Spiritwalker 3: Cold Steel (77 page)

“He’s still alive,” I said stubbornly.

“We’ll find him.”

As Camjiata’s army withdrew to set up camp, men and women armed with muskets, axes,
and looted swords settled in to guard the barricades through the night. Brennan and
Kehinde shook my hand,
and Rory’s, too, for after all, they had spent a lot more time with Rory even than
I had.

“Brennan and I will remain for another month at least,” said Kehinde. “We’ll be assisting
the locals as they draw up a charter for the governance of Lutetia. You can find us
if you need us.”

“May Fortune smile on you in your search,” added Brennan.

Bee led the way with a lantern. We ventured through the shattered remains of the grand
encampment that days ago had been the scene of so much life. A scorched vendor’s cart
lay tipped over, wheels broken. A dog nosed through the ashy remains of rounds of
cheese. The shine of my candle’s flame surprised a scurry of rats swarming a corpse,
burrowing in through eyes and mouth. Thin children knelt beside a soldier, tugging
a ring and a watch from the body.

Lights rose and fell as might tiny fire boats atop waves, marking the paths of men
and women who also searched. We discovered a half-conscious man with a crushed foot
and torn scalp. This nameless soldier Rory and I hauled awkwardly between us as he
slipped in and out of awareness, calling for his mother. He was a Lutetian, no taller
than me, and very young. I could not bear to leave him, and I was grateful when we
found an old man driving a cart with wounded men in it bound for Red Mount. We sat
on the tailgate and bumped along, helping the man gather in more wounded until the
wagon was full.

On the Cena Road, men with lanterns were pulling corpses off the road to allow traffic
through. Bee tied her shawl over her mouth and nose. “Doesn’t the stench trouble you,
Cat?”

“I don’t have the leisure to be troubled.” I hopped off the wagon and hailed an older
man with an avuncular face. “What happened here, Uncle?”

“The Tarrant lord Marius and his troop made their last stand, is what happened. Too
bad, for he fought well.”

“Is the lord dead?”

“How should I know, lass? I heard he was chopped to pieces, and I heard he was wounded
and carried off by the Iberians. This is no place for lasses on a night when men are
drunk with blood and victory.”

“I’m looking for my husband.”

He sighed. “May the Three Mothers aid you in your search, then. Good fortune.”

As he trudged away, I called after the wagon. “Rory! Bee! Bring the lantern. We’ll
know a cold mage is close if the flame dies.”

“I can’t smell anyone in this nasty stench,” muttered Rory as he handed the lantern
to Bee. “But maybe I can find him by his clothes.”

“Blessed Tanit! How many dead there are!” Yet Bee gamely brandished the wrought-iron
candle lantern over corpses laid in neat ranks like firewood. “Wouldn’t it be easier
to go to the manor house and find the cacica?”

A hundred paces away, soldiers were searching through a roadside ditch. “Ah! Curse
it! The cursed sword bit me!”

“Here, stand aside, you prickless worm. Let me—Ah! Curse it! It burns!”

With drawn sword I ran to their lamps. “What have you there? Let me see.”

“Oo! What pretty girl assaults us…?”

I bared my teeth at their insolent grimaces. Something in my demeanor made the men
retreat. The sword lay grimed by dirt, but I knew it as Vai’s cold steel instantly.
I snatched it up with my right hand. Such a black tide of wild anger swept me that
for a moment I went blind.

Rory shouldered up beside us. “Cat, best we move out of here before there is trouble.”

“I’ll cause trouble,” I said, taking a step toward the men that made them hurry away.

Bee and Rory pulled me back and led me along the drive to Red Mount. Wounded men lay
on the gravel of the two courtyards, packed like fish in a barrel. The awful stink
blended with their cries and groans. Surgeons and healers worked by lamplight, assisted
by soldiers and by elderly women bringing water for the injured. Mostly men just lay
there, awaiting some distant hour when an exhausted doctor would finally take a quick
glance at them.

“Cat, what about the cacica?” Bee repeated. “I tried to say this before, but you don’t
listen. If you can talk to her in a mirror, perhaps she can see the well of Andevai’s
power and lead you to him.”

Blessed Tanit! Why hadn’t I thought of that?

I swayed, leaning on Bee. “Rory, go and fetch our things. We’ll meet by the well.
Bee, you look through the sheds. I’m going to see if I
can find Lord Marius. I give this sword into your hand, Bee, into your hand only,
until we find Vai again.”

