Cold Steel

18

I had to let go of my unshed tears so I could concentrate on the task that lay before me. By scratching each cat on its big head, I calmed myself. I ought to have been scared of them. Any, except possibly the half-grown littlest, could have ripped me to pieces, but they shouldered their bodies around mine in a way I found so charmingly affectionate that it sucked my tears quite dry. They heartened me.

“My thanks to you. No need to accompany me any farther. Run as far as you can before he comes back.”

Yet the cats waited as I retrieved the head of the cacica from the ground where Bee had perforce left her. “Your Highness, you have been generous in aiding us. I feel obliged to confess that I am taking you to Haübey, not to Caonabo.”

She regarded me unblinking with a stare I was glad I had never had to face down while she sat on the duho, the seat of power. “Explain yourself.”

“Your brother the cacique made a bargain with me. He said he would get me to Europa if I would take you to your exiled son Haübey. I accepted because reaching Europa was the only chance I had to get my husband back. The cacique promised me that Haübey will take you back to Sharagua, and thus to Caonabo.”

“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.

In a howling, chirping, chortling pack, the Hunt passed through the gate of the hurricane’s eye. My sire galloped in their midst with a spear in one hand and fear in the other.

On a second thunderclap, the eye closed and the Hunt vanished.

The dark clouds cleared away. The city fell silent, as if holding its breath. But it was not still. The boiling movement that spun along the bridges and balconies flowed merrily along. Its constantly shifting pattern contracted and expanded like a flock of birds in flight, spinning around and around the center like a whirlpool around an unseen eddy.

My finger twitched. My arms were my own again. I rubbed my eyes to break free from the trance.

Blessed Tanit! If the Wild Hunt rode into the mortal world, then Hallows’ Night had come again. Months had passed in what had felt to me like a single day. Bee and I had walked in Adurnam in late March. Now it was the end of October in the mortal world. The Hunt would pursue a person whose blood hummed with the power and energy we humans called magic. It would corner, kill, and dismember the hapless victim, and toss the severed head down a well. Yet looking at the silent personages awaiting their feast atop the ziggurat, I had to wonder: Was my sire the master, or a slave to others’ bidding?

This mystery lay beyond my grasp right now. I had to concentrate on what I had come here for. If the crowning feast was the center of the city, then surely my sire would hold his prisoner close to the celebration yet hidden from it. The spirit world did not have shadows but it did have brighter places and places more gray and indistinct. It had places that drew the eye, and places the eye slid away from as water slides off a duck’s back.

I found it on the fourth staircase, the broken one. Along the outer rim of the towering crack that split the staircase ran a narrow balcony like an outgrowth on a glassy stone cliff. A figure sat there, unmoving. It was too small for me to see features or even to discern the colors of the clothes it was wearing, although it looked a lot like a dash jacket and he looked like a man. The only way to reach the spot was to be lowered by rope, to climb by ladder, or to fly.

Could I fly? Wasn’t I an eru’s daughter?

I turned my thoughts inward, searching through my body for a memory of wings, but I remained stubbornly Cat, locked into the mortal flesh my mother had given birth to.

So I did the only thing I could: I plotted out a route and hastened toward the broken stair. Once I reached its jagged steps, I raced up them to the point where the huge gash like a notch made by a giant’s knife had cut through the stone into the interior of the ziggurat. A bridge no wider than my hand spanned the gap between the sides of the gash; the balcony lay on the other side of the crevice. I balanced across the gulf of air until I reached a flight of floating steps, some of them missing because they, too, were broken.

After clambering up, I paused to catch my breath on a tiny platform not even wide enough to sit on. Above me rose the sheer face of a cliff, as ominous as a wall of ice. A pretty balcony ornamented by ribbons lay above me, and above it rose more cliff. Below me, the cleft fell away into darkness.

