Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (79 page)

“Let those who are bound to me as kin come to my aid!”

An icy wind kissed my nose. Like distant thunder my sire’s voice
laughed mockingly. A bee sting flamed as an ember on my hand, then faded. Wet noses
prodded my arm and a rough tongue licked my face as the breath of cats warmed me.
The creatures of the spirit world could not cross into the mortal world except on
Hallows’ Night… or in my wake, as Rory had.

“May blessings bring quiet sleep and plump deer to you and yours, Aunt,” I said politely,
“and let me assure you that your son is well and behaving himself as much as he can.
But I seek my cousin eru and the one she travels with. If they will cross with me.”

An eerie arc of day broke over the land. In its wake rolled a coach and four. The
coachman drove right for my outstretched arm, and I grabbed at the harness and flung
myself backward to draw them with me.

The coach rolled into the entry hall as people shouted and scattered. It kept on through
the open front doors and glided a hand’s span above the steps before settling to earth
on the graveled forecourt. The horses stamped, a mist steaming off their pearlescent
skin. The coachman tipped his hat to me. His blue eyes tightened with a smile that
did not touch his lips. The footman jumped as lightly down from the back as if she
had hidden wings. She flipped down the stairs and opened the door.

“What is your wish, Cousin?” the eru asked. In the eyes of everyone else she appeared
as a man. Perhaps I just found her more comfortable to talk to as a woman.

“If you will convey us, I would be glad of it. Bee, Rory, get in.”

The eru swung the bags of provisions up onto the roof.

“What means this, that those who served us now serve you?” The mansa looked ready
to ignite.

“They do not serve me, nor did they ever serve you,” I retorted. “But if you wish,
Mansa, you can come with us. We could use a powerful cold mage.”

“So it has come to this,” he muttered. “I am being led by two girls.”

His irritation brought a smile to my lips for the first time in days. I made an elegant
courtesy. “Yet you must admit, Mansa, that my dearest cousin Bee and I are two exceedingly
fine young women, with quite unexpected depths.”

Only a man of his stature and birth could manage an expression
that so purely combined a censorious frown shaded by a wrinkle of amusement at his
eyes, for as much as he disapproved of my bold way of speaking, it was equally obvious
a part of him found it appealing.

“That is one way to describe it, Catherine. We have not the leisure for me to explain
the other. My predecessor could not have imagined that the bargain Four Moons House
forced onto the Hassi Barahal clan sixteen years ago would lead to this peculiar end.”

But he wanted Vai back as much as I did, so he dismissed his djeli and gave orders
to his nephew to follow with the surviving Four Moons soldiers and mages as soon as
they could get horses. Then he got in.

The door was shut. The squinty gremlin eyes of the latch stared at me in what I thought
might be surprise to find me back again. The coach jostled as the footman swung up
onto the riding board in back. On the whip’s snap we rolled, on our way at last.

Drake’s trail led north in fire and ashes.

The first staging post lay in smoking ruins. Locals poking cautiously through the
remains of a cottage, kitchen-house, and stable yard told us of fire and confusion
none of them had been close enough to observe. The staging-post attendants were missing
and the horses had all been stolen.

“A clever move on his part,” remarked the mansa as he paced the scorched grounds of
a third staging post, later that afternoon. “All the local militias are in disarray
from the campaign. Had we not this magical conveyance, his actions would have slowed
down our pursuit so greatly there would have been no chance we could catch him.”

Seeing my distress, Bee ushered us back into the coach. As we headed into the gathering
dusk, she talked to fill the silence. “Can the blacksmiths’ guild not be recruited
to help us?”

“What can they do?” he retorted. “They have devised their own means to control and
channel the destructive chain of fire magic, but they cannot combat this. I am come
to appreciate General Camjiata’s devious mind. He raises a fire mage who can win his
battles and discards him when he becomes too powerful, yet does so at no risk to himself.
From what you’ve explained, Catherine, it seems to me the general pushed the man into
embracing the worst of his anger without the man realizing he had been manipulated.”

“Yes, it does seem that way.”

