Cold Fire (22 page)

Drake tugged Abby against him as in an embrace. He ripped away her blouse, uncovering her torso and breasts. The gleam of my sword and the light of the ladder man’s lamp illuminated a suppurating wound gouged into her side. The wound oozed with a slime that glittered like phosphorous. Drake pressed a hand against it, fingers smeared into the oily mess. She cried out, then stilled as abruptly as if he had stabbed her. I yelled a protest and splashed forward to save her.

A salter grabbed at me. My training snapped me into a lunge, weight and force thrusting the blade’s tip into his shoulder.

His gaze met mine, unreadable. Blank and dead.

Cold and hot together, blood racing, I rotated my elbow out and yanked free the blade, able to think only that it hadn’t been a killing blow. The salter dropped at my feet. A wave spilled over the body, and it turned white and began to dissolve like a ridge of salt crumbling away.

Maybe I screamed in sheer shocked surprise. Someone screamed.

The salters scattered, stumbling away from me. The two closest to Drake began to croon in a moaning whoop whose rise and fall made my skin crawl. A glow like fireflies winked along their skin until their complexions shone as if they were turning alchemically into burnished gold. Flames licked along their ragged clothing. Sparks spun in their eyes.

Furious shouts and curses rose from the rooftops.

A fourth salter limped toward me, his white gaze fixed purposefully on me. He was the one who had bitten me. As he licked his teeth and smacked his lips with the obsession of hunger, he looked me right in the eye with what I knew, like a knife to the gut, was the dregs of the mind that had once dwelt happily in a youthful, healthy body.

“Kill me. Kill me.”

I thrust. My blade caught him just below the ribs. Then I pulled free.

He toppled into the sea, and the crystalline remains of what had once been a man hissed away in the swells.

I fell back as a wave of heat blasted off James Drake. The two glowing salters burned in earnest. A third joined them. Their greasy, bitter smell gagged me.

A hand caught my arm. I jerked around to stare straight at a muscled and very bare black chest wrapped with knives. Two old, ropy scars drew a starburst pattern over his left shoulder and across his heart. Once, he had taken the worst of a bad knife fight. Or perhaps he was the one who had won.

“Up! Hurry, Perdita!” With a disturbing shriek of a laugh, the woman leaped off the ladder and landed with a resounding splash next to me.

The burning men weren’t even screaming because the flames were consuming them so quickly. The reek of singed flesh dizzied me. I sheathed and fastened my sword, grabbed a stiff rung, and began to climb. I had to work around the knife man, and as I passed he spread a hand across my backside most invasively. But he merely shoved, with astonishing strength, to help me on my way.

Up!

My mind had shut down. Keep climbing. One foot. The next foot. One hand. The next hand. My shoulders strained and my fingers cramped, so I concentrated on pushing up with my legs. One more, and one more again. Keep climbing.

Hands grabbed me from above and hauled me up. I half hung over the rim of a huge basket. Below, fire roared through the pens. A figure stood in the flames, not moving. If you were dead already in every way that counted, wouldn’t true death come as a blessing?

Kill me.

I collapsed onto a swaying floor, wet, exhausted, and numb.

Clut-clut-clut.

The sound penetrated my dulled mind the way Bee’s little sister Astraea’s whining complaints in time pierced even the most heartlessly impervious. Not because you cared, but because you just wanted it to stop.

The basket pitched. I grasped at the rope railing, clinging as my rescuers hauled in the rest of their catch. First came Abby, then Drake. Was he glowing slightly?

I shut my eyes. Glittering salt crystals poured onto the sand in the shape of a man’s body, hissing away as the sea dissolved them.
I had killed two men.
Yet were they still men if their minds and maybe their souls had been eaten?

