Chapter 32 — The Fire Behind the Wall

Fire moved across the fields faster than men carrying buckets.

The wind drove it through rows of young wheat until separate lines of flame joined into broad sheets; villagers ran between the well and the field edge with wooden pails, basins, wet blankets, and anything else that could hold water. Morton stood among them with half his grey hair singed and his face black with soot.

He saw Arlan's riders and dropped the bucket in his hands.

"My lord." Arlan dismounted before the horse had fully stopped; Morton came toward him through mud and ash, then went down on one knee as if the failure belonged to him personally.

"We couldn't hold it. The wind caught the eastern rows. Four men guarding the fields were killed before anyone raised the alarm." Arlan looked past him.

The fire had already taken most of the planted ground; men were saving corners, ditches, and the strip nearest the wall rather than pretending they could recover what was burning in the center. A wounded guard came running from the back hill. "The grain store too!" Morton turned.

The man struggled for air. "Burned. The stores from the foreign merchants. Most of it gone." For a moment no one around Arlan spoke.

The previous foreign purchases had been meant to remove hunger as a weapon, and now the smell of burned rye rolled down from the hill again. Men who had spent days carrying sacks into safer stores stared upward and understood that someone had known exactly which precautions had been taken.

FireStorm had rebuilt food reserves after the previous arson, divided stores, changed watches, and still suffered a coordinated strike while its strongest patrol force had been drawn north; that meant the attacker had known the new arrangements.

By full dawn the last spreading fire had been contained, and smoke hung low over the holding, and the four dead field guards were laid beside the road. Their throats showed clean cuts like the men killed at the earlier storehouse.

Morton stood before Arlan with a broken key in his hand.

"Punish me," he said. "I was responsible for the stores." Arlan took the old man's wrist before he could kneel again.

"Now is not the time for apologies." He turned so the villagers could hear.

"A mountain raider did not enter a locked stone storehouse without damage, burn the fields at the same time, kill guards with trained cuts, and leave without being seen. Someone told the attackers where to go and how to enter."

Murmuring spread through the crowd; Arlan looked across faces that had arrived from half a dozen ruined villages and roads.

"There is a mole in FireStorm." The words did more damage to order than the smoke had.

Fire could be fought with water and dirt; a hidden enemy turned every neighbor into a question. Refugees who had arrived recently became obvious targets for suspicion, while older families began wondering who possessed keys, who worked late, and who had been absent during the alarm. Arlan watched the fear change shape and understood that if he allowed accusation to become proof, Elton would have achieved more with one infiltrator than with a hundred raiders.

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People turned on one another almost immediately, and one man pointed at refugees who had arrived two weeks earlier. Someone shouted back that old FireStorm families had access to the stores; a woman pulled her children away from a neighbor she had eaten beside the previous night.

Two men raised hoes.

"Stop." Arlan did not shout, but Wayne's guards were already moving between the groups.

"Nobody becomes a traitor because another frightened person points at him. Evidence decides that. Anyone who starts violence inside the holding before we have evidence helps the enemy for free." The hoes lowered; Arlan began with the bodies.

The knife wounds were straight, deep enough to sever the throat cleanly, and consistent across all four men, and Wayne crouched beside him.

"Nightsong soldiers favor the throat when clearing a camp," the captain said. "I've seen the same work on the border." Arlan nodded; the dead were evidence of trained attackers, but not of who inside FireStorm had helped them.

Wayne compared the cuts with the earlier storehouse killings and found the same economy of movement. The victims had barely struggled. Surprise, knowledge of the patrol schedule, or both could explain it. The attackers had passed through the weakest points and left before the alarm gathered.

The back-hill storehouse offered more.

The ground around it had been trampled during the fire, so Arlan separated prints made after the alarm from those pressed deeper into the mud beforehand, and he had Wayne keep everyone except Morton away from the threshold while he worked. It annoyed people eager for answers, but a footprint destroyed by ten helpful boots was no evidence at all.

Inside, the burn pattern ran outward from several points instead of one accidental spill; whoever set the fire had wanted the grain to catch fast enough that the watch could not smother it before the roof went. The attackers had chosen dry stores, strong liquor, and a windy night; nothing about the burn looked improvised, and whoever planned it understood both the stores and the local weather conditions outside.

Its stone door had not been smashed, and the hinges were intact. Fresh scratches marked the keyhole, but there was no damage consistent with forcing the lock; someone had opened it with the proper key or a close copy. Morton swallowed.

"Only three people had keys after the last fire. Me, the guard captain for the store, and Will."

"Where is Will?" The question passed down the line of men nearby, and no one had seen him since the night before.

Will had arrived among refugees roughly half a month earlier; he had worked reliably enough that Morton eventually trusted him with storehouse duty. His absence made him the obvious suspect, and Arlan did not stop at obvious.

He crouched inside the charred storehouse and sifted ash near the doorway with the tip of a broken board, and half of an oak stopper lay among the blackened grain. He picked it up; the wood smelled faintly of alcohol beneath the smoke.

Red Sun Flame. "They used our spirit as an accelerant," he said.

Morton's eyes narrowed. "Will could have taken a bottle."

"From which store?" The old man paused.

The distillery stock had its own guards; a recent refugee assigned to grain would not normally know where every usable bottle sat, when the watch changed, and how to remove enough without being noticed. "Will had help," Arlan said.

Outside, last night's rain had left the ground soft enough to preserve tracks; several prints belonged to FireStorm guards. Others showed hard leather soles with iron reinforcement associated with Caron troops, and Arlan followed them away from the storehouse. Fine white grit appeared in one impression.

He touched it. Quartz sand. The same pale material used at the glass kiln; whoever had helped the attackers had moved through more than one protected part of FireStorm that night. The mole was not merely a frightened refugee who had found one key.

The locked storehouse and the fields had been struck in the same night; whoever opened the way had known where FireStorm kept both food and keys, and when its strongest men would be absent.