Cold Fire

18

Clut-clut-clut.

The sound penetrated my dulled mind the way Bee’s little sister Astraea’s whining complaints in time pierced even the most heartlessly impervious. Not because you cared, but because you just wanted it to stop.

The basket pitched. I grasped at the rope railing, clinging as my rescuers hauled in the rest of their catch. First came Abby, then Drake. Was he glowing slightly?

I shut my eyes. Glittering salt crystals poured onto the sand in the shape of a man’s body, hissing away as the sea dissolved them. I had killed two men. Yet were they still men if their minds and maybe their souls had been eaten?

As the basket rocked again, I looked up. The knife man and the woman who had laughed swung easily into the basket and rolled up the ladder behind them. Abby was led toward the stern by a young man who had his arm around her. A seventh individual, small and agile, clambered in the rigging to investigate the bloated creature above us. An eighth person fiddling at the stern of the basket worked a crank. As the clut-clut-clut increased its clamor, the creature under which we labored began ponderously to part the currents of air. Heat rose from a metal cylinder like the breath of a dragon, pouring upward into the oblong whale with its thrumming skin.

We were sailing in an airship.

A small airship, to be sure, but an airship nonetheless.

I pulled myself up to see the isle falling away behind us, looking like leviathan at rest in the midst of the slumbering sea. The wind rumbled in my ears. Knife man and the woman who had laughed braced themselves against the basket, examining me. They were kissed by the pearly glamour of a waxing moon now sliding free from clouds.

Drake settled beside me. “You were slow. You need to do a better job following orders.”

“Yes, certainly I was slow, since it’s every day I have an opportunity to be trapped on an island filled with victims of the salt plague and then be rescued by buccaneers in an airship. No reason to be surprised by any of that!”

The eerie glow around his person had faded, but his blue eyes shimmered. “Please don’t be so annoying.”

I was so angry that I thought maybe the top of my head was going to blow off. And, if we were fortunate, propel the airship faster. “You lied to me!”

“Maku bastard!” The man who had had his arm around Abby grabbed Drake’s shoulder, threatening with a hand in a fist. “She mind rotted. Yee promised to heal she!”

Drake’s eyes burned hot blue. “Take your hand off me. Or I’ll burn it off.”

Knife man rocked the basket. Abby’s man stumbled to his knees. Drake caught himself clumsily, bellying against the basket’s rim. I shifted to balance, and the woman who had laughed grinned at me.

The young man burst into tears. “She me dear good sister. Dey behiques tell we it too late. Den dey take she a Salt Island. But den we hear dat in Expedition der some folk can heal any salter. Dat how I find yee. Now she don’ know she own name. She don’ know me, she own brother.”

“She is healed. There’s no salt plague in her. You have what I could save. And you thank me for the risks I took by assaulting me?”

“God’s blessing for saving she,” wept the young man.

Drake rested a hand on the man’s plaited hair. “What happened to the salter who bit her?”

“We drive dat salter in a pit and we pour salted water over he.”

“That was done well. I would have acted sooner, but if I had, I would have been arrested and imprisoned and she would never have gotten off Salt Island. Go back to her. She needs you.”

With both hands on the guide rope the brother staggered back to where Abby sat as in a stupor at the stern, her hands lax on the untidy mess of her rumpled pagne.

I shook out and retied my pagne. I was not ready to talk about Abby. “Drake, when did you leave Adurnam? What happened to the general? Why are you here?”

“I’m here because Expedition is my home. I was born in the Ordovici territories, but I left home at seventeen. I’ve lived in Expedition Territory for twelve years. Once my business in Adurnam was complete, I sailed back to Expedition.”

“What was your business in Adurnam?”

“Why, to rescue the general and bring him over the ocean to Expedition.”

“He’s in Expedition?”

“At the moment, he is not. He went west to a city called Sharagua to pay his respects to the cacique’s court and person.”

“You didn’t travel with him?”

“In the Taino kingdom, all fire mages serve the cacique. So I’m forbidden from traveling into Taino country. I wouldn’t want to anyway. Their laws are unreasonably strict. They won’t allow me to heal people.”