As the basket rocked again, I looked up. The knife man and the woman who had laughed swung easily into the basket and rolled up the ladder behind them. Abby was led toward the stern by a young man who had his arm around her. A seventh individual, small and agile, clambered in the rigging to investigate the bloated creature above us. An eighth person fiddling at the stern of the basket worked a crank. As the
clut-clut-clut
increased its clamor, the creature under which we labored began ponderously to part the currents of air. Heat rose from a metal cylinder like the breath of a dragon, pouring upward into the oblong whale with its thrumming skin.

We were sailing in an airship.

A small airship, to be sure, but an airship nonetheless.

I pulled myself up to see the isle falling away behind us, looking like leviathan at rest in the midst of the slumbering sea. The wind rumbled in my ears. Knife man and the woman who had laughed braced themselves against the basket, examining me. They were kissed by the pearly glamour of a waxing moon now sliding free from clouds.

Drake settled beside me. “You were slow. You need to do a better job following orders.”

“Yes, certainly I was slow, since it’s every day I have an opportunity to be trapped on an island filled with victims of the salt plague and then be rescued by buccaneers in an airship. No reason to be surprised by any of that!”

The eerie glow around his person had faded, but his blue eyes shimmered. “Please don’t be so annoying.”

I was so angry that I thought maybe the top of my head was going to blow off. And, if we were fortunate, propel the airship faster. “You lied to me!”

“Maku bastard!” The man who had had his arm around Abby grabbed Drake’s shoulder, threatening with a hand in a fist. “She mind rotted. Yee promised to heal she!”

Drake’s eyes burned hot blue. “Take your hand off me. Or I’ll burn it off.”

Knife man rocked the basket. Abby’s man stumbled to his knees. Drake caught himself clumsily, bellying against the basket’s rim. I shifted to balance, and the woman who had laughed grinned at me.

The young man burst into tears. “She me dear good sister. Dey behiques tell we it too late. Den dey take she a Salt Island. But den we hear dat in Expedition der some folk can heal any salter. Dat how I find yee. Now she don’ know she own name. She don’ know
me
, she own brother.”

“She is healed. There’s no salt plague in her. You have what I could save. And you thank me for the risks I took by assaulting me?”

“God’s blessing for saving she,” wept the young man.

Drake rested a hand on the man’s plaited hair. “What happened to the salter who bit her?”

“We drive dat salter in a pit and we pour salted water over he.”

“That was done well. I would have acted sooner, but if I had, I would have been arrested and imprisoned and she would never have gotten off Salt Island. Go back to her. She needs you.”

With both hands on the guide rope the brother staggered back to where Abby sat as in a stupor at the stern, her hands lax on the untidy mess of her rumpled pagne.

I shook out and retied my pagne. I was not ready to talk about Abby. “Drake, when did you leave Adurnam? What happened to the general? Why are you here?”

“I’m here because Expedition is my home. I was born in the Ordovici territories, but I left home at seventeen. I’ve lived in Expedition Territory for twelve years. Once my business in Adurnam was complete, I sailed back to Expedition.”

“What was your business in Adurnam?”

“Why, to rescue the general and bring him over the ocean to Expedition.”

“He’s in Expedition?”

“At the moment, he is not. He went west to a city called Sharagua to pay his respects to the cacique’s court and person.”

“You didn’t travel with him?”

“In the Taino kingdom, all fire mages serve the cacique. So I’m forbidden from traveling into Taino country. I wouldn’t want to anyway. Their laws are unreasonably strict. They won’t allow me to heal people.”

“Heal people? You burned those salters alive!”

“I used them as catch-fires, that’s true. Was that life, what they suffered? I ended their misery through a quick, merciful death that healed Abby. To burn out all the teeth in someone as far advanced in the disease as she was would have killed me. I think it was a fair trade.”

“So speaks the man who said he could heal me if I would just have sex with him.”

“Cat, you were drunk. You can’t expect to have understood exactly what I meant. Anyway, I thought you knew your own mind. You’re an independent young woman, traveling on your own. And you’re a Phoenician girl.”

