Cold Steel (The Spiritwalker Trilogy)

by Kate Elliott

  “How can it be we have not yet taken that estate?” demanded Camjiata of his staff. His temper flashed, as dark as storm clouds. “Can you not see that it anchors the western flank of the Coalition army? No wonder Lord Marius holds the field. He need not worry about this flank, and thus can keep his center strong and take heavy losses against our superior weaponry but smaller numbers. Drake, why have the fire mages you brag of been defeated yet again by cold magic?”

  Drake had his own spyglass, which he turned toward the estate.

  A second fire seared across the treetops. With a shout of triumph the Iberians swarmed forward. Yet once again the fire was sucked clean out of existence as quickly as if a god had inhaled it into immortal lungs. Bolts and arrows from within the estate’s inner wall poured down on the attackers, driving them back.

  “There is your answer,” said Drake. “There must be several powerful cold mages inside the walls of the estate. Some are absorbing the backlash while others are killing the fire.”

  “Then take care of this problem personally, James! Else I shall have cause to wonder if all your talk is nothing more than idle boasting. Probably it is the Diarisso cold mage, the one who is evidently stronger than you.”

  Drake threw the spyglass angrily to the ground and his blue eyes actually sparked, but then he controlled himself and, without another word, stalked off.

  Camjiata watched him reach the horses before turning to his staff. “Captain Tira! Let the Amazons take the estate and hold it against all counterattacks until the Coalition army breaks or you are dead.”

  She nodded, as calm as if he had asked for tea. “It will be as you command, General.”

  I ran over to the fallen pine. Rory had passed out, dead drunk, his head pillowed on the satchel. I unslung the basket from my back and tucked it into Rory’s embrace. The thought that Vai might be caught helpless within the compound as Drake poured fire through him while the general’s forces advanced filled me with a frantic desperation. Luce was fighting, too! But Luce had made her choice, and I had to respect her decision.

  I raced back to the general. “Let me go with the Amazons.”

  He stared as if I had sprouted snakes for hair and turned him to stone. “You truly fear your husband is the cold mage who defends the estate. You fear Drake can kill him.”

  “Drake said it himself. When they are being used as catch-fires, cold mages are helpless and vulnerable. I can help you. I can creep in unseen.”

  Anger did not knit his brow, but suspicion grew like a brewing storm. “Creep in and warn them? Is that your plan? If we do not take Red Mount, we will lose the battle. If we lose the battle, we lose the war. Do you understand me, Cat?”

  For the radicals of this generation not to be stamped out and imprisoned and executed, Camjiata had to win. For Vai’s village to be released from clientage now instead of decades from now, if ever, Camjiata had to win. For Bee to have a hope of living in peace, Camjiata had to win.

  And if Camjiata lost, and the mage Houses and princes won, I would probably lose Vai to the mansa in the end.

  “I understand what is at stake.”

  The ringing thunder of the artillery boomed around us, thrumming down into the belly of the world. Smoke gusted out of the wounded earth in murky clouds.

  He studied me, and what he read in my expression I did not know. But he nodded. “Very well. Let the Coalition break, and the Roman army fall, and then you can have Drake and save your cold mage likewise. But not a moment before victory is mine.” He glanced over to where Rory was huddled in the shadow of the tree. “I’ll keep an eye on him for you. Strange. Why does he hate battle so? He did not strike me as a coward.”

  “He’s no coward,” I snapped. “He just has a heart, unlike you and me, General.”

  42

  We marched to Red Mount. Luce was not in the company I was assigned to. The Iberian riflemen had hunkered down along the estate’s outer wall. With caps set on the wall to draw enemy fire, they shot over it into the orchard. Drifting smoke spun into coils, concealing half the world. Soon I was sucking in lungsful of heat, chaff, and powder. I kept my gaze fixed on the feather in Captain Tira’s shako, like a bird’s wing in fog. A hand touched my back as for balance and a shoulder brushed mine as I waited, crushed within the close-packed ranks of my sisters.

