Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits Read Free Page A

dead and not replaced because it wouldn’t have been fair on a young dog, with Dave likely to snuff it first. They never really get over it.
    He fastened his boots, heaved himself into his greatcoat, shoved on a hat and a double pair of gloves, wool first and then thick leather, picked up his stick and went out. Time was he’d have taken a gun, but his eyes weren’t up to it now, nothing like. He’d slowed down disappointingly quickly in the last few months—there’d been days when he’d barely put his nose out of doors—but he was feeling noticeably better this morning.
    He moved upwind at a steady shuffle, leaning on his stick to ease his right leg. Well before he reached it, he guessed the source of the smoke. The Cabinet House. Must’ve caught it good and proper. Yes, there it was, no more than a shell of walls, roof fallen in, nothing left of timbers and partitions except ash and embers on the ground and an odd reek of something sweet and sticky drifting on the breeze. Hundred and twenty years, getting on, it had stood here. Dave knew that because the date was carved into the lintel stone.
    Enter and wonder—1781.
    It was the fifth earl who’d built it, to house his collection. Pretty well all the earls had been mad on something or other, and the fifth had been mad on collecting. Used to go travelling round Europe and beyond with a couple of dozen servants to look after him, buying up anything that caught his fancy, provided it was odd enough. Built the Cabinet House, all little fancy turrets and spires and what have you, to hold his collection in special glass cases. Then he’d got a fever—Egypt or somewhere—and died, and the sixth earl had come along, not interested in collecting but mad on shooting, and planted up Dave’s wood for pheasant-cover, all among grand old oak trees—been there hundreds of years, some of them. Had to have a gamekeeper, of course, so he’d built a house for the fellow—Dave’s house now, because he’d been gamekeeper here following on from his father and his grandfather. So all his long life, there the Cabinet House had stood while the wood grew round it, full of its knick-knacks—dragons’ teeth, locks of mermaids’ hair, funny-shaped nuts, bottles from pharaohs’ tombs, that sort of rubbish. Dave was sad to see it go. Might’ve lasted me out, he thought.
    Forty years back, the eighth earl—book mad, he’d been—had fetched some of his scholar friends along to look the lot through, and they’d gone off with anything worth while for their museums. There hadn’t been anything left to be sad about, really, except memories.
    Dave stood in the doorway gazing vaguely over the pile of ash with the remnants of heat beating up into his face. Warmin’ my old carcass through, he thought. Doin’ something useful at last.
    Sudden as a blink, almost, the sun rose, slotting its rays through a gap where a fallen tree had brought down several of its neighbours. There was a movement in the ashes a little way over to Dave’s right. He peered at it with his good eye and decided it was more than just an eddy of wind stirring the surface. Something underneath. He scuffed the fringe of ashes aside, took a half pace forward, gripped his stick by the ferrule and reached out, trying to rake the thing towards him with the crook.
    Poor beast, he thought. What a way to go. Put you out of your sufferin’, shall I?
    He took a quick stride forward, this time onto hot embers, thrust the crook into the heart of the heap, hooked it round something more solid than ash and dragged it free. It cheeped plaintively as it came, disentangled itself from the crook, and stood, shaking the ashes from its feathers. It was a baby bird, about the size of an adult rook, its eyes newly opened, its body covered with astonishing luminous yellow down that seemed to ripple with the heat of the fire, and the