Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (45 page)

It was a comforting thought, soon succeeded by annoyance as I dodged out of the way
of wheeled vehicles and hurried onto quieter lanes behind a man pushing a wheelbarrow
full of bricks.

Gracious Melqart! Andevai’s high-handed style really did display him in a most unflattering
light. Four Moons House had a lot to answer for in its treatment of him, but he was
not innocent of fault. His vanity dovetailed with his pride to make arrogance easy
for him. Yet his plan had worked. Now he could keep them off guard with raging and
sulking until Bee and I completed our business.

Rory was lounging in the hostel’s parlor with a mug of beer in one hand and a dozing
toddler on his lap as he charmed the woman who ran the place. With her ash-blonde
hair and skin the color of milk, she looked as if her ancestors had lived in this
region since before the Romans came.

“Where is Bee?” I asked.

He waggled his eyebrows. “She went for a walk, though I begged her to wait until you
returned. Maestra Artia says there’s been a dreadful epidemic at the New Academy.”

“All the pupils were sent home!” The woman was eager to tell the tale again. “When
my husband’s cousin’s wife’s nephew went to deliver a wagonload of turnips and onions
in his usual way, he was turned back from the gate by that strange young man who looks
like
a ghostly spirit. Several of the servants have died. On no account is anyone to enter
the grounds.”

“What of the headmaster?”

“A high and mighty nobleman, they say, though I never saw him. He lingers on his deathbed!”

“How frightful!” I exclaimed, and seeing that she was not likely to leave the room
without provocation, I surreptitiously pinched the toddler so hard the poor child
woke up wailing.

After she apologetically carried off the screaming baby, Rory turned on me. “Cat!
How could you? He peed on my arm!”

“Bee won’t be able to stop herself from poking her nose in a little farther. I’m going
after her. You must lie low until we return.” I explained the situation.

“How can they wish to shoot me? They don’t even know me!”

“Go wash your jacket. Stay alert and stay inside.”

I walked out of town on the old Roman road that led south along the river to the city
of Colonia. For once it was pleasant to have only my own thoughts for company. As
much as I loved Vai and trusted his strength and loyalty, Bee had been right: He was
not always a restful person to be with. Bee was not a restful person either, but my
heart could never truly be at peace unless I knew she was safe, and I wasn’t ever
wholly happy except when she was near. I hurried, eager to reach her.

At the third mile marker I reached a large estate. A towering hedge blocked my view
of the land. I passed a massive iron gate closed across a pretty lane lined by evergreen
cypress trees. The drive cut through landscaped grounds to a distant compound house
set back by the river. On the opposite side of the gate, the impenetrable hedge gave
way to a row of larger cypress grown close enough to block the view toward the river.

“Cat! Here!” Bee peeked through cypress branches.

I hopped over the roadside ditch and shoved through the branches. Before I could inform
her of what an idiot she was to go tramping off without me, she dragged me out of
sight behind the cypress. Inside the estate grounds, we hid in a copse of trees of
white-barked alder, ringed by yet more cypress. The trees concealed a set of marble
benches whose bases were carved with what I first took for serpents and then realized
depicted swimming dragons with tapered wings, elongated muzzles, and smoky breath.

“Why didn’t you wait for me?” I demanded. “Any terrible calamity could have befallen
you! Anyway, I’m so aggravated, Bee, because nothing is going as planned!”

She listened as I explained what had happened. “I trust you did not suffer any mistreatment
while staying overnight there!”

Sadly, I blushed, thinking of how we had started on the bed and ended on the table.

“Not that I need hear any details!” she said, laughing. “I have come to agree with
the Romans in this. An excess of passion is clearly the sign of a undisciplined mind.”

“Vai is not undisciplined!”

She smiled in the manner of a general contemplating sweet victory. “I wasn’t talking
about him.”

In the distance dogs began barking, a clamor that built to a frantic yipping. We leaped
to our feet.

“Fiery Shemesh!” Bee exclaimed. “I thought we would be safely hidden here!”

A huge dog with teeth bared charged through the trees, followed by a slavering pack
of equally gigantic hounds. They erupted into a deafening frenzy of yips and barks
as they surrounded us. I brandished my cane, wishing desperately that it were a sword.

