Cold Fire (50 page)

The last day of October dawned with rain and blood.

On the previous night, I had crept to the assembly house to eat my nightly bowl of porridge only to find the village gathered to discuss the weather. A red dawn and the afternoon’s steadily rising swells foretold the coming of the Angry Queen. I slept in the rafters of a roofless, abandoned shed, and woke at daybreak soaking wet from a squall of rain and bleeding with my monthly courses. I endured the rain but was glad of the blood.

As the winds began to batter, folk hurried to lash down everything they could before they headed to the ridge for safety. The storm was coming in faster than they had anticipated. Already water flooded up the shoreline far past the high-water mark. The wind had risen to such a pitch that it rumbled. Branches whipped, tearing free. A roof  ’s thatch scattered in a bluster of debris. The sea was streaked with foam as the wind sheared the tops off the pounding waves.

The Herald of wind and thunder strode past high in the sky, his black hair a sheet of darkness. The Flood with his blue-green arms washed around the curve of the promontory, spray spitting so high I thought it would speckle the feet of his heavenly brother. I wanted to be like them. I let go of the shadows and stood with my face into the wind and my braid flying out behind me, sure the gale was about to lift me off my feet. And then I would walk the storm.

Only, of course, I was my mother’s daughter, composed of mortal flesh, so the wind shoved me stumbling back. I slammed into a tree trunk. A wind-shorn coconut smacked into the ground beside me, barely missing my head.

A strong hand fastened harshly on my arm. “A remarkably pretty opia be haunting us,” said the shaven-headed man. Once I might have been frightened by his lustful sneer and his machete.

I met his gaze. “The storm is coming for
me
. Do you want to be here when it arrives?”

He did not.

So I braved the day alone. I sheltered in the lee of the outer walls of the ball court. Rain tore in sheets driven horizontally by the gale. I could barely see the shoreline. A huge wave crashed across the lowest rank of houses, ripping them off their moorings in a splintering crashing roar. Yet the tremendous and unstoppable power of wind and rain and water transported me into a state of almost unendurable rapture. I was so alive.

Dusk settled as the darkness of Hallows’ Night swept over the waters.

My ears popped. The wind ceased between one breath and the next.

A rip like a lance of light sliced through the massed clouds. Her eye opened, vast and terrible, and the spirit who was the hurricane saw me, an insignificant pest far below.

She blinked.

A shining coach pulled by four pearlescently white horses swept out of the embrace of the towering storm wall and coasted over the gleaming foam. The vehicle rolled to a halt on the wrack-ridden shore. Waves parted to flow around it. I ran down to meet them with my bundle of stolen belongings and purloined food slung over my back. The coachman raised his whip to greet me. The eru smiled as she swung down the steps and opened the door. She did not speak, so I merely nodded as I rushed up the steps into an interior lit by cold fire.

I shrieked. “Rory!”

He’d had his legs up on the narrow cushioned bench, lounging, but he swung them down to brace himself as I flung myself at him.

“Oof !” he said, as I hugged him.

“Rory!”

“You already said that.” He fixed his big hands on my shoulders and held me away to offer a reproachful look. “I waited and waited for you but you never came. I began to think you just sent me away from that cursed old dragon because you were mad at me for trying to tear out his throat.”

“I sent you away to save your life! So much has happened, I can barely remember that now! Why are you here?”

His eyelids closed partway, giving him the hooded look of a man who wants to speak frankly but dares not. “Our sire came to Massilia a moment ago, and leashed me.”

Another presence waited in the coach, facing us from the opposite seat.

A young man studied me. A dash jacket, trousers, and kerchief of unrelieved black gave him the severe look of the accountant who comes to tell your aunt and uncle that they have lost all their money in an ill-advised speculative venture. Worn loose, his straight black hair fell to his hips, and there was something about its thick texture that made it seem it might writhe into life and choke me if I was foolish enough to anger him. I could not read his ancestry in his face, because while the hair reminded me of the Taino, his complexion made me think him Afric, and yet the cut of his nose and cheekbones might have been Celtic, and the epicanthic fold at his eyes reminded me of Captain Tira’s Cathayan origins. He certainly had the arrogance of the Romans! He was, in fact, remarkably good-looking and no older than Vai.