I stared out the window at a rabbit racing across a meadow in fright for its life.
A hawk stooped. With a gasp, I leaned to watch. In a flash of feathers the hawk thumped.
Then we rocked around a corner and
I never saw whether the hawk had caught its prey or the rabbit had escaped.

“Of course you would recognize such a stratagem, since you possess the same sort of
devious mind,” said Bee. “For example, now we are thrown together as kinsfolk, allow
me to commend you on your strikingly cunning ploy to elevate Andevai as your heir
and thus bind him more tightly to the mage House. Considering everything I was told
you said about him before, I would never have guessed you would do that.”

He brushed a finger along the unscarred side of his chin as if deciding whether to
dignify her barbed teasing with a reply. “It was no ploy. The young man is the most
rare and potent cold mage of his generation in Four Moons House and possibly in all
of Europa, although I must request you never repeat to him that I said so.”

“Have no fear,” Bee reassured him. “I, too, would prefer to avoid any chance his already
bloated conceit might yet expand, difficult as it is to imagine it could get any vaster.”

The mansa’s smile flashed so unexpectedly that for an instant I wondered if a different
person had fallen into the coach with us. “The confluence of such powerful cold magic
with the sort of unusually good looks that bring so much consequential attention to
his person has certainly fed a temperament already prone to vanity and pride.”

Bee patted my hand, trying to get me to smile. “You see, Cat, this is where Andevai
gets his pedantic way of speaking.”

I sighed.

The mansa glanced from her to me and back to her. “Yet for all his faults, he displays
a profound sense of responsibility, as well as a willingness to labor tirelessly for
the benefit of the House. He has also the intelligence and discipline to look beyond
his own desires to what may be best for the House. I am not blind. The world is changing,
even if I cannot approve. Sadly, there are many who no longer seek my approval.”

Bee offered him her most refulgent smile, an expression of considerable genius which
she had worked for hours in front of a mirror to perfect. “As long as you respect
and support my beloved cousin, and don’t make her husband too miserable, I shall approve
of you, Your Excellency.”

He had the grace to laugh. “There is a great deal I thought I knew that I now discover
I had not the least understanding of.” He reached for the shutter on the door that
opened into the spirit world. “Why this is never opened, for instance.”

“Don’t touch that!” Bee and I said at the same time.

Startled, he withdrew his hand. “What secret lies behind this closed door? For some
years Four Moons House employed this very coachman and footman as servants. Then they
vanished with you, Catherine, only to reappear again at your call.”

A razor-toothed imp of mischief sank its fangs into my tongue. “The Master of the
Wild Hunt has been spying on the mage Houses all along, seeking the most powerful
among you to kill each year.”

“Do you mean to explain to me how you know all this, Catherine? That Beatrice walks
the dreams of dragons I know. Andevai has explained how troll mazes protect against
the Wild Hunt. But I am still puzzled by what exactly you are, a secret my heir has
not seen fit to share with me.”

I no longer saw a reason to hide the truth. “What would you say if I told you my mother
was a human woman and my sire the Master of the Wild Hunt?”

He sat back with a chuckle. “No wonder the boy can scarcely contain his vainglory
when he speaks of you. I must say, Catherine, that gives me considerable relief, for
it has been a goad on my pride that you escaped me three times.”

I did not know what to say to that. I had not even shocked him!

We rocked along, wheels rumbling a steady rhythm. Bee made me eat cooked chicken and
rolls and cheese. For half the night we rolled through forest, and eventually I slept,
head resting on Bee’s shoulder. I woke at dawn to the sight of Bee paging through
her sketchbook under the thin light of a cloudy day. Both Rory and the mansa dozed,
Rory with his hands curled up by his face and the mansa bolt upright, his big frame
filling half the opposite bench and pressing Rory’s slighter figure into the corner.

“Have you found anything new?” I asked, as if I could pull hope from her dreams.

“No.” She handed the book to me. “For the last month, all I have dreamed of is fire,
and I couldn’t bear to draw all those flames for I
swear to you I heard screams in them.” She pinched a length of skirt between her finger
and thumb. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

Yet for all that I stared at every sketch, I could discern nothing to tell me how
to save Vai. What if he and I weren’t meant to meet ever again?

