Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (22 page)

Never before marrying a cold mage had I had to consider the uses of illusion. In Southbridge
Londun, Vai had woven the illusion of a troop of turbaned soldiers riding down a road,
a feat that would have impressed me more had I liked him at the time. In Expedition
he had done nothing but play with the illusions of small objects, forming light into
the shape of lamps or a gleaming necklace with which to adorn me, because in Expedition
cold mages had less magic to draw on. Yet he had woven illusions out of cold fire
so skillfully they had seemed like solid objects, impossible to know as intangible
unless you tried to touch them.

Rory and I had almost been caught near Cold Fort by a troop of mage House soldiers
under the command of a cold mage. They had ridden across a field under a mask of illusion
that made them invisible to unsuspecting eyes, but not to cold steel.

Too late, I closed my fingers over my cane. The ghost hilt buzzed with the energy
of cold magic pouring into it.

“Quiet.” I got to my feet. “Abandon everything. Go out through one of the windows.
Meet me at the hat shop.”

Bee grabbed the little knit bag with her sketchbook. I crept to the carriage house
door. The cistern was covered by a plank lid. Unswept leaves from the apple and pear
trees littered the ground. The big brick oven was closed tight. Behind, Bee stuffed
the flasks and my sewing kit into the knit bag as she eased toward the shuttered windows.

I wrapped shadows around myself and padded under chill daggers of sleet to the basement
steps. The hiss of sleet and the whine of the
wind drowned all other sounds. I pressed numb fingers against the door. I drove my
awareness down the fraying threads of magic that had once protected the house from
intruders. A foot scuffed faintly on damp leaves over by the cistern. An exhalation
stirred in the passage beyond the door.

There were other people here. I just could not see them, for the courtyard looked
exactly as it ought under the cloudy afternoon light.

A slap of wind huffed down over the courtyard with a spray of ice so strong that it
hammered me to my knees. As I twisted the hilt to draw cold steel, the basement door
was flung open. The wind and ice ceased, to reveal the courtyard walls lined by turbaned
mage House soldiers, their crossbows fixed on the carriage house doors. Not yet drawn
out of its sheath, my sword withered back into a cane as the cold magic that had been
holding the illusion in place vanished and a man spoke.

“Bring them inside.”

An old man in one of the voluminous robes called a boubou appeared at the open door.
The gold earrings he wore marked him as a djeli, a poet who spoke the tales of history
and also a person who could handle and chain the energies we called magic. In his
right hand he held a mirror, angling it to catch my image. Within the mirror he could
see the threads of magic, so he could see me.

“There you are, Catherine Barahal,” he said.

I spun, ready to bolt, only to see Bee being marched through the back gate from the
alley. Soldiers emerged from the carriage house carrying the three packs and the chest.

“We met before, as you may recall,” continued the djeli, in kindly tones.

“Bring them inside, Bakary,” repeated the other man, the one I still did not see.

As they brought Bee up, I let the threads of shadow drop. The soldiers exclaimed,
swinging their crossbows around. I was relieved when the djeli led us into the house.

The mansa of Four Moons House sat in a chair in the kitchen. The wide sleeves of his
indigo robe swept over the arms of his chair. He had concealed himself within a perfect
illusion of an empty kitchen. I had thought Vai a master of weaving cold magic into
illusions, but obviously I had not properly understood why the mansa ruled the mage
House.

He was a physically imposing man of middle age, old enough to be my father but not
old. He had the girth of a person who eats well and remains active. His Mande heritage
showed in his black complexion,
while his tightly curled dark red hair spoke of his Celtic ancestors. His presence
made the kitchen seem shabby. We stood before him like supplicants. He examined us,
then glanced at our gear, which his soldiers had set on the floor by the unlit stove.
Finally he gestured to the djeli.

“Where is Andevai?” asked the djeli.

“He is not in Adurnam, Mansa,” I replied, for the djeli was speaking for the mansa,
not on his own behalf.

“Yet here are three packs, for three people to carry,” said the djeli.

“He is not in Europa, Mansa. You yourself sent him to the Antilles to spy for you.”

