Cold Fire

by Kate Elliott

  30

  In the morning, I went to the law offices and after a protracted duel negotiated new terms: I would write Keer a thrilling monograph detailing the lurid superstitions believed in the primitive villages of Europa, and in payment she would take me to see Chartji’s aunt.

  For two weeks I followed a strict routine. Early in the morning when it was cool, Bee and I attended the fencing academy. I then accompanied Bee to her morning lessons in Taino, for it seemed useful to learn something of the language most people in the Antilles spoke. She then was carried off by a pair of Taino women, haughty nobles, and their prodigious retinue of companions, servants, allies, hangers-on, and guards. The rest of the day was mine. While I did indulge myself playing batey with off-duty soldiers in the courtyard, mostly I thumbed through my father’s journals. I chose tales I could string together to give Vai a glimpse of the truth of what had happened to me in the spirit world. My first two attempts Keer rejected. The third she accepted.

  Every evening the general entertained notables, but I was no longer invited. I discovered narrow corridors between the rooms, once used by servants and now convenient for eavesdropping. But at every gathering Gaius Sanogo or another warden was stationed in such a way that even wreathed in shadow I could not squeeze by undetected. I had to rely on Bee’s reports.

  The general was visibly displeased when broadsheets trumpeted the unexpected news that a young woman of Phoenician lineage and Europan upbringing had at the general’s behest and the cacica’s request been betrothed to a Taino prince. Everyone knew the Taino considered the Europans to be uncouth barbarians, nor had any Taino nobles deigned to ally themselves even with the most distinguished of Expedition’s noble lineages, so the news was a nine days’ wonder.

  On the first day of October, I held a printed copy of my monograph in my hands. I showed it to Bee in the privacy of the garden, in the shade of a star-apple tree.

  Bee leafed through the pamphlet. “I like this typeface. It’s very even.”

  “All the dialogue is rewritten. I object to having Celtic villagers talk like Expedition locals, with their yees and shalls.”

  She ignored me. “It is tremendously exciting and lurid. ‘His kiss was lightning, a storm that engulfed her.’ So romantical! I am quite overwhelmed, or I would be if a disturbing image of that terrible dream of you kissing Andevai did not rise into my mind like a dreadful moist and tentacled beast out of the briny deeps. Here. ‘He was beautiful and she was young and not immune to the power of beauty.’ It would be better as ‘He was a beauty and she was a—’”

  “Give me that, you beast!” I snatched at the pamphlet.

  She skipped out from beneath the tree into the morning sun that was baking into the patio brick, and paused there with her gaze lifted to the east. Her black curls fell—as the poets said—in a riot down her back, which I had always assumed meant they had some experience in untangling a mop of hair that was both thick and excessively curly. I waited. The face Bee showed to the world was only a part of her; despite her dramatic demeanor, she was far more reticent than I would ever be.

  She walked back. “Oh, Cat. I’m feeling hopeful. It’s very painful.” She handed me the pamphlet. “By the way, Professora Alhamrai was a guest again last night. She asked about you. I made sure to let her know the general suspects you of nefarious treachery.”

  “You used the word nefarious? You don’t think that was a bit overdone?”

  “Now that you mention it, she laughed. As if I were joking!”

  I sighed. “Do you think anyone will ever believe I wasn’t involved in the raid on Nance’s? Besides Jasmeen, that is. As a businesswoman, she’ll profit handsomely by the war. I would think people would be suspicious of her since she shares the general’s bed.”

  Bee’s gaze narrowed, for the subject of Jasmeen irritated her. “They’re very discreet. You need to go meet the troll.” She kissed me on either cheek. “May Tanit bless you with good fortune in your hunt, dearest.”

  At the law offices, Keer offered me a platter of fruits and nuts from which I took one and ate it, and I offered her a pouch of nuts I had purchased on the street, from which she took one and, cracking its shell between her teeth, swallowed it quickly.

  “I cannot talk you out of wishing to become acquainted with them?” she asked. “This one whom you would call Chartji’s aunt, and her brother, are what you rats would describe as being insane. It comes of being only two in a clutch. I warn you because I like you.”

