The House burned. Her dreams burned with it.

  She cradled the cat in her arms as everything around her was consumed by black flames. She thought, almost guiltily, of the second stash of money she kept upstairs. There was no time to reach it. She had to let it go.

  Ylia whispered to Urgal, “Come on. We have to move.”

  The cat did not move, seemingly could not. The blow had stunned him. She wondered whether there would be permanent damage. Rage made her veins hotter even than the Daimon-fires. I’ll kill you, Warden. She quieted the rage somewhat by remembering just how tough Urgal was. He could recover. So she prayed.

  “Come on you big lump!”

  The cat let out a low moan in protest. He wasn’t moving anywhere. All his instincts had abandoned him.

  She would have to move him.

  Ylia was stronger than her slight frame would indicate. A lifetime on your feet, serving heavy tankards, lifting barrels, carving wood, mending and fixing a broken House, will grant that strength. But Urgal was massive, almost three times heavier than she was.

  “I’m going to have to drag you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  She grabbed his huge forepaws and began to heave. It took everything—causing a worrying shimmer of pain to run up and down her spine—to pull him just a couple of feet. Sweat formed on her brow from the heat of the fires, which were becoming rampant, as though they only grew hungrier the more they devoured. She had served more than a few patrons like that. They came hungering for a drink, but one drink only made them want more. Her father, for all his virtues, had possessed that fault.

  “Help me a bit, Urgal!” she cried. The flames had reached the pillars and ceiling. A great groaning sounded as the upper stories of the House began to weaken.

  The cat kicked limply with his back legs. Ylia heaved.

  Come on! Just a little farther!

  The door was only six feet away, but bearing such a heavy weight, and assaulted as she was by the flames, it might as well have been miles. Smoke blossomed and billowed. Her lungs felt like they were lined with ash. She choked. Her eyes stung, watered.

  Come on!

  The muscles and tendons in her arms were corded to the point of breaking. If she had looked in the mirror at that moment, she was certain she would not have recognised herself. The cat, however, finally seemed to be aware of the danger, his kicks more purposeful and powerful.

  With a final wrench, they lurched from the building. The House gave a final groan and the upper floors collapsed in an avalanche of black and orange flame. Dust and smoke billowed out of the doorway like vomit from the mouth of the underworld. Ylia screamed and threw herself protectively about her fallen beast. The heat was a scar she would never heal.

  ***

  For a long time, they sat on the other side of the road, watching the House burn. Urgal had put his head in her lap. Occasionally, he licked the hand that stroked him. Ylia stared at the smouldering ruin without blinking. She could not comprehend it. One day, one act of malice, and it was all lost.

  Why? That was the question she could not get her head around. She had been cooperative. She had told the Warden what he wanted to know. She had no lied to him. Why had he done this? The answer was too dark to look at. But she knew it. She knew it because the same thing had happened twenty years ago, when her father had been seized in their home. There had been no reason. He was innocent. Her mother and sisters and brothers were all liars, but not her father. Somehow had to be the rock in her family, and her father was that rock. Even her mother recognised that she was lost without him. His narrowness, his straightness, had been what drew her to him. He was the necessary antidote to her chaos, the stabilising ingredient in the alchemical potion of their lives.

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  And for no reason, for no reason at all, he had been taken from them.

  A sound disturbed her, a high whining. The hairs on the backs of her arms rose. A cloud of black specks rose into the sky. The specks circled and swarmed and parted in terrible confusion.

  She realised with horror it was the bees. They were rising in flight as their home burned. The hives, which some said had stood there for three thousand years, were going up in flames.

  “No...” she whispered. In her panic to get Urgal out, she had forgotten about the beehives in the garden. They had no way to escape the path of the flame. Maybe the whole forest will burn as well. Maybe that is what the Warden intended. To burn it down so there is nowhere left for Telos to hide.

  She stood, paced back and forth. The House was a pure inferno, uncomfortable to look at, impossible to even approach for the intense heat. There was no way she could save them.

  The bees screamed, squealed with their fairy voices. She smelled burning honey. She smelled death.

  At last, the tears broke free fully. She collapsed to her knees, wailing and sobbing like the day when her father had been dragged away.

  Her father had been a beekeeper. He taught her everything she knew. Their home in Aurelia had been a big one, on the very outskirts of Auroch. They’d had land aplenty. A cow. A goat. Chickens. And beehives. Her father tended the hives, and nothing brought her more joy than when he returned with cupfuls of honey. How sweet it was! How gooey! How syrupy! How magical! Nothing in all Erethia tasted like honey.

  She’d loved the bees as much as the honey they produced. She would sit and watch them busying about their hives for hours. They were so industrious, so hardworking. She knew with some deep instinct only children possess that this was how the world was supposed to be, the natural way of things. Happy, healthy beings were productive. Not in the way the Wagemasters demanded productivity: driving their workers with the whip until they were broken, but with the effortless ease of a creature that naturally creates life-giving nourishment. Cows make milk. Bees make honey. People make beer. That was the way things were when the world was right.

  Her father told her, once, that when she was only three years old she had turned to him and said, “One day, daddy, I am going to fly on the back of a bee up into the sunlight!” It had made him so happy, that bright optimism, he had never forgotten it, and constantly reminded her of the quote. Whenever Ylia felt disheartened, she repeated the phrase. It was that phrase that’d helped her endure and then escape the Wagemasters. It was that phrase that’d allowed her to build a new home and business in Yarruk, far from home.

  For the first time, the words stuck in her throat. The bees screamed as their home and livelihood was likewise destroyed by the careless malice of the flame. She screamed with them.

  And the tears burned and burned.

  That was how Ellen and Darryl found her. They stood for a while and watched the flames with her. They tried to comfort her. They tried to console one another. Then they departed, whether in search of alcohol to drown their sorrows or new work, Ylia did not know or care.

  When there was nothing left within her, no tears left to cry, something else came into being. It was a thought, but not like any thought she had had before. Always her life had been a web of complexities, a balancing act, juggling where she was now and where she wanted to be in five year’s time; juggling the needs of clients and patrons with her own needs and sanity; managing the finances of the business and looking after her own; a hundred different priorities and responsibilities carefully arranged like a row of polished tankards. But now there was only one thought, one burning star in the black pitch of her despair.

  Telos has your money. You must find Telos.

  Her House was in ruins. She doubted any of the Relics or Demons she had stashed would survive the heat of those flames. There was nothing here for her, anymore. The only thing left was to recover what little money did survive—because Telos had taken it.

  Ylia was not devoutly religious, but she did believe in the gods. It could be no coincidence that she had seen one of their ships flying overheard last night. Clearly, this was a time of change, a time of transformation. Words from the Book of Beltanus, a book she had read and re-read as a schoolgirl—and that had provided her with some comfort after her father was gone—returned to her now:

  “And Talon cast Beltanus down,

  down from the Golden Skies to Earthly Ground.

  And broken was he on the stone of Erethia.

  But lo, what Talon meant for evil,

  Great Destiny had wrought for good…”

  Tears came again, but this time they were tears of resolution.

  “We’ve got to find Telos, Urgal.”

  The cat nodded. He sniffed the ground, then let out a low growl. He began to pace, still moving gingerly because of his wound, but the mention of Telos’s name had at least cheered the cat up.

  Ylia decided not to mention that she was seriously considering killing the thief.