Cold Fire (13 page)

“Blessed Tanit!” I breathed. “Grandmother!”

Flames obliterated the scene. The town walls rang like a struck bell as the ripple of fire boomed out around the stone.

The tide passed. Pale daylight, like dawn, rose on a world utterly changed.

Fati was gone.

On either side of the road lay fields. Three-horned antelopes grazed on grass as green as emeralds. Fields tilled in spirals marked patterns on the ground that would, I felt sure, create beautiful images if seen from the sky. Thick-leaved vines of sweet potatoes flourished on a field of dirt mounds, the only crops I recognized. Elsewhere, huge stalks were crowned by flowers whose petals blazed with streamers like orange flame; that is, unless they were really burning. Others wept green tears. A vine strung along posts burst pods into a cloud of butterflies. Small winged creatures with faces like bats swooped down, snapping them up, until the air drifted with shimmering scraps.

Fati was gone. She might have been anywhere or anything. A stone about half the size of my fist lay on a patch of earth beside the road. I scrambled down.

“Don’t touch that!” said Bee.

But I did. The stone was waterworn to a smooth finish, deep brown in color, like sard. The veins in its surface flowed like speech against my skin. I felt I knew its voice. “Do you think the tide…turned her into this stone?”

“And you thought
I
was the credulous one?”

“Spirits change, just as the land does.” I touched my father’s locket, the familiar ache in my heart, the one that could never be filled. “So after all, maybe I can’t ever find my parents, not if they were caught in the tide.”

“Wouldn’t everything be caught in the tide? How could you escape it?”

“You escape it by sheltering on warded ground, like this road.” I closed my fingers over the stone and, ignoring her protest, tucked it into a pocket sewn on the inside hem of my jacket. “Although that doesn’t explain how we escaped being swept away at the river—”

“Cat.”

A sound like the rushing of river water swelled behind us. I turned. Out of the walled town, human-like creatures rose in a tide of dark wings.

Bee said, “Blessed Tanit protect us!”

A mob circled above us. Their vast wingspans half blotted out the sky. They swept down over us, claws gleaming.

“Down!” I snapped.

Bee dropped, and I straddled her back, feet braced on either side of her. My sword blazed with an icy light so bright it burned. I slashed and stabbed as they attacked. Where my blade nicked flesh, they shrieked, scattering in all directions.

“Cat, what are they?”

“Don’t move.” I shifted so my skirts belled over her. “They don’t like my sword.”

The mob resumed its circling above us. One landed out of reach of my blade.

Tall, broad-shouldered, and powerfully built, she looked much like a human. Her short black hair stuck up in spikes. Her narrow face was as translucently pale as watered-down milk, and she had the stark blue eyes we in the north called “the mark of the ice.” A line of purple-blue tattoos like falling feathers spun down the right side of her face and neck. She wore a sleeveless calf-length tunic covered with amulets sewn onto the fabric much as hunters fixed such talismans onto their clothing to protect them in the bush. Her wings certainly amazed me. But it was the third eye in the center of her forehead that riveted my attention.

“You are an eru,” I said, choosing offense over defense. “My greetings to you and your people. May we be at peace rather than at odds. I ask for guest rights, if such can be offered to peaceful strangers who have stumbled here by accident.”

She spoke in a voice like a bell. “You are well come here, Cousin. Our hearth is open to you. All we have is yours. All we are is at your service. But we have to kill the servant of the enemy. That is the law.”

“Cat,” Bee whispered from under my skirts, “I think they mean
me
.”

The eru cried out the same way the great bells of Adurnam cried out the alarm when the city was threatened. “It speaks! Beware!”

I shifted my sword’s angle; the eru took a step back. “She is not my enemy, and therefore she is not yours.”

More eru landed out of my reach, ranging in a circle around us. The tall ones had third eyes as bright as gems. The shorter bore marks on their foreheads like a mass of cloudy veins, and I had the oddest feeling they could see with those blinded, blinkered third eyes onto sights invisible to me. It was very disturbing. Worse, it seemed likely these eru could rip us to pieces in short order with their claws. And how could I predict what damage they could do with their magic, for weren’t eru fabled as the masters of storm and wind?

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll just go on our way.”