Even from halfway within the ziggurat, my doubled vision could still see the top of the pyramid’s flat crown, as if part of me still stood inside one of the threads of power and spirit that weave the worlds. Overhead a churning circle of brilliance swirled in the sky. The eye of the gate opened. Howling and roaring, the Wild Hunt spilled back into the spirit world in a boiling mass of turbulent beasts. The layers and levels of the city emptied as all moving things converged on the height. Human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: four black as obsidian and four white as snow. They had no faces as I recognized a face. Instead they surged with a force I could only describe and feel as hunger.

The horseman reined his mount to a halt in front of the dais. My sire was glowing, ruddy with a surfeit of blood. Slowly he bowed his head. Every line of his body was tense and tight.

Certainty infused me like a bolt of hot anger through my flesh: He hated the creatures who sat in those thrones. He wanted to slash his spear through every watching, waiting presence but could not because eight chains bound him, one to each chair.

Those chains like whips snapped, bringing the horse to its knees.

A voice like a hammer blow cut through him, turning the mounted horseman into a kneeling eru with wings furled as in pain. He knelt before them. Blood is power because blood binds.

A prince among slaves is still a slave.

He hadn’t been talking about Andevai. He had been talking about himself.

“Give us what is ours.” The eight personages spoke in one voice. “As you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”

The Hunt was merely the conduit. The courts could not walk into the mortal world, so only their servants could bring them the mortal blood they craved.

The blood of the sacrifice poured out of a hundred wounds. Through the chains of binding they sucked the fresh blood of the kill out of his flesh and into theirs.

I licked the air. I tasted the blood of the kill, so rich and sweet, laced with the spice of power, the salt of life. My hunger swelled together with the hunger of all the many presences, the denizens of the spirit courts. The force of their ravenous appetites built like the front of a storm. I took a step, thinking to race back across the bridge that spanned the cleft and regain the staircase, for surely I could rush up to the height and claw in to take my share before they had drained it all.

An unseen person coughed as though waking from a dusty and uneasy doze. The cough startled me back to my own self as I remembered who I was and why I was here.

“Vai? Can you hear me? Is that you?”

“Catherine?” His voice was hoarse.

The ribbon-ornamented balcony above me could only be reached by a skeleton of what had once been a stair-rail as delicate as crystalline branches. Rungs and railings had been shattered by savage blows to make the stairs unusable. I didn’t need stairs. I checked my sword to make sure it was secure, found a fingerhold on a jaggedly broken rung, and scrambled up. The weight of the pack threw off my balance, but I was determined. A presence loomed over me.

He said, “Give me your arm. Reach up.”

I did so blindly, slipping as I let go. A callused grip caught my wrist. He hauled me over the side and to my feet. His hands on my waist were like fire, I felt them so. His beard was a little unkempt. Streaks of powdery dust smeared his right cheek.

“Catherine.” His voice was balm on my yearning heart.

I dislodged his grasp and retreated to the edge of the balcony. The white rock wall behind him was pitted with gouges and holes. A frail ladderlike stair, leading up the cliff face to the next level, had also been smashed. From the far side of the balcony, the cleft cut away deep into the heart of the massive structure, shearing away into the inky depths.

It was strange he was so disheveled and dust-stained when we stood on a spotless white balcony with ribbons streaming off the railing. His trousers were ripped at one knee. A cuff on his dash jacket had torn, and ragged slashes raked through the fabric of its left shoulder, although no blood stained the cloth. The smell of mortal blood lay heavily on him, yet he might be my sire, flown down to confound me with blood still coating his tongue.

“Show me your navel!”

He turned his back on me. “I’ll let you find it yourself, if you can tell me how many buttons this jacket has.”

“Are you telling me all your jackets are cut to the same pattern? For if they are, then that one has fourteen.”

He turned back with a suspicious frown that made him look a little like the mansa. “After all, I am reminded you might have counted them. You’ve assaulted me before in the guise of my wife.”

“Are you saying my sire has tried to seduce you more than that one time in the carriage?”

“How could you know about that?”

“Such secrets are best left unspoken within hearing of they who can see and hear all.”