  “I have to try. There is one other thing. From here to troll town, you may be startled to not be able to see me. I have to hide myself in case I’m being followed. I can’t really explain.”

  Keer gave a pair of clicks which I was coming to understand in troll speech meant a match of wits in which the players stood at the same level as when they started. “Thus the words of Maester Godwik. ‘You will know her because she is touched with the summer breath of the unreachable maze.’”

  “When did Maester Godwik say that?”

  She cocked her head. “He wrote it. We received dispatches yesterday from Adurnam.”

  “Any for me?”

  “No. There will not yet have been time for you to receive a reply to the letter you sent for your cousin who is after all here in Expedition.”

  “Then how did Maester Godwik know I was here?”

  “We also veil our secrets. If the meeting must be made, let us go.”

  Let it not be said cats and trolls cannot act decisively and in concert. I wrapped myself in threads of magic. Accompanied by two young trolls who were some manner of kin, Keer and I walked upriver to Iron Bridge. The factories clustered on the eastern bank, smokestacks belching. Like most trolls in Expedition, Keer favored clothing that mixed a wild combination of colors and cuts, the kind of thing I would have pieced out of a ragbag had I no alternative. The few trolls I had seen in Adurnam had had more muted tastes, which had only seemed outrageous because we in Adurnam had never met the trolls in Expedition. But it was not until we reached the glittering wall marking the environs of troll town that I realized Keer dressed to fit human taste.

  Troll town had a boundary rather than a wall, a fence of wire from which hung fluttering ribands sewn with polished shards of glass or metal. The instant I stepped beneath, my veil shredded as if cut to pieces, leaving me visible and vulnerable. Ahead lay a confusing maze of oddly-shaped structures wound about by paths and mirrors.

  “This way,” said Keer.

  As we ventured into the maze, my head began to ache with a pulse right between my eyes. No pattern or landmark distinguished one path from another. Structures like five- and six-sided gems popped up right in my way, only to seem to veer aside as the path took a sharp turn. Copses of nesting houses, some with tiled roofs and others with roofs like plaited hats, clustered around wells. Trolls busied themselves everywhere, watching me pass as if they were hungry. Their cacophony assaulted me, shrills, clicks, whistles, trills, and a constant tapping with no discernable rhythm that washed over me until I felt myself sinking. Bile rose in my gorge.

  A white-hot pain slicing through my eyes staggered me. Keer’s hand fixed on my elbow, and she steered me into shadow. Her breath on my cheek smelled of dry summer grass. I was blind.

  “Not the place to look weak. You are safe with me, but some here will be discourteous and eat you, thinking you need to be culled. Close your eyes.”

  I hadn’t known they were open. I squeezed them shut, fumbling at the cloth to draw the cane free. “Let them try to eat me,” I whispered.

  “Put it away.” Keer spoke so close to my ear I could almost feel the bite of her teeth into the inviting flesh of my cheek. “It is too shiny. It will attract vultures and killers.”

  Blindness gave me no succor. As painfully as the shots and glints had struck me, it was not glass and mirror that made me reel. Not until this moment had I understood how much I oriented myself by winding myself into the threads that bind and interlace the worlds. I did not
see these threads with my eyes but felt them through my whole being. Here, I was completely cut loose.

  I found a hoarse scrape to serve as a voice. “I am going to throw up.”

  “Quickly.”

  I clung to the troll as she guided me what way I did not know, to the slaughterhouse or to rat country, I could not tell, nor dared I look, for all my efforts were fixed on not puking. The most vivid image overtook me, of me on hands and knees on the dusty ground vomiting while lean, deadly predators circled in, watching my struggles until they darted in for the kill…

  “Sit,” said Keer. I heard the other two trolls whistling to each other, perhaps discussing which part of me would be tastiest.

  My legs gave way. Swallowing bile, I sat on a hard surface, face in my hands.

  “That was harsh,” added Keer. “You must be a spiritwalker. Ditch behind you.”