  We made our way in a crouch to the smashed gate. The constant hammer of noise pounded through my body. The Iberians were using planks and doors as shields behind which they pushed forward into the orchard. Scorched leaves crumbled underfoot. Spent bullets, musket balls, arrows, and crossbow bolts crunched under my boots. The peppering fire of rifles melded with the rhythm of drums.

  I wrapped myself in shadow and smoke. Using a tree trunk as shelter I peered into the smoky fog of the orchard. Bodies littered the ground. The bloody and battered Iberians had stalled as a rain of arrows and the pop of musket fire trapped them in the ashy trees. One man cowered, huddled up like a broken child, sobbing.

  Yet not five paces from him, a different man called laughingly to the Amazons, “These Tarrant bastards are saying no man can dislodge them. Let’s see what you women can do!”

  Amid the trees, a soldier was dragging himself along the ground with his arms. His uniform was so covered in ash and his face so smeared likewise that I could not tell whose side he was on. A white fox nipped at his heels, until I blinked and realized it was only smoke pooling on the ground. The soldier slumped forward, facedown. A flash of light about his form dazzled me. The smoky fox leaped, swallowed the light, and vanished. I shook myself, for I was seeing things that weren’t there.

  Through patches of smoke I surveyed the layout of the inner compound. There was a two-story fortified stone house with a tower, as well as a long stable and several sheds. The compound wall and the stable wall were cut with loopholes for defense.

  A pattern emerged, once I looked for it.

  I slipped out of my shadows to report to the captain, who was sheltering behind a broken door propped between two trees. “Captain Tira! All of their musket fire is coming from the western corner. That means the eastern gate and the house are where the cold mages stand.”

  “Of course it is,” shouted the captain. It was hard to hear her even though I could have reached out to touch her. “Do you see that reflection of light in the tower window? It’s a spyglass. They’re directing their forces from up in the tower.”

  A body fell not ten strides from me. A cloud of wasps swirled over the corpse, but there were no wasps, only grit in my eyes.

  A man ran up from the outer gate and crouched beside Captain Tira. I pulled the shadows around me just in time, as I realized it was Drake. He did not notice me. His lean face shone as pale as if he never got any sun, but I thought it was just that he was sweating. His blue eyes were so bright they gleamed like polished gems on the edge of burning.

  “There are four cold mages,” he shouted, already hoarse as he struggled to be heard above the din. “Three in the tower and one at the carriage gate. I will burn the carriage gate using the one at the gate as my catch-fire. I’ll also set the roofs of the stables on fire. You’ll have to move fast to break through once I do, or their arrows will kill you regardless.”

  “Why did your mages not set fire to the stables before this?” the captain asked.

  “They’re young and inexperienced,” said Drake. “Also, there’s a mage in the tower who is the strongest mage I’ve ever touched. He’s the one we must defeat. His reach covers all but that one corner of the enclosure, where they’ve focused their muskets. Do you see?”

  “Yes, I already know.” Captain Tira smiled as to herself. “Very well, Drake. At your signal, we’ll advance. You rid us of the cold mages, and we’ll kill the officers.”

  She lifted a hand to give the command for forward, just as she nodded toward where she had last seen me. Thus was I given my orders: Kill the officers.

  Drummers beat the roll of advance. A cadre of Amazons shielded Drake as the lin
e pressed forward pace by pace through the trees into withering flights of arrows and the sting of musket balls. I could hear nothing but the shattering thunder of rifles around me. After an eternity we had made it halfway along the trees.

  In my veil of shadows, the path I crept seemed to weave in and out of the interstices that bind the world. Threads stitch the world together. Every substance, solid or liquid or air, moves with the quivering resonance of a struck bell. I saw with altered eyes: Behind the closed carriage gates lay the bright well of a cold mage.

  Rifles cracked in my ear. Beside me an Amazon collapsed, bleeding into the dirt. I flung myself down to use the fallen woman as a shield, but I had to roll away quickly when her body writhed and glowed. Drake was pouring the backlash of his magic into the wounded.