Holding her breath she touched the hilt with a finger. When it did not spark or sting,
she slipped it out of my hand. “Cold steel! Does this mean I need only draw blood
to kill?”

“No. Only if you are a cold mage. But no weapon will shatter this one.”

She tested its balance, then both she and Rory hurried off.

With shadows drawn tight around me, I crept into the stone house to see if I could
find Lord Marius. He was still alive, lying on a couch in a sitting room with eight
wounded officers. To my surprise Marshal Aualos was seated in a chair beside the couch,
joking with Lord Marius as they shared a bottle of whiskey. Lord Marius’s color was
sallow, and his eyes glazed with pain, but he could still laugh as the Iberian officer
told a lewd story about a man who had mistaken his wife for a sheep. Lord Marius’s
left arm had been mangled into a pulp.

Doctor Asante and her attendants entered. She spared only a glance for Marius’s arm
before she examined the other wounded officers. “Your arm will have to come off, Lord
Marius. Marshal, please leave. I prefer to do my work without an audience.” As the
marshal and his aides left, she examined each man. “This one is dead. Take him out.
Those two I cannot help and this one…”

Lord Marius had not the strength to heave himself up on his good arm but he watched
her with a keen gaze. “Doctor, is there nothing you can do for my aide, young Butu?
He’s not sixteen. My cousin’s son.”

“My apologies, Lord Marius, but his belly has been opened. I have no way to heal such
an injury. However, with some luck and a little cooperation, you may recover.”

“But never fight again.”

“Men battle with their minds far more than with swords. Do you mean to retreat to
your country estate and never again involve yourself in politics?”

“Are you an Amazon, Doctor? Why else would a woman walk the battlefield?”

“I was an Amazon for many years, but now I am chief of the general’s medical corps.”

“He has placed a woman in charge?”

“I am a woman,” she agreed with the raised eyebrows of a person who has heard the
comment once too often to be amused by the necessity of explaining one more time.
“I also am a doctor. If you have some objection to my expertise, I can send another
person to tend to you.”

“No, no.” He chuckled although it hurt him. “I am sure you will treat me as tenderly
as would my mother, were she still with us. The folk in our villages would come to
her for lotions and compresses and such healing craft. I do not fear your touch. I
am just surprised by the presence of women in the army. Women give life. It is not
their place in the world to kill.”

“Only to be killed? I do not like the sound of that conundrum, my lord. So I will
ask you this: Does the she-wolf not hunt the same as her mate?” She spoke the words
while staring straight at me, then crossed the room to the hearth where I stood out
of the way. Setting her bag on a table, she pretended to look through it while speaking
in a whisper. “What creature are you, that carries a spirit blade and waits in the
shadows?”

“You’re a fire mage,” I breathed. “Only trolls and fire mages can see my sword when
I’m hidden.”

“Sharp Diana! It is you, little cat!”

“Why do you call me that?”

“It is what Daniel called you after I had washed you and placed you yowling in his
arms. Know this, Catherine. He loved you the moment he saw you. We all did.”

“What happened? Who are you?” I whispered. “What is your place in all this?”

She smiled affectionately, allowing me to glimpse pieces of a story Camjiata had never
known and I had never suspected. “I loved your mother, and she loved me. But under
the law you could only be claimed and protected by male guardianship, and we had to
get Tara out of the prison quickly, for she was to be executed at dawn. Fortunately
she loved Daniel also, and I trusted him. The general has promised me the new code
will change the law so that women may stand equally in guardianship to men.”

For the space of several breaths I had no words. But at length I murmured what abruptly
seemed clear. “After Camjiata’s defeat and capture, they were coming to find you,
weren’t they? When they died.”

Truth is written in the face. Hers had measured suffering, others and her own, and
she had kept walking to do the work she felt called to do even though she, too, had
lost the ones she loved.

“Yet why are you here, child?” she asked gently. “I sense you are come in some desperation.
You may always apply to me for aid, little cat.”

My heart beat so hard. “Some day, Doctor, I pray we will have time to speak at length.
But right now I’m looking for my husband.”

She nodded. “The cold mage whom James Drake hates so very much.”

“Doctor! Why do you mumble? What am I seeing there, a sword and a shadow…” In his
grievously wounded state, Lord Marius had slipped partway into the threads that bind
the worlds. “Camulos’s Balls! It is Cat Barahal! Have you crept in to kill me? Is
this what became of Amadou?”

