Read Online The Fire Seer by Amy Raby - Free Book Online Page B

arrived yesterday, and he’d been with her almost the entire time.
    Could someone have kidnapped her? Lured her away?
    The front door was unbarred. Mandir burst through it.
    Rain pelted his head and shoulders and pooled around his feet. The streets were dark. He summoned globes of fire at intervals for visibility, but they revealed only emptiness and rain.
    He splashed to the Hall of Judgment. There, under the covered stairway, he shook the water from his hair like a dog and pounded on the door.
    A guard with a mace at his belt answered it.
    “I need Rasik,” said Mandir. “My partner’s missing.”
    The guard looked him over. “Rasik’s off duty.”
    “Get him back on duty. I need to talk to him.”
    The guard shook his head. “I’m sorry, but it’d be my head if I tried to drag him out now. If you want to talk to him, he lives over there.” He pointed at a house down the street.
    Mandir headed out into the rain again. Rasik’s house looked, from the outside, a lot like his own guesthouse, except a little larger. He banged on the door.
    Rasik answered it with an expectant air but frowned when he saw Mandir. “I’m off duty. Talk to me in the morning.” He started to shut the door.
    Mandir caught the door and forced it back open. “My partner’s missing. Help me find her.”
    A baby wailed somewhere inside the house, and a woman’s voice spoke. Mandir couldn’t make out the words. Rasik turned in the direction of the voice and called, “No, dinner’s not here yet. It’s something else.” Then to Mandir, “I’m not your partner’s keeper. You lost her, you find her.”
    “She left the guesthouse through the front door,” said Mandir. “You’ve been out and about preparing for the storm—if not you, then the servants under your command. Somebody must have seen her leave.”
    He heard splashing behind him in the street. Mandir turned, hoping it might be Taya, but it was only a servant boy delivering a leather pouch. Rasik accepted it wordlessly and said to Mandir, “You want me to question all the magistrate’s servants because you don’t know where your partner is? Do it yourself.”
    “If she comes to harm, things will go badly for you,” said Mandir. “The Coalition will send another team out here—”
    “Who’s to say she’s come to harm?” said Rasik. “Maybe she just went for a walk.”
    “In this?” Mandir gestured at the pouring rain.
    “Excuse me,” said the servant boy. “Do you mean the Coalition lady?”
    Mandir turned eagerly. “Have you seen her?”
    “She’s in the stable,” said the boy.
    “The stable ?”
    The boy nodded.
    “Where is the stable?”
    “Show him,” Rasik said to the boy.
    Mandir followed the boy through the muddy streets to the stable. The huge doors, large enough to admit a horse or even a wagon, were ajar, and he found himself able to slip inside without opening them farther.
    The barn was warm and dry. It smelled wholesome, of hay and straw and well-groomed horses, with just a hint of manure. The animals were restless. Some stamped their feet or circled in their stalls, distressed by the storm. But the servant boy was right. Taya was here. Mandir couldn’t see her, but he could hear her voice. She was crooning to some creature in one of the far stalls.
    Mandir brushed the rivulets off his rain-spattered clothes—flood and fire, he hated looking disheveled—and finger-combed his hair. He stalked down the aisle, relieved at having found her but furious that she’d made him worry and run around like a fool in the rain.
    He rounded the stable aisle and spotted her. “What in the Mothers’ names are you doing here? I looked all over for you!”
    Taya jumped at his sudden words. She was standing in one of the animals’ stalls. The black horse in the adjoining stall, startled, flung up its head and reared, and then capered about the stall, kicking at the walls.
    “Look what you’ve done,” snapped Taya. “I only just got her calmed