“Heal people? You burned those salters alive!”

“I used them as catch-fires, that’s true. Was that life, what they suffered? I ended their misery through a quick, merciful death that healed Abby. To burn out all the teeth in someone as far advanced in the disease as she was would have killed me. I think it was a fair trade.”

“So speaks the man who said he could heal me if I would just have sex with him.”

“Cat, you were drunk. You can’t expect to have understood exactly what I meant. Anyway, I thought you knew your own mind. You’re an independent young woman, traveling on your own. And you’re a Phoenician girl.”

I put a hand on my sword’s hilt. “I would be very cautious about what you say next.”

He took a step away from me just as it occurred to me that it might be a mistake to make a fire mage angry. But his voice remained patient. “I meant only that a young woman of your background can do as she wishes. I would never have suggested otherwise had I thought you were under the thumb of a father or brother.” He smiled pleasantly. “Or beholden to a husband.”

I could not speak out of sheer choked consternation. My cheeks flamed.

Then he surprised me. “My sincerest apologies, Cat. I meant no harm, and certainly no disrespect. A remarkably pretty girl like you is hard to resist.” He raised both hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I hope we can make peace.”

“Whatever else,” I muttered grudgingly, “you did get me off Salt Island.”

“So I did.” With a nod, he groped his way by guide rope to the stern, where he began to chat with the sterns-man at his rudder.

I did not want to drown in my anger, so I went over and knelt beside Abby. “I’m so sorry,” I said to her brother.

“I know yee,” she said with that horribly puzzled smile.

She began to comb through the tangles of my hair with her fingers. I did not want to interrupt something that comforted her, so I settled cross-legged in front of her. Knife man brought over a comb, and Abby worked through my hair, never yanking although the snarls seemed intractable. The woman who had laughed offered me a gourd bottle, and I swallowed a juice that made my eyes water and my mouth sting. Or maybe I was just tired and shaken. With Abby still combing my hair, my eyes fluttered and shut.

I woke leaning against the side of the basket, my hair a smooth curtain falling over my shoulders to my hips. Abby stood at the prow of the basket with her brother, his arm around her, watching phosphorus dance its glamour on the waves. Staring into their future, which must have seemed very dark. Wasn’t it sometimes better to be dead?

I shut my eyes rather than look.

I woke as the air changed, and we bucked like a skittish horse. The clut-clut-clut slowed to a lazy clunk-cluunk-cluuunk. I rose. We drifted over land, a hulking beast of ridges grown with a breathing exhalation of forest. I remembered Bee’s sketches of airships. What had seemed funny then, when she had drawn hapless passengers falling from the basket to deaths far below, seemed indecent now. Easy to joke about a thing you have no experience of and will never suffer.

Off to our right, firelight dappled a hollow.

Knife man paid out the ladder, and the woman who had laughed went over with a grace and strength I admired. I grasped Abby’s hand just before she went over, and she smiled at me, and her brother said, “Thank yee, maku,” in a way that made me glad she had been saved, even what was left of her. Even in the face of the deaths of others, two of which I had caused. Even so.

Over they went, climbing away into a life hidden from me. Below, on the ground, a rushlight shivered into life. After some time, it wavered away and vanished. The woman who had laughed swung a leg back over and hopped in. We began to move as knife man hauled the ladder back up.

A shape dropped beside me, startling me so badly I cried out. The fourth crewman was a petite, white-haired woman with a lined and leathery black face, her eyes hidden behind goggles. Her sleeveless singlet exposed wiry arms, and she wore loose trousers, a harness with four knives, and a bracelet molded in the shape of a running wolf. She said a word whose meaning I could not guess at, and swung back up into the rigging.

“Uncommon quiet, this night.” The woman who had laughed leaned companionably beside me against the basket’s rim. The land slumbered silent beneath like behemoth asleep. We watched together. I was content not to speak, and she felt no need to chatter. After a while, knife man moved up on my other side.

“We saw what yee wrought, there on the beach,” murmured the woman. “That blade yee carry turned them to salt. They dissolved when salt water washed them. Yon fire mage never saw. Peradventure, yee don’ mean to tell him.”

