Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  In the spirit world, land and ocean warred, one rising as the other fell. Where the ocean receded, the span of the land grew. When the ocean swelled, the measure of the land shrank.

  How could I see it all, and all at once? For here, on the brink, I was not standing in the spirit world and yet neither was I standing in the mortal world.

  The threads of life and spirit stitch together the interleaved worlds. Mages drew their power through these threads, and I used the shadows of the threads to weave concealment and enhance my sight and hearing in the mortal world.

  Now it seemed to me that I was standing both inside and outside. I was caught within a single translucent thread that pulsed with the force of life and spirit that some call magic and others call energy. Its span was no greater than the span of my outstretched arms and yet it was also boundless. The contrast so dizzied me that I swayed. The lip of the abyss crumbled away beneath my feet. Flailing, I tipped and fell forward through another flash of blinding light.

  My knees smacked onto solid ground. After I sucked down the pain and blinked the afterimages of spots from my vision, I looked around.

  I had come to rest on a ledge cut into a cliff side that overlooked a deep bowl of land like a crater. Inside the crater the ground was cut up by narrow ridges and steep prominences in the manner of a maze. A city of bridges and wide balconies wove through this labyrinth of air and wind. Every surface had a crystalline glimmer. The spacious balconies and winding bridges were ornamented with ribbons colored blood-red and melting-butter-yellow and the stark blue those who lived in the north called “the mark of the ice.” Rainbows rippled as on invisible currents of water.

  I was not alone.

  Brightly robed people strolled along arm in arm on these hanging paths, gossiping and laughing with gentle smiles. Others rushed past as on urgent errands. Some wore headdresses of peculiar construction, spiky like quills or curved like crescent moons. The colors they wore made a rainbow of movement. They gathered and split off into new groups at each place where bridges merged and intersections branched. Blues poured in one direction and violets and greens in another, only to meet up at a farther remove, spilling and merging until it seemed their robes changed color as easily as I blinked.

  A tiered ziggurat towered above the rest of the city, its highest tiers like an eagle’s aerie wreathed with gold and silver wisps. Somehow, from this angle, I could see the entire edifice, even though that should have been impossible. Up the center of each face of the ziggurat ran a staircase. On three of these stairs, figures descended and ascended in constant motion. The fourth stair was riven by a cleft, a gleaming canyon that sliced into a dark interior. The top of the ziggurat lay flat and open like the holy sanctuary in a Kena’ani temple.

  The scene on the top of the ziggurat reminded me of a princely hall as described in tales of the olden days told by Celtic bards. A half circle of lordly chairs stood on a dais. Four shone as if beaten out of gold, and four had a texture as black as the depths of a moonless night. No one I could see was sitting in them, yet I felt the whisper of presences ready to materialize. Musicians strolled through, strumming lutes and harps. Drummers played a soft rhythm like the pulse of the hidden earth. A crowd of lordly personages waited at long tables set with platters so bright their glitter made me blink. No one seemed to be eating. I wasn’t sure there was food or drink.

  The lower levels of the ziggurat lay deserted, empty of life. Four bridges, one on each side, connected the four staircases on the tiered mountain to the rest of the city. A moat ringed the city below the outer cliff wall, filled with a viscous liquid. When I peered down from the ledge, its steamy current gleamed ominously, as if warning me I could not escape, because I was trapped by molten fire. The only way off my ledge was along a narrow bridge that vaulted into the maze.

  Where almost everything is in constant movement, that which stands still stands out.

  A man waited unmoving on one of the bridges. A swarm of personages in bright robes flowed past, breaking around him as water breaks around a rock.

  I memorized a path from my ledge to him through the weave of bridges and balconies. No one tried to stop me as I hurried through the city. Either they did not know I was there, or I was too insignificant to matter. Despite the convoluted path I had to follow, I had no trouble reaching him. He stood facing a gulf of air. A wind rising up from the boiling moat whipped through his dash jacket.

