by Kate Elliott
I dashed forward to grab up shards and hand them to him, to make the work go more quickly. On the street beyond lay the two bodies before the window, and three more within view, two sprawled lifeless while a third, a man wearing a cap trimmed with a red ribbon, dragged himself along the cobblestones like a rat with broken hindquarters. Two women ran out from a building and hauled the red-capped man inside their door, him whimpering in a way to set me so on edge that I had to gulp down a sob.
“Why are you doing this?” I said, finding a measure of calm in our pointless and rather idiotic task.
“Broken things must be fixed,” he said. “Also, if the front is closed up, looters and thieves are less likely to come inside.”
“I mean, why follow us back here?”
“Because you didn’t come after me when I left,” he said. “And I heard the shouting and the crash.”
“You could have walked into a killing mob.”
“Yes.”
It was so cold standing next to him that I might as well have been immersed in a snow bank, but I kept bending and handing, bending and handing, and the effort kept a core of warmth in my body. He remained intent on the glass, spreading in its patchwork frame back across the gap more quickly than I would have believed possible. I could not discern what he was doing without a mirror to watch him in, but somehow he was able to knit the glass together by tracing the breaks with a hand.
“Why?” I asked.
He spoke without looking at me. “I made a promise to myself that if I was not going to kill you, then no one would.”
“Very noble I am sure.” Musket fire popped in another street, startling me so badly I dropped a thick pane of glass, which broke in half at my feet. The street before us lay empty under a gray sky. “Then why delay by fixing this window? If folk see you here, or recognize your work for cold magic, the innkeeper and her people will suffer.”
“Catherine, the militia just rode past. We can’t go out quite yet. Anyway, people blame cold mages for everything. Cold magic is so commonly used to improve life that folk take it for granted.”
“It is?”
He rushed on without having heard me. “How few understand that cold magic saved most of them from a life of constant petty war and raiding. That it is the mage Houses that have secured them from the tyranny of princes.”
“Only to substitute their own tyranny. You’re the son of slaves, Andevai! Bound for generation after generation to serve a mage House. Whether bound by princes or mages, what difference does it make to those who want freedom?”
“What is freedom?” he asked bitterly, “and who is truly free? We are all bound by what we are, and where we come from.”
“Maybe,” I said slowly as I considered the turn my life had taken, the lies I had been told, “because we do not look farther than where we have been told to look. Perhaps it would all appear very different if we weren’t afraid of what we are. Or what we might become.”
He had cut his hand, blood smeared across one palm as he stared at me. He looked as if I had just struck him. I was rather struck myself. The words had come out, although I’d had no idea they were waiting on my tongue.
What was I most afraid of? Beyond the prospect of being hunted down and killed.
I was most afraid of being alone and unwanted.
“Cat, come look at this.”
I turned. While Andevai and I had been working at the window, Bee had evidently run back to the scullery to fetch our things. She stood bent over a table piled with our coats. Her sketchbook lay open as she drew with quick, measured strokes on the page. “I didn’t have time when we woke to think about what I’d dreamt last night, but now it’s flooding back. Under the gaunt ribs of a whale… no… sheets of fabric and twisted metal… scorched wood… They’re looking for something, digging in the wreckage….” The words emerged in ragged bursts, as if she were running and thus out of breath. “A man, tall, wheat-haired. With a mustache? I have never met him, but he knows you, Cat. He’s standing with a troll… laughing….”
“Brennan?” I said.
Abruptly, Bee’s hand stilled. Her eyes rolled up, and a shudder ran straight down through her body. She spoke in a deep, masculine voice, raspy with age. “The airship.”
I had heard that voice before, from a dying man. I stared at her, my skin prickling as with ice, and yet it was a pressure of warm air that pushed in through the remaining gaps in the casement, bringing with it the reports of musket fire and the churning roar of the riot gathering force in distant streets.
Andevai’s hand touched mine. The warm moisture of his blood trickled onto my skin. “Is there something wrong with her? That’s not her voice.”