I put a hand on my sword’s hilt. “I would be very cautious about what you say next.”

He took a step away from me just as it occurred to me that it might be a mistake to make a fire mage angry. But his voice remained patient. “I meant only that a young woman of your background can do as she wishes. I would never have suggested otherwise had I thought you were under the thumb of a father or brother.” He smiled pleasantly. “Or beholden to a husband.”

I could not speak out of sheer choked consternation. My cheeks flamed.

Then he surprised me. “My sincerest apologies, Cat. I meant no harm, and certainly no disrespect. A remarkably pretty girl like you is hard to resist.” He raised both hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I hope we can make peace.”

“Whatever else,” I muttered grudgingly, “you did get me off Salt Island.”

“So I did.” With a nod, he groped his way by guide rope to the stern, where he began to chat with the sterns-man at his rudder.

I did not want to drown in my anger, so I went over and knelt beside Abby. “I’m so sorry,” I said to her brother.

“I know yee,” she said with that horribly puzzled smile.

She began to comb through the tangles of my hair with her fingers. I did not want to interrupt something that comforted her, so I settled cross-legged in front of her. Knife man brought over a comb, and Abby worked through my hair, never yanking although the snarls seemed intractable. The woman who had laughed offered me a gourd bottle, and I swallowed a juice that made my eyes water and my mouth sting. Or maybe I was just tired and shaken. With Abby still combing my hair, my eyes fluttered and shut.

I woke leaning against the side of the basket, my hair a smooth curtain falling over my shoulders to my hips. Abby stood at the prow of the basket with her brother, his arm around her, watching phosphorus dance its glamour on the waves. Staring into their future, which must have seemed very dark. Wasn’t it sometimes better to be dead?

I shut my eyes rather than look.

I woke as the air changed, and we bucked like a skittish horse. The
clut-clut-clut
slowed to a lazy
clunk-cluunk-cluuunk
. I rose. We drifted over land, a hulking beast of ridges grown with a breathing exhalation of forest. I remembered Bee’s sketches of airships. What had seemed funny then, when she had drawn hapless passengers falling from the basket to deaths far below, seemed indecent now. Easy to joke about a thing you have no experience of and will never suffer.

Off to our right, firelight dappled a hollow.

Knife man paid out the ladder, and the woman who had laughed went over with a grace and strength I admired. I grasped Abby’s hand just before she went over, and she smiled at me, and her brother said, “Thank yee, maku,” in a way that made me glad she had been saved, even what was left of her. Even in the face of the deaths of others, two of which I had caused. Even so.

Over they went, climbing away into a life hidden from me. Below, on the ground, a rushlight shivered into life. After some time, it wavered away and vanished. The woman who had laughed swung a leg back over and hopped in. We began to move as knife man hauled the ladder back up.

A shape dropped beside me, startling me so badly I cried out. The fourth crewman was a petite, white-haired woman with a lined and leathery black face, her eyes hidden behind goggles. Her sleeveless singlet exposed wiry arms, and she wore loose trousers, a harness with four knives, and a bracelet molded in the shape of a running wolf. She said a word whose meaning I could not guess at, and swung back up into the rigging.

“Uncommon quiet, this night.” The woman who had laughed leaned companionably beside me against the basket’s rim. The land slumbered silent beneath like behemoth asleep. We watched together. I was content not to speak, and she felt no need to chatter. After a while, knife man moved up on my other side.

“We saw what yee wrought, there on the beach,” murmured the woman. “That blade yee carry turned them to salt. They dissolved when salt water washed them. Yon fire mage never saw. Peradventure, yee don’ mean to tell him.”

Under the circumstances, I settled on a truthful answer. “I don’t. Do you plan to tell him?”

“We’s paid for the conveyance, that only. Not for secrets.”

I smiled, for she sounded exactly like my uncle, scion of the Hassi Barahal clan that made its living stealing and selling secrets. “Who are you, if I may ask?”

