Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (30 page)

Watching him helped me not look at my hands groping through
empty air or across illusory vistas that still looked to me like streaming masses
of ribbons. Often I shut my eyes and felt along the rugged cliff rather than grow
dizzy from the confusion between what I could see and what I could touch.

Hadn’t it always been that way with Andevai? When I had first met him, I had seen
one man, but I had had to discover the part of himself he kept concealed.

“Catherine, are you paying attention? Don’t grab there. Up a little… with your right
hand…
there
.”

Often we rested on ledges no wider than my feet, leaning against the rock wall, and
I was grateful for each respite because my forearms were beginning to burn and my
fingers to get as dry as if they were being sandpapered. But we could not fully relax
until we reached what I saw as a polished clamshell of a platform tucked along the
curve of an ebony tower. After he smashed the rungs of what looked to me like a glass
ladder that led up from below, we sat huddled against the wall and shared half of
the water in the second flask. He dozed off, slumped against me. I could not sleep;
my hands were smarting and my arms felt numb.

Were the courts still feasting? No movement troubled the bridges and spans and balconies
whose complex patterns haunted me. I stared at the beautiful city and I hated it for
lying to me. I hated myself for seeing it as beautiful, for believing it must be so
because all the tales said it was.

People told so many stories whose fractured truths hid as much as they revealed. What
we did not know could hurt us. What we chose to ignore could cause harm, maybe to
ourselves and maybe to others.

Vai sighed in his sleep. I rested my head against his. We had come by twists and turns
more than halfway to the outer wall. I thought surely I could let him rest for a few
more breaths, but then I heard a scuffling and scratching below and above. The rasp
of tongues tickled the cut on my arm, and my blood oozed. The cursed creatures were
tracking us again.

Vai stiffened, going so tense that I thought he had woken, but he was still asleep.
He murmured words in the village dialect he had spoken as a child. Most of the words
slipped past, too thickly patois for me to understand. Then he spoke almost desperately.
“Don’t touch me!”

He jolted awake and shoved me away so roughly that he almost pushed me off the edge.

I grabbed his arms, dragging myself to a stop with his weight. “Vai! It’s me. It’s
Catherine.”

He sucked in air. For an instant I was frighteningly certain he did not recognize
me. Then all the air went out of him. He pulled an arm out of my grasp and rubbed
his eyes.

“What were you dreaming?”

He looked away, jaw clenched. “Nothing.”

I pressed a hand on his chest. He flinched.

I sat back, withdrawing my hand. He curled his hands into fists, and I watched him
climb the pinnacle of disdain as his expression settled into the scornful arrogance
that had so scalded me when we had first been thrown together. One wrong word and
he would lash out. Not with his fists—as Auntie Djeneba had once said, “He don’ seem
like that kind”—but with words meant to cut and intimidate.

“I don’t understand how you can see through the illusion,” I said soothingly. “I still
see the city. The ziggurat is quite splendid if you don’t mind knowing you’re meant
to be the main course at the feast. I’m ready to go on, if you are. You know I trust
you, my love.”

“We can’t get out of this foul pit quickly enough.” His voice was harsh, but I understood
the anger was not directed at me.

I took a swallow of water and offered him the rest.

He wiped his mouth, his lips so dry they were cracking. “I hear them. They’re following
us again. There’s one gap we have to clear. That gap is the one you described as a
moat. But I have a plan for that. If you’re sure, Catherine, utterly sure the creatures
can’t harm you.”

“I’m sure,” I lied. I could have become an actress in the theater after all, because
he did not guess how my heart trembled. “Remember, I was bitten by a salter and not
infested. The teeth of the plague can’t take hold in my blood.”

But even though it was true I could not be harmed by the bite of a human infested
with the salt plague, the bite of a ghoul was rumored to be far more potent and virulent.
I had to take the chance. Nothing mattered except that we escape, and this was the
way we had to do it.

We climbed, sometimes a little up or a little down but always transverse.
Once I thought I was moving through a fall of water, only there was no pressure and
no current, only grit sifting into my face, the dust and salt of the mortal world.
Was this place pitted with gates into salt mines all across the mortal world? Now
was not the time to find out.

