There was no time. She grabbed two more docile patients, one in each hand, and towed them to the wall along with her string of people. With one gigantic pull of her magic she yanked all the nails in the wall to her right from their moorings. They shot across the ward like arrows.

With a magical shove Daja thrust both the iron grating on the sole window and the metal in the shutters over it into the night. She turned, still clutching her patients, and rammed herself back-first into the wall. Planks and crossbeams dropped free like rotten teeth. Daja dragged her six people through the tangle of lumber into the night’s cold, then towed them toward the ring of guardsmen who held the crowd back.

Hearing wood crack behind her, she turned, still clutching her linen rope and two patients’ wrists. In a slow burst of flames, smoke and embers, the ground floor walls collapsed. The madmen’s ward fell in. She thought she heard screams from those she’d been forced to leave behind, but told herself fiercely that was just the fire’s roar of triumph. It had won.

People were tugging her hands. She jerked away, then realized they wore the green robes of hospital workers. She let them take charge of her patients.

A second roar: the central part of the hospital collapsed. A third: the soup kitchen. Daja scrabbled in her belt pouch, coughing, and brought out her mirror. She pressed it to her forehead, trying to breathe slowly. What of Olennika? Jory?

Sheer exhaustion made her calm enough to summon an image. When she did, her knees went straight to jelly. Down in the muddy slush of the open ground she went, not caring in the least. In the mirror Frostpine helped Olennika to drink from a long-handled ladle. The cook-mage was wrapped in a blanket; as far as Daja could see, Olennika had fled once her clothes burned off. Olennika looked terrible, but she was alive. Beside them Jory bent over, coughing. Someone thrust a bottle at her: Nia. Matazi and Kol were nearby, helping people into the Bancanors’ sleigh.

Relief poured over Daja. For a moment she swayed, wanting to cry.

But she had work to do yet. Grimly she felt in her pockets until she found the bottle Nia had given her at the house. Her stomach rolled in protest as she eyed it, then tried to reject its contents when Daja gulped them down. Two minutes later she was coughing and vomiting, her stomach in revolt against the strong-tasting fluid, her lungs expelling their latest load of soot-black phlegm.

When she was done, she lurched to her feet and walked toward the blazing hospital. A guard yelled for her to come back, but it was a scarecrow-thin figure in a flapping green robe who ran up and seized her arm.

“They say I’m mad,” the man cried. “You’re not even locked up!”

Daja gently pried his hand from her flesh. “You’re right, but not like you think you are,” she said.

The man blinked. His eyes were large and pale, the color impossible to guess in the flame-lit dark, fringed by long, heavy black lashes. He looked like a madman, or a prophet, she thought. “That made my head hurt,” he complained.

“I’m sorry. An account has come due. Debts must be settled,” Daja told him. “I’ll be fine.” She patted his shoulder and continued her walk into the hospital’s inferno. Once more she was reminded of pijule fakol, the fearful Trader afterlife for those who did not pay what they owed. Ben probably deserved to spend eternity in pijule fakol, but Daja could not help him escape what he owed in this life if it meant he would burn forever. If she did not stop him now, the Bookkeeper might also log the deaths Ben made with her creations to her account.

With no one else to worry her, she let her magic flow out to open a tunnel through the fire. Within moments her non-Sandry clothes had burned away. Her mirror she tucked into the breastband her friend had made. She wasn’t sure how long even Sandry’s work could last: firewalking in a small boardinghouse was one thing, the holocaust of the hospital and soup kitchen another. For dignity’s sake she hoped she would keep her clothes, but the important thing was to find Ben.

He could have died when the nursery roof collapsed, as she had been told, but she doubted it. At first she had thought that he’d slaughtered his mother, then chosen to kill himself by rescuing children from the hospital he’d set ablaze. She didn’t feel that way now. He’d leave a bolt-hole for himself. Ben didn’t want to die. He wanted to build more fires, not to become one.

Her path took her into the heart of the inferno. Beams fell all around her; walls caved in. She had to be careful not to get struck-a cracked head would kill her-but the fire itself warned her when a large object was about to fall.

In the center of the blaze she stopped. She held her left hand palm up and let the magic in its living metal pour from her fingers like a waterfall, seeking anything like itself. It rolled through the burning hospital and the ground beneath it, questing like a hound. There, about a quarter of a mile away. She pulled the living metal’s power into a ribbon that stretched between her left hand and the gloves she had made. Following it brought her to a trapdoor in a burning storeroom. It was open: she looked down and saw a ladder.

Raising a hand, she called a piece of fire to light her steps. With her free hand she gripped the ladder as she descended. She came to level ground about fifteen feet below the storeroom.

She padded along on bare feet: her boots and stockings had burned as she walked through the hospital inferno. She kept one hand cupped over the fire seed that lit her way. He would get as little warning of her arrival as possible. While she could track him if he kept her gloves-and he would never give them up, even if he guessed she could follow him through them-she would rather finish this now. That he’d betrayed her was bad, but she’d been betrayed before. She could survive it. She could not allow him to use her work to ruin more lives.