With only a little grumbling—Mungle wanted a fight, and did not seem to understand that his opponent was not one to be met with fists—they sought out the nearest river stair. Plenty of wherry-men floated within hailing distance; most were gaping at the smoke, and the rest were rowing passengers who gaped on their behalf. Jack got a boat large enough for them all, and gave instructions for their man to take them through the races of the bridge, landing them on the other side.
Where they would do…something. Firefighting was not what I expected, when I joined a faerie court. But it would be a fine opportunity to see what fae were capable of.
The tide was low, and at slack water, so the wherry ventured forth into the river. The oarsman had to thread his way through the other boats, though, so their progress was slow. And before they reached the stone piers of the bridge, a sudden flare of light brought all their heads around as one.
With a roar like a terrible beast, one of the many warehouses lining the river’s bank burst into orange and gold. Heat seared their faces, and Irrith flinched hard enough to almost go over the gunwale. The wherryman, a member of the London class most renowned for its command of profanity, put all his foul words to use, staring at the sudden expansion of the fire.
“Pitch and tar,” the hob Tom Toggin said when the wherryman was done. He was not swearing, Jack realized after a moment. “Or oil. Or hemp. Prob’ly pitch, it going up like that.”
And then it was Jack’s turn to curse. Seizing the oarsman’s shoulder, he said, “You know the wharves well, yes? How many of the warehouses contain such material?”
The man seemed to have lost the ability to blink. “Er—don’t rightly know—”
“How many?”
The boat drifted aimlessly on the current as the man shrugged. “Most of ’em?”
Another roar, another wash of heat. The next warehouse in the row had caught.
And in the heart of the flames, something stirred. It might have been nothing more than a curling tongue of light, a ripple of fire along the collapsing line of a roof. But the fae in the boat saw with different eyes than a mortal might, and Tom Toggin grabbed Jack’s sleeve, pointing with a finger that shook from pure terror.
Salamanders, Jack thought, curious despite his concern. There were a few in the Onyx Hall, creatures of elemental fire; he kept meaning to study them. But from what he knew, they were hardly a thing to inspire such fear.
Then he looked more closely, and his eyes widened.
He had seen such a thing before, yes—but much, much smaller.
In the hottest part of the blaze, a sinuous shape uncoiled, flexing its newfound power. Not a salamander, a mere lizard born of fire’s light. Conceived in the inferno’s womb and fed by the combustible treasures of London’s wharves, it was far larger, far stronger, and worthy of a greater name.
Christ, Jack thought, staring in abject horror. It’s huge.
The Dragon of the Fire roared.
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: eight o’clock in the morning
Word spread through the Onyx Hall, faster than the flames above. A Dragon has been born.
A Dragon. Such had not been seen in England for many a forgotten age.
It was a source of great excitement, almost enough to distract the fae from the Cailleach Bheur. These were not the deep reaches of Faerie, far removed from the mortal world; few creatures of such power still existed here, and those few that did mostly slept. When they thought of the Dragon, they saw only the grandeur of it, and did not think of London.
But Lune did, even before Irrith came to tell her that another church was in flames.
“I forget the name,” the sprite said, wiping soot from her face, left behind when the icy wind had dried all the sweat. “At the north end of the bridge. Jack—Lord John, that is—says it had a water tower.”
Even through the leaden weariness inflicted by the Cailleach, the exhaustion of decrepit age, Lune knew what she meant. The church of St. Magnus the Martyr, at the foot of London Bridge.
Where, thanks to the innovation of a clever Dutchman, water-wheels in the northernmost races churned the Thames upward, through leaden pipes that arched over the steeple of the church, from whence they fell with sufficient force to propel water through a goodly portion of the City’s riverside district. Thus were houses supplied—and the men fighting the Fire.
“It knows,” she whispered, and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. The Dragon knows how we oppose it, and fights back.
We. But the Onyx Court was already engaged in one battle, against the Cailleach Bheur—if battle it could be called, when her scouts could not find the Hag’s location, nor her advisers craft any means of blocking the deathly wind. How could they fight a second in the streets above? Fear gibbered at the edges of her vision, a hundred variants of death braiding into one terrifying whole. Death by fire, by ice, by the withering of age or the putrefaction of plague, creeping closer with every moment that passed—
No. Lune snarled it away. This was her oath, and her burden. She could no more abandon mortal London to the Fire than she could leave her court to the Hag. If Jack was brave enough to face a Dragon, she must give him all possible aid.
She forced herself to think. The church was under attack; the Bridge itself would not long be safe. The stones could not burn, but houses and shops had crowded its length for centuries, choking the roadway with timber and plaster. And where people traveled, so too could the Fire: down the Bridge to the crowded suburb of Southwark. Then they would lose all hope of controlling its spread.
Her fingernails had dug deeply enough into her palms to cut. Lune pried them free, wincing, and said, “Find Dame Segraine. Tell her to call out every water nymph, every asrai and draca in this court, and marshal them at the Queenhithe entrance. If a fae can swim, send him out to fight. We must keep the Dragon from crossing the river.”
CANNON STREET, LONDON: eleven o’clock in the morning
Nearly a quarter mile of the riverfront was alight now, by Jack’s best estimate, the cheap weather-boarded tenements that crowded about the wharves going up like dry tinder. The conflagration had roared through Stockfishmonger Row, Churchyard Alley, Red Cross Alley; men stood in lines, slinging full buckets up from the river, empty ones back down, but they might as well have pissed on the blaze, for all the good it did. The city’s few fire-carts could not even make it into those warrens, nor close enough to the river to fill their tanks. The Clerkenwell engine had fallen in.
He sagged back against a shop on Cannon Street, breathing mercifully clean air. The road was filled wall-to-wall with carts and men on foot; what belongings could be evacuated had been brought here. The livery companies were rescuing records and plate from their company halls, while the poorer folk of the Coldharbour tenements ran with what they could carry on their backs, unable to afford the rising price of a wherry or cart.
Not everyone out there was a dockside laborer, though. One finely dressed gentleman, holding a kerchief over his nose to filter out the drifting smoke, stopped at Jack’s side. “Where is the Lord Mayor?”
Jack wiped his streaming eyes and straightened, taking advantage of his height to crane over the shouting masses. “I think I see him—here, let me lead you.”
The fellow kept hard at Jack’s heels, forcing between two stopped carts whose drivers swore uselessly at each other. Sir Thomas Bludworth, when they came upon him, was a wretched sight; the Lord Mayor of London mopped at his face with the kerchief around his neck, staring and lost, trying ineffectually to direct the men around him.