Cold Fire (11 page)

“We’re here! We’re here!” But they couldn’t hear me.

“You don’t suppose they’ve drowned?” said Lord Marius. “What a stink! I can’t see or hear a cursed thing down there. It might as well be tar.”

“Get the magister. He’ll be able to see if they’re down there.”

“We can’t trust him. His own master told me so. He’ll try to help the girls escape. He’s got the power to do it. You felt the force of that storm. Bold Taranis! If I had a regiment of such mages, I’d never lose a battle.”

“God of Lightning, Marius! Listen to yourself. If the girls die it won’t matter either way, will it? Isn’t there rope? We’ll lower down one of the soldiers to look for them.”

“Cat!” Bee’s voice came as from the other side of a river, calling across a turbulent channel.

Her hand, trembling in mine, turned to sand.

My fingers closed on grains dribbling away.

She was gone.

Gone.

I had lost her.

My thoughts shattered. I could not see or hear or think.

Then I heard Andevai’s voice, shaken and hoarse. “It’s worse than I thought. I feel the wind of the spirit world. This is a crossing place, and it is open. Why haven’t you gone down already? Get me rope! Hurry! Catherine, speak to me.”

“I lost Bee.” My voice was scarcely more than a whimper. It was all the breath I had.

“I hear you, Catherine. I’m coming. Hold on.” His voice changed timbre as he turned his head away. “Cat’s down there, but she’s fading.”

Lord Marius’s voice was sharp. “Is she dying?”

“No. She’s fading into the spirit world. It shouldn’t be possible for humans to pass from this world into the spirit world except at the cross-quarter days.”

“Are these the cold mages’ secrets? That they can move at will between this world and the abode of the ancestors? The ancient poets spoke of spiritwalkers. I never thought it was true.”

“I’m tied in. Lower me down. Catherine, hold on!”

His body appeared as a shadow, covering half the lit circle. I felt, as on my own body, skin parting beneath a slicing edge of glass as he cut himself. Blood’s hot stinging scent drenched me as in a waterfall. Did a cold mage’s blood have more power than that of an ordinary person? On the threshold between this world and the other side, the force of his blood swelled and surged like the ocean tide, for it was the essence of life in the undiluted form of salt and iron. I suddenly understood why I had not crossed. My blood had opened the path, but the stinking spew of muck we’d fallen into had coated my skin, sealing away my blood.

A rope’s end spun down before my face. It bobbed, bounced, swayed. Clumps of dirt peppered the muck around me like grapeshot, loosened from the slime-dried stone shaft.

“Catherine! I’m almost down. Hang on.”

“I have to follow Bee. I can’t lose her, too.”

I scoured away the mud above my eye. Pain burned where my fingers gouged out the clogged wound. Liquid pushed, trickled, and then streamed down my face.

His voice rang closer now, almost on me. Astonished. “You’re all light!”

A rich fat drop of my blood struck the slime in which I floundered.

“I’m here! Grab my hand, Catherine.”

His fingers brushed my hair, but his touch was as insubstantial as mist.

His next words came as from the far side of the world. “The gate’s closing. I can’t grasp you. And I can’t cross. Catherine, I will find a way. I promise you, I’ll find you—”

I fell through.

Into a river whose rushing waters tumbled me over and dragged me under. Skirts tangling in my legs, I pulled upward but my hands could not break the flashing surface. I sank into my past.

I am six years old and the water closes over my nose and mouth as my mother’s strong hand slips from mine. The furious current wrenches her away.

My lungs were empty. I was drowning. The current dragged me toward a shadow that resolved into a vast maw rimmed with razor teeth. The spirit world was going to devour me.

Fingers with a grip like death fastened around my wrist. I thrashed.

“Cat! Don’t fight me!”

Bee’s voice! I went limp as she pulled. Then my mouth was above the water. I retched as air hit my lungs. The current tried to drag me back down. In panic I lunged upward through the shallows, shoving aside the body that was in my way and scrambling until solid ground met me. I collapsed, face pressed against a hot skin of stones.

