Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (27 page)

“I wondered when you would tell me. I can see we do not travel in Taino country. My
brother is a persuasive man, and you are young, so I cannot fault you for giving way
to his conniving. What is done cannot be changed. In truth, I have seen sights I would
not otherwise have witnessed, so my gourd of knowledge becomes weightier. Was that
winged creature who attacked us the one who commanded my death?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Well, then, you did well to defy him as much as you are able.”

I had rarely received a compliment that pleased me more. “My thanks, Your Highness.
Since we’re here, will you drink?”

“Your manners are improving. Yet is it safe to drink here?”

“Here on warded ground, from this water, it is.”

“Then I will do so, for I wish to taste the waters of these springs.”

I cradled her in my hands so she could lap, rather like a dog, but it went well enough.
I drank to satiety, filled the bottles, and stowed them in my pack. My sire’s whispered
words nagged at me, but I dared not discuss them aloud with the cacica lest unseen
ears overhear. Had he been taunting me, or warning me?

“We must go to the palace,” I said.

“In Sharagua, such a central compound would be the cacique’s domain. That suggests
the palace is the home of the spirit courts of Europa. We can discover what lies within
by entering.”

Buoyed by this truism, I advanced, with the cacica’s hair clutched in my right hand
and my sword in my left. We walked at least a mile, if one could measure distance
here as in the mortal world, and I was pretty sure one could not. I was pretty sure
distances might expand and contract. How else could the cats have reached me so quickly
when I called to them? They paced alongside, escorting us. The littlest several times
bumped into me on purpose, until I finally swatted her with the flat of my sword.

“Little beast! No wonder Rory finds you annoying!”

She sulked away so like Bee’s spoiled little sister Astraea that I laughed. The adult
females coughed in what I imagined was shared amusement.

Strange to think that laughter brought us to the walls.

White walls like seamless ceramic rose to the height of ten men, so high I could not
hope to climb. A massive sea-green door promised an entry, but it was closed tight.
Fortunately, warded ground formed the tongue of the gate, with a smooth pillar, a
spring of water rising in a stone basin, and a sapling ash tree. Standing safe between
the wards, I examined the huge doors.

The lintel was carved of jade in the form of two eru with hands braced against each
other’s, their lips about to meet in a kiss that
would never be consummated. Did the entrance always look like this, or was it formed
this way to taunt me? The doors had neither ring nor latch. When I pushed with a foot,
neither budged. The cut on my forearm was still oozing, but a smear of my blood wiped
onto the jade did nothing.

Frustrated, I murmured my sire’s words. “ ‘The palace where those without blood cannot
walk.’ ”

“The dead have no blood to offer,” said the cacica. “Perhaps the dead cannot cross.”

“I could go forward alone. But it seems wrong to leave you behind. I should have sent
you with Bee.”

“Hers is not the responsibility. You can hang the basket from the tree and return
to get me.”

“What if someone steals you, Your Highness? What if I can’t return this way? Or get
out at all?”

“If you are unable to get out, I will be lost regardless.” Her clear gaze measured
me. “I do not fear you will abandon me. You have proven yourself loyal.”

“My thanks, Your Highness.” Her praise startled me into an unexpected spike of optimism.

I returned her to the basket, hung the basket from a branch, and from the spring drank
my fill of water so cold it numbed my lips.

This time, when I smeared blood onto the jade, the stone parted as easily as curtains.
As I pushed through, my first step took me into light so bright it blinded me. My
second step brought me to the brink of an impossibly vast chasm. The silence made
me wonder if I had gone deaf.

An entire world fell away from my feet like a bowl with tiers. Each of these tiers
marked a landscape as wide as continents, and each landscape was surrounded by the
Great Smoke. I looked down as might a star, hanging so high that the whole of existence
lay exposed as I watched the surge and flow of the spirit world. Tides of smoke swept
up from the waterless ocean to engulf swaths of land, then rolled back into the sea.
Everything the tide touched was changed, except for the steady gleams that marked
warded ground, the straight lines of warded roads, and a few patches that might have
been briny salt flats.

According to the story of creation told by the Kena’ani, Noble Ba’al
had wrested land out of ocean in his contest with the god of the sea. The sages of
my people said that the world was created out of conflict. Was this not similar to
what the troll lawyer Keer had told me? “
At the heart of all lie the vast energies which are the animating spirit of the worlds.
The worlds incline toward disorder. Cold battles with heat. When ice grows, order
increases. Where fire triumphs, energies disperse
.”

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 air.

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.