  “Catherine!” he called, smiling.

  I ran to him, my heart pounding and my lips dry. But as I reached him I slowed. A sword’s length from him, I extended my blade instead of my arm.

  “Show me your navel,” I said.

  “Show me yours first, Catherine. How can I know it is truly you?”

  “You said you would always know if it was me. What is the first thing you ever said to me?”

  He laughed. “That I loved you from the first moment I saw you.”

  I took a step back, disappointment a pinch in my heart. “That’s not the first thing you said.”

  His laughter deepened into a roar as he changed into a saber-toothed cat.

  “Am I a mouse, that you play with me before gulping me down?” I demanded. “If you mean to kill me, then I wish you would just get it over with.”

  He turned sideways as if to swipe at me but hesitated when he caught sight of something behind me. Like a beaten animal he hissed, head hunched, ears down. I pressed back against the railing as I turned with my blade ready to block.

  The personage who approached paid me no notice. I might as well have been invisible.

  Such a proud and imposing woman could walk at her ease through any princely court or mage House estate. Her robes shimmered with peacock hues. A headdress and cloak of rustling ornamental feathers made me stare. Her graceful hands had long fingernails painted red, as if she had dipped them in blood.

  “There you are, precious.” She fastened a gem-studded collar around the neck of the angry cat without the least sign that his size, teeth, and annoyance disturbed her. “It is time for the Hunt.”

  Unexpectedly she turned, fingers closing like iron around my wrist. Her eyes had neither iris nor pupil; they looked like shards of ice stabbed into her face. Without so much as asking my leave or apologizing for the discourtesy, she pressed the raw cut to her lips.

  Winter leaches warmth from the air. Ice forms into chains that bind quivering souls.

  My heart, my thoughts, my very spirit drained into the chasm of winter, crushed under the weight of a glacial shelf. I was the food and the drink; I was the thread of power being tasted and sipped; I was the one bound and chained…

  The hand released me. I collapsed to my knees, hacking as if I were coughing out the dregs of my soul. Despair curdled in my gut. I would never find him. He was already dead. Bee and Rory were lost in the mortal world where I could never reunite with them. My tasks undone, my promises unkept… all lost…

  “This is weak fare, not the prisoner whose powerful blood you promised us,” she said in a cold voice to my sire. “He continues to defy us and has placed himself out of our reach and it seems yours as well. If only he would surrender, as you claimed he would, he would nourish us with that astonishing strength. But since he refuses to feed us, and the time is come for the renewal of the binding, then you, my pet, must hunt in the mortal world for our feast.”

  With fingers wrapped around the leash, she climbed toward the ziggurat. My sire followed, tail lashing, exactly as might a beast bound into obedient but unwilling servitude.

  For the longest time the ice in my veins held me frozen. As they ascended the magnificent stairs, the woman and the cat were joined by elegant personages splendidly garbed in gowns and capes sewn of pearls and silk and shells. Up they climbed to the very crown of the ziggurat. There a cloud of darkness swirled.

  Hounds yipped anxiously. Wolves howled and hyenas cackled. Wasps massed in a cloud. My sire changed from cat into a man riding a black horse. He raised a hand, commanding the a
ir.

  A churning eye like the center of a hurricane boiled into existence in midair. It reminded me of the goal in batey, a window in the heavens between the spirit world and the mortal world. A smear like a bolt of night surged up from the ziggurat, piercing the air as a deadly lance.

  Thunder cracked. A gate between the worlds swirled open.

  The Wild Hunt had been released.

  In a howling, chirping, chortling pack, the Hunt passed through the gate of the hurricane’s eye. My sire galloped in their midst with a spear in one hand and fear in the other.

  On a second thunderclap, the eye closed and the Hunt vanished.