“Folk hired to do a job,” she answered.

“Yon fire mage is right, yee know,” said knife man, the weight of him very noticeable on my other side.

“About what?”

“It were a kindness to let they salters die.” He nodded toward my belt. “No ordinary manner of blade, that one.”

I fixed a hand possessively on the hilt. “Only my hand can wield it.”

He said, “Surely bound to yee. Some manner of cemi.”

“It’s just a sword.”

The woman laughed with a kind of wavering howl. It was not a laugh I would soon forget.

“Have it that way, then, Perdita.” Knife man grinned. “Kiskeya is a beauty, is she not?”

“Who is Kiskeya?” I asked, pleased I could frame a useful question to move the topic on.

“Why, Kiskeya is this island. She is the mother of we all.”

The hills plunged in jagged shadows down to the foamy white rim of a beach. The airship skipped and rolled as air currents eddied and battered us from two directions. Then we turned and headed parallel along the coastline. Under the moon’s light, the sea became a dark mirror in which stars were caught. I smelled a flowery fragrance, a heady perfume blown into my face by the night wind. A bird called in a mournful loop. Far in the distance, I saw a shimmering glow as of a city burning night candles.

“What city is that?” I asked.

“Expedition,” said the woman.

“So this island is part of the Taino kingdom. While Expedition is a free city on this island ruled by mage Houses and princes. But how could a free city have been established here?”

“When the first fleet, that one out of Mali, come across the Atlantic, it come to land here, on the south shore of Kiskeya. The island was then ruled by many caciques, each with he own territory. One of these caciques, named Caonabo, dealt with the fleet’s officers. He gave them territory in exchange for allowing the Taino to trade and ship through they port.”

“And in exchange for the maku not starting a war,” said knife man with a sardonic chuckle.

“Is that where the law about the salt plague comes from? The one that all salters or anyone bitten by a salter have to be quarantined on Salt Island?”

“Yee have it right,” she said. “’Tis all written down in the first treaty, that one which established Expedition Territory. But yee’s mistaken in thinking Expedition ruled by princes and mages. A Council rule in Expedition. Why, mages is not even allowed to form professional associations or corporations or guilds in any wise. The Council don’ like mages much. So besides the insult to Taino law for a take yee two gals off Salt Island, Expedition’s wardens shall be after yon fire mage for another reason. Because in Expedition ’tis against the law for a fire mage to use a catch-fire.”

“Will you tell them?”

“Not good for business to tell tales,” said knife man.

“The Taino on Salt Island shall tell them,” said the woman. “Yon fire mage shall have some trouble hereafter.”

I could only hope! But their words puzzled me. “Are there truly no cold mages in Expedition?”

“What is a cold mage?” asked knife man.

I was too surprised to answer, but fortunately the woman did.

“Fire banes,” she said.

“Fire banes? I suppose cold mages could be called fire banes.”

“They who come from Europa speak such stories of fire banes as mighty as hurricanes, but I don’ believe them,” remarked knife man. “Yee ever see such power in a fire bane, gal?”

I was really too astonished to answer. In the east, the light had changed yet again, black of night easing to a charcoal pallor. The wind began to soften as dawn crept up the horizon. We were drifting down, sinking closer to the waves and a length of beach.

“Why would there be no powerful cold mages here?” I asked.

I could see them better now: He was a big man, broad-shouldered and powerful, with black skin and a shaved head. The ropy scar that patterned his left torso was not the only old wound marking a violent life. Yet the woman who had laughed scared me more. Not that I thought she was about to strangle me to get my sword, but that she surveyed me with a measuring eye, as if wondering if I were a secret she could steal and sell to the highest bidder. She could have walked down Adurnam’s streets without looking the least out of place, with brown skin dusted with freckles from constant sun, reddish-brown kinky hair, brown eyes, full lips, and a thin Celtic nose. But then when she laughed, you would shudder.