He sniffed, inhaling with a lift of his chin. “A maiden no longer, it seems,” he remarked, “but not gotten with child.”

“Cat,” said Rory, “your mouth is hanging open.”

The coach rocked as we bucked back into the winds. I grabbed at a strap to steady myself as I gaped. How could I ever forget that voice?

The amber gaze, so like mine, pinned me. “Tell me, Daughter. Whose blood shall feed me tonight? That of the girl who walks the path of dreams? Or some other? Son, open the shutters.”

Rory slid open the shutter of the door that opened into the mortal world. A tumult of wind and rain shook the coach. Raindrops iced as they spattered inside. A surly little voice hissed displeasure. A glitter of eyes winked on the door handle. With my sleeve, I wiped away a frosting of ice from the latch. Its gremlin face glowered briefly, but it seemed too intimidated to speak.

Rory leaned across and slid back the shutter on the door that opened into the spirit world. The hunt raced on the wind, tangling across the sky. Beasts clamored within the brawl of storm and surge. In their teeth I heard death: owls silent, snakes winding, hyenas cackling with laughter; the shrill of a hawk before it stoops, the pulse of fear that stops a beating heart, the festering that eats at flesh from within. If you are not to be killed then you must kill: That is the law of the hunt. Its drums sang in my heart, and the promise of blood tasted as sweet on my lips as a kiss.

I had that bastard Camjiata now.

“I know who it is, the power you sense rising.” I shouted to be heard above the din.

“Lead on, little cat,” said my sire, his cruel smile burning.

Expedition.

I leaned out the window to see the jetty lights burning and the masts in the harbor swaying in a blustering wind. Lights riddled the walls that ringed the old city. Sparks spun across twisting braids of smoke from the factories. Like tethered fish, the Taino airships that had spread out to occupy the city bobbed and tugged against the rising wind. We had come in so fast and unexpectedly that the airmen realized the danger too late; Taino sailors began hauling down the smallest airships in a belated attempt to stake them down and save them. The others bucked and rolled. A cable snapped. A stubby prow dipped, slicing across a building’s roof and jarring a cistern off its moorings. Water poured down the walls as people ran to escape the crumbling roof.

All across the city, people raced to shutter windows and tie netting over homes and roofs. Yet because of the speed of the storm, their efforts would not come quickly enough.

What must destroy the fleet would devastate the city.

So be it. Ice rimed my lips and chilled my heart. I was the hunter’s daughter.

But I was also Luce’s friend.

I would have grasped my sire’s hand like a supplicant, but I dared not touch him. “Promise me the hurricane will not come here, only the wind of our passing.”

He set a hand on the rim of the open window. “The hurricane will come someday, for the hurricane lives in this part of the world. But on this night the Angry Queen walks elsewhere. Then she will sleep until the season turns and the waters warm again.”

He leaned out to look. The coach circled the factory district, and one by one every factory engine stuttered and, with a collapsing hiss of steam, died. Gas lamps exploded. All the street lightning went out. A dull
boom
shook through the air.

He licked his lips with the precision of a cat. “Where is the dreamer? I cannot taste her.”

The maze of troll town glittered below, cutting through the chains of the magic he used to track his prey. I sought for her in my heart, and for a moment I caught her, but a mirror’s reflected light spun her image away and I lost her.

“I have hidden her from you!” I cried as my heart thrilled with triumph.

“So the little cat bites back.” His gaze on me could not be shed. He might have drained dry my spirit as easily as cut my throat to feast on my blood. “Where is the blood I’m owed this night?”

“I’m not sure how to find him.”

“Hunt down the threads that bind the world to find him, Daughter.”

Rory pressed fingers to my knee. “Scent is not only your nose, Cat. Who are you looking for? I can help you.”

“Let her sharpen the blade of her senses on her own,” said our sire. “How can she hone her steel if you do the work for her?”

