Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (87 page)

I laughed.

“Why does that amuse you? I do not understand your jests, little cat.”

He was not like me or any human. When the river floods and drowns, it does not regret
its victims. When a storm lays waste, it does not ponder the uses of power. Fire consumes
and does not grieve. The ice gives no thought to what it crushes as it works its way
over the land.

But I did not have to like him. “That my mother told you tales, that’s all.”

We turned the corner into a commercial district on the road leading out of town, lined
with taverns and inns whose windows were ablaze with Hallows candles. These flames
went out one by one as we rumbled along the cobblestones. The buzz of voluble conversation
ceased, too, fading to an anxious silence that draped the street with its fear.

The luscious aroma of coffee drifted to my nose.

“Did you try coffee, Sire?”

“No.” He sniffed. “Is that smell coffee? I wondered what that was but I didn’t know
how to go about getting it.”

I stuck my head out the window. “Stop here! Sire, do you have any money?”

“Money? Oh! Yes, the stamped metal roundels.”

He passed over a huge cloth bag so weighted with coins I had to
set it on the floor, for it was too heavy for me to easily hold. I picked out a denarius
by feel, hopped out, and dashed into a benighted coffee shop where men whispered in
frightened voices about the suddenly extinguished lights. With so much confusion it
was easy to place the denarius on the counter and take four full mugs back to the
coach, one for each of us. I wanted to be wide-awake.

As the horses stamped we stood on the street and drank our coffee.

“My thanks,” said the coachman.

“Sharp and nutty,” said the eru, “with a taste of sun.”

When I had drained my cup, I wiped a finger along the bottom and let the latch lick
the last drops off my skin.

“Mmm,” murmured the latch. “I like that!”

“What do you think?” I asked my sire.

An owl swooped down out of the night and landed atop the coach, golden eyes unblinking.

“I think it is time to go,” he said. “The courts are waiting.”

I looked him in the eye. His amber stare was just like mine. “It’s what you made me
for, is it not? To be the sacrifice.”

A smile ghosted across his lips, then vanished as he glanced toward the owl and shook
his head to remind me that the courts heard and saw everything he heard and saw, just
as he could hear and see through the eyes of his Hunt. “All the others before you
died. So are you trapped, little cat. You will never be free…”

His voice faded as on words left unsaid, for there were words he dared not say within
the hearing of the owl because he was not the owl’s master. The owl was spying on
him.

But I could guess.
All the others before you died, because they failed. So you are trapped, because they
could not understand and thus act. You will never be free unless I am also free
.

As a young man in the mage House, Vai had known in his heart all along that he might
as a magister gain the power and glory granted him because of his magic, but he would
not be free as long as his village was bound in clientage. A prince among slaves is
still a slave. Freedom cuts in every direction. No one is truly free, if even one
person lies in chains.

I knew what I had to do.

As the coach rolled on I unbraided my hair and combed it out
with my fingers. Let the courts be dazzled by its beauty! I pinched my cheeks to make
sure they glowed, and moistened and bit my lips so they shone. My sire watched in
silence, his expression a mask of ice.

Feeling bolder, I opened the shutters on both doors and gazed out over both the mortal
world and the spirit world. On Hallows’ Night, the coach traveled in both worlds at
once.

The spirit world flashed past in changing aspects, all the possibilities that might
ever have been and every gradient between: a world in which the mansa ruled, and one
in which he suffered an early death in the hold of a ship, and one in which he owned
a shop and sold white damask to women who would take it away and dye it into all the
colors and patterns they could dream of.

In the mortal world we sped across the quiet waves of the Mediterranean Sea and past
the spice-laden markets of Qart Hadast, the jewel of ports. The fields and trees of
north Africa trailed away as bands of desert crept their fingers into the green. A
long lonely stretch of golden rock and pale dunes passed beneath us until we reached
a salt mine. The enterprising miners in the Malian Empire had broken through to an
ancient gateway between the worlds and inadvertently unleashed the ghouls who craved
the salt of mortal blood and being.

Wind blew grit into the interior of the coach. The land was so quiet where once people
had lived and worked and thrived, where they would do so again. The coach rocked from
side to side, bucketing as we descended into the pit. Salt links the worlds. Each
gate swirls with energy, the power of transition and transformation. These threads
bind us all.

The shutters slammed shut. I caught in a breath, the coach jolted to a stop, and all
the air punched out of me. My entire body went numb.

My sire leaned forward until his face almost touched mine. “You must be what I made
you to be, Daughter.”

“Yes,” I said, because I had finally understood what he wanted the day he had encased
Four Moons House in ice. “After that, Sire, you will give up all claim to me and mine.
For that matter, you will also give up any claim to bind any of your children who
do not wish to be bound.”

He extended a hand in the radical manner, and we shook to seal our bargain.

“By the way, may I have that big bag of coin?”

“Yes. I have no use for it.”

The latch opened the door; the steps bumped down although the eru had not disembarked.
That the eru acted as footman was a courtesy for mortal eyes, for the coach was as
alive as I was.

My sire climbed out. I grappled with the bag of coins, slinging it over my back despite
its distracting weight. No sensible young woman raised in an impoverished family walks
away from a pot of gold, even if she may never get a chance to spend it.

I took in and released a breath for courage, and I went out after him. With a hand
braced on the threshold of the coach door and my feet still on the steps, I paused
to survey my ground as a general may do before a battle.

The palace of the courts lay before me, the realm of both shadow and light, as deep
as the murkiest pit and as high as the brightest peak. What Vai had seen as a nest
of starving ghouls determined to drain him of his blood, I had seen as a grand feast
populated by elegantly clothed and peacock-feathered personages who had grown accustomed
to their harvest. Hard to say which was true. Maybe they both were.