Mid-morning on the following day we stopped at a burned-out staging post to allow
the coachman to tend his coach and horses. The mansa studied the coachman as the man
watered the horses from a bucket whose lip never touched stream or well.

“No living horse can travel at such a steady pace without cease and not die,” said
the mansa. “What manner of creature are they?”

The coachman acknowledged the mansa’s attention by flicking a forefinger against the
rim of his cap, but did not deign to respond.

“The man mocks me,” said the mansa, as if it were my fault.

I glanced up at him from under half-lowered eyelids, although I did not mean to be
coy. “I would be cautious in assuming that he is man.”

With a shake of his head he walked away.

Bee was still in the nearby woods doing her business. I approached the eru, who stood
beside a stream watching the flash and subsidence of ripples.

“I want to thank you for coming at my call,” I said.

Away from the others she wore her female aspect. “The law of kinship binds us. But
there are other reasons to answer.”

“Perhaps you can tell me what those might be,” I said, careful not to ask a question.

“Perhaps my lips are chained.”

“Perhaps the Master of the Wild Hunt chains you to his purpose.”

Her gaze held a whisper of the wild fury of lofty winds where an eru might climb,
when she is free to fly as she wishes. I could not see her third eye, but I knew it
was there. “Perhaps I am not the only one who is chained. Chains reach deep and rise
high, little cat. They may be anchored in the depths of the Great Smoke, or pull against
us from the heights of the tallest peak. Do not mistake the servant for the master.”

I thought of the courts atop the ziggurat feeding on the blood my sire brought them.
Picking up a stone, I tossed it into the water. “I have been thinking about chains.”

“Cat! Over here!” Rory knelt at the wall of a byre. “It’s all dried now, but Vai pissed
here.”

I saw nothing except scuffed ground and what looked like half-formed letters scraped
into the dirt and then obscured by footprints. “You can distinguish different people’s
urine?”

“Can’t you? I shall never understand you Deadlands people. How do you distinguish
who has been poking around where if you can’t smell?”

“There’s a thought I am grateful had never occurred to me before now.”

A scrap of leather cord had been half shoved into a hole scraped under the byre’s
wall. I got hold of it and fished out the empty ring of an ice lens. The sight so
congealed my legs that I sat down with a thump.

Rory pried my hand open to see what I was clutching. “He left this here on purpose,
so we would know he is with Drake.”

All along the road to Arras and then on to Audui, every isolated staging post had
been burned. Worst, at one hostel the corpse of a magister had been stuffed headfirst
down a well. When we pulled him out by the rope tied around his feet, the seeping
blisters over every bit of his reddened skin told the story of how he had died.

“Over here.” Rory beckoned from beyond the hostel’s vegetable garden to an old and
falling-down outhouse. He indicated a row of three stones and a pearl jacket button.

The mansa came up behind us. “Four stones for Four Moons House. The estate of Four
Moons House lies on the Cantiacorum Pike. If they stay on this road, they will pass
it. If Andevai attempts an escape there, he can hope for assistance.”

“I don’t think Vai will risk drawing Drake’s anger down on the House, or on his village.
And I’m certain he won’t abandon the other mages.” But I rubbed the dirt off the button
and tucked it into my bodice.

The mansa insisted we break our headlong pace and spend one night at Audui’s resplendent
mage inn. In truth the amenities of a bath, a change of underclothes, the promise
of a comfortable bed, and a decent supper improved my mood considerably. The steward
in charge told us there had been a plague of fires tormenting the countryside,
a freakish set of frightful blazes no one could explain although they had passed as
quickly as they had come.

“How long ago?” I asked over a delicious meal of soup, roasted beef, yam pudding,
fish in dill sauce, and apple dumplings.

“Just yesterday did all the reports come in, Maestra,” said the steward in charge.
“One of our own young grooms escaped a terrible fire yesterday at West Mile Post just
four miles west of town.”