“She must be sacrificed,” said the eru who had spoken before. “As a courtesy to you, if it is your wish, we will kill her and eat her at the welcoming feast, all except her head. Her head we will cast in the well to give strength to our water. Out of respect for you, our guest, we will show her this honor.”

Bee’s choked exclamation hit me in a wave of fear. I swept my blade in a slow circle, to mark each eru, ten in all. “I will take as many of you with me as I can, before I let you touch her.”

A melody like words flowed around the circle, then ceased when the first eru raised an arm. “Do you serve her, who is a servant of the enemy?”

“Why do you believe her to be your enemy?”

“Did she not come to seek a serpent’s nest? Do you not feel the enemy turning and turning again? Doesn’t this rising tide aid their servant because it forces us, who would drive her away, to hide within our wards rather than pursue her?”

“I think you are a servant of the night court,” I said, remembering the eru who had pretended to be a footman in the service of Four Moons House and what she had told me when we had stopped at Brigands’ Beacon so Andevai could make an offering. “Because servants of the night court have to answer questions with questions.”

She nodded in the manner of an opponent acknowledging a hit. “I am she who speaks for this hearth when the night court commands.”

Black wings fluttered. Out of the sky dropped a crow. No ordinary crow could cause such a reaction among fearsome eru. They took flight in a cacophony of wings until only the speaker remained. With a self-satisfied air, the crow folded its wings and cocked its head to consider me. A smear of dried blood mottled the tip of its scabrous bill. I was sure the blood was mine.

I could not resist a jabbing feint at the crow, just to make it hop back. I had feelings, too, even if Bee sometimes called me heartless.

“Don’t think I’ve forgotten you,” I said as I touched the clotted wound above my right eye.

With its third eye, the speaker looked at the crow, and then at me with all three eyes. For an instant, I thought I saw a reflection in her third eye: turning wheels flashing along a road.

“The master comes,” she said. “The enemy’s servant will not escape.”

Bee had shoved her head out from under my skirts. “Look!”

She scrambled up, pointing toward the hills. At first all I noticed was eru fanning out like herders. They were shepherding antelopes toward the town walls, or corralling them within sturdy copses of shimmering trees. Beyond, a blur of fog avalanched down the distant slopes. Claws sharpened in my chest as though a foul beast had burrowed inside me and latched on to my heart.

“I don’t know what else to do, Bee,” I said as the fog grew. “You have to run for it. Take my sword. If I offer it to you freely, you can take it.” I held it out.

Sparks leaped from the blade, and where they struck her hands and arms, a shower of spitting flames poured like a sheath over her limbs. She yelped and snatched back her hand.

“Cold steel burns the servants of the enemy, so she cannot wield it,” remarked the speaker with a cruel smile. But her smile vanished as she looked past me. She knelt.

How the vehicle had bridged the distance so quickly I did not know. An elegant black coach pulled by four white horses rolled to a stop beside us. The horses had a polished sheen, like pearl. The first pair stamped, hooves striking sparks from the obsidian pavement, while the second pair waited patiently in their traces.

The coachman was a burly man wearing a perfectly ordinary wool greatcoat. He wore his short blond hair in the lime-whitened spikes traditional to Celtic warriors in the ancient days when the Romans with their land empire and the Phoenicians with their sea trade fought to a standstill, and the barbaric Celts shifted allegiance depending on what benefited them the most. Seeing me, he did not smile, but the corners of his eyes crinkled as with an inward chuckle. He tapped two fingers to his forehead in greeting.

A figure swung down from the back. I recognized the tall, broad-shouldered eru with skin the color of tar, her third eye ablaze with a sapphire brilliance, her wings a swirl of smoke. Power roiled in her like a storm about to burst free. I stepped between her and Bee as if I could fend off the brunt of the blow. My blade shone like a torch, its hilt turned to ice against my palm.

“Let it be,” said the coachman to the eru. “We are here for Tara Bell’s child, not for the other one.”

She settled back, wingtips fluttering as if a wind spun off them. I swallowed; my ears popped; the wind died.

“Greetings, Cousin,” the eru said. “The master has sent us to fetch you.”

Such a wave of despair washed through me that my strength failed. I stared at the two creatures I had first met in the guise of a humble coachman and a humble footman. Bee grasped my hand. Hers was cold.

