Page 8 of Truth in the Treme

“Fire climbs. It wants to go up and out, so it writes you a map if you know the alphabet. You read the char back down to where it burned longest and hottest, and that points you home. One origin, one accidental story. But look.” She rose and walked him to a second cone, then a third, each one its own dark fan against the studs, none of them touching. “Three. Separate. No wiring runs between them, no path a single fire could have walked. Three fires lit close together so they would read as one once they met in the middle.”

“Set,” he said.

“Set well. Whoever did it knew how a room burns.” She pointed her tablet at the low tide line he had noticed the day before, the dark stain pooled along the base of the wall. “And they brought help. That is a pour pattern. You do not get a flat run of burn like that from a candle or a wire. Something liquid sat there and caught. The lab will name it for me by the week's end, but I have smelled enough of it to tell you now it came out of a can, and not a household one.”

Bastien listened, and found he was learning. He had spent two centuries certain that his own work was the only work that reached past the obvious. Maya read scorch and ash and the chemistry of a burning room with the same patience he brought to a cursed object, and she arrived at her answers by the same road, evidence laid on evidence until only one conclusion could carry the weight. He respected very few of the living. He found, standing in the wreck with the hat awkward on his head, that he respected her. It was a strange communion, the two of them alone in the black shell of somebody's ruined life, the mortal investigator and the very old thing beside her, reading the same death in two different alphabets. Outside, the city went about its bright indifferent morning. Inside, the light came down through the collapsed roof in dusty gold shafts, the burned studs rose around them, and Maya crouched over her char cones. They were both of them keepers of the city's violent dead, each in a different tongue. He had simply never met a mortal who did it half so well as she did.

While she photographed the origins and marked them on her diagram, he drifted to the back of the structure and gave the place his other attention.

He opened himself to it slowly, deliberately, every sense he had honed across centuries. He went looking for the faintest echo, the kind of residue too thin for any working short of his own to leave. A struck match of old magic. The cold breath of a thing that had passed through. The grease a summoning smears across the air, the hum a curse leaves in the grain of burned wood. He pressed himself into the ruin until his head ached with the reaching.

The house gave him char and wet ash and the grief of a place that had held lives and now held none. Of his world it gave him nothing at all. Not a thread, not an echo, not the dying ring of a power long gone. He had walked out of the fire scene the day before confused. He walked to the back of it today and came up emptier still, and for the first time in memory he wondered whether the instinct that had kept him alive for two hundred years was pointing him at a door that was not there. He crouched in the dead center of that ruined house, an old and dangerous thing kneeling in the ash of an ordinary crime, and felt the ground of two centuries tilt beneath him. His senses were the one inheritance the long fall had left him. They had never lied. They had led him to every curse and every killer and every buried working in this city for longer than any living soul had drawn breath, and now they stood at the edge of these fires and told him, flatly, that there was nothing here of his own kind at all. Either the world had made a thing his senses could not perceive, or the thing devouring the woman he loved had never been a thing at all, and he could not decide which of those frightened him more.

He found Maya again at the threshold, stripping off her gloves.

“Your witnesses,” he said. “The ones who saw a woman standing in the flames. What do you do with them?”

“I write them down and I weigh them at about nothing.” She did not say it unkindly. “You want to know what people see in a burning building at night? They see what fear hands them. Smoke starves the brain. Panic fills the gaps with faces. Adrenaline turns a curtain into a person and a shadow into a ghost, and every one of them will swear on their mother it was real, because to them it was. I have had three witnesses to one fire give me three buildings. The mind is a poor camera in a crisis.”

It was a clean answer, and a sound one, and he could not argue a word of it. He had seen terror build whole hauntings out of bad wiring and worse consciences. He nodded, and he thanked her, and underneath the nodding he could not lay the question down. A frightened mind invented its own monsters. He knew that. He also knew that the woman he loved had stood at this same tape and dropped into a memory that belonged to a corpse, with no magic anywhere near her, and he was no longer sure what the ordinary explanations were worth.

Back at the office he spread the witness interviews across his desk and read them against one another.

Maya had not exaggerated. The accounts fought each other on every point that mattered. One man put the burning figure at the front window, another at the rear of the house, a third inside a doorway that the floor plan said did not exist. One swore the flames had bent against the wind. One had heard a woman crying. One had heard nothing but the fire. He laid them in a row and tried to find the single shape they all pointed at, and they pointed nowhere, three frightened people describing three different nights.

He had not finished sorting them when his phone rang. Maya, again, and he knew before he answered that the day had turned.

“Tell me you are free,” she said. “I have got another one. Different end of the city, same smell to it. I want your eyes before I let anybody decide it is nothing.”

He was already reaching for his coat.

He did not drive to the address. He drove home first. He would not leave her alone behind drawn shutters with yesterday so close at their backs, not for any fire in the parish, and he knew before he reached the stairs that she would never agree to wait in the car once he had her. For the second time in as many days a fire had finished its work and waited for him. This time he refused to walk toward it alone.

FIVE

He climbed the stairs meaning to win the argument before it started. He lost it before he reached the top.

Delphine already had her shoes on. She stood in the front room with her bag over her shoulder and her chin set at the angle he had learned to respect, the angle that meant the discussion had ended in her mind before it began in his.

“No,” he said.

“You have not heard the question.”

“I have heard it for two centuries in one shape or another. Stay home. Stay safe. Stay where I put you.” He crossed to her anyway, because his hands wanted her near even while his mouth argued. “There is a fire across the city and a person setting them, and I am asking you to let me work it without splitting my attention.”

“And I am telling you I will not sit alone in this apartment with the lights on, jumping at the radiator, waiting to find out whether my own head turns on me again.” Her voice stayed level, which was worse than shouting. “Yesterday I lost an hour of my life standing on a sidewalk. If it is going to keep happening, I would rather it happen where you can see it than have you come home and find me on the floor. I am not going to let this thing make me afraid of my own city.”

He had no answer to that he could stand behind. She had named the exact arithmetic he had been running since dawn, and she had come out the same side of it he had.

“Stay well back,” he said. “Behind the line, where the air is clean. The moment I tell you to go to the car, you go to the car.”

“Yes.” She rose and kissed him, brief and certain. “See. We can agree.”

He drove them across town toward the second column of smoke with the radio off and her hand resting on his knee. The route ran out of the Quarter and up through neighborhoods where the supernatural kept to its corners in the daylight. A witch's veve sat chalked fresh on a blue door. A thin man loitered in a doorway whose shadow fell a half-beat behind him. None of it, not the veve and not the dead man and not the old hidden traffic of a city that had always made room for more than the living, so much as turned a head toward the smoke standing up over the rooftops ahead. Whatever was burning his city drew no notice at all from the things that would have known magic when they smelled it.

The second fire dwarfed the first.

It had taken a corner double deep in another quarter of the city, and it had taken it thoroughly, two stories gutted to a black shell that still breathed heat into the wet afternoon. A news van had parked across the intersection with its mast up. Neighbors stood three deep behind the barricades, phones raised, faces lit by a screen instead of the flames now that the flames were mostly down. The smell reached him a block out, wet char and scorched tar and that low chemical note underneath it that he had learned only yesterday and would now know anywhere. This one had the look of a proper disaster, the kind the city would talk about for a week. The double stood gutted against the low wet sky, its windows blown to black sockets, steam and smoke still ghosting up off the drenched timbers. New Orleans had an old and intimate acquaintance with fire, as it did with flood. It had burned to the ground twice in the Spanish years and never quite stopped expecting to burn again, and the crowd behind the barricades watched with the hush of people whose city had never once let them forget it could be taken from them in a single night.