Burning Night: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 19, Part 1: Tabitha

Her home was well secured. The door locked, the windows shuttered, the walls made of a solid foot of stone. Her heat haze extended her senses to the far walls of her living room, and the air around her was a slave to her will. She could feel through the heat in the air, hear with the vibrations in the air colliding with the fringes of her heat-haze, and see through the candles on her desk and the torches on the walls.

And despite that, she had no idea how Mathias managed to get into her apartment unannounced.

"I've found him," Mathias said, with an amused smirk that Tabitha was beginning to suspect was simply how his face looked at rest.

That or everything amused him.

The fact that, once again, he had managed to slip inside her home despite her locked door and shuttered windows didn't seem to bother her as much as it should.

"Well, where is he?" Tabitha asked, standing up from her desk and abandoning another sketch of an airship's lift-bag.

"We suspected he would find a legitimate reason to be at the wall. Our mistake was looking in the wrong agency," Mathias explained, drawing a small piece of paper out of his pocket.

"He didn't join a construction crew?" Tabitha asked.

"No. Nor an agricultural detail. I checked both of those last night," Mathias said, as he set a small paper bag on her desk.

"Last night? Have you slept yet?"

Mathias frowned at her, and said, "you left me with the impression that this wayward apprentice has a City shattering secret in his possession. I've spent most of the night examining paperwork by torchlight in record rooms I don't have clearance for."

Tabitha took the small paper bag and raised it to her nose. The smell of burnt oils and slightly seared coffee beans wafted through her senses, making her smile contentedly. "I'll get on a pot. Where do you get so many beans?"

"I stole these from the Bureau of Agriculture's warehouse when I was trying to find their records room. Someone owes me for an all-nighter, may as well be an obstructionist bureaucrat," Mathias muttered, as he rubbed his eyes.

Tabitha stood up and strode over to her kitchen, where she took out a teapot and filled it with water. She set her will to the water as she walked back with it, and set the pot on her table just as it reached a gentle boil.

"Set the whole bag inside, and pinch the top of the bag with the pot's lid," Mathias said, as he set his hands in his face and rubbed the sides of his head.

Tabitha set the bag in the water, and shut the lid, draping a bit of the small paper bag over the pot. "So, where did you find him?"

"Army recruitment," Mathias said.

"What?" Tabitha asked.

"There were no records of his application to construction or farming," Mathias said, as he reached over and took the lid off her teapot. "The only other posting at the Last Wall is sentry duty. But to get that post, you need to pass basic training, which is usually done fairly close to populated districts."

Mathias carefully drew the bag out of the pot, flinching as his fingers pinched the bag before dropping it into the pot lid.

"You know I can walk into a blast furnace without sweating," Tabitha remarked, as Mathias waved his fingers I the air. "Putting my hand into boiling water actually makes a neat party trick."

"Allow us creatures of flesh and blood our proclivities," Mathias replied. "Now, strangely enough, I remembered a ceremony I was invited to a few weeks ago. They're celebrating the second generation of coffee plants surviving to a harvestable age with a ceremony. It's held in a reclamation zone, which means it doesn't even have a wall. And the honour guard will be the nearby army trainees."