As she entered one of the east squares and fought her way through traders setting their market stalls for the day, a cry went up. “Fire!” someone shouted, others echoed it, and Alishia almost laughed out loud. The column of smoke already reached the heavens, flames licked and danced at its base and the stench of burning overrode even the warm tang of oiled spices and freshly squeezed rhellim. How could they only now acknowledge its existence? But then she saw the flaming stall in the corner of the square, and she understood. Before, the fire had little to do with them. A distraction, a novelty, something to chat about while they awaited their first customers of the day. Now it had touched one of them by sending down a flaming page from a book, kissing a stall-covering alight, seeding itself away from the library. The threat of it engulfing all of their lives became immediately apparent. A couple of the traders rushed to help the frantic owner haul what she could away from the voracious flames, but most merely tried to protect their own stalls. They threw buckets of water across the canopies, packed away stock, calming their mules as best they could.

More flaming confetti floated down from the sky. Some of the little fires had burnt themselves out before they hit the ground, but a few—those feasting on a particularly rich history text, perhaps, or those with several pages stuck together by time—blazed into whatever they touched.

A man bashed at his own head to put out the flames in his hair. A woman squatted and pissed on her burning furbat. Novelty mutated into panic as the whole city seemed to speed up. Where people had been walking they now ran, where they’d been running they were now sprinting, whether toward or away from the fire. Water carts careered through the streets. Barrels bumped and spilled their precious cargo back into the gutter, and by the time Alishia had run to the fire, there were already several wagons parked around the old, misshapen library building. Groups of sweating men and women swung buckets back and forth, fire glinting on their strained faces, skin seeming to stretch and redden even as they worked.

Hopeless, Alishia knew. All hopeless. There were a billion places for the flames to hide, and even if they did manage to douse the conflagration and drown it from the fabric of the building, the books would smolder and simmer inside, the fire biding its time, ready to leap out and finish the destruction as soon as their backs were turned.