“There’s thanks for you!” Bee sprawled on the rocky shore, water purling around her.

I heaved up a spew of sour-salty water. My whole body spasmed. “I thought…I was going to…lose you…just like my papa and mama…” I coughed out frantic sobs.

“There, now, Cat. There, now.” The warmth of her hand on my back soothed me.

Heat baked down on my hatless head. Wind murmured in leaves. Insects buzzed. A tremulous peace calmed my galloping heart. I hadn’t lost her. I hadn’t lost her. I hadn’t lost her.

I rose. We had floundered to shore on a rocky island trimmed with a sandbar. The sleepy horizon smelled of the sea. A wide, estuarine river flowed past, alive with a flashing presence. A feminine face with skin the blue-green of turquoise breached the surface. Eyes like stones tracked us. A slick shoulder streaked with long hair the color of twilight rolled away beneath the water.

Across the river stood tall trees leafed in summer glory. Far away, a winged creature perched on the blasted tip of a fire-scorched pine. On the far bank sat four wolves looking death in our direction. I was absolutely sure that they looked hungry and we looked delicious.

Bee tugged on my elbow. “Do you think they can swim across?”

“I wouldn’t like to stay and find out.”

The brushy sandbar on which we stood was separated from the other bank by a stagnant, muddy channel. Downstream, where the back channel met the river, the water was covered with algae. A foul substance stirred beneath that green surface in the same way heating water shrugs just before it boils.

“I guess we have to wade across that slimy-looking mud to get off this island,” I said. “Let’s get out of these winter clothes first.”

We stripped off coats, gloves, and petticoats. I peeled off my wool challis riding jacket as well, because it was so hot. We rolled up our gear into separate bundles. She still had the knit bag.

“At least you saved your sketchbook and the knife,” I said, my courage plunging. “I lost—”

Light winked on steel. Not ten paces away, my sword rocked in the wavelets along the shore. In the spirit world, it appeared as the sword it was rather than disguised as a black cane.

I pounced and swept it up. The blade flashed as if it had caught the rays of the sun, only there was no sun, nothing but a flare of gold on the horizon. The winged creature on the distant tree opened its wings and launched upward. It was not a bird of prey, as I had thought, but a winged woman, her skin as black as pitch and yet glowing as if she were a smoldering torch of power.

“Beware! Beware! A dragon is turning in her sleep!”

Did I imagine a voice, or actually hear one?

The wolves tested the river’s shallows as if they had decided they were indeed hungry enough to try to reach us.

Bee turned as she slung her bundled gear over her back. “Did you say something, Cat? Oh! Incredible! Your sword washed up!” She raised a hand to shade her eyes. “Is the sun rising?”

A line of fire limned the sky. A blast of wind shook the trees like an unseen hand wiping clean the slate on which all is written. What came behind it was sharp and painful and obliterating.

“It’s the tide of a dragon’s dream,” I cried. “Grab hold of me and don’t let go! If we’re swept away, we’ll go together.”

I threw my arms around her in an embrace so tight she grunted in protest. Across the river, the wolves plunged into the current and began swimming across.

A low bell tone shivered through the world. Its sonorous vibration splintered air from water, stone from fire, flesh from soul, here from there, now from now. The tone like a taut string passed through us as a knife slices parsnips, as a kiss unexpectedly filters through your entire being, as cold magic flows down a sword’s blade, as a choice propels you down a new path whose track you can never retrace once you have set your feet on it.

My heart, my flesh, my bones, my spirit; all thrummed as if caught within the enveloping thunder of a drumbeat that boomed on and on. Within the hollow rolling sound, the space between the beats, there unfolded a long white shore of glittering sand washed by lapis-blue waters and trimmed by thick vegetation with fanned, fringed leaves and flowers so vivid in their reds and oranges and whites they were almost molten. I felt I was looking through a window onto another shore. Then, like a vase shattering into pieces, the world tipped and parted beneath me. An abyss loomed.