  The dark clouds cleared away. The city fell silent, as if holding its breath. But it was not still. The boiling movement that spun along the bridges and balconies flowed merrily along. Its constantly shifting pattern contracted and expanded like a flock of birds in flight, spinning around and around the center like a whirlpool around an unseen eddy.

  My finger twitched. My arms were my own again. I rubbed my eyes to break free from the trance.

  Blessed Tanit! If the Wild Hunt rode into the mortal world, then Hallows’ Night had come again. Months had passed in what had felt to me like a single day. Bee and I had walked in Adurnam in late March. Now it was the end of October in the mortal world. The Hunt would pursue a person whose blood hummed with the power and energy we humans called magic. It would corner, kill, and dismember the hapless victim, and toss the severed head down a well. Yet looking at the silent personages awaiting their feast atop the ziggurat, I had to wonder: Was my sire the master, or a slave to others’ bidding?

  This mystery lay beyond my grasp right now. I had to concentrate on what I had come here for. If the crowning feast was the center of the city, then surely my sire would hold his prisoner close to the celebration yet hidden from it. The spirit world did not have shadows but it did have brighter places and places more gray and indistinct. It had places that drew the eye, and places the eye slid away from as water slides off a duck’s back.

  I found it on the fourth staircase, the broken one. Along the outer rim of the towering crack that split the staircase ran a narrow balcony like an outgrowth on a glassy stone cliff. A figure sat there, unmoving. It was too small for me to see features or even to discern the colors of the clothes it was wearing, although it looked a lot like a dash jacket and he looked like a man. The only way to reach the spot was to be lowered by rope, to climb by ladder, or to fly.

  Could I fly? Wasn’t I an eru’s daughter?

  I turned my thoughts inward, searching through my body for a memory of wings, but I remained stubbornly Cat, locked into the mortal flesh my mother had given birth to.

  So I did the only thing I could: I plotted out a route and hastened toward the broken stair. Once I reached its jagged steps, I raced up them to the point where the huge gash like a notch made by a giant’s knife had cut through the stone into the interior of the ziggurat. A bridge no wider than my hand spanned the gap between the sides of the gash; the balcony lay on the other side of the crevice. I balanced across the gulf of air until I reached a flight of floating steps, some of them missing because they, too, were broken.

  After clambering up, I paused to catch my breath on a tiny platform not even wide enough to sit on. Above me rose the sheer face of a cliff, as ominous as a wall of ice. A pretty balcony ornamented by ribbons lay above me, and above it rose more cliff. Below me, the cleft fell away into darkness.

  Even from halfway within the ziggurat, my doubled vision could still see the top of the pyramid’s flat crown, as if part of me still stood inside one of the threads of power and spirit that weave the worlds. Overhead a churning circle of brilliance swirled in the sky. The eye of the gate opened. Howling and roaring, the Wild Hunt spilled back into the spirit world in a boiling mass of turbulent beasts. The layers and levels of the city emptied as all moving things converged on the height. Human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: four black as obsidian and four white as snow. They had no faces as I recognized a face. Instead they surged with a force I could only describe and feel as hunger.

  The horseman reined his mount to a halt in front of the dais. My sire was glowing, ruddy with a surfeit of blood. Slowly he bowed his head. Every line of his body was tense and tight.

  Certainty infused me like a bolt of hot anger through my flesh: He hated the creatures who sat in those thrones. He wanted to slash his spear through every watching, waiting presence but could not because eight chains bound him, one to each chair.

  Those chains like whips snapped, bringing the horse to its knees.

  A voice like a hammer blow cut through him, turning the mounted horseman into a kneeling eru with wings furled as in pain. He knelt before them. Blood is power because blood binds.

  A prince among slaves is still a slave.

  He hadn’t been talking about Andevai. He had been talking about himself.

  “Give us what is ours.” The eight personages spoke in one voice. “As 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.”

  The Hunt was merely the conduit. The courts could not walk into the mortal world, so only their servants could bring them the mortal blood they craved.