Under the circumstances, I settled on a truthful answer. “I don’t. Do you plan to tell him?”

“We’s paid for the conveyance, that only. Not for secrets.”

I smiled, for she sounded exactly like my uncle, scion of the Hassi Barahal clan that made its living stealing and selling secrets. “Who are you, if I may ask?”

“Folk hired to do a job,” she answered.

“Yon fire mage is right, yee know,” said knife man, the weight of him very noticeable on my other side.

“About what?”

“It were a kindness to let they salters die.” He nodded toward my belt. “No ordinary manner of blade, that one.”

I fixed a hand possessively on the hilt. “Only my hand can wield it.”

He said, “Surely bound to yee. Some manner of cemi.”

“It’s just a sword.”

The woman laughed with a kind of wavering howl. It was not a laugh I would soon forget.

“Have it that way, then, Perdita.” Knife man grinned. “Kiskeya is a beauty, is she not?”

“Who is Kiskeya?” I asked, pleased I could frame a useful question to move the topic on.

“Why, Kiskeya is this island. She is the mother of we all.”

The hills plunged in jagged shadows down to the foamy white rim of a beach. The airship skipped and rolled as air currents eddied and battered us from two directions. Then we turned and headed parallel along the coastline. Under the moon’s light, the sea became a dark mirror in which stars were caught. I smelled a flowery fragrance, a heady perfume blown into my face by the night wind. A bird called in a mournful loop. Far in the distance, I saw a shimmering glow as of a city burning night candles.

“What city is that?” I asked.

“Expedition,” said the woman.

“So this island is part of the Taino kingdom. While Expedition is a free city on this island ruled by mage Houses and princes. But how could a free city have been established here?”

“When the first fleet, that one out of Mali, come across the Atlantic, it come to land here, on the south shore of Kiskeya. The island was then ruled by many caciques, each with he own territory. One of these caciques, named Caonabo, dealt with the fleet’s officers. He gave them territory in exchange for allowing the Taino to trade and ship through they port.”

“And in exchange for the maku not starting a war,” said knife man with a sardonic chuckle.

“Is that where the law about the salt plague comes from? The one that all salters or anyone bitten by a salter have to be quarantined on Salt Island?”

“Yee have it right,” she said. “’Tis all written down in the first treaty, that one which established Expedition Territory. But yee’s mistaken in thinking Expedition ruled by princes and mages. A Council rule in Expedition. Why, mages is not even allowed to form professional associations or corporations or guilds in any wise. The Council don’ like mages much. So besides the insult to Taino law for a take yee two gals off Salt Island, Expedition’s wardens shall be after yon fire mage for another reason. Because in Expedition ’tis against the law for a fire mage to use a catch-fire.”

“Will you tell them?”

“Not good for business to tell tales,” said knife man.

“The Taino on Salt Island shall tell them,” said the woman. “Yon fire mage shall have some trouble hereafter.”

I could only hope! But their words puzzled me. “Are there truly no cold mages in Expedition?”

“What is a cold mage?” asked knife man.

I was too surprised to answer, but fortunately the woman did.

“Fire banes,” she said.

“Fire banes? I suppose cold mages could be called fire banes.”

“They who come from Europa speak such stories of fire banes as mighty as hurricanes, but I don’ believe them,” remarked knife man. “Yee ever see such power in a fire bane, gal?”

I was really too astonished to answer. In the east, the light had changed yet again, black of night easing to a charcoal pallor. The wind began to soften as dawn crept up the horizon. We were drifting down, sinking closer to the waves and a length of beach.

“Why would there be no powerful cold mages here?” I asked.

I could see them better now: He was a big man, broad-shouldered and powerful, with black skin and a shaved head. The ropy scar that patterned his left torso was not the only old wound marking a violent life. Yet the woman who had laughed scared me more. Not that I thought she was about to strangle me to get my sword, but that she surveyed me with a measuring eye, as if wondering if I were a secret she could steal and sell to the highest bidder. She could have walked down Adurnam’s streets without looking the least out of place, with brown skin dusted with freckles from constant sun, reddish-brown kinky hair, brown eyes, full lips, and a thin Celtic nose. But then when she laughed, you would shudder.