With the tip of his ebony cane, the mansa fished one of the dash jackets out of the
chest. The intricately tailored garment was sewn out of a bold blue-red-and-gold fabric
printed with an elaboration of Celtic knots so complex it hurt my eyes. His gaze on
me fell as cold as the sleet he had called down. He spoke with his own mouth instead
of through the djeli’s words.

“Do you think I do not recognize these clothes? Andevai’s penchant for fashion started
as mockery, so we observed in the House. He wore more and more outrageous clothes
to belittle the other young men and their pretentious styles. But of course he always
looked good in them.”

“We came to enjoy the anticipation of what he would appear in next,” added Bakary,
amusement making his tone light.

The mansa tossed the expensive dash jacket carelessly over a chair, where it rested
in folds and wrinkles. His resonant voice deepened, steeped in disgust. “Do not lie
to me regarding his whereabouts. You belong to me because of the marriage chained
between you and Andevai. By law, I have power over your life and your death.”

“Cat is many things,” interposed Bee in a tart voice, “but one thing she is not is
a liar. If you wish to know where your spy is, then you must answer to yourself.”

“I am puzzled by your impertinence. You are but two girls from an impoverished family
of mercenaries. One of you is a bastard. Both of you serve your clan’s business by
acting as spies for the Iberian Monster. Those cursed Hassi Barahals cheated us twice
over. Not only did they give us the wrong girl, but they had already placed her in
the service of the general so she could spy on us once she was inside the house. A
cunning and unscrupulous plan.”

“I am puzzled that you speak of unscrupulous spies as if you are innocent in this
regard, since we have already established that you sent the cold mage to spy in Expedition,”
retorted Bee. I could tell by her flushed cheeks and brilliant gaze that she was just
getting warmed up. “Or do you mean to advance the argument that what is wrong for
us to do is right for you to do? If we even
were
spies for General Camjiata, which we are not. I do not know what arrangements the
Hassi Barahal clan made in the past with the general, but I assure you, Magister,
that the day my parents handed Cat over to Four Moons House to spare me from being
married off to a cold mage against my will, was the day I considered myself emancipated
from their selfish affections.”

His eyes narrowed. “A fine and affecting speech, but I must suppose that legally you
are still bound to them because you are an unmarried woman and such maidens can never
be guardians of themselves.”

Bee laughed so sarcastically that everyone in the kitchen jumped as at a gunshot.
“By which you mean to say, men like you do not wish such women to be guardians of
themselves.”

He ignored her in favor of measuring my body. “I must assume you seduced Andevai in
the usual way. You have that look about you that may make a young man feel hunger.”

At the boardinghouse I had learned to scold any man who ogled me in such an insulting
way, and I usually succeeded in getting the other customers to laugh at him.

Bee murmured, “Cat! Don’t!”

But I did.

“Rather, I would say that radical principles seduced him. Really, Your Excellency,
you have only yourself to blame. Why should he serve an unjust system as if he were
a horse placed in harness who has no choice but to pull lest he be whipped if he balks?
Even so, Vai made you a vastly generous offer. If you would release the village of
Haranwy from the clientage it has labored under for generations, he promised to serve
you loyally. He would have sacrificed his own freedom and happiness to assure their
liberty. You laughed at him.”

“I did nothing so crude as laugh. I gave him his sister’s freedom, when in truth she
ought to have been bred to see if more cold mages could be produced out of that family.
It was far more than I needed to do!”

“Kayleigh is not a brood mare!”

His lack of recognition betrayed that he had no idea that Vai’s sister was named Kayleigh.
“That I released her shows my appreciation for his value to Four Moons House. We may
hope he will sire children on you who have some measure of the strength he has—”

“I’m not a brood mare either!”

“—but the genealogies sung by the djeliw tell us that cold mages with such deep roots
rarely breed children who possess as much potency. To think how many advantageous
matches the House lost now he is wasted on you! We might have sent him on a successful
Grand Tour and afterward prosperously negotiated for three or even four wives for
one such as him. Even if he does not sire powerful children, many Houses are willing
to make the try for grandchildren out of such a mage. Each marriage creates a rope
that binds us and makes us stronger for the coming war.”

