Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (82 page)

I raced back, flung open the door, and leaped into the interior of the coach.

Bee said, “Blessed Tanit, Cat! What terrible thing is happening?”

“Close your eyes!”

I opened the door into the spirit world and jumped out.

Night shrouded the world, the air as frozen as the icy water in which my sire had
tried to drown me. But I was not daunted.

Holding on to the latch so I did not flounder away from the coach, I called. “Sire!
Father! You are bound to me as kin. Come to my aid!”

A breath as of wings fluttered so close by my face that I flinched, but I did not
retreat. Fingers of ice tightened over my arm, their touch engulfing me under the
weight of an ice sheet. His three eyes gleamed in the darkness, and the third was
a pulsing knot of blood.

“Beware of what you ask for, little cat. Do you understand there will be a price?”

“Yes. And I will pay it. Only me. No one else.”

“Taken. What do you want?”

“Of your own self and will, you can only walk into the mortal world on Hallows’ Night.
But I am a spiritwalker. You can cross with me right now.”

“At last you understand.”

He laughed, and he sprang like a cat. He flowed like a viper. He struck like a raptor,
the beat of unseen wings carrying me back through the coach. Bee sat as stiff as if
she were encased in ice, but I had no time. I tumbled past her and to earth.

My sire was already standing on the gravel drive, as unruffled as you please. In his
severe black jacket and trousers, and with his coldly handsome face, he looked like
a man you never ever wanted to cross swords with because he would rather wait until
you turned around and then stab you in back so he wouldn’t have to go to the trouble
of seeing the light drain out of your eyes.

“Intriguing,” he said. “The cold mages pull heat and energy from the spirit world
and lock it up in this world, thus stealing it from us, but this red-haired man is
dispersing it through their bodies back into
my realm. I would never have seen any of this if you had not escorted me through.
I shall have to think about what this means.”

“Father! He’s going to kill all those people! Save them. Save Vai! I beg you.”

“You are a slave to the chains that bind you to others. That makes you weak.” His
smile cut.

I licked a spot of blood off my lip. “No, it makes me strong.”

The history of the world begins in ice, so the bards and djeliw claim, and it got
so cold so fast I was pretty sure the world was going to end right under my feet.
A gossamer undulation like wings of frost flared at his back, and the veins of his
closed third eye smoked like night on his brow.

He raised a vast pressure of cold that began to choke down the fire. Drake’s young
fire mages collapsed first, crusted all over in a skin of ice. The soldiers cowered
in fear, guns dead.

My ears throbbed. My eyes were sucked dry of moisture. My lips stung.

Drake saw us, for the shadows had been ripped right off me. I thought it must surely
end quickly. What mortal could stand against the Master of the Wild Hunt?

But Drake blazed. The flood pouring through Andevai and the eru surged as an ocean
tide around the fire mage. Like a volcano, Drake had become the flowing energy that
consumes all in its path.

Soot spun in black tornadoes into the sky. Lightning sparked and flashed. The air
above the palace grew so hot that a green aura of light appeared and twisted in the
sky.

Ice and fire warred in perfect balance, neither able to retreat or to advance.

I ran forward to grab my sword. Drake did not notice. He dared not take his eye off
the Master of the Wild Hunt, because no matter how powerful he and Andevai together
were, fire mage and catch-fire, to falter even for an eyeblink would bring the ice
crushing down.

I leaped up the steps, taking them two at a time. Just as I reached the top, Drake
saw me coming. A thread of heat woke in my heart as he spun backlash into me with
a fevered smile. Vai was blinded by the force of all that magic, and my sire was too
far away to help me. It would take me only a few heartbeats to burn.

But I only needed one, for my sire had given me all the opening I needed.

I leaned into the thrust. Cold steel slid up under Drake’s rib cage and pierced the
beating fury of his heart. I ran him through up to the hilt.

His brow wrinkled as if he were puzzled by how close I stood.

I shoved, just one step more, to make sure I really had him. He rocked back. Caught
on my blade, he could not pull away. His eyes flared and sparked in sheer stymied
fury. He tried to speak, but although his mouth opened, no sound came out, only a
trickle of blood.