Knife man smiled. “Because ’tis just a story di maku tell. I hear they don’ even have gaslight in they cities in Europa, so they tell this story about cold mages to fill dem shoes.”

“It’s true!” I retorted indignantly. “In Europa, cold mages can extinguish fires, call down storms of ice and snow, and twist and shatter iron-”

Knife man began to laugh, and he punched me on the shoulder as at a good joke well told. “With dem honest eyes and fierce look, yee almost had me believing, Perdita,” he said, grinning. “Until that yee said about iron. That was too much.”

From the rigging shrilled a whistle.

“Time to go,” said the woman.

“Where are we?”

“Why, we have crossed into Expedition Territory, Perdita. We don’ go into the city. The wardens shall shave off we asses and chop off we hands to decorate the council square. We shall drop yee and yon fire mage at Cow Killer Beach. Yee can find a canoe to take yee along.”

“What’s a canoe?”

Knife man punched me again on the shoulder, not quite so lightly this time. When I held my place by sinking into the blow, his grin widened. “Yee a real maku, ja? New come to the Antilles?”

“A foreigner? Isn’t it obvious?”

He was still grinning, but the amusement faded from his eyes, and it took every thread of courage I had not to step back from the edge that cut through his voice. Not only physical scars can mark you. He was a killer, and not one bit sorry to be so. He just happened to like me, and to have been paid. “Remember, Perdita. Yee a pretty gal, and yee healthy and shapely and with that fine fall of hair. Yee brave, and yee strong, and yee have that cemi yee carry. But Heaven’s Breath, gal, yee are but a babe fallen in wild country.” He raised a hand, forefinger up to scold me. “Don’ yee go getting drunk around men. What yee think will happen?”

He clucked disapprovingly as he shook his head at me, so like a fussing old uncle that I blushed bright red rather than getting angry.

“Yee think about it, Perdita,” he finished, and he went over to toss out the ladder.

The woman had a scar along the line of her jaw, so fine it was easy to miss. “Me grandmother was Phoenician-born. No man ever lied to she daughters and lived to speak of it. For the insult, she’d a stick that arseness of a fire mage with a knife in he gut before he knew what hit him. Then twist it and pull his entrails out, to make sure he suffer longer.”

She wasn’t teasing. “Your grandmother was Phoenician-born! What clan?”

“Don’ go asking, for I don’ want to have to refuse to tell yee. We’s just folk hired to do a job. One piece of advice. Wear long sleeves until that bite heal.”

“My thanks.” I offered a hand in the radical’s manner. With a grin she shook it.

Knife man slapped me hard on the ass as I went over the side. “Don’ forget what I told yee!”

I climbed down first, Drake coming after. As soon as his feet hit the sand, they drew up the ladder. A hand waved; I waved back as the little airship took a course out to sea.

“Cat! Come along!”

He was already halfway down the beach, walking toward a ridge beyond which smoke rose. I winkled out my jacket from the bundle.

“Hurry up!” he called.

“I’m covering the bite with long sleeves.” I considered the boots, and decided it was better to walk barefoot on the sand. “Who were they?”

“Criminals of the worst sort. You must keep the bite covered until it heals. Tell no one where you were. I hope to reach Expedition before any word of the incident on Salt Island gets there. I’ve got to sort out what I have to do, and there’s you besides to complicate my situation.”

Dawn rose as we climbed on a sandy path over the ridge and down to a hamlet ringed by garden plots. Smokehouses steamed with the savory aroma of meat being cured.

Gracious Melqart! I had forgotten how hungry I was!

Women walked out of the forest, carrying pots of water on their heads. Round houses circled a raised plaza paved with stone and a long dirt field where children were playing a game with a ball. Except for the cry of brightly plumed birds, the soft wash of waves, the blat of a goat, and the casual morning chatter of folk and chickens going about their daily business, it was too cursed quiet. If anyone saw us, they gave no sign. We might as well have been ghosts.

“Stay here, Cat,” said Drake.