For a moment, the touch of his hand and the comfort of his presence seduced me into tightening my fingers over his as I looked at him. “I think she’s talking about the Rail Yard.”
He stood very close, his expression not arrogant at all but focused, disciplined, and direct as he stared at me. Only at me. “What do you want me to do, Catherine?”
Kiss me.
I yanked my hand out of his and strode across the chamber. I grabbed Bee just as she shuddered and shook herself, tongue flickering out of her mouth in a way that was not quite human.
“Cat, the airship,” she said hoarsely in her own voice. The cold had cracked her lips, and she licked away a spot of blood. “Look. The snow. A thread of smoke, there. A festival wreath. It might be today. Look how short the shadows are. They’ll be there when the sun’s at its highest. We’ve got to go.”
“Of course.” I shut my eyes and envisioned a map of the city. We stood in the district called Cernwood Fields, and if we made our way through the Bitters and across Dog Isle past Eastfair Market…
“I know how to get there,” said Andevai.
“You don’t even live here,” I objected, opening my eyes. “You’re from the country.”
“I studied maps. Your face is bleeding, Catherine.”
Bee shoved my coat into my arms. “You can argue later.”
I laughed. I am sure I sounded on the edge of lunacy, soon to be howling at the moon, as I tugged on coat and gloves. We pushed through the wreckage of tables and the splintered door. As we paused on the street, deserted but for the four sprawled and bloodstained corpses, Andevai absentmindedly licked the wound on his thumb. I gingerly brushed my gloved fingers over the cut on my chin, which I had thought healed over. A drop of blood beaded on the leather from the reopened cut, and although I had not meant to, I raised my hand and touched my blood to my lips. The blood he had drawn.
“Are you sure,” Bee said, “that we can trust him, Cat?”
I looked at Andevai. He looked at me, not with arrogance or pride but with an expression whose intensity I dared not fathom. He lifted a hand, to indicate that I must cast the lots to judge his fortune.
I said, “I suppose we’re about to find out.”
30
The inhabitants of the district of Cernwood Fields had gone to ground, shutters and entrances closed, although here and there we saw a gate or a door cracked ajar as if to offer a haven for folk fleeing the soldiers. We struck a steady loping pace down the main street and thence into side streets, pausing at each intersection to consider where the worst sounds were coming from. In our winter coats we appeared nondescript, even Andevai. At intersections, we discovered shops with broken windows. We surprised men patching a shattered casement with planks of wood, but once they had a good look at us, they set back to work.
We had to walk some miles northeast to reach the Rail Yard, and soon enough we left the troubled central streets behind us and strode through a frigid morning. An odd quiet gripped us; Bee said not one word, and with Andevai in our company, I could find nothing to say. He remained silent, seeming half absent, as if his concentration were elsewhere.
The usual morning crowds about their business were nowhere to be seen, only a few people like us scurrying on their way with heads down. A pulsing roar of human voices punctuated by the r
eports of musket fire faded as we made our way through the somber warehouses on Dog Isle to the bridge beside the long roofs of Eastfair Market. My eyes began to sting from a bitter tang in the air. Folk at the market gates called after us, asking what we’d seen. We hurried around to the market’s rear where laborers off-loaded coal cars and men changed out horses and brought in new teams. Beyond Eastfair Market, the lowland plain began its gentle rise toward the steep Downs and high Anderida. Thirty years ago, according to maps in my uncle’s study, this had been countryside. Now three mills built of brick and timber stood one after the next along a line of rectangular ponds and a channel of the Sieve hemmed in by stone banks. Waterwheels groaned where water trapped in the murky ponds raced down toward the channel. Chimneys coughed smoke whose sooty weight swirled over lanes of squalid housing. I tasted the stench of human waste, sweet rot, and hot, gritty ash. Although we were at least half a Roman mile from the nearest of the mills, the sound of the machines made a heart-battering clatter that filled the air. Despite unrest elsewhere, the factories were spinning.
Pausing to catch our breath, we stared over the hard angles and smoky pallor.