He had plotted our route well. Had we not had so many narrow ledges on which to take
quick rests, I would never have made it, for my arms were beginning to feel they were
being squeezed in a vise. Naturally he spoke no word of complaint, just massaged my
forearms whenever we halted, although his, too, had become as hard as the rock we
clung to. My legs trembled from fatigue, and my buttocks ached from all the pushing
up and down and sideways.

He whispered. “Look, love. Look. We’ve made it to the edge.”

Below us a path paved with gems meandered alongside the moat. On its far side rose
the outer wall, looking to my eyes like the forbidding face of an ice cliff. On the
path roamed the personages of the courts, resplendent in their vivid robes and changeable
aspects. Groups flashed along more distant bridges and ramps toward us, as if gathering
to hear a poet sing.

Vai unwound the kerchief he’d knotted around his neck. Easing his sword partway out
of the sheath, he cut his skin for the first time.

Red blood welled up.

A cry shivered through the air. Dust spattered from the walls.

Vai pressed the kerchief to his wound to sop up the blood. The greedy whispering of
the courts scraped the air like fingernails down a chalkboard. Hadn’t they had enough
blood? Could they ever be satisfied?

“Catherine.” He handed me the kerchief, then clambered to where the moat ran narrowest.
The liquid in the moat was churned into a froth of pinkish foam like spume bubbling
from the mouth of a dying man. I probed with a foot down a wall I could feel but not
see, and found a toehold. Easing myself down, I settled my weight on one aching foot;
my calf cramped but I had to grit my teeth and endure it. I let go with my upper hand
and groped for a lower place to grab. A hand, or claw, slammed up, dislodging my boot.

So I leaped down among them. Cats always land on their feet. I plunged forward, smearing
the blood that stained the kerchief onto any surface I could find: their robes, their
outstretched hands. I
rubbed a speck of blood on the path, feeling dirt beneath my fingers instead of the
smooth silver walkway I saw with my eyes.

The fine, elegant people turned on each other in a frenzy. I jammed the kerchief into
the gaping jaw of a being wearing the face of a distinguished elderly man and dressed
in the formal court clothes a man would have worn a hundred years earlier, all silk
and gold-threaded embroidery.

I shoved my way out of the clawing, jibbering crowd as they converged to tear at the
one who was suckling on the cloth. A few had enough sense to smell Vai’s escape. I
raced out in front of them.

The interior maze ended without touching the outer wall. It was this gap we had to
cross. He dashed across the moat as if there were no liquid in it and started climbing
the outer wall, but he was still within reach of their teeth as he tested a grip.
I followed him into the steaming waters, but the molten fire in the moat was an illusion.
It was all grainy dirt.

A creature glided toward me. She had the seeming of a woman whose coiled hair was
laden with gold coins. I thrust. My sword pierced her. Pain shivered up my arm, but
I pushed, leaning my full weight into her.

She shattered, coming apart like a pouch of sand when it is ripped open.

Where the grains soaked into the ground, the veil of illusion cleared. As if through
glass, I saw the dusty surface of salt. I smelled the sun of the mortal world, and
heard the shrill whistle of wind blowing beneath an empty sky.

“Catherine!”

The exhalation of their breath iced my neck. To climb I had to sheathe my sword. Fear
propelled me. I swarmed up the face of the cliff as he hoarsely called directions
so I need not pause and look, for if I had hesitated, they would have grabbed me.

“Up three hands, now right, another hand farther, so you see it? There! Your foot
to where your knee is. In a half step. There, that’s right. Push up, it’s wide enough
to hold you. See my left foot? Let go with your left hand. You grab where my foot
was…”

So we climbed, me sweating from the pain that flamed in my arms
and hands. I was so exhausted I was shaking, but I was not going to lose him.

