Free The Golden Horn by Judith Tarr Page A

you?”
    “I’ll come back to you,” Alf answered.
    Jehan hesitated. But the children whimpered, and Alf’s
eyes were terrible. He retreated slowly at first, then more swiftly.
    Left alone, Alf stood for a moment, his face to the fire. It
tore at him, buffeted him, strangled him with smoke. He reached inward to the
heart of his strangeness, gathered the power that coiled there, hurled it with
all his strength against the inferno. The flames quailed before it. He laughed,
the sound of steel on steel, with no mirth in it.
    Yet the fire, having no mind, knew no master. It surged
forward into the gap it had left, and reached with long fingers, enfolding the
slim erect figure. Enfolding, but not touching. That much power he had still.
    He laughed again briefly, but his laughter died, and with it
his anger. Pain tore at his sharpened senses, mingled with terror. There were
people in the heart of that hell, alive and in agony or trapped and mad with
panic. He set his mind upon a single thread of consciousness, and followed
where it led.
    Jehan, setting the children down within the safety of the
fire lines, saw Alf cloaked in flames. He cried out and bolted forward; a
stream of fire like a shooting star drove him back.
    He would have advanced again, but hands caught him and held him,
in spite of his struggles.
    “Will you show some sense?”
    The voice was sharp and familiar. He stared blankly at Thea,
who glared back. She was dressed as a boy, her hair caught up under a cap.
    “You kept him from being burned,” he said. “Now
he’s gone and done it, and where were you?”
    “Don’t be an idiot.” She let him go. “He’s
perfectly safe. The last thing he needs is to have you blundering after him and
getting killed before he can stop you. Here, see if you can talk these people
into getting upwind and staying upwind, and keeping the fire back.”
    Already she was drawing away from him. “Where are you going?”
he called after her.
    “To be an idiot.” She vanished as Alf had, into
a wall of fire.
    o0o
    The sun crawled across the sky. Beneath it, steadily,
inexorably, the flames advanced. Not only wood but fired brick and even stone
fell before them. With the sun’s sinking, the City wore a girdle of fire
from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn.
    Jehan lowered his burden to the ground and coughed. Pain lanced
through his scorched throat. The woman he had carried from her smoldering house
moaned and twisted, overcome more by hysteria than by the smoke. She could heal
herself, he thought with callousness born of a long day’s horrors. He coughed
again, more weakly, and nerved himself for another foray.
    A shape grew out of fire and darkness. Its face seemed vaguely
familiar, but he saw only the cup it held out, brimming with blessed water. He
snatched eagerly at it, caught himself with a wrenching effort, dropped stiffly
to his knees. The woman gulped the water greedily. and cursed him when he took the
cup away half full to give the rest to the boy who lay beside her.
    Gentle hands retrieved the cup, returned it filled. “That
is for you,” Alf said firmly.
    He drank slowly in long sips. With each he felt his strength
rise a little higher.
    When no more remained in the cup, he surrendered it. Alf
hung it from his belt and set his hands on Jehan’s shoulders. They were
warm and strong, pouring strength into him, soothing his hurts.
    “Where—” Jehan croaked. “Where—”
    “We’ve opened Saint Basil’s as a field
hospital. Thea is there, and Bardas—Sophia had no luck in fetching him to
safety.”
    “But you—the fire—”
    “We’ve been bringing all the worst wounded to
Saint Basil’s. Come with us and help us.” Carefully, without
waiting for an answer, Alf raised the boy who had drunk the half of Jehan’s
first cup. The woman he ignored, though she tugged at him, whining.
    Saint Basil’s lay on the very edge of the inferno yet
separated from it by a circle of garden. Streamers of fire,