I waited as he walked to the beach where men were loading baskets and barrels into a pair of long, narrow wooden boats. I watched as he negotiated. The men looked my way, and the bidding got steeper. I knew this dance. They’d be arguing: “Ah, but Maester, you understand that if we add the girl, we’ll have to take out two baskets, and then where’s our profit?”

At length Drake gestured to me, and I walked over, all too aware of the men’s scrutiny.

“Get into the canoe,” Drake said.

“I hate to mention this, but I’m terribly thirsty.”

“I only paid for passage. Have you any funds at all, Cat?”

“Do you think I wouldn’t offer to pay my own way if I could?”

“I wish you would stop that. A simple ‘No’ would suffice.”

I thought it wiser to say nothing, so I clambered into the canoe and arranged my bundle to cushion my backside. He sat in front, his back to me. The men paddled with long blades that cut the water. I clutched the gunnels, too paralyzed at being surrounded by water to worry about thirst.

It was not such a long distance, no more than an hour or three, but my life crawled past my eyes at a creeping baby’s pace and then limped back as an aged crone before we came around a headland. There, spread before us, lay the infamous city of Expedition.

Buildings stretched along a jetty that ran for at least a mile along the shore. At a river’s mouth, the embankment broke into a harbor where masted ships clustered. Proper city walls rose down by the harbor. Where the river opened onto the sea lay a flat island ringed by six skeletal towers like the points of a prince’s coronet, stately airships moored to two of them. On the eastern side of the river, a pall of drifting smoke darkened the morning sky, streaming in billows into the west on a stout wind. Smokestacks grew like shafts of blackened grain. The distant clatter of engine works and busy machines hammered a faint counterpoint to the wind’s bluster and the slap of swells against the canoe’s hull as we parted the waters.

Founded by refugees from the Empire of Mali and their Phoenician shipmasters and allies, the population had swelled with the ranks of criminals, indentured servants, unscrupulous merchants, fortune hunters, and the discontented and maladjusted flotsam and jetsam borne across the ocean from Europa and Africa. More recently, so history told, trolls had emigrated south from their homeland to make common cause with like-minded rats, as Chartji would call them. I wondered if there might be an office of Godwik and Clutch I could approach for aid in securing passage back to Adurnam and Bee once I had accomplished my task.

We passed slim canoes and chubby sailboats, men out fishing who waved to us in a friendly manner that our boatmen returned. We skimmed not toward the river’s mouth and the big wharves where the oceangoing ships lay to harbor but toward a crowded comb of piers farther west. Boats crammed the shore.

I pressed a hand to my breast, feeling the locket’s warmth like a promise that I would soon find a safe haven. Caught by an inexplicably sharp thrill, I leaned forward. The jetty spread before me in all its magnificently confounding bustle, folk hauling and carrying and bargaining and loitering and tossing out line and drawing in skiffs. The life and light of the place seemed about to break over me like the tide of a dragon’s dream.

We bumped up against a pier. The steersman offered a gap-toothed leer as I scrambled out with my bundle and my cane. My bare feet slipped on fish guts and less savory spume. I gritted my teeth and plowed on.

“Come along, Cat,” said Drake over his shoulder as he strode down the long wooden pier.

Men working on or lounging in canoes and skiffs looked up as he passed, expressions incurious or passively hostile; then they would see me, and a wolfish kind of grin would flash as they took a good look along me from my head to my toes. My pagne had plastered itself down the length of my thighs. I regretted leaving my jacket unbuttoned, because my shift and bodice were still damp enough to cling. I crossed my arms over my chest.

“Fished a river siren out of the water, did yee?” called one young man to the men in the canoe. “Look at that hair!”

Men within earshot all agreed, quite vocally and with a great deal of amusement, about my cursed hair. I could not imagine why I had not braided it back.

I had no trouble keeping track of Drake in the press of bodies, for his red-gold shock of hair stood out like fire. Men stepped out of his way, not making a scene of it, but it was clear Drake need not ask for passage. They knew what he was. And he was glad they knew.