I did not fall because Bee did not fall. Bee was an immoveable pillar of stone.

With a howl of rage, a shape writhed out of the channel where the water had run so green. It was far larger than could possibly rest under the surface unless the channel’s depths reached all the way to Cathay. It seemed not so much to unfold as to expand as a balloon expands when air is heated inside it. It spread a net of tentacles. Its maw was rimmed with razor teeth so white they hurt my eyes. This was the creature that had meant to eat me in the river. One huge appendage lashed overhead and snapped down to crush us.

“Hold on to me!” I shouted as I slashed at it with my sword.

My blade severed the limb. The tentacle fell writhing on the stones, spraying a stinging black ichor that hissed and bubbled across the earth. More appendages lashed over us. The tide of the dream cut through the creature. Its moist hide parted like peeled fruit. Light mottled the body, slithering in and twisting out until my stomach clenched. I shut my eyes, waiting to be smashed.

The air quieted, and the world grew still. The river flowed deep and dark and wide. The trees stood green and lovely. Bee still held me. We hadn’t moved. Nothing had changed around us.

Of the monstrous creature, there was no sign. The surface of the back channel was a sheet of glassy calm. Only a single patch of green remained, riming the steep bank, and as I watched, it scuttled along the shore like a little green crab trailing a black spume behind it and missing one claw.

“The cursed wolves!” I released Bee and spun.

The current streamed undisturbed except for a large leafless branch floating past. Four white birds perched with the most amazing insouciant balance on the uppermost swaying spur of wood. One dove into the water and came up with a gleaming fish in its cruelly hooked beak. The wolves had vanished.

Bee grabbed my arm. “What happened? What was that?”

I lowered my sword. “That was the tide of a dragon’s dream. That’s what Andevai told me. Any creature caught outside a warded place is washed away and never comes back. But that didn’t happen, did it? I guess
he
doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does!”

“Do dreams have tides?”

“Dreams can change course suddenly. Once you’re dreaming, you are pulled along without knowing how far into the ocean of dreams you’ll go. That might be like being caught in a tide.”

“I thought walking the dreams of dragons meant sleeping, and waking up to sketch my dreams. I was thinking of it in a…metaphorical way, not an actual one. I don’t like it here. And I was never bleeding, so how can I have crossed?”

“Let’s get off this island. Then we can talk.”

We splashed across the muddy flats and climbed up a sleepy bank carpeted with a bank of intensely gold flowers like chiming bells. No, the flowers were
actually
chiming as the wind’s caress made them bob and tinkle.

“Those flowers are making noise,” Bee said in a small voice.

She struggled up to a patch of ordinary grass and sank down. I sat beside her. It was a beautiful day. The landscape with its splendid trees and golden bank of flowers looked perfect enough to be painted. A searingly blue butterfly fluttered past. My whole body felt as heavy as a sack of sand. I could not have moved if the great general Hanniba’al and a thundering herd of elephants had borne down on us at that moment, although even had they done, I fully expected some horror would materialize out of the soil to flay them to ribbons, crack their bones to pieces, and suck out their marrow.

“Blessed Tanit,” I said in a voice that did not sound like my own, “the spirit world was nothing like this the first time I walked here.” I thought of the wolves who had pursued me and the coach as I fled Four Moons House. “Well, I guess it was. We should have listened to Rory. This is not a safe place. Merciful Ba’al. Now he’ll wait at the Buffalo and Lion wondering what became of us! Do you know what he told me after you went off with the headmaster? He said that the headmaster is a serpent. A dragon. That illusion we saw looked exactly the way I imagine a dragon would look. But the headmaster is a man.”

“Cat,” whispered Bee.