The Hunt surged in the air as a mass of boiling black cloud, my brothers and sisters.
I saw crows and spotted hounds, smart-mouthed hyenas and silent vipers. A cloud of
wasps and a spinning web of spiders jostled against women with lions’ heads and men
with the bodies of fish. Dire wolves prowled in their packs shoulder to shoulder with
the tawny beauty of the big cats. Yet the hunters had been bound to serve not nature’s
course but the courts’ desire.

The coach and horses were not touching the ground. I was pretty sure they could not.

I glanced back at the eru holding on at the back and ahead to the coachman sitting
on the driver’s bench at the front. The eru regarded me with all three eyes. “This
is as far as we can take you, Cousin,” she said.

I smiled. “Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the trust you’ve shown in me
and the trust I’ve been able to give to you. Should things fall out in such a way
that you discover leisure to do as you wish at some later date, my solicitor can be
found at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in the city of Havery, where you picked
me up.”

The coachman raised his whip in salute.

I jumped awkwardly down into the pit, shifted the heavy bag on my shoulders, and with
my sword in hand walked forward after my sire. The pit had become a resplendent plaza
crowded with hungry courtiers. They slipped and slid about so much I could not count
them, but I began to think they were far fewer than I had first believed. They just
took up so much room and never stopped grasping and moving. Eager to get their drop
of the rich feast, they parted to make a path for us that led straight to the dais
of glittering salt.

On the dais stood four chairs beaten out of gold and four stools carved from obsidian.
As my sire approached, human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: they who
ruled as the day court and the night court, for the spirit world was washed by both
light and dark. What manner of people they were I could not tell: Were they spirit
creatures who had begun to lose the ability to change and had thus become more and
more solid? Ancestors who craved a rigid sort of immortality? Elders who stood in
relation to humans much as dragons did to the feathered people? I did not know, and
right now I was not going to find out.

The courts awaited the sacrifice. Chains like whips lashed my sire to his knees before
them. He knelt, but he did not bend his head; his lips were drawn back as if he wished
to growl. The Hunt stirred with myriad hisses and chortles and howls and snarls.

“Give us what is ours.” The voice of the courts thundered, many in one. “So you are
required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because
we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”

They ignored me, so I walked past him and planted myself in front of the dais, facing
up to their chairs.

“Peace to you,” I said with my friendliest smile. “Does this night find you at peace?”

A vast and horrible silence smothered the world. Their golden eyes chained me with
a will as heavy as eternity. I fell into the rip current of their gaze, into the breathing
heart of the ice.

At their deepest levels, the worlds vibrate. A force flows through every part of existence.
Cold mages can redirect this flow; fire mages energize and disperse it. As for what
exists in the spirit world beyond
our ken,
courts
and
dragons
are just names we give to powers we do not comprehend and cannot escape.

Because I was my father’s daughter I could make a story of it, a way to understand
and put words to something far bigger than I was: In the worlds there is an ancient
and unending duel between dragons and courts. In the Great Smoke, the mothers of dragons
dragged innocent girls into the ocean of dreams, using mortal women to midwife their
fragile hatchlings.

Thus the duel tipped to favor the dragons, and so the other side had fought back.

In the old village tales written down by my father in his journals, the Wild Hunt
did not take blood. Death comes to all things in the mortal world, and the Wild Hunt
rode on Hallows’ Night to gather in the souls of those fated to die in the coming
year.

Perhaps the cold mages had come to the attention of the courts because powerful cold
magic caused changes in the flow and ebb of energy in the spirit world. Perhaps mages
shone so brightly and their blood tasted so sweet that, once one had been taken to
bind the Wild Hunt the very first time, the courts developed a taste for their blood
and then a need for it and then a desperate craving. By drinking the blood of mortals
they had in the end become what we called ghouls: creatures who devour the essence
of others in order to live.

I did not have to devour the essence of others in order to live. I could live perfectly
happily working in a humble office with my dear cousin, building up a respectable
business that involved spying and sneaking, although obviously I would be first to
volunteer to do the most dirty, adventurous, and strenuous work. I could sleep perfectly
happily on a mat on the floor with the man I loved, even though obviously I would
prefer to lie in a bed he had built for us, because it was more comfortable. I was
eager to teach my brother to cheat at cards, to nurse Vai’s mother through her weak
spells and nurture Vai’s sisters into women, to hope Luce survived the war, to get
to know Doctor Asante, and to write about everything to Professora Alhamrai, and maybe
even to return to Expedition someday to visit the people I had become so fond of.
I wanted to introduce batey to Europa. That would be something, a ballcourt in every
city and town!

The courts tried to hammer me flat under the crushing cold of the
ice, they wanted me to be afraid, to give up, to give in. But I braced myself on my
sword and warmed my hands on my locket. I answered the polite greeting they had not
made, for they did not know how to reciprocate in the traditional way.

“I have no trouble, thanks to my power as a woman. I just want to clarify two things.
There is one sacrifice each year. There cannot be another, and it is this sacrifice
that binds the Wild Hunt and indeed all your servants for another year. So you all
agree and accept me as the sacrifice?”

“We accept.”

They were so hungry and impatient and greedy that they threw their chains off my sire
and onto me. Their touch tore at my skin as a hundred sharp nails of ice, a net of
barbs poised to puncture me and drink me dry.

“That being so, you take my mortal blood. Is that not right? Mortal blood seals the
contract by which you first bound the Hunt and all your other servants?”

They answered by tightening the chains. A bloody seam opened on my breast right above
my heart. So rich and sweet blood streams, alive with the salt of life and the spice
of power. They suckled the air to suck me dry, to use the salt of my life to yet again
chain those who served them.

Blessed Tanit! It hurt.

My soul was being torn from my body, all life and love and courage and strength pouring
through the gash.