There flashed in an instant through my mind a hundred triumphant retorts and gloating
taunts, but in the end I realized I simply did not care enough to speak. With a grunt
of pain, for my hand hurt from clenching so hard, I jerked the sword out of his body
and turned the blade to cut his throat. Blood poured down his chest, ruining the dash
jacket he had stolen from Vai. I stepped out of the way as he toppled face-first onto
the stone stairs.

With a sound like a monstrous beast inhaling, the flames vanished as all the fires
went out.

Drake was dead.

Dead
.

I had to secure our precarious situation. The cold mages sprawled limp on the steps,
but I had not the leisure to worry about them. The fire mages were frozen. The soldiers
stared in horror at my sire. While it was true that a great deal of magic was billowing
off him, to my eyes he looked like a perfectly ordinary man. And while his clothes
certainly were severe for being sewn out of unrelenting black, they were not otherwise
exceptional or astonishing. But the soldiers dropped their rifles and fell on their
faces, begging for mercy.

A moment later several young fire mages and a few more soldiers came running around
the side of the building, chased by a saber-toothed cat. They, too, surrendered in
abject fear, but the instant the cat saw the Master of the Wild Hunt, he turned tail
and ran.

I knelt beside Vai and bent to rest my cheek lightly against his lips. The whistling
of his labored breathing calmed me. He was alive. Yet that was not his breath whistling.
A teakettle hiss shivered the air.
Pinpricks of ice jabbed my skin. Crystals grew out across the scorched and blackened
front of the building. Ice spread in curves and scallops, cones and six-sided lacework.

Years ago ice had devoured Crescent House.

Now ice was engulfing Four Moons House.

I could no more stop my sire than I could stop winter.

“Bee!” I cried, waving her forward from where she peered out the coach door. “Hurry!”

Without looking to see if she followed, I ran over the threshold into the building,
looking neither to my left nor to my right. The path I had taken on the day the husband
I had not wanted had brought me here remained fixed in my mind so clearly it took
no effort for me to turn right, left, left, and then right to reach the long salon
I recalled all too well. Its glass doors looked onto an interior garden enclosed by
the wings of the House and a high stone wall behind.

The mural painted along the salon’s walls, depicting the Diarisso ancestors guiding
their kinsfolk and retainers and slaves along the hidden paths of the waterless desert
to safety, had peeled and smeared and turned brown in patches where flames had begun
to eat through the walls. Yet the strong-as-iron women and handsome men clothed in
gold and orange strode undaunted, their chains of magical power and secret knowledge
wreathing them like vines. The paint glittered with flashes of light as ice penetrated
the walls. It made the mural seem to move, as if the ancestors were walking still
into the future they had made for themselves out of the devastation of what they had
been forced to leave behind.

The glass doors opening onto the garden had cracked and shattered from the heat. I
wrapped the hem of my skirt around my hand and opened metal latches so hot they burned,
then kicked down the framework of glass doors sagging on their hinges.

I could not count the number of people trapped in the garden. Some had been trying
to lift others out over the back wall, but judging from the shouts beyond the wall
and the scorched tops of trees, I guessed that several fire mages and soldiers had
been stationed there to prevent anyone from escaping. Nearby a big cat roared.

I hated Drake all over again. What manner of man cared more for his own perverted
sense of honor and pride than for people’s lives?

Winter chased through the doors and kissed the air. Snowflakes drifted prettily through
the chamber on a lazy wintry breeze. I shivered.

Bee did not need to be told what to do. How someone so small and lovely could bellow
in quite that ear-shattering manner never failed to astound me. “Everyone! Listen!
You will immediately follow me out the front doors. Now! If you stay behind, you will
die.”

Her honeyed voice had the rare gift of impelling people to obey without pausing to
needlessly quibble. Nor were the people of Four Moons House fools: A fire-ravaged
structure would soon collapse. We did not have time to explain the real danger.

More than a hundred people had taken shelter in the garden, many of them children,
women, and elders. The djeli Bakary leaned on his cane, so stiff with age he had not
been able to ride with the mansa to war. I waved Bee over to help him. The old steadied
the young. The young assisted the old. I sought out Vai’s mother and sisters, almost
lost in the midst of the crowd as the flight began. Vai’s mother was wracked by coughing.