Andevai spoke in a low voice, as if the sight pained him. “If you want to go to a place where the mansa will feel some reluctance to follow, that is the place.”
Surprised, Bee glanced at him, and she caught my eye and raised her eyebrows.
I shrugged and began walking again. Yet my thoughts spun over and over as I considered the busy combustion of factories and the fire-withering heart of mages.
The Rail Yard was a field of tracks sown from the burgeoning rail system that, in concert with canals, wound down from Anderida to haul coal, timber, and iron to Adurnam’s port. Workshops and stables crowded one side of the Rail Yard, but we tramped past them to the high brick wall that surrounded the industrial yard. Its iron gates were chained and its guard posts abandoned.
“How do we get over?” Bee asked, surveying the impressive walls and gate.
“I can break the lock.” Andevai searched through the heavy wreath of chains for the lock as I drew Bee back, remembering the force of the shattered cup. After a moment, he laughed and began to haul lengths of chain through the iron railings. A crudely cut lock thumped out of the lacework to the cobblestone pavement. “Someone was here before us.”
He shifted the gate open enough for us to slip through, then closed it and looped chains back through. Parallel to the wall ran a series of long, low workshops with big doors, all chained closed. Some of the roofs were half caved in, and most of the windows were shattered, as if a man had walked the length of each building and smashed each individual pane with a sledgehammer. No one had swept up the debris exploded over the dirt.
I looked at Andevai. “Did you do that?”
“How could—” demanded Bee, and then closed her mouth.
A clink of dropped metal falling on metal came quite distinctly from beyond the workshops, followed by a curse in a male voice.
I raised a hand for silence and gestured that they should stay hidden. Then I padded down a lane between empty workshops toward the open space beyond. I drew on my glamor and became brick and dirt and broken glass, the battered surroundings of an industrial yard inhabited by the ghosts of projects abandoned because of destruction. A twisted hulk sprawled across open ground. Its vast ribs curved as high as the surrounding roofs, and flaps of shredded skin stirred in the breeze. Within the ribs mounded more fabric in coils and rumpled hills like the collapsed internal organs of a whale. Pockets of hard snow had settled into crevices and corners, making the remains sparkle. Although torn and burned, the airship’s skeleton had a graceful beauty.
Rats scrabbled in the wreckage: Three figures huddled around a fractured wood-framed basket, the remains of the gondola. A man plied a shovel; a woman knelt and picked through a heap of debris, trying to free something. The third figure had a troll’s plumage, and although its back was to me, it had turned its head so far around it was looking right at me. No head should be able to turn that far. I shuddered, and then, at last, I recognized them.
Fiery Shemesh! Chartji, Brennan, and Kehinde.
Chartji raised a hand in a gesture humanlike if odd in its rhythm, meant to beckon me forward. Then—thanks be to gracious Melqart—she turned her head back properly round to watch what Kehinde was doing.
I ran back to my companions.
“Come, quickly. They’re here! Just as you said, Bee.”
Andevai had his back to me, and his head positioned in the normal way, but he gestured in the direction of the main gate. “I’ll stay here.”
“Are you afraid to see the results of your handiwork?”
“I know what it looks like.”
“How can you know what it looks like? You were at the inn when the explosion hit.”
“Say what you will and think what you must, Catherine,” he said with so much force it seemed my lips prickled as though freezing into ice. Bee shivered, eyebrows drawing down dangerously as she frowned. “Someone must stay here to keep an eye on the gate. If I whistle, that will be your signal to run.”
If ice had touched me a moment before, I was now flooded with hot alarm. “Has someone been following us all along?”
“It’s not what I see. It’s what I sense. I can feel threads of cold magic for some distance around me. The mansa is in Adurnam, and he is on the move—which means he is personally searching for you and Maestressa Barahal.”
“If you can feel the, ah, threads of the mansa’s movement, then can he not feel you in kind? Track us by following you, if he suspects you are with us?”
“He will be able to sense my magic.” He bit his lower lip, white teeth furrowing the lip as he studied me. I did not like that look. It reminded me of our hands touching, our fingers entwining, at the inn. I felt heat flood my face as I blushed.