He disappeared over the rim, then reappeared to haul me up beside him. I shrugged
out of the pack. We lay panting side by side. The length of my blade was pressed into
me by the weight of his leg alongside mine. I rested on my back, staring at the pewter
bowl of the sky and what appeared to me now as the high white wall of the palace rising
behind my head exactly as I had seen it before I had entered. Vai lay on his stomach,
and he appeared to be looking over the edge of an escarpment as he stared into the
pit we had escaped. I had to shut my eyes because I could not tell which direction
was up. I felt dizzy. His ragged breathing was all the sign I needed to know that
he, too, was fighting the toll taken by our exertions.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” I said. “We’ve got to reach the jade doors and retrieve
Queen Anacaona’s head. Someone is sure to come after us.”

“We need to retrieve
what
?” Vai sat up as if he had finally woken out of a bad dream.

I opened my eyes. “I’ll explain later. There’s a jade door with warded ground somewhere
along this exterior. We can cross there.”

We stumbled to our feet as I hoisted the pack. Vai stowed the tools and slung on the
carpenter’s apron. His face was gray with exhaustion, but he trudged forward stubbornly.
My entire body hurt as we staggered along the rim of the palace.

I wanted to ask Vai if he saw the white stone walls rising beside us, if he saw a
plaza stretching to all sides like a sheep-mown pasture, but the effort of forming
words was too great. All I could do was look ahead, hoping we would soon reach the
jade door and its warded ground.

A cloud of crows swept past, flying as before a blow. Wind sheared across my back.
I faltered, looking over my shoulder. A wrath of clouds boiled toward us. Lightning
flashed, although no thunder sounded. Rain lashed the ground in sheets.

I had seen that storm before. I knew what it portended.

I grabbed Vai’s hand. “It’s my sire coming. We’ve got to run.”

Light flashed on the horizon ahead of us. It splintered into a smoky
tide like the crests of multiple waves tumbling toward us: a dragon’s dream.

Vai’s hand tightened on mine as he sucked in a harsh breath.

We were caught between Hunt and dream, between death and obliteration.

A plain black coach rolled up, pulled by four white horses whose hooves did not quite
touch the ground. A coachman sat on the front of the box. He had the white skin and
short, spiky, lime-whitened hair of a man of Celtic birth. He wore a plain black coat,
thin leather gloves, and a hat that he tipped up with the handle of his whip, greeting
us. The footman hanging on at the back of the coach was no man but an eru; she appeared
as a woman with black skin, short black hair, a third eye in the center of her forehead,
and her wings neatly furled. She did not let go of the coach. Instead the door swung
open. My sire beckoned from the interior.

“Best hurry,” he said with a calm smile. “This coach is a refuge, a sort of warded
ground all on its own. The tide is coming in fast. You’ll be safe inside here.”

His sober dash jacket and neat black trousers made him look like a humble clerk on
the way to his day’s work at his master’s offices. You would never have guessed he
had recently hunted down and killed some poor soul in the mortal world, and then been
forced to bow before the spirit courts and have all that power ripped from him to
feed them instead. Not until you looked into his eyes. His gaze had as much mercy
as a knife in the dark.

“Do you imagine we believe you?” asked Vai in the tone of a man at his supper who
has just been told that the crust of bread set before him is the haunch of beef he
requested.

“I imagine you have no choice but to join me. I have something of yours, Cat.” He
indicated the Taino basket in which I kept the cacica’s head.

“How could you get that?” I demanded.

“I saw you hang it on the tree. Best hurry, Daughter.”

I looked at Vai, and Vai looked at me.

A smile brightened his weary face too briefly, but it was enough to strengthen me.
There is more than one way to skin a cat. There were
two doors in the coach, one that opened onto the spirit world and one that opened
into the mortal world.

Vai nodded.

I swung up into the interior of the coach and gripped my sire’s arms so he could not
slam the door in Vai’s face and thus leave him outside at the mercy of the tide.

“Father! I missed you so much!” I leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, my lips warm
against his cold, cold skin.

I had the intense pleasure of watching my sire blink in bewildered astonishment.

Before he could react, I snatched the basket off the seat and slung it over my body.
Then I clambered past him. Grabbing the latch, I pushed down with all my strength.

It did not budge. It did not shift at all.

I hissed, “Open up, I beg you.”