  The carriage gates burst into fire so bright that its light speared into the sky. In answer a wash of ice slumped over all, and the flames died. I was close enough that my sword bloomed, so I twisted its hilt and drew the blade out of the spirit world.

  Fresh fire tore into the roof of the stables as Drake poured the backlash into the mage at the gate. The magister flared like a candle, too weak to channel so much power, and his light snuffed out: He was dead. Within a fire blazing with doubled force, the carriage gate was consumed. This time, when the fire was killed by cold magic, the damage was already done, the gate demolished.

  With a shout the Amazons pressed through the smoking ruins of the gate. The sound of a desperate melee rang on the air, groans and shouts and bayonets striking and the clatter and thunk of crossbows and the incessant fire of rifles. Just as I reached the gate, a hammer of cold killed every rifle in the orchard mid-fire and doused the flames on every roof. Still in shadow, I plunged through the charred planks and beams of the gate. The dead cold mage lay twisted in the wreckage, smoke pooling in his open mouth: He was not Vai.

  I stared across a gravel-paved courtyard churned with smoke and bodies. A rifle cracked, and a man in Tarrant green who had taken cover in a stone arch went down as blood sprayed his head. A snarling cat as insubstantial as darkness clawed the bright spark of his soul out of his chest. A wolf sewn of mist leaped upon a woman who had a bayonet in her gut and swallowed her unmoored soul.

  As the skirmish boiled across the courtyard, spirit hunters nipped at the fallen.

  The Wild Hunt rides on Hallows’ Eve, but its shadows linger all the year long: It is the Hunt that consumes the souls of the dying at the moment of death. There they prowled, my brothers and sisters, a glint of teeth in the smoke, a sliver of light on the wind. Because I stood with a foot anchored in each world, I could see the whole.

  The Hunt does not take blood, only souls. For the Hunt itself is the gate through which the souls of the dead pass from the mortal world into the spirit world.

  A bolt shot from the tower skimmed my hat’s feather, jostling the cap off. Even invisible, I was not immune to death. No one in the mortal world is immune.

  I ran for the stone house, dodging and ducking. I had to reach the tower before Drake did. The ribbon of his fire weaving spun up into the tower to splash into the well of the cold mage who sheltered there. Whoever that cold mage was, he was immensely powerful, able to absorb every bit of the backlash that Drake channeled into him. In a burst of heat, flames skimmed along the roof of the stables and sheds as Drake wakened more fire.

  The stronger the cold mage, the better for Drake!

  The door to the stone house was shut tight. Window slits gave cover for defensive shooting. A bolt loosed from within kissed my hair, just missing my ear. I slammed up against the wall of the house, now inside their range. How to get in?

  The door burst into searing flames that chewed through it with such ferocity I had to retreat from its billowing heat. Men shouted inside, but not in panic. They sounded like soldiers sure of their strength and their good defensive position. In the courtyard and stables and orchard the battle raged on, a chaotic ferment of blood, noise, panic, and determination. Half the roofs in the compound were on fire.

  A rising breath of cold magic warned me. I dropped to my knees.

  Cold hammered down. Every soldier in the courtyard hit the ground as if felled by an axe blow. Where Drake was I did not know, but all the fires went out. The door of the stone house opened, half fallen off its hinges. Soldiers poured out. So intent were they on their foes that one stumbled over my back, knocking me sideways without even noticing I was a stone in their path. I dodged into the house as, behind me, the Amazons tried to rise before they got cut down.

  I could not look back. I had my orders.

  A Tarrant captain stood by an old-fashioned brick fireplace. He had a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.

  “The officers wear feathers in their caps. Aim for them,” he said to his soldiers, who were standing calm and collected at the window slits leveling their crossbows.

  I stuck him in the gut with my sword so hard up under the ribs that the point tapped brick behind as he gurgled. His eyes opened wide as his mouth formed soundless words, as a man might practice a polite introduction. A silent owl woven out of smoke swooped down and snapped up his soul.

  If you are not to be killed, then you must kill. That is the law of the hunt.