“Behave!” she proclaimed in her orator’s voice. They ceased barking and flattened
themselves, ears back. Waggling forward, they acted like courtiers who have fallen
out of favor and wish to regain the approval of a mercurial queen. She deigned to
allow them to lick her hand and grovel at her feet.

“Gracious Melqart, Bee! You have always had a way with dogs, although I cannot imagine
why except that dogs have no discrimination whatsoever, for they will adore anyone
who feeds them!”

At the sound of my voice, several growled.

“Down!” she cried. Their growls ceased. She glanced at me with a triumphant smile.
“Didn’t Andevai win your heart by feeding you? Care to try your fortune with these?
I swear on Melqart’s Axe I will only let them bite off one of your hands.”

“Bee, someone is coming.”

My warning came too late. The cypress branches parted to reveal a ghost-pale figure
wearing a midnight-blue dash jacket under a plain wool coat. The headmaster’s assistant
stared, mouth agape. Kemal Napata was an albino of Avarian ancestry, which meant he
had extremely pale skin and straw-colored hair but also broad cheekbones and eyes
with an epicanthic fold to mark him as a man whose ancestry resides in the distant
East. His surprise was certainly greater than our own. After all I had done and said
in the last year, I could easily recognize the look of frustrated longing and struggling
restraint that tightened his expression.

“Beatrice Hassi Barahal!”

“Maester Kemal Napata,” she echoed with a graceful courtesy. “Please, if you will,
call off your hounds. I do not fear them, for they are quite loving, but I confess
to some anxiety that they have taken a dislike to my dear cousin Cat, mistaking her
name for her character.”

At the academy we had jokingly called him the headmaster’s dog for his doglike loyalty,
but I examined him with a fresh perspective now. He had a stocky frame and an appealing
face once you became accustomed to his unusual coloring. More importantly, as the
headmaster’s assistant, he must know things most people did not.

I said, “Begging your pardon, Maester Napata, but is the headmaster a dragon?”

His gaze skipped off Bee and landed on me. “Amun’s Horns! You both must leave at once.”

A gust of wind thundered through the cypresses. The white branches of alder lashed.
A heavy weight thumped. Whimpering, the hounds huddled behind Bee.

A claw with talons as long as my arm raked between two cypress trees. Smoky mist spun
through branches, which crisped to brown as if scorched by heat. The thin carpet of
snow in the circle melted so fast that one moment we were standing on white and the
next in seeps of water. A very large creature gave a very large
huff
that so scared me I dropped my cane.

Trees parted as a head thrust through. Its skin was scaled with obsidian flakes that
both devoured and reflected light. Its eyes were as big as my head, so fulgent a green
that they shone.

My enemy.

What instinctive force clawed up from my gut I did not know; I only knew that this
was my enemy and I had to kill it or be killed.

Yet its gaze paralyzed me. In its eyes lay memories like shadows.

I saw a curly-haired man lift a little girl up to stand on the lower railing of a
large, flat ferryboat. He braced himself to steady her. A crippled woman limped up
next to them as they stared across a wide river. The little girl was babbling nonstop
about her lovely new boots and whether there were any biscuits left to eat and if
they would have to sleep in the coach once they got across the river and could she
possibly hold on at the back of the next coach with the guard if she was very very
good. Her parents smiled fondly at her and apologetically at the other passengers
crowding on, some of whom winced away from the woman’s scarred face and empty sleeve.
The ferry juddered as it cast off from the shore and began tacking across the powerful
current. The woman pressed a hand protectively on her rounded belly. Wind whipped
up the girl’s long black braid. The ferry bucked as if wrenched by an invisible hand,
and some passengers cried out in fear. But with each tilt and dip of the boat, the
girl shrieked with excited glee as she leaned trustingly into her father’s arms. She
galloped her little carved horse through empty air, and with a bright smile at her
mother, she said—

“Cat! Step back!”