  With something I could only call kindness, the troll held me by skirt and jacket while I retched into a rubbish-filled ditch. The stinking remains of my breakfast mottled a sole-less shoe upper and a fraying basket strewn with cracked chicken bones. After a bit, I rose. A man stared curiously as he trundled past pushing a cart filled with bricks. We were back in rat country, on a backstreet lined with ramshackle workshop compounds between weed-ridden empty lots.

  “I could use something to drink,” I said, my words tasting quite foul.

  Keer hissed, her head slewing around. Three unknown trolls wearing only ribbons and strings approached in a crouching posture whose stealth made me extremely apprehensive. Were they about to spring? Had they followed us out of troll town?

  “I feel much stronger,” I said in a loud voice.

  Keer’s young relatives dipped their heads, baring teeth as they placed themselves between the strangers and me. The other trolls backed off.

  Unmolested, we returned to the law offices, but I felt too queasy to draw the shadows around me. I had to hope the general’s spies hadn’t been able to follow me to troll town.

  A clerk brought a tray in with a steaming pot of tea and a flask of rum.

  “Tea, or rum?” asked Keer, talons poised above the tray and teeth flashing wickedly.

  “Might I have rum? Why did you call me a spiritwalker?”

  She handed me a shot glass and poured tea for herself. The rum burned down my throat. She poured tea again, this time for us both.

  “The world is a maze. It is twisted and layered. Like a knot, perhaps you rats would say. No, that is not a good analogy. Anyway. Some of you rats can navigate to places in the knot where none of my kind can go, just as we have our secret pathways.”

  I sipped at the tea. The flavor breathed with the scent of late summer flowers, dusty and tart. “Your own secret pathways? Does the Wild Hunt hunt your people?”

  “Such a question demands we enter the circle.”

  “I can’t play the game, Keer. My head feels like it’s being squeezed in a vise. My feet feel like they’ve been chopped out from under me. If that makes you want to eat me, or if I lose all the height I’ve gained on Triumph Spire, so be it. Just give me another shot of rum first.”

  Keer eyed me in the peculiar way trolls had, looking with one eye and then the other. “You have given me the gift of your weaknesses. Now we are like clutch mates. I can either consume you to strengthen myself or…”

  She had the most interesting eyes, in one way so human with round black pupil and silver iris and in another way so gleaming and deadly, rimmed by the tiny feathers of a metallic golden-brown color. I almost felt I could see in that lens the secret pathways known only to trolls.

  “Whatever the second is sounds more appealing than the first,” I interposed, for one of the things I liked about trolls was that the ones I knew appreciated a sardonic sense of humor.

  She poured me a second shot of the very dark rum. “Your very entertaining pamphlet and its colorful tales is a rat story, not one of ours. We have our own enemies, and maybe you have met them. But no Wild Hunt like the one you describe rides through troll country.”

  “I don’t see how it could track anything in that maze.” I raised the glass to my lips, then set it down without drinking. Could Bee hide in troll town on Hallows’ Eve? “Keer, do you think the Wild Hunt only hunts humans? Or have you found a way to protect yourselves against them?”

  “They are not the ones who hunt us. Once, long past and beyond telling, my ancestors were almost wiped out. A few pockets survived in valleys amid the great ice shelves. Now we grow again. But the eye of our older brethren lies upon us, and the unwary are taken.”

  “Who are your older brethren?”

  “I think you rats call them dragons. It is not our word for them.”

  Now I did drain the second shot glass, and followed it with a chaser of tea to purge the sting from my throat. The printing press wheezed in the workshop out back, and pens scritched in the clerks’ office. “Fiery Shemesh! Not even my father knew that!”

  “Not even the ancients know every secret that exists in the world,” mused Keer. “At the heart of all lie the vast energies which are the animating spirit, if you will, of the worlds. The worlds incline toward disorder. Cold battles with heat. When ice grows, order increases. Where fire triumphs, energies disperse.”

  “Is the ice alive?”

  “An interesting question. The worlds are a maze with many paths. That is all I know.”

  I considered her odd statement that we were now clutch mates. “Keer, troll town seemed to me like a maze with many paths. I want to call on you as my kinswoman. If I send my cousin to you on Hallows’ Night, will you hide her in troll town?”