“Bintou, help your mother. Wasa, that’s a very fine new crutch you have. Don’t let
go of it. Yes, you can take the puppy, too. I’m going to carry you.” Wasa’s weight
felt like nothing when I hoisted her into my arms. Fortunately the puppy was frightened
enough that it did no more than whimper in her thin arms.

Other people led the way out. Bee stayed with Bakary and the slow-moving elders at
the rear. The building creaked and moaned around us. Ice bloomed in feathered ridges.
Thin blades of cloudy ice popped out from the walls.

“Move! Move!”

A booming roar shuddered through the fragile chambers as part of the building collapsed.
The ice kept spreading. Glittering spires grew up from the floors. Clear branches
snaked down from the broken ceilings.

We staggered out onto the portico and its terraced steps. The cold mages were beginning
to shake themselves, to rise, to drag their unconscious and injured brethren away
from the building. I helped Vai’s mother and his sisters down to the gravel driveway,
then ran back up the steps.

Serena lay in a pool of blood, doubled over in pain.

“Blessed Tanit!” I cried. “What injury have you taken? Let me help you away.”

She grasped my hand with more strength than I would have expected. “No injury of the
kind you mean. I fear this is a miscarriage. Where is my husband?”

The mansa was alive but unconscious and unresponsive. Blistering burns had bubbled
up on his neck and arms. Ash rimed his mouth, a smear of blood caught at the corner.
Serena knelt beside him and, with the tone of a woman used to command, called others
to her.

Four Moons House was being inexorably trapped in ice. Amid the clamor of voices, an
eerie grinding noise drowned all until the speech of humans was nothing more than
the restless tickling of insects. Thick pillars of blue-green ice shot up alongside
the doors, spearing all the way to the high roof above. Ice encased the great edifice,
every span of it locked away in a transparent cage.

Within the disorganized spill of people along the lower terrace, I found Vai sprawled
on the steps. It looked as if he had woken enough to start pulling himself away and
then collapsed again. His eyes fluttered. A word formed on his lips but he hadn’t
the strength to get it out.

“Vai! Andevai! It’s me. It’s Catherine! Stay with me, my love. Don’t leave me.”

I looked for Bee and instead saw Rory, dressed only in trousers, padding toward me
with an alarmed look on his face. He flung himself down on the other side of Vai,
trembling with fear as he looked past me. Naturally I turned to see what frightened
him so much.

Across the drive my sire dusted soot from his hands with a meticulous frown. He glanced
at me across the gap between us and nodded to acknowledge the bargain we had agreed
to. Then he gestured with his plain black cane as a lord does when he wants a servant
to do something for him. The eru clambered up on the roof and tossed our luggage to
the ground. My sire climbed into the coach. The latch winked as if reflecting light,
or perhaps making a brassy gremlin scowl in my direction. My sire’s hand covered the
latch’s face as he shut the door.

The eru furled her wings. The coachman tipped his cap at me.

“Ha-roo! Ha-roo!”

Wheels rumbled over the gravel drive as the horses first walked and then broke into
a smooth carriage trot. The coach rolled away down the driveway. I waited for it to
vanish into the spirit world, to cross the shadows and return my sire to his rightful
home.

But it did not. It simply drove away back toward the main road, moving at a sedate
pace as might a lordly man who has just paid a polite social call on a friendly neighbor.

I stared in consternation.

I had just let loose the Master of the Wild Hunt into the mortal world.

Rory tugged on my arm. “Is he gone, Cat? I know he saw me! I was afraid he would make
me go with him.”

“He’s gone, Rory. You’re safe.”

“His children are never safe. No one is ever safe!”

“No, you’re all safe,” I said with certainty, and I hugged him.

Fortunately I did not have time to dwell on the bargain I had made. There was simply
too much to do, with night falling over the displaced population of Four Moons House.
Before anything else we sent runners to the nearby villages of Haranwy and Trecon.
Then I cleaned the blood off my sword and hunted down the rest of Rory’s clothes.