Too late. The vast jaws of the predator opened as the ferry tipped, took on water,
and sank as quickly as a stone, so fast that no one had a chance to scream. The railing
scraped the girl’s hand as she clung to it, then lost hold. A rumble was all the voice
the river had as it tore her father away from her. Her mother’s hand gripped hers
with such desperate strength, but as her blood welled up from the scrape and dissolved
into the water, she faded out of her mother’s grasp.

Delicately the beast closed its mouth over my body. Then I was drowning in a sea of
smoke.

In the depths of the ice, wreathed in ice, sleeps the Wild Hunt. When it is woken,
all tremble in fear.

In the depths of the black abyss, there drift in a watery stupor the Taninim, called
also leviathans, and when they wake, their lashing tails smash ships into splinters
and drive the sundered hulks under the waves.

In the depths of earth, wreathed in fire, lies coiled in slumber the Mother of All
Dragons. Her smoky breath fills the ocean of dreams. She stirs, waking, and the world
changes.

So we are told.

But of all the great powers in this world, one thing was certain.

No one could screech as loudly as Bee when she was truly outraged.

“LET. HER. GO!”

Thumps hammered its body, small fists pounding the leviathan’s massive flanks.

“How dare you? After I almost died unearthing a nest, is this how you repay me?”

Then she kicked him.

I wasn’t sure how I knew she had done that, only that I was spat out amid a rain of
pebbles. After a moment the hail ceased. A dog crept up to me, ears down, and apologetically
licked my face.

“Pah!” I shoved the animal away when it looked as if it meant to lick me again. Grabbing
my cane, I staggered to my feet and spun to face the monster.

Bee sat on a bench beside the headmaster as Kemal Napata hovered anxiously behind.
The headmaster had his hands on his knees,
looking winded. His seamed black face and tall, slender frame looked exactly as I
remembered them from Adurnam: those of an elderly man of Kushite ancestry with a scholarly
demeanor and a calm heart. Sparks of green lit his eyes before fading into brown.
The hounds swarmed over to press close to his feet.

Bee was in full spate, like the spring flood.

“I don’t care if her sire is the Master of the Wild Hunt and if the spirit courts
are the most ancient enemies of your kind. I never asked to walk the dreams of dragons!
Someone else decided on my behalf! Furthermore, when you tricked me into crossing
into the spirit world, I almost died to save those hatchlings! And after all that,
I am meant to watch while my dearest cousin is
eaten
?”

“Maestressa, you cannot speak to the noble prince in such a tone,” said Kemal, aghast,
for Bee was leaning toward the headmaster as if her next move would be to punch him.

“What do you mean, I can’t speak to him in that tone? I
am
speaking to him in that tone, now that I know he is not a prince of Kemet at all
but rather an impostor slithering about the world with some manner of secretive plot
in hand that involves the death of perfectly gentle, mild, and blameless young women!”

By the angry flush mottling his cheeks, Kemal appeared as if he might be reconsidering
his infatuation. Trying to gather up enough breath to speak, I wheezed my way into
a coughing fit.

Bee ran to me. She patted my face. “Dearest! Are you going to live?”

“Really, Bee,” I said in a hoarse voice, “I was quite impressed by that diatribe until
you described yourself as gentle and mild.” I eyed the evidence of the broken branches.

The headmaster got to his feet. Bee and I jumped back. I raised my cane defensively.

“Maestressas, might we retire into the house for a cup of tea? The warm fire would
be welcome to my old bones.”

Bee squeezed my hand. “Surely you can understand that we may be reluctant to enter
a den within whose walls we may be devoured at your leisure.”

“I fear you have read too many lurid tales, Maestressa,” he said in so kindly a manner
that I began to think he must have reached the little grove of trees just in time
to banish the monster, for this harmless old
man could surely not have been the monster himself. “You will be safe within the house.
I do not eat human flesh.”

“I heard half of your manservants have died,” Bee said rudely. “Did you eat them?”

He sighed. “Yes.”

Bee opened her mouth and then, after all, could grapple no words onto her tongue.

I pushed her behind me and swashed with my cane. “Back away slowly and we’ll make
a break for it,” I muttered.

“Yes, I ate them,” he repeated, “but they were not men.”

“What were they, then?” she asked. “Trolls? And why did you try to eat Cat?”