My right hand I splayed over my breastbone. In the interstices that knit together the mortal world and the spirit world, I sought the ones I loved. Bee’s heart beat so close to mine it was as if my breath mingled with hers, even as mirrors shattered her image into a thousand shards. The locket tingled against my palm, and its warmth tugged me toward Vai’s bright spirit to the north. Rory was right here. I could even feel Bee’s little sisters, Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan, Luce and them at the boardinghouse, their lives like feathers tickling my skin. They were all safe.

I licked my lips, trying to taste the air as my sire tasted it, trying to sense the land as he sensed it. The mortal world was an impenetrable shadow, here and there pierced by essences I had no other word for except
light
. Scattered across the city and land below shone the spirits of mages strong enough to scent. Some flickered within the mortal shadow like comforting candlelight or gleamed with the steady purpose of gaslight. Others smoldered like half-buried coals. A few flared like pitch torches set alight. One I recognized: Drake simmered in the general’s town house, and at first look it was easy to see his magic as nothing more than a sullen red glow of no particular strength. But Vai had been right, of course. That smolder was merely a cap for a vast reservoir of molten power barely tamped down and ready to erupt.

I marked him. But I turned my heart toward the enemy I sought.

“General Camjiata. Lion of war. Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.”

I closed my left hand at my waist as if I held the hilt of the sword Camjiata had stolen from me. As at my command, my kinsmen bolted on the paths that net the world: loping wolves, baying hounds, rippling cats, silent sharks, winged raptors. From the smallest to the largest, they raced on the scent I envisioned more as a face and a figure and a presence than as a smell.

My senses slammed up against the border between Expedition and Taino country as against a spirit rope strung with amulets and charms. The Taino had woven a barrier around their kingdom not just with wealth and weapons but with what Vai’s grandmother might have called the nyama of their behiques. Yet it took me, half mortal as I was, only a moment’s negotiation a tear a rip in the spirit barrier. I slipped through, and the hunt poured through after me.

The island of Kiskeya slumbered, as yet unaware of this invasion, but her beating heart pulsed in the rhythm of the wedding areito. I heard its chant and rattle but I could not see the plaza or the ball courts; I couldn’t see the people celebrating. They were hidden from me because they were wreathed in shadow. I knew Camjiata was close, but I could not find him.

Yet the world was lit. Flames like gas lamps marked each behique, some burning fierce and strong while others simmered with a fire humble or frail. Yet in truth the presence of all those fire mages was difficult to distinguish against the brightest blaze. Most were like candles held next to a bonfire. The cacica’s magic burned so brightly that she almost blinded all else. How she did not kindle into an inferno I did not at first understand. She ought to be dead. The backlash of her power ought to have consumed her long since, but it had not. Nor was she surrounded by the charred corpses of her catch-fires. She was surrounded by a net of magic that shone as a dew-moistened spider’s web might when the rising sun catches in the filaments and breathes light over them.

Threads pulsing as with the flow of energy stretched from the Taino plaza across great distances into the faraway masses of the huge ice sheets, through the spirit world, and back into the mortal world. These threads did not have color, precisely, nor did they glow as flame does. Like spirit, they were animate, or at least shot through with energy and force. Were these threads cold magic? Each led back to a different point, and those points were not flames but intangible wells of power that reminded me of the deep blue pool on Salt Island that Drake had told me was considered sacred by the Taino.

Those wells of power were cold mages. For at last, I understood what I was seeing. Her catch-fires were all fire banes. She was continually casting off heat into an entire troop of catch-fires linked to her as if they were knitted into one garment. She did not pour the backlash into a single catch-fire but divided the stream into many, so no single one was overwhelmed and thus consumed, as I had almost been killed by Drake. Anyway, the fire banes who were her catch-fires were not killing her combustion, or even absorbing it. Their bodies were conduits. The cool depths of their spirits like wells swallowed the constant pillowing outwash of the cacica’s fire magic and expelled it through glimmering threads into the spirit world.

The brilliance of her power obscured all scent or taste or sound of the general.

I could not find him.

But there was one spirit she did not obscure. Right next to the cacica, a well of dazzling purity plunged into the bottomless blue waters of the spirit world. Its play of welcoming light and restless energy beckoned like the surface of water seen from below when your lungs are almost out of air.