We stepped onto a vastly wide, stone-paved avenue slimed with a thin layer of mud and oil churned by sun and yesterday’s rain and the constant trammeling of the exceptional amount of traffic coming and going. A high-wheeled cart driven by a bored-looking man and drawn by a hairy but quite small mammoth-if that was not a contradiction in terms-trundled past as I stared gape-mouthed. A four-winged bird feathered in bright colors reminiscent of a troll’s crest glided overhead, a white tube clutched in its fore-talons. Four soldiers casually carrying rifles over their shoulders strolled along the jetty, now and again pausing to speak to young men as if recruiting.

Two men uniformed in red tabards hurried along the avenue, each carrying a long staff and wearing a stiff black cap. Drake dropped at once into a crouch, head bent to conceal his face. He fiddled with his sandals as if he had caught a pebble until the men walked out of sight past a company of women who were striding along with laden baskets on their heads.

“Come along, Cat.” He rose and began walking east, in their wake, toward the distant city walls.

I caught his wrist and pulled him to a stop.

“What’s that?” I pointed to a wide dusty open work area set off behind a low fence and rimmed with long thatch-roofed shelters with no walls. Men worked at beams and planks. In truth what had drawn my eye was the rear view of a young man stripped to the waist and plying an adze along a beam. I could not help but admire his muscled back.

“That’s a carpentry yard. Strange you should need to ask, as they have the like in Adurnam.”

He tugged, but I held my ground.

His gaze narrowed. “Didn’t you see the two wardens? They can arrest me. I’m taking you to the Speckled Iguana. You’ll stay there in hiding until I sort out if the general is back in the city.”

I ripped my gaze away from the carpenter’s decorative back and stared at Drake as if he had sprouted two heads. “You’re abandoning me here?”

“I’m not abandoning you, Cat. You’ll lie low in a safe place. I’ll pay your room and board, and the innkeeper will watch over you. He’s a partisan, an old soldier and countryman. An Iberian.” He sighed, as if exhausted by having to explain things to a persistently dim-witted child. “I need you to keep your mouth shut and your head down until I return. As soon as I know what the situation is here, we’ll sort things out.”

“How long until that happens? What will I do?”

He shook his arm with an angry grimace, and I let go. “The longer I stand here in public view, the more likely it is I’ll be spotted. Then I’ll be arrested. Is that what you want?”

“Why should I want that?”

“A question I couldn’t possibly answer.” As if to punctuate his words, a clock tolled down the hour: ten in the morning. Some distance down the jetty, at an intersection of a major side street, stood a squat building topped by a clock tower. A parade of little clockwork children passed beneath the clock’s face.

“Blessed Tanit,” I whispered, for the clock’s workings had finally shaken loose the obvious. “What if I’m pregnant?”

Most inappropriately, he kissed me on the lips. “Don’t you know why we fire mages are so sought after as lovers?”

“Why would I know that?”

His fingers tightened painfully over mine. “Cat, I fear no man has ever told you that repeated impertinence in a woman makes her ugly. Take care you do not lose your pretty face. Or perhaps you have complaints beyond those whose linen you have already aired.”

The comment so reminded me of the head of the poet Bran Cof that I would have laughed, except I had seen James Drake engulf three men’s bodies in flames.

I twisted my hand out of his grip. “I am sure,” I said in my blandest tone, “that fire mages are sought after as lovers for their own special qualities.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. But you’ll be glad to hear we are indifferently fertile. So the chances my seed will plant in you is small.”

I pressed a hand to my belly, seized with a horrible foreboding.

“Or are you disappointed? I know women dream of becoming pregnant-”

“I was dreaming about having a bowl of yam pudding!”

“You’re very amusing, Cat, when you make your little jokes.” He flagged down a man who was pulling along a cart with a canvas awning draped over a seat wide enough for two people. “We’ve loitered too long. I must get out of sight immediately. Wardens patrol thickly through these districts where most of the trouble comes from.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Go to the Speckled Iguana.” He kissed me again on the lips and clambered onto the seat. “Ask for the innkeeper and tell him the usual phrase: A rising light marks the dawn of a new world. You can trust him.”

He spoke a meaningless phrase to the cart-man, who was wiping sweat from his forehead with a cloth. The man stowed his cloth, gripped the shafts, and off they jolted, leaving me all alone in the midst of an unfamiliar city.