I spoke in pleading whine I did not like but could not help. “We just want to go home.”

The splendor of her third eye sparked rays of light along the surface of the black road. “The master has summoned you.”

“Help her return to the other side, and I’ll give you no trouble,” I said desperately.

The coachman’s lips curved in a wry, weary smile.

“You will give us no trouble regardless, Cousin,” said the eru, not in anger but in sorrow. “You are bound, as we are bound. Get in the coach. Both you and the serpent. We have a long way to travel. The master is not patient.”

“Indeed, he is not,” said the coachman with a glance skyward as the crow flew. “We outraced the storm of his anger. Now it is time for you to take shelter.”

Over the hills boiled a black wrath of clouds. In the cloud’s heart, lightning writhed like so many coiling incandescent snakes. Its power hummed in my bones and my blood like a fever. The crow sped toward the storm as if to welcome it.

A horn wept from the walls as the herding eru chased down the last of their charges, and the kneeling eru broke free and fled.

My knees were turning to jelly. “Blessed Tanit. If we run, that storm will destroy us. If we go with them, you’ll be killed.”

“One thing at a time,” said Bee with astonishing calm as her hand tightened on mine. “Right now, our best chance is the coach.”

The eru opened the door and swung down the steps with the ease of practice. I sheathed my sword, climbed in, and sank onto the forward seat, into the same place I had sat when I traveled in this coach with Andevai.

Bee sat down opposite, her knees shoved against mine. “Don’t give up hope, Cat.”

The door closed. With a crack of the whip and a shout of “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” the coachman got the horses moving. We turned in a sweep, and the coach lurched as the eru jumped on behind. We picked up speed. No coach in the mortal world ever ran so smoothly and so fast.

A blast of wind shook the coach. The shaking and shuddering pitched us off our seats. The coach bounced up, thudded down, pitched halfway over, righted itself. Like a ship caught in a typhoon, it rolled and yawed. We clung to each other as the gale roared around us with a howl so loud I saw Bee’s lips moving but could not hear a single word, nothing except the frightful mocking caws of a murder of crows flocking around us as if their flight were the wind.

Unseen claws squeezed my heart. If I did not obey, the master would crush me.

Terror, like grief, can make you numb. But when the first edge passes, as the storm gusts on and the coach settles, it can also make you angry. For who wishes to be subject to terror?

We struggled up to sit. After the battering we had taken, I was grateful the cushions were so soft. We caught our breaths.

“That puts Papa’s temper tantrums into perspective, does it not?” said Bee with a gaunt smile.

I looked at the two doors, the one to my right which we sat up against, and the other door, closed and shuttered, by which Andevai had sat on the first journey we had made together. He had warned me never to open the other door, but when he had said that, he had meant the door to my right, the one we had just used to enter the coach.

I grinned. “This coach is a passageway between the worlds. One door leads into the spirit world. But that one leads back to our world. We’ll jump out and run for it.”

I scooted over to the other door. Sliding my sword half out of its sheath, I sliced a stinging, shallow cut in my right hand. I grasped the latch, smeared blood on it, and pushed down.

The latch bit me.

I yelped, jerking back my arm. Three tiny puncture wounds in the back of my hand prickled red with my blood. The latch glowered, having acquired a dour, brassy gremlin face as wide as my hand and as thin as a finger. Incisors sparked as if tipped with diamond. A thread of a tongue licked along the brass, and my blood vanished.

Bee slid her knife from the knit bag and, with all her considerable strength, chopped where the latch was attached to the door. The blade thunked, and bounced off. The force of the blow redounded back up her arm. She cried out, dropping the knife as she doubled over.

“We’ll see about that!” I cried, fully drawing my sword.

The nasty little gremlin latch-face
winced
.

The coach slammed to a stop so abruptly I was thrown back against the seat and Bee thrown forward, narrowly missing my unsheathed blade and banging her knees. The coach rocked violently. The door to the spirit world was flung open to reveal the coachman.

“Out,” he said.

It wasn’t that he looked angry. He didn’t look angry. It was just that I was suddenly sure he could yank both my arms out of their sockets if I did not obey. Not that he would want to, or would enjoy the act, but that he could.