It was from these thoughts that I was suddenly jarred by the crash of glass and an explosion of light and heat. No, not heat, but hotness. Flame.

What had happened? I felt myself reacting before I even knew, for the room was ablaze. I was up and pulling Elias away from the heart of the flame while some distant corner of my consciousness told me what I had seen. A barrel, alight and clearly laden with lamp oil or some other flammable liquid, had come crashing in through the window. Elias was now moving toward the open window to escape, but I pulled him back.

“No,” I shouted. “Whoever wished to burn us is surely still out there, hoping to flush us out. We must flee with the rest of the patrons and lose ourselves in the crowd.”

“Agreed,” Aadil said, pulling Teaser by the arm.

I opened the door to our chamber, began to flee, but checked my pace. It became clear at once that ours was not the only room to have been so assaulted. For an instant I harbored the obscenely flattering idea that the attack had not been set upon us but that we had been hapless victims of circumstance, unfortunate bystanders to an unrelated conflict, but I knew this was a foolish hope. There were great powers at work against us, and there could be no denying that we were meant to burn to death.

Elias, who never claimed bravery-indeed, who nursed his cowardice the way other men nursed virtue-was out the door before me, and the instant I stepped through, another barrel came surging into our room, crashing against the wall in the only portion of the closet not yet ablaze. The flames spread in an instant, cutting off my view and access to Teaser and Aadil.

I paused, torn between safety and duty. Elias suffered no such conflict, and was already gone, mixed with the crowd, heading toward the nearest exit.

“Mr. Baghat!” I cried. “Are you unharmed?”

“Thus far,” he called back. “If you’ve a clear path, take it. I cannot make it out that way. My companion and I must take our chances with the window.”

“Use caution,” I began.

“Tend to yourself,” he shouted. “Go now, and we shall talk later.”

There was no arguing with such sound advice. I pushed my way into the mass of bodies now struggling to escape the tavern. There were shouts and cries and the sounds of cracking wood and breaking pottery. Thick smoke now filled the rooms, obscuring my view so that I could not see my best course. I had to trust that the people in front of me had some animal sense of safety that would lead us through the inferno. It was a terrible thing to have to trust strangers, but I did not see that I had much choice, so I moved forward, keeping my head down against the smoke, my shoulders hunched against the tongues of flame.

At last we poured out of doors. Already the constables were on hand, as well as neighbors come to fight the fire, passing bucket after bucket of water in order to splash them upon the building. I observed, even in my fear and relief, that they managed the situation as well as they could. There was no hope of saving the tavern-it was already as good as burned to ash-but the surrounding structures could be saved. We were fortunate in the weather, for the rain had picked up since we’d entered, and all around us, over the shouts of terror and the crackle of wood, came the sizzle of water against the advance of flame.

I wondered briefly if whoever had attempted to kill us would have tried a different method had it not been raining. Even a man who might murder without regret may find it harder to burn down half the city with as free a mind. There was no ease about this, however. I could see already that at least half a dozen people had been burned badly. They lay upon the dirt, screaming for aid.

Thus it was that I found Elias. He may have been no lionheart, but now that the danger had passed, he did not hesitate to lend his skills to the needy. He was kneeling over a young man, hardly more than a boy, really, whose arms had been badly scorched.

“Gather some of that snow,” he shouted to a woman standing nearby, one of the barmaids, I thought. “Press it upon his arm and don’t let him take it off for a full quarter hour.”

As he disengaged himself from this patient to see who was next most in need of his services-limited though they were, he would be the first to admit, for burns were terrible injuries-he suddenly went slack and pointed toward the building.

I saw at once what he had seen, though I might have wished I hadn’t. Stumbling from the flames like a man emerging from his own grave came Aadil. His clothes and skin had been scorched, and most of his stockings had been quite burned off. Horrible red burns covered his legs, and his face was a mass of soot darker even than his skin. But what troubled me most was the blood. It was on his face, his arms, his legs, but mostly his chest, and it was bubbling forth.

Elias and I both ran forward and caught him as he toppled over. It took nearly all our combined strength to keep him from falling to the ground. Once we set him down, Elias tore open his shirt. “He’s been shot,” he said. “At very close range, from the look of the powder burns on his clothes.”

“What can you do?”

He said nothing and looked away. I understood there was nothing to say.

“Teaser is dead,” Aadil gasped.

“Save your strength,” Elias told him.

He managed the briefest of laughs. “For what? I go to Paradise, and I have no fear of death, so you need not trouble yourself to comfort me.” He paused here so he could cough out mucousy blood.

“You did what you could,” I said. “Who shot you, Mr. Baghat? Did you see?”

“I tried to save him, but I could not get to him in time.”

“Who shot you, Mr. Baghat?” I said again. “Who did this to you so we might avenge you?”

He looked away and his eyes closed. I thought he was already dead, but it happened that he had one more utterance in him. He said: “Get help. Celia Glade.”

Having uttered these words, he breathed his last.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

WE MEANT NO DISRESPECT TO OUR NEWFOUND AND QUICKLY LOST associate, but Elias and I recognized that we would do well to avoid any notice that might fall upon ourselves, and we certainly had no wish to fall in with any constables who might show their faces. I knew too well that a visit before a judge, no matter what one’s degree of guilt or innocence, could easily end in a lengthy stay in prison, and I was in no mood to attempt to explain myself even before that most mythical of creatures, the honest magistrate.

Unwilling to face the chaos of another boat crossing, we found a hackney to take us across the bridge. Elias wrung his hands and bit at his lip, but I could tell he had control over his emotions and conducted himself with philosophy. It is a hard thing, even for one such as myself who has chosen a life often filled with violence, to see one man die before your eyes and to be in the same room with another and then learn he has, moments later, burned to death. As a surgeon, Elias was often confronted with injury and often had to inflict hurt himself, but it is quite another thing to witness violence visited upon the innocent, and he took it hard.

“What did it mean?” he said at last. “His last words about Miss Glade?”

Discovering Elias’s congress with her seemed now to be a lifetime ago, and I had no energy to spare to think of it then. The betrayal had been insignificant in the light of all that had happened, and I meant to treat it accordingly. “It could mean either of two things: that we must seek her help, or we must seek protection from her.”

In the dark of the hackney, I could see him nod methodically. “And which do you think?”

“I know nothing but that we must see Mr. Franco at once. I must learn what he knows of this Teaser fellow and Pepper’s invention.”