  The blood of the sacrifice poured out of a hundred wounds. Through the chains of binding they sucked the fresh blood of the kill out of his flesh and into theirs.

  I licked the air. I tasted the blood of the kill, so rich and sweet, laced with the spice of power, the salt of life. My hunger swelled together with the hunger of all the many presences, the denizens of the spirit courts. The force of their ravenous appetites built like the front of a storm. I took a step, thinking to race back across the bridge that spanned the cleft and regain the staircase, for surely I could rush up to the height and claw in to take my share before they had drained it all.

  An unseen person coughed as though waking from a dusty and uneasy doze. The cough startled me back to my own self as I remembered who I was and why I was here.

  “Vai? Can you hear me? Is that you?”

  “Catherine?” His voice was hoarse.

  The ribbon-ornamented balcony above me could only be reached by a skeleton of what had once been a stair-rail as delicate as crystalline branches. Rungs and railings had been shattered by savage blows to make the stairs unusable. I didn’t need stairs. I checked my sword to make sure it was secure, found a fingerhold on a jaggedly broken rung, and scrambled up. The weight of the pack threw off my balance, but I was determined. A presence loomed over me.

  He said, “Give me your arm. Reach up.”

  I did so blindly, slipping as I let go. A callused grip caught my wrist. He hauled me over the side and to my feet. His hands on my waist were like fire, I felt them so. His beard was a little unkempt. Streaks of powdery dust smeared his right cheek.

  “Catherine.” His voice was balm on my yearning heart.

  I dislodged his grasp and retreated to the edge of the balcony. The white rock wall behind him was pitted with gouges and holes. A frail ladderlike stair, leading up the cliff face to the next level, had also been smashed. From the far side of the balcony, the cleft cut away deep into the heart of the massive structure, shearing away into the inky depths.

  It was strange he was so disheveled and dust-stained when we stood on a spotless white balcony with ribbons streaming off the railing. His trousers were ripped at one knee. A cuff on his dash jacket had torn, and ragged slashes raked through the fabric of its left shoulder, although no blood stained the cloth. The smell of mortal blood lay heavily on him, yet he might be my sire, flown down to confound me with blood still coating his tongue.

  “Show me your navel!”

  He turned his back on me. “I’ll let you find it yourself, if you can tell me how many buttons this jacket has.”

  “Are you telling me all your jackets are cut to the same pattern? For if they are, then that one has fourteen
.”

  He turned back with a suspicious frown that made him look a little like the mansa. “After all, I am reminded you might have counted them. You’ve assaulted me before in the guise of my wife.”

  “Are you saying my sire has tried to seduce you more than that one time in the carriage?”

  “How could you know about that?”

  “Such secrets are best left unspoken within hearing of they who can see and hear all.”

  He took a step back, halting beside an object I had mistaken for a boulder but that I now realized was the bundle of stolen clothes, food, and leather bottles from Salt Island. Such a bolt of joy flooded through me that I had to struggle to catch my heart before it crashed right out of my chest. Only Vai would have thought to drag the bundle with him out of the coach. His sword lay sheathed on the ground. I was almost certain my sire could not touch cold steel.

  He thought I was my sire.

  I shrugged off the pack to ease my shoulders. “You claimed you would always know where I was. So I would think you would know this is me, Vai. Who else can carry my sword?”

  “There are many things I am no longer quite so sure of.” His wary gaze made me cautious, and made me bitter, for I could see my sire’s abduction had injured him in an intangible way.

  “What was the first thing you said to me, when we first met?”

  His lips curled into the scornful sneer I had seen too often in the first days of our acquaintance. “Easy enough to tell. When I saw you that night coming down the stairs, I thought it was the other half of my soul coming to greet me. But I’ve spoken those words aloud more than once. You might have overheard them.”

  I raised an eyebrow, trying to mimic his disdain. “Yes, that’s lovely and romantical, Vai, but that isn’t the first thing you actually said to me.”