Burning Night: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 13, Part 3: Tabitha

As Regina started up the stairs, she turned back to Tabitha. "Is this going to be a heated conversation?" She asked, with a cheeky grin on her face. "Fire him up to make him more receptive? Leave him with a burning desire to do the right thing?"

Tabitha laughed. "I may threaten to turn him into hot ash."

The mirth on Regina's face faded a little. "Can you actually do that?"

"Without singing the chair he'd be sitting on,"

"I'm in. It should look more convincing if someone from Oversight is lurking in the corner without intervening. Just please don't actually kill him."

"Dead men don't confess," Tabitha said, trying to sound reassuring. "I may show off some Crafting to suggest that I'm serious, however. Are you comfortable with that?"

"I'll be the most interesting thing I see this month," Regina said, laughing.

Shadows, Tabitha thought to herself. They have the most peculiar sense of humour.

Regina lead her up four flights of stairs, and along a wide hallway with surprisingly ornate doors; solid sheets of thin metal with delicate designs etched into the metal.

"That's a tad ostentatious," Tabitha remarked.

Regina scowled, and her mouth scrunched up, as if contemplating spitting on the door. "The head of their department has wooden doors. Real wood, the kind of thing you have to treat every few years with oil. Pretentious prick. Even my Bureau Chief doesn't have wooden doors to her office."

Imagining the office to the head of Oversight, Tabitha conjured a vision of a dark, damp tunnel with jagged rocks forming foot long spikes along the walls, with dozens of black-clad assassins lurking in crevices with knives.

Tabitha smiled ruefully, imagining it. What she envisioned was probably as ostentatious as wooden doors. Knowing what she knew of Oversight, their headquarters was likely the blandest building in the City.

She rapped hard on the doors and listened as someone shouted from inside. "I'm on my way! Fires of the bloody abyss, keep your knickers on!"

Tabitha grinned at that comment, and let a small tongue of flame dance around the palm of her hand.

The door slid open, and a tired-looking man who clearly hadn't shaved in over a week stood at the doorway, wearing a distinctly wrinkled white shirt and a deeply irritated expression. "And what the burning hell can I-"

Tabitha wasn't sure if it was the dancing flame in her hand or her coat that stopped him in the middle of his sentence. "I, ah, madam Crafter! How can I help you?"

"I was hoping for a word, Mister Millerswright. Inside your office will do." She said, and stepped past him.

She didn't look back to see if the coroner would follow her. She knew he would. The coat guaranteed it.

She stepped into an enviably organized room. The desk alone was arrayed in a tidy, almost militant arrangement, with papers stacked in neat rows and arranged by topic. The shelves near the desk were arrayed with precisely stacked, neat columns of report binders of the same dimensions, differentiated only by the neatly written labels attached to the spine of each.

The contrast from her own desk was so stark the sight of it stabbed at her like an open wound.

She barely restrained the reflex to ignite her heat haze.

Instead, she smiled and picked up an ornament on his desk. One of a very small number of personal items, it was a small glass flower held inside a glass bulb, a complicated piece of work likely presented originally as proof of mastery in a trade.