Doctor Asante’s two assistants were busy preparing the table for the surgery. I unwrapped
the shadows and crossed to kneel beside the couch. “I told you the truth about Amadou
Barry.”

“He was ever a fool about that girl,” he murmured, eyes rolling back at a stab of
pain.

The doctor said, “We need to operate.”

Desperate, I grasped Lord Marius’s uninjured hand. “Please. I’m looking for my husband.
I heard he was last seen going to aid some cold mages seconded to your battalion.”

“Ah!” Was that a wince of physical agony, or had he seen a sight he dreaded to tell
me of?

My heart pinched until I could not breathe and thought I might faint. “Tell me!”

“He never once drew his sword although I know cold steel in the hand of a cold mage
need only draw blood to cut life from the body. His one concern was to kill fire,
to save as many lives as he could. I think he must have spared twenty cold mages who
would otherwise have been burned like torches by the enemy’s fire mages. He could
have escaped into Lutetia, but he came after us because there were three young cold
mages seconded to my troop, and he knew they would be killed or enslaved.” He winced.
“He bore the brunt of magical attacks whose impact I could neither see nor understand.
As we
were surrounded and made our last stand, the truth is that he collapsed.”

A tear seared my cheek. “Dead?”

“He was never hit by any physical weapon. More like he collapsed from exhaustion.”

“Blessed Tanit!” I murmured. “Too much cold magic for too long with no rest.”

“Then I was wounded,” mumbled Lord Marius in a fevered recollection. “The red-haired
fire mage took him. Threw his limp body over a horse and rode off with his company.”

My heart stopped.

“Where?” I cried.

“I did not see…” He passed out.

“If I do not amputate the arm, he will die.” Doctor Asante took my arm, then kissed
me on the forehead, as a mother might. Finally she released me and turned to her patient.

In a daze I walked to the door. In the passageway I leaned against the wall. My legs
had stopped working. Out of the sitting room issued the grinding scrape of a saw punctuated
by the grunts and gasps of a man trying not to scream. Driven on as if lashed by a
whip, I staggered back to the north courtyard and there sagged against the well in
utter despair and confusion. Despite everything, I was so exhausted that I fell asleep.

Bee tugged me awake. “You can’t believe who I found.”

I bolted up. “Vai!”

“No. Juba!”

“Juba? Haübey!” The spark of hope dimmed, then flared. “Has Rory returned yet? What
if he couldn’t find the basket?”

“Calm down, dearest.” She pressed her forehead against mine and bent her will to soothe
my heart as her gaze pinned mine with bitter intensity. “Calm down.”

She led me into the barn. Rory was sitting in a quiet corner, holding the hand of
a dying man. He smiled, indicating the basket and satchel at his side. Bee grabbed
them and made me follow her farther in.

Haübey worked by lamplight in a stall carpeted with straw. An oil lamp held by a Taino
soldier made a shimmering splendor of the trickling streams of blood oozing across
the chest of a wounded man. With a precise stitch Haübey was sewing up a frightful
gash that ran from
the man’s shoulder to below his breastbone. Despite the urgency that nipped at my
heels like wolves, I had the decency to wait.

The Taino prince Haübey, called Juba by Europans, resembled his brother Caonabo in
every particular except that his black hair fell only to his shoulders rather than
halfway down his back. His air of intensity sat in marked contrast to Caonabo’s reserved
demeanor. Also, Haübey had a fresh scar over his right eye. I had forgotten he was
a healer. Although not a fire mage like his brother, he had been trained in a behique’s
knowledge even if he had not the full store of a behique’s power.

Bee’s gaze was fixed on Haübey as if judging where to aim her axe blow the best to
split his head in two. “I haven’t shown myself to him yet. I felt no fear in confronting
the general, yet I hesitate now.” Her fingers crushed my hand until I grunted in pain.

Finishing, he rose as he wiped blood off his hands. He nodded curtly, if absently,
at me, then looked again. “The fire bane’s lost woman! I had heard you walked with
the general.” His gaze tracked past me, and his eyes widened. “Beatrice!” He uttered
her name so throbbingly that, had I not been heartless, exhausted, and desperately
in search of my beloved, I should have blushed. “Why are you not in Sharagua with
my brother?”