Nightsworn | The Whispering Wall #2

Sixty Eight: Smoke

Dela dreamed she was back out on the plains with her family. It was a strange dream; it had no sound, only images, of places and people she'd grown up with. Her many small siblings chased each other through the long grasses, play-fighting and trying to lodge sticky clumps of tack-weed on each others' clothes. Her older siblings were either out hunting or tending children of their own. Her many aunts sat and gossiped around the fire, cleaning the skins from the last hunt or repairing frayed gathering baskets. Smoke spiralled into the night sky, where a bright moon hung overhead; in the distance, the second moon illuminated the mountains. The breeze changed, and smoke blew into her face.

She woke up choking. Bleary-eyed, she thought at first that she was still in the dream and that the haze would clear in a moment, but as she slowly regained wakefulness the haze resolved itself into tendrils of smoke, creeping in around the gaps in the dorm room door. She could no longer see the ceiling, and her lungs were full of grit.

"Lin," she croaked. She got up on her hands and knees, keeping low to the ground. "Lin, get up!"

She shook the huddle in the other bed vigorously. Lin began to groan, but was overtaken by a fit of coughing. A moment later her head appeared over the top of the blanket.

"Temple fire," Dela said, and cringed as she heard the distant crash of something collapsing. "We need to get out right now."

It must have been a big blaze, she thought groggily, to have smoke reach their dorms. Most of the temple was made of stone. Only the public prayer hall would have enough in it to burn.

She and Lin crawled to the door, the skirts of their nightdresses over their noses. She had to plunge her head into the smoke cloud to find the latch, and returned to the floor with her eyes stinging and streaming tears. The corridor outside wasn't any better.

"This can't just be someone dropping a votive," Lin muttered, but they didn't speak further to avoid drawing more smoke into their lungs. Some doors of the dorms were already flung wide and the rooms empty; those that weren't they pounded on until there was a response. The smoke was so thick that coming upon the exit was a surprise; the rarely-used door at the end of the dormitory block stood open, pouring smoke into the street. Dela gasped in a lungful of sweet fresh air and then doubled over with wracking coughs. In the dimness she heard others coughing. The shadowy shapes of other soot-smeared acolytes drifted in the street. Someone was crying nearby.

"Are you alright?" Lin asked. They both winced as someone else was noisily sick.

"Been better." Her throat and eyes ached. She couldn't pull in a full breath. "You?"

"I feel like I've been stamped on. On the inside."

"Same."

Dela crept to the end of the street to look out into the main temple courtyard. Confirming her suspicions, smoke poured out of the main doors from the prayer hall. The courtyard was thronged with people, some in guard uniform. The Clerics stood in clusters in their nightgowns. Dela hurried back to the small group who had escaped through the dormitory exit.

"Everyone else is in the courtyard."

"What happened?" A voice spoke up. Though it was hard to confirm through the rasp in it, Dela thought the voice might have been Taria's. "Does anyone know?"

"How would we?" someone else snapped. "We were asleep."

"Let's just go and find the priestesses," Lin said loudly, before a fight could break out. Dela herself felt shaken; if she hadn't woken up when she did, she and Lin might have died in there. "They'll tell us whatever it is we need to know."

In a shambling group, the acolytes from their section of the dormitory shuffled into the courtyard. A city guard jogged over, spotting them from the edge of the throng, and came to a stop in front of Dela. "Are any of you in urgent need of medical attention? Everyone will get seen, but we don't have many physicians here yet. Anything urgent goes first."