  I was halfway across the room to the stone stairs before any of the others noticed the captain’s body sliding down the wall as he collapsed. As a sergeant came running I slashed my wicked sharp blade across the throat of the orderly behind him. No one noticed because they were all staring at the dead captain. I slipped past a pair of men guarding the steps and began my climb, dodging around men pressed to window slits, waiting to loose their bolts.

  “Felt you a breeze—?”

  “Bastards can’t even hold the line against cursed beasts of women—!”

  This foul-mouthed man I stabbed from the back and shoved so he tumbled down, his weight staggering those below him. How they shouted in consternation, looking about for the spirit haunting them. Fool! Fool! Always letting my reckless lusts take hold of me.

  That was how Andevai had courted me. I had seen what he was, arrogant and vain and determined to win once he entered any contest, and yet despite knowing he would see me as a challenge to be won, I had still allowed myself to be dazzled by his physical beauty and his unrelenting admiration. He had seen my weakness, which was my desire for him, and so he had fed me one morsel at a time until I could no longer resist devouring the whole of what he offered. So be it. Maybe I was a fool, maybe I would one day get so angry at him that I would rip out his throat, but I cursed well was not going to let Drake or the mansa have him. He belonged to me.

  The stairs led past an empty first-floor room and up to the top floor, which was a square room with four windows. On a table lay an unrolled map of the landscape over which the two armies struggled, with Red Mount marked by a bold red X. A man with lime-whitened spiky hair bent over the table, tapping a knife’s point on the house in which we stood. The old mansa of Two Gourds House sat calmly in a chair. A middle-aged magister sat cross-legged on the floor, hands on knees, head bowed, panting as he collected himself. His face was reddened, blistered in places. He was not Vai.

  “Let me take the next attack,” said the old mansa. “You are weakening.”

  “No, no,” gasped the other man. “You are the strongest, Mansa. As long as you remain strong, you can kill any fire they can raise and hammer them all to the ground.”

  The old mansa sighed, then beckoned to a pale youth even younger than Luce. “Take the secret way, child. Hurry. Deliver a message to Lord Marius that we must have reinforcements. We will hold, or we will die.”

  “I can help you by staying here, Mansa!” With his eager, innocent face, the lad reminded me of Luce before she had gone to war, the way she had been back in Expedition.

  “No. This is not your battle. Go!”

  I stepped aside to let the youth pass down the stairs because I could not bear to touch him any more than I could have hurt Luce. He looked so inno
cent. The middle-aged magister brightened as a new aura of fire’s backlash wrapped his body. Fire broke out again across every roof in the compound except for the stone house’s tile roof. Through the north-facing window I looked over a second courtyard, this one ringed by a barn and cowshed and with a brick well at the center. The lad came running out the back of the house, then hesitated and glanced up at the tower where the officer, standing all unaware next to me, looked down at him.

  “Curse it! Go!” shouted the officer to the youth.

  Two Amazons and an Iberian burst into the courtyard through an arched gateway that linked the two courtyards. The taller Amazon plunged toward the youth, striking with her sword. The lad parried, but the deficiencies of his sword craft reminded me of Vai: He was the pupil who learns fighting by rote and works on perfect imitations of the forms taught by the sword master. That did not make him an effective fighter.

  Yet he had no need to be a masterful fighter. Just as I realized the lad was wielding cold steel, the backstroke of his blade caught the glove of the woman and cut just deep enough to draw blood. The tip of the cold steel blade writhed like a viper’s tongue. The soldier swayed as the steel serpent drank her soul; she toppled.

  Beside me the officer released a bolt that struck the Iberian in the back, sending him to a knee. The other Amazon dashed back to the clot of soldiers fighting hand to hand under the arch, dragging the Iberian with her.

  The young cold mage climbed into the well and vanished.

  “He’s in the tunnel,” said the officer.

  A hailstorm battered over the estate, pounding so hard I could not hear anything except its drum on the roof. The catch-fire sagged forward as the channel of Drake’s fire was cut off. A soldier caught him as he sagged sideways, too weak even to sit up. The other soldiers around me shot at the felled Iberians and Amazons below, taking their time, making each bolt count.