“Did you hear the headmaster say those two strange things right before the militia arrived? He said, ‘That explains
her
.’ He meant me, like he was watching me all those years in the mirrors trying to figure out what I was. Then he said by all means to take you with me, but that was
after
I said I was going to the labyrinth. If he knew the labyrinth would lead me to the well, and the well was a crossing into the spirit world, that would mean he wanted you to cross into the spirit world. That he
knew
you could cross. But your blood didn’t open the Fiddler’s Stone, so how could—”

“Cat.” Bee’s fingers clamped so hard on mine they cut off my words. Her voice was a murmur. “Don’t move except to turn your head to your right.”

A thousand pins would not have made the skin along my neck and back prickle more violently. I slowly turned my head.

A woman sat cross-legged on the bank under the canopy of a massive yew tree whose wide crown and split trunk I had, strangely, not noticed until just now. She simply sat, saying nothing, looking over the river, her hands folded peacefully in her lap. She had the look of the locals who lived in the countryside northeast of Adurnam: tightly curled black hair with a reddish cast, dark brown skin, and brown eyes, features that spoke of Celtic forebears as well as West African ones. It was her ordinariness that made me uneasy. She was dressed in the commonplace, practical summer clothing of the villages: a skirt sewn from bright cloth printed with red and orange paisleys on a butter-yellow fabric and bulky from petticoats beneath, and a high-necked blouse with a kerchief tucked around the collar. The apron she wore over all looked recently laundered, not a stain or a crease. She held a strip of fabric of the same pattern as the skirt. Folding it, she deftly bound it over her hair to create three decorative peaks in the fabric.

Perhaps I sucked in air too hard.

She turned. Her eyes widened with the same surprise I had felt a moment before.

Hers was a face that arrested the gaze. It had a familiar look to it, especially about the eyes, which were deeply lashed and finely formed. I trusted that face at once, although I knew I ought to trust nothing here.

“Greetings and peace to you, Aunt,” I said, for there is never any harm in being polite. “Is all well with you?”

Bee’s hand tightened on mine.

The woman spoke in a voice I had heard before. “No trouble, through my power as a woman. And you, bride of my grandson? I did not expect to find you so quickly.”

Bee tugged on my hand. “Run.”

“Do I know you?” I asked, for I was dumbfounded, although not struck dumb.

“Before this, one time I and you have met. I am Vai’s grandmother.”

I don’t know how many times I blinked, or how wide my mouth gaped. Bee’s tugging on my arm grew quite insistent, until I realized she intended to rip off my arm if I did not do something.

“Are you a spirit sent to confuse and tempt me?” I asked, and added hastily, “No offense intended. It’s just a question.”

The woman held out a necklace. A locket shone as if sunlight burnished it, although the silvery sky revealed no sun.

“That’s my locket! With my father’s portrait.” I pulled my arm out of Bee’s grasp.

“Cat!” Bee lunged, pinning my hand to the ground. “Don’t you dare take it!”

The locket dangled like deadly fruit from the woman’s hand. “To walk with wisdom and caution in the spirit world is wise,” she said. “This amulet Vai tucked in my hand. He gave it to me after he made an offering to the ancestors. He asked me to look for you. He thought this locket might draw me and you together.”

“Who are you?” demanded Bee.

“Do not speak your true name aloud in the bush. The creatures who live here eat names as well as blood. You can call me Fati.”

I twisted out of Bee’s grip, snatched the locket, and opened it. The image of Daniel Hassi Barahal, with his black curls and ironic smile, stared at me. When I touched the locket to my lips, I
knew
this was my very own locket. I had been forced to trade it to two girls in Four Moons House in exchange for their getting me out through a locked door.

“How did Vai obtain this?” I asked as I slipped it over my head.

“He did not tell me. He asked me to find you and guide you, for I know a little of the bush. Already I find you on open ground where any spirit animal may eat you.” She lifted a scolding finger. “You must stay on the path. Or on warded ground.”

“We were in Adurnam an hour ago,” said Bee. “How can he have been at your village? How could he even know we fell into the well? Cat, you need to give that locket back.”