  “I will. And not let her be eaten. Today you did not reach Chartji’s aunt.”

  “I’ll have to try another path to reach my husband. Why can you see my sword?”

  She cocked her head. “How can any not see it? It is so very shiny.”

  I clasped her hand in the radical manner, and she showed me her teeth and raised her crest, and I did not know what it meant to her, but it heartened me. The headache had passed. Outside, the sun beat down. Clouds glided like airships on an aloof journey, and who was to say they were not? Perhaps creatures of air lived in the clouds whose existence we had no inkling of.

  So many mysteries. And yet I had my own burdens.

  I left the law offices and, drawing the shadows around me, walked down the long boulevard along the sleepy waters of the bay to the neighborhood I had too briefly called home. I sought out the compound where Kofi’s people hired out carts and wagons. I crept in where I had never been invited, feeling like the worst intruder. There I saw Kayleigh boiling and mangling clothes with young women, laughing and easy with them as she had never been easy with me.

  I waited. Midway through the afternoon, Kofi came in with an older man who looked enough like him to be a brother. Kofi greeted Kayleigh with an affectionate wink that made me absolutely wild with envy for the simple pleasure they could take in being together among family that cherished them. But I stalked him as he went into a secondary courtyard where three new rooms were going up beside a shed storing broken wheels. We were alone. I let the shadows fall.

  He stepped into the shed and picked up a splintered spoke. “A witch, then. Leave Kayleigh alone. She never harmed yee.”

  “Whatever you think of me, whatever you believe of me, I ask you to remember I risked my life to find that old man in the boathouse.”

  “That is surely true,” he agreed grudgingly. “For he sake, I shall listen.” He waited.

  We had gone too far too fast to exchange polite pleasantries. “I wasn’t the one who betrayed the radicals at Nance’s. I knew nothing about it. The general and his people were using me. I was ignorant of the plan. It’s a complicated story.”

  “The stories yee tell always is. Yee shall understand if I’s skeptical.”

  “Jasmeen is the general’s mistress. With my own eyes I saw Jasmeen kiss the general and call him darling. She comes at night for assignations. She�
��s the one who betrayed you.”

  He whistled softly. “Yee’s a meaner bitch than even I thought, weaving a tale like that.”

  A foot scuffed behind us. Kofi whipped his spar forward as if to charge. Just as I shifted to defend myself, Kayleigh stepped in under the shed’s roof. Kofi settled back on his heels.

  “Maybe Cat is, but if I were you, Kofi, I would look into it.”

  “Would yee now, love? After she humiliated yee brother as plain as she could?”

  My face burned, but I bit down the words I wanted to shout into his doubting face.

  Kayleigh sighed. “Even if Cat betrayed Vai, which seems likely, I think she cares for him. People have more than one face, many parts, contradictory feelings. I don’t think she wants him dead. I have a very good idea of where she wants him.” Her mouth curled into a smirk.

  Kofi lowered the spoke. “The same argument Vai made. He said ’twould take a hells good actress to behave toward a man the way she was behaving the night of the areito. But he wanted it to be true. That don’ make it true.”

  “He wanted it to be true?” I asked, so choked with hope I could barely speak.

  “Don’ think I shall let yee get yee claws in him, gal. Vai is like me own brother. Get out.”

  “Wait.” Kayleigh took a step closer, hand raised. “We hear yee’s living with the general, Cat.”

  “I live with my cousin, not with the general. She needs me. You may have heard she is soon to be married to Prince Caonabo.”

  “So we have read,” said Kofi. “The radicals shall call for a boycott of the wedding areito. We don’ like it that the general had a hand in the raid at Nance’s.”

  I plied my hook, hoping for a catch. “Are we trading information now? I have some for you. The marriage is the deal the general made with the cacica, in return for her support for his Europan war. He promised her that the spoils of victory in Europa would refill her empty treasury.”

  Kofi took a step back and caught himself with a muttered curse. “Ma Jupiter! I don’ reckon that can be true. An empty treasury!”