It’s all right, Olennika told her. You might try the second floor—

Daja was afraid, but she knew what Lark and Sandry would do. Straight across the building from here? she asked.

Through the door. Olennika pointed to it. They’ll obey simple commands. Simple, mind. I brew the drug myself and I made it that way.

Daja nodded, then ran for the door they’d discussed and the hall beyond. Large wards opened off either side of the hall, disgorging escapees. She was shocked at how many people were still inside, but at least those who could move were there to help those in trouble. She dodged two girls supporting a very old man and caught a toddler when the woman who carried him dropped the child.

“I’d forgotten they were so heavy,” the gray-haired woman said and coughed ferociously. “He’s the last of the little ones. Some fellow named Ladradun went in for more, and the roof caved on him. We’ll get no more babies out.” She accepted the child from Daja and continued on her way.

Daja used her senses to check the fire. The garret and the fourth floor were gone, and most of the third. A full story lay between this floor and the blaze-that was bad. She had to hurry.

At the end of the hall she found a large double door with heavy iron deadbolts to secure it. Above the bolts she noticed a small window with a sliding shutter. Daja opened it and peered inside. Most of those she could see sat on cots, weeping. She prowled. A man with very short dark hair, seeing her face, attacked the door, trying to grab her through the peephole. “Get us out!” he screamed, then coughed. “Out, get us out!”

So the drug doesn’t work for all of them, Daja thought grimly. She wrestled the bolts out of the locks, thinking bad thoughts about the workers who hadn’t tried to move these people. Then she felt guilty; she had hesitated at the thought of dealing with crazy people in a firestorm herself. Grabbing both doors, she yanked-them back.

The man who had yelled at her tried to shove by. Daja grabbed his arm and hung on. “If you’re awake enough to know you’re in trouble, you’re awake enough to help me,” she snapped.

“The questioners-the governor’s questioners-they’ll come for me,” he insisted, fighting her grip. “They don’t dare let me go free with what I know. They’ll pry my secrets from my mind and they’ll kill me.”

Daja thought fast. “Pretend you’re a healer,” she told him. “They won’t notice you!” She took a green worker’s robe hanging on the wall outside the ward and threw it at him, then let him go and marched into the room. There were thirty beds. Most of the occupants were the sitting-and-weeping sort. “Come on,” Daja said, dragging the closest to her feet. “Walk out of here. Follow the others.”

The man stared at her wide-eyed, wringing his hands.

“Go!” Daja cried, shoving him at the door. “Walk out of here!” She did the same with the next patient, and the next. The fourth was curled up on his bed. He did nothing when Daja shook him.

“He won’t budge,” said the man who feared the governor’s questioners. He stood beside Daja, the worker’s robe sagging on his bony frame. “He’s that way most of the time. They put a diaper on him. And the others are still here.”

Daja looked back. The three patients she had ordered to leave stood at the door, huddled together, bewildered. She looked at her companion.

“Lead them like horses?” he suggested.

Daja grabbed a sheet from an empty bed and cut it in strips with her belt knife. “Why aren’t you like them?” she wanted to know.

He shrugged. “It doesn’t work the same for everyone. I’m not mad enough, I think. That helps.”

Common sense from a madman, Daja thought desperately. This day just gets worse by the minute.

Something on the floor overhead caught fire: she felt the surge as the blaze fed, and the sigh of nails as they melted. Daja thrust a wad of linen strips at her companion. “Tie them together by one hand,” she ordered, going to the next bed. “Like a string of horses. Get as many as you can, and lead them out. Hurry!” She grabbed the young man in the next bed by his wrist and tied one end of a strip to him. “Get up,” she ordered. He obeyed. She seized the old woman in the next bed and pulled her to her feet, then tied one of her wrists to the young man’s. Towing them along, she added three more to her string.

The next, a middle-aged man with a head shaved bald, threw himself at Daja, shrieking. He clawed her cheek with ragged nails, then got his hands around her throat. Daja let go of her string of docile patients and ran him into the wall, slamming him against it as she called heat from the fire above into her skin. He didn’t notice. She rammed him again and called for more heat until he screamed and let go, waving burned hands. He ran from the room. Daja gasped, coughed, and propped herself against the wall as she sent the heat she’d used back into the inferno overhead. She couldn’t worry about that fellow running loose. On the second floor, she felt the ceiling give way. It hit the ceiling over her head; the wall under her palm warmed. The timbers overhead groaned under the weight of burning walls and roof. Smoke leaked through the cracks.

Daja roped five more patients into her string and dragged them into the corridor. From the rolling smoke that filled it came her green-robed madman. Someone had given him a soaked cloth to hold over his nose and mouth. Daja passed him her string of patients and plunged back into the ward.

She had four more roped together when the beams above them moaned a second, longer time. Smoke shot down in streams through cracks that broadened as the ceiling began to tear loose from the walls.