He looked away sharply. “You’re right. It would be best for me to mark a trail back through the city as a decoy, although it is unlikely the mansa suspects I am trying to aid you.” He examined the gate as though to memorize the number and ornamentation of its iron finials with their resting eagles and coiled snakes. “It’s doubtful he will suppose me to have so much initiative. Or be rebellious.” His sour words surprised me. Before I could reply, he went on thoughtfully, finger and thumb tracing the trim line of his closely shaven beard to his chin in a way that was terribly distracting. “Or I could rejoin the mansa and try to lead him away from you until nightfall tomorrow brings the solstice, and thereby Maestressa Barahal’s release from the contract.”
“Surely a mage House can force my cooperation with or without a contract,” said Bee. “Kidnap me. Take me prisoner. I have no one to protect me. My family could not manage it even when they were here.”
“It’s true,” he agreed, “that folk without support or means are at the mercy of those who have the weapons, or the magic, or the followers to coerce them. My village knows that well enough, for it is how we became slaves. What he will not have is a legal contract to force your compliance. But if you do not choose to become part of Four Moons House, then you must find some other power to become client to.”
Bee looked at me. “I would rather sit in a cage and starve myself to death than share the bed of a man under the terms I was so insultingly offered!”
“Of course you would!” I agreed. “We’ll find another way. With Tanit’s blessing, we’ll reunite with Rory.”
Andevai glanced at her and then sharply at me. “Who is Rory?”
“A kinsman.”
“Oh. Well. Thus you prove my point. How is anyone to survive without the protection of a powerful patron or the support of your kin?”
“Surely we have laws to which we can appeal,” I said.
I turned as Chartji ambled into view, feet crunching on debris and her head bobbing slightly. Her crest was raised, its plumage startlingly bright in the crisp air, in a season where colors were usually so muted.
“Did someone have a que
stion about the law?” She wrinkled her snout to mimic a human smile, but the expression produced a rather more threatening visage.
Bee recoiled, taking two steps back. “That’s a troll,” declared Bee in passionate tones.
“Bee!” Her rudeness appalled me. “This is Chartji. I won’t trouble you with her full name, which I have been assured we would not understand in any case.”
More of her extraordinarily impressive teeth came into view as her smile sharpened and her crest stiffened.
I went on quickly. “She is a solicitor at the firm of Godwik and Clutch, with offices in Havery, Camlun, and Adurnam, although I’ve been told she is originally from Expedition. This is my… cousin… Beatrice Hassi Barahal.”
Bee had the grace to look embarrassed by her unfortunate reaction. “Salve,” she said awkwardly.
Quickly, to smooth over the chasm of bad manners, I indicated Andevai. “And this is my… my…” My tongue froze. My lips turned to stone.
“I am Andevai Diarisso Haranwy,” he said, coolly enough. “I believe we have encountered each other before. Greetings of the day to you, Chartji. May you find peace.”
“And to you,” said Chartji. She then began speaking in what I guessed was an older dialect, the one I was pretty sure Andevai’s grandmother had spoken.
Andevai’s flaring eyes revealed his startlement. Then he flashed a grin. A grin! Had I ever seen him smile with such delight? The troll and the cold mage ran right down through a series of exchanges whose rhythms sounded very like the usual local greeting but whose tones had an appealing music I could not duplicate. Chartji did not miss a beat, and Andevai looked—
Blessed Tanit! I was like a runaway wagon careening down a hill. His charming smile did not alter our situation one bit. With the day passing and our plight as unsettled as ever, I broke in.
“My apologies, but we ought to move farther away from the gate.”
“I take it you are here illegally, just as we are?” said the troll.
I walked up the alley between two workshops, and the others followed. Both Andevai and Bee pulled up short when we came into sight of the wreckage, the gaunt ribs, the listless folds of torn fabric skin, and the shattered spars and planks of the gondola amid a dusting of ash and shattered tiles and bricks and who knew what else? Maybe the dust of human bones.