“Vai is not a stallion to be put out to stud!”

“He is what I choose to make him.”

Bee tapped me sharply on the forearm to shush me.

“Are you saying your own children are not as potent cold mages as you so obviously
are, Magister?” she asked with a sweet smile that startled the mansa and made the
old djeli make a sign to avert disaster. “Have you no lofty sons to inherit your princely
seat as mansa of Four Moons House? Are you forced to conceive the awful thought that
the young cold mage best suited to become mansa after you is a humble young man born
to people who have been enslaved by clientage for so many generations that you cannot
think of them as anything except lowborn inferiors whom you may breed like livestock?
Yet think! The son of a prince may rule whether he do so wisely or well, and he shall
have advisors and kinsmen to steady him. But the son of a magister who has no magic
cannot be given magic, can he?”

The temperature in the room dropped precipitously, making my eyes sting and my lips
go dry. The mansa strode to the stove. With a look, he drove the soldiers from the
kitchen. Accompanied by a horrible groaning strain, the door of the stove buckled.

I kicked over the table and dragged Bee down behind it just as the thick iron door
shattered like the hull of a boat shot to splinters. Bee screamed. Shards of metal
thunked into the table so hard that a few
almost pierced through, their jagged blades the visible threat of his astonishing
power. My ears rang. My breathing was all torn to pieces.

“Blessed Tanit shelter us,” whispered Bee, her complexion gone a sickly gray-white.

I was shaking. “You couldn’t have known. Stay down!”

As I rose, I drew my sword on the shimmering backwash of his magic. The cold steel
glittered as if coated with burning oil, making the gloomy kitchen blaze with light.

“I cannot kill you, Your Excellency. Nor do I wish to. You lost Andevai not because
I seduced him but because you refused to respect him as a man.”

The djeli had survived the mansa’s display of power unscathed, for he had his own
secrets. He turned on me now. “Maestra, keep silence.”

“I won’t keep silence! You speak of fruitful alliances and breeding rights, but Andevai
and Kayleigh are people the same as you.”

The mansa frowned. “Of course they are not the same as me! Their ancestors disgraced
themselves and thus put their honor in chains.”

“Easy to speak of honor when you get to choose whose honor to champion. Is it the
gods who foreordain our birth and position in life, or only chance? What if things
had been different, if the history of the world had fallen out in another way? What
if your people had been forced into chains? Would it not be wrong that a man of your
power be whipped as a common laborer all his life just because of a chance of birth?
Would it not be wrong that a man of your dignity be bound to a master who does not
respect him and can use or discard or kill him without penalty? What then of your
power and majesty? Why do you deny to Andevai what you assume for your own self?”

“You are a fatherless bastard. For you to believe you can lecture one such as me is
not just absurd but unnatural. Andevai belongs to Four Moons House. As do you. Understand
that I can kill you, and take no legal penalty for doing so.”

“Yet you have not done so!”

A spark of cold fire winked into existence, then expanded into a globe of light. “I
admit to curiosity about a girl who can vanish and reappear at will. A girl who can
walk into the spirit world and return to this one. A girl who can tell me where Andevai
is.”

Footsteps rapped along the passage. A magister wearing a fine indigo dash jacket under
an unbuttoned winter coat stepped into the kitchen. I had seen him before; he was
the mage who had unsuccessfully pursued me at Cold Fort, the one whose horse I had
stolen.

He made a clipped courtesy to the mansa. “Uncle, we found this man—”

The mansa smiled triumphantly at me. “Ah. My nephew has found him despite your efforts
to shield him.”

Rory sauntered in, toying with the end of his long braid. “Cat? Do you want me to—?”

“No!” I exclaimed, just as Bee said, “No!”

The mansa stared, startled by Rory’s appearance. The djeli tried to catch Rory’s image
in the mirror’s slippery surface, but all he saw was a saber-toothed cat. I studied
the young magister, tracing the family resemblance between him and the mansa.