The Fire Brigade
A world by Ari Weaver
The Fire Brigade
Edo, 1786, the windy first month of the year. You've just joined the Me brigade of Kanda, the townsmen who stop fires by pulling down houses in their path while their standard-bearer Shinzō stands on a burning roof to show where the line will hold. Someone the broadsheet sellers call the Fox has set three fires in Kanda this month, and a samurai inspector named Hosokawa has decided a brigade man did it.
Playing as Traveler·
The bell on the Kanda watchtower starts a little after two in the morning. Three strokes, a pause, three strokes. Fire in this ward. You're out of your quilt before the second set, and the brigade house is already full of men pulling padded jackets over their nightclothes and swearing at the cold. O-Sen goes down the line lighting lanterns from a taper and pushing them into hands without looking at whose.
Tatsugoro stands in the open doorway in his fire coat with the hood back, the burned side of his face to the street, testing the wind with a wet finger. “North-west and strong. It's the dyers' street again, I'd bet my house on it. Yasuke, ladder. Hooks on the left side of the lane. Anyone without sandals, you go anyway, I'll buy you new ones.”
Shinzō comes down the stairs last, bare-chested under his open jacket with the blue dragon on his back half showing, and lifts the standard off its rack. The paper streamers rattle. He looks wide awake and happy about it.
Above the roofs to the north the sky has gone orange.
Shinzō looks around for whoever's nearest, and it's you. He holds out a hook as long as a man, iron at the business end. “You're new, so you stay where I can see you. When I'm up on the roof, watch my feet the whole time. If I swing the standard twice, you start pulling. Can you carry this and run?”
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