A Cast of Corbies - Chapters Twenty and Twenty-One

[kalinara]

So last time, the plot finally kicks in and all of those little hints and threads about fire and fire safety have just become relevant because there's a fire in the theater!



So things are immediately exciting. Terrified screaming, roaring flames. One of the actors, the one playing Sir Verrick, uses his "most penetrating voice" to take command: shouting at everyone to make for the exits and leave immediately.

That's when we learn that the exits are blocked. Shit. The crowd is panicking now. We pop into Raven's head as he realizes, with an "odd bit of calm" that while the fire is "hungrily licking at the walls" (a nice bit of imagery there) the air is still relatively clear, there's not a lot of smoke yet, and the flames aren't as high as the initial panic made them seem. They've got time to act.

So Raven does: he calls his frozen Bards to order. Tells them to play anything as loud as they can and shouts at the actors to sing along. Doesn't matter if they can sing or if it's on tune. Just sing something.

It's not quite calming down the crowd yet, but the Duke comes on stage with the musicians and starts shouting commands. He gets the stagehands to open the stage doors and the trap doors and shouts to the crowd. Nightjar switches to a martial charge and the others follow her lead.

I'm a little annoyed at the lack of explicit use of Bardic Magic here. I mean, it's good to give Arden a heroic moment, I suppose, but this is EXACTLY the sort of situation that Bardic Magic is suited for so it seems very contrived that Raven and his troop weren't actively using it.

Raven takes charge of the Bards again, picking a specific light marching song, and having them follow along. Okay, this time, it does start to sound like he's doing actual Bardic Magic:

The power of music ….please, let it work, let it work…. The regular, insistent beat thrummed out, over and over, working its way into the collective mob mind, overwhelming panic by the force of sheer repetition. I’ll never want to play this piece again, never, Raven knew, but if only we can keep it going long enough…

It annoys me a little that it's not specifically referred to as such. This would be fine in a standalone novel, but this is specifically a series where Bardic Magic - Magic that is specifically designed to influence people and crowds by the way - Magic that is featured heavily in a similar scene of panic in the previous book by the way - so why are we being coy again?

So folks are being funneled out, but things are starting to get a bit more frantic. The flames are getting worse and Raven starts to worry about the place coming crashing down on them. The Duke is still commanding but he's starting to cough.

Raven keeps playing on though, then we get this:

“Raven. Raven! Dammit, Raven, come on!”

It was the Duke, grabbing him savagely by the shoulder. “The others—”

‘They’re all out. We’re the last ones. Come on!”

A sudden roar made Raven glance wildly up. “Look out, the roof—”

He and the Duke dove frantically together through the trap as flaming hell came thundering down over their heads. They hit the ground, staggered, ran together through the tunnel under the stage, arms over their faces, struggling through smoke so dense Ravens lungs ached with the effort to breathe. His good eye was watering so badly by now that he could hardly see where he was going. Powers, he wasn’t going to be able to find his way out, he was going to die down here

The Duke successfully pulls Raven out and I again mourn that this isn't the universe where this story is either a throuple or a love triangle with both men and Regina, because this would be a great beat. It's not a bad beat here, but the men don't have nearly as much connection as I'd like them to have.

Oh, hey, a couple moment happens as Magpie throws herself into a coughing, disoriented Raven's arms. Regina, still dressed in her character's ballgown, shows up shouting Arden's name. They have their reunion too. Arden is pissed, by the way. Not at her, but at his discovery that the exits were bolted from the outside.

Things get worse. While everyone is safe outside, the wind is causing the flames to spread.

I suspect those merchants who were against Arden's fire safety plans are regretting it now.

Nightjar yells that they need to get the neighboring people out and she leads the other musicians and actors to go pound on people's doors.

And honestly, it occurs to me that aside from hugging Raven, Magpie hasn't gotten to do anything useful yet. And I mean, on one hand, I'm not the kind of reader that wants the main characters to do everything, but I feel like if Magpie had gotten Nightjar's lines here, she'd have felt more involved and significant in the scene.

The Duke shouts at everyone to not try to fight the fire, grab what they can and run for the river.

And yeah, the fires are spreading fast. Nightjar thinks they'll have to go in there and pull people out by force. Again, the idea of using Bardic Magic here to pied piper people out does not come up. Fortunately, the people do start racing from the building.

They keep trying to get people out. Sir Verrick's actor gets another heroic moment here:

They knocked on doors, yelled in windows, tore shutters off with desperate strength to get into houses where no one answered. The actor who played Sir Verrick came staggering out of one house with a lame boy in his arms; the child had presumably been left at home while his parents went to work. The man dumped him on a cart loaded with possessions being pulled by a whole family. When they, wild with panic, would have shoved the boy off again, the actor roared at them savagely, “Leave him, and by the One, you die by my own hand! Get to the river, go!”

Jaysen realizes the boarding house is in the path of the flames. He runs through the crowd. Raven thinks that surely Linnet has enough sense to get out on her own, but Madam Shenna would be too frail. So he and the others follow. At one point Magpie is shoved off her feet by the crowd, but Raven and Nightjar manage to catch her arms and pull her upright.

