He had turned the entire house into a chimney. This was the work of someone who knew fire. This was Ben’s doing.

Watersday, she thought as she ran onto the covered rear porch. He picked Watersday, when there might not be a brigade anywhere close, because the servants are off. She beat on the door. Was Morrachane or were any of the servants home?

Nearby she heard bright, urgent peals from the fire alarm bells that hung at the nearest street corners. A few moments later she heard another bell ring in the distance.

There was no time to be polite. She released the fire in the western extension and gave that part of her attention to the door. Seizing the nails and the hinges, she yanked. The metal flew out of the wood, dodging her politely.

“Ow!” someone cried behind her. Daja pulled Nia aside as the boards that formed the door fell onto the porch. The girl was nursing a cut along one cheekbone: she had been scored by a nail.

“I told you to summon fire brigades!” Daja told her. “Get out of here!” In the part of her that gripped the biggest fires, under and in the kitchen, she felt an errant flame discover a trail of oil. Strengthened, it raced along to find a storehouse of full oil jars, pulling other flames with it. “Nia, you can’t come in!” Daja gripped the flames hard and tight, holding them from a bounty of oil by less than a foot.

Nia’s face dripped sweat, but her eyes were steady. “You can’t search alone-you’ll never find her in time,” she said. “It’s an awfully big house. I know the inside.”

Daja groped for something Nia would understand. “I don’t think we’ll find her alive. Ben Ladradun did this. He’s as mad as a rabid rat. She’s probably dead.”

“We’re wasting time,” Nia insisted.

Daja drew breath to argue, and felt her hold on the cellar fire tremble. She tightened it. If it reached the oil-she couldn’t let it reach the oil. “Let’s go,” she said. “Hold your scarf over your nose and mouth-wet it, if you get the chance. Feel a door before you open it. If it’s hot, don’t open it.”

The girl nodded, pulled her scarf up over her nose and mouth, and plunged into the house, Daja behind her. They searched room after room, with the exception of the kitchen, where smoke rolled out of the cracks around the doors. Like the cellar fire Daja gripped it with her power; it wasn’t going anyplace, but it was foolish to stick their heads in there.

“Aunt Morrachane!” cried Nia. “Aunt Morrachane!” Her courage made Daja feel small. She knew Nia was terrified, but she had forced herself to come in to save a woman she pitied.

Once they’d checked the ground floor, they ran upstairs. “Her bedroom’s here,” Nia said, running to a closed door. She yanked it open. “Aunt Morra-“

Daja stopped beside her. Morrachane was on the bed, but she would not be leaving with them. She would beat no more servants, torment no more sons.

Nia fainted. Daja barely caught her in time to keep the younger girl from cracking her head. She managed to drag Nia into the hall and to slam the door on that dreadful sight. Then she went to an ornamental jar on a hall table and vomited until nothing came through her raw throat or streaming nose.

Daja’s grip on her concentration wavered: the cellar and kitchen fires surged ahead a handful of inches. For a full minute she trembled on the verge of releasing them to wipe away that room and the body in it. Only the knowledge that a fire might spread to the neighboring homes stopped her.

She knelt beside the younger girl. “Nia,” Daja said, patting the girl’s ashen cheeks. “Nia, please, we have to get out.” Was Ben still here or had he fled? Surely he’d escaped.

Nia groaned: she was coming to. Daja wished she had smelling salts to hasten the process. No doubt Morrachane kept—

She stopped that thought where it was. Nothing could make her go back into that room. Instead she slung one of Nia’s arms over her shoulders and stood, dragging the half-conscious girl to her feet. The blaze in the cellar was getting bigger, searching for cracks in her control.

She hauled Nia down the back stair, sweating so hard the drops pattered onto the wooden steps. More tendrils of the cellar fire escaped her grip, straining greedily for those oil jars. She released the fires in the wing opposite them. Her quickest escape would be the way they’d entered, which took them past the kitchen. She would need all her strength to hold that and the fire in the cellar just below it.

Something changed: Nia had control over her feet. She trembled, but she took most of her weight off Daja. Relieved, Daja forgot to watch where she was going. She tripped and went sprawling on the ground floor, yanking her support away from Nia. The other girl dropped to her knees with a yelp.

Daja’s attention broke as she fell. A rope of flame wrapped itself around a jar of oil below. It shattered; the cellar fire roared.

Terrified, Daja shoved it and the rest of the fire into the earth under the house, down through a crack in the underlying rock. Following the crack, the blaze roared into an underground chamber filled with the unfrozen Syth. The water surged up into the crack, turning to steam as it hit the fire and boiling its way to the cellar. All it needed was the slender path the fire had made: the water’s force enlarged it fast.