Jaysen races into the building and then the boardinghouse collapses.

Since this chapter and the next are pretty short, I'm going to combine them.

--

Cliffhanger time. Everyone stares in horror at the building. But happily, and dramatically, Jaysen and Linnet come racing out. Linnet's sobbing because her mother wouldn't leave. Raven spares a moment of pity, thinking that at least her death would be quick, but things are still pretty hellish and chaotic.

These chapters aren't quite as short as they seem, but it's pretty hard to recap all these frantic moments. People are screaming, the mob is panicking, and the authors have forgotten how Bardic Magic is supposed to work. That's the gist for a lot of this.

We do see some misanthropy and xenophobia at work, of course:

The wind still blew, relentlessly, hot as a demon’s breath, hurling the firestorm further and further. “How far is it going to spread?” a woman wondered.

“Not far enough,” a man retorted. “Let it burn the rich, that’s what I say. Let ‘em stew in their marble halls!”

“Hey, now,” another man protested, “the Duke’s a good man. Let it burn the foreigners, that’s what I say! An’ th’ Buggies! Them things that ain’t human! Let ‘em all burn!”

Oh, right. Blame the foreigners, Raven thought bitterly. That’s intelligent. Blame anyone who’s different from you, you bigoted idiot.

We get some actual deaths on page as someone tears free of a burning building only to collapse dead - Nightjar checks him and says he must have breathed in too much fire to live.

Nightjar, as a Healer, doesn't want to leave them but Raven pulls her away. She can't save anyone if she dies. It occurs to me that if the book had just combined Nightjar and Magpie's characters, Magpie could have had a specific and independent role in the storyline. But it's too late for now.

The Duke pops up again to be dramatic. He's on a horse. Raven's quick to assure us that it's not out of snobbery, but so he can be seen "like a true war leader". Again, I appreciate the story giving Arden these moments, but I feel like it's doing so by forgetting what our main characters are actually supposed to be able to do.

The new water wagons are at work! Yay! But it's still not enough. Regina pops up again, disheveled, and Raven thinks about how she should be on the horse with the Duke. And again, I can't believe I'm saying this but I WISH this were a love triangle story. Because that's the kind of bittersweet thought that a protagonist who loses the love triangle should have.

There's also a point where Raven, watching the horror of the fire, wonders how Regina's holding up, musing that women are tougher than "we men like to imagine". No thought of his actual love interest, by the way. Not that I blame him.

Eventually they realize that fighting the fire is no use, and they resolve to pull down enough houses to form a fire break instead. Raven gets his bucket taken from him and is given a hook. He doesn't have skill, he's just ordered to reach up, hook a ridgebeam of a building and pull.

It occurs to me that it's actually an interesting beat to have a caravan nomad taking part in the firefighting efforts of a city, but that never comes up. Raven's culture and ethnicity is only relevant when it comes to microaggressions and oversexualization after all.

There's a dramatic moment where a woman trapped in an attic drops her baby out the window. Raven catches it. He's congratulated and told to get back to work.

Magpie FINALLY shows up just to be imperiled:

A new surge of wind had brought the fire back to vicious life all about the women. Most of them were running for shelter like so many deer, but to Raven’s horror he saw that Magpie, through surprise or just plain weariness, had waited just a second too long to run-and a sudden shower of sparks set her wild mass of hair on fire! Raven never stopped to think, This is impossible, I can’t possibly reach her in time. He leaped across the distance separating them in one superhuman bound, catching Magpie to him, smothering the flames with his bare hands, not even feeling the pain, then threw his arm about her and practically carried her out with him to safety at the rivers edge. He didn’t even stop there; he let momentum carry them both into the water, into the blessedly cool, safe water. They tripped, and fell together, came up together, and discovered that the river here was no more than waist-deep. He helped her to stand.

The smothering the flames with his bare hands thing is interesting and makes me wonder if he'll be able to play afterward.

Magpie is unharmed and they share a moment. They run to the river. Magpie can swim, Raven can't. Which seems surprising, but I don't know enough about Roma people to know if swimming is generally a skill taught. It seems like it ought to be though, since nomadic people encounter rivers?

Anyway, they're fine. People in boats pull them up.

There's more horror as they see everything burn. The Duke is on his horse, demanding to know where the Church is, and why their mages aren't helping. The Judiciary mages show up right then, because Ardis is a heroic protagonist. The people go back in to help - including Raven, who zones out until Arden, again, tells him he can stop helping.

The chapter ends with him collapsing in exhaustion with a bunch of other people. We'll see the aftermath in the last chapter, next time.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

And despite all the faults, these are VERY cinematic scenes. It displays all too well how fire can spread in tight, bone-dry quarters. (Actually reminds me of a fire that happened near a friend's tiny townhome and yikes.)

= Multi-Facets.

[kalinara]

You're not wrong. The scenes are well done. Or would be in a different universe. But the Bards forgetting to use Bardic Magic here is like watching Dragon Ball Z and realizing that the characters forgot they can fly.