He took a step back, halting beside an object I had mistaken for a boulder but that I now realized was the bundle of stolen clothes, food, and leather bottles from Salt Island. Such a bolt of joy flooded through me that I had to struggle to catch my heart before it crashed right out of my chest. Only Vai would have thought to drag the bundle with him out of the coach. His sword lay sheathed on the ground. I was almost certain my sire could not touch cold steel.

He thought I was my sire.

I shrugged off the pack to ease my shoulders. “You claimed you would always know where I was. So I would think you would know this is me, Vai. Who else can carry my sword?”

“There are many things I am no longer quite so sure of.” His wary gaze made me cautious, and made me bitter, for I could see my sire’s abduction had injured him in an intangible way.

“What was the first thing you said to me, when we first met?”

His lips curled into the scornful sneer I had seen too often in the first days of our acquaintance. “Easy enough to tell. When I saw you that night coming down the stairs, I thought it was the other half of my soul coming to greet me. But I’ve spoken those words aloud more than once. You might have overheard them.”

I raised an eyebrow, trying to mimic his disdain. “Yes, that’s lovely and romantical, Vai, but that isn’t the first thing you actually said to me.”

“Ah. Something about the theater, then.” He ran a finger down the line of his beard. “That you’re not cut out to be an actress.”

“If I’m no actress, then surely you should know I must be me. Yet you stand there with no welcoming embrace! Since you cannot recall your exact words, let me remind you. You said that I might have the looks to be in theater, but not the skill.”

“Did I? A truthful statement, you must admit.”

I had meant to tease him into recognizing me, but his comment chased all thoughts of teasing from my mind as curiosity burned instead. “Why did you praise my looks? With Bee around, it’s a compliment no young man ever threw my way. Bee always dazzled them all.”

His rigid posture relaxed. He closed the distance between us and cupped my face in his hands. His fingers had the roughness of a laborer’s, but his touch was gentle. He examined my windblown hair and dirt-smudged skin.

“All the better for me that they were blind.”

I tried not to look gratified—certainly this was not the place for it—but a blush warmed my cheeks regardless.

“I’ve always wondered what you thought when you first saw me.” His hands slipped down to grasp my hands as he preened just a little with the lift of his chin and the squaring of his shoulders.

I felt obliged to prod him. “I thought you weren’t as handsome as you so obviously thought you were.”

A laugh crinkled at the corners of his eyes without quite making it to his mouth. “How quickly did you realize you were mistaken?”

“Oh, Vai,” I breathed. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t find you.”

I threw my arms around him just as he crushed my body against his. At first I simply held on, letting my heart beat into the rhythm of his. It felt so good to embrace him. When I tilted back my head to look at him, he pressed kisses on my eyes. I pressed my mouth to his throat. Hot blood pulsed beneath my lips, so close I could have ripped through to it with a single bite and joined in the feast now consuming the thoughts and attention of the spirit courts. I shook myself away, pulling out of his arms.

“We have to go,” I said. “The courts will finish feasting and remember you. And what if the tide of a dream washes through and catches us?”

“We’re safe from tides here. The walls ward the pit.”

“What pit?”

The mocking curve of his lips made me shudder. “Your sire threw me into this pit. The creatures swarmed after me, too many for me to fight off. I climbed up here just ahead of them and smashed both stairs with my cold steel. Since they can’t climb, they can’t reach me. I would be dead if I had not grabbed that bundle of provisions out of the coach.”

“I stole all that when I was imprisoned on Salt Island.”

“That’s what kept me alive. But I’ve consumed all the food and drink.” He knelt to rummage through my pack. Opening one of the flasks, he took a thirsty swig, then a more measured swallow. After, he offered it to me.

I shook my head. “I drank my fill at the gate.”

“No food?”

“None. The mansa found us before we had made all our preparations.”

“When did you encounter the mansa? I suppose that is a tale to be told later.” He emptied the pack, nodding with approval when he found my sewing kit and some of his carpentry tools. But it was his shaving kit and the little box that held sheaths that made him stare. “Lord of All, Catherine, I must say you are well prepared for adventure of one sort or another.”

It is an odd thing to know you stand close to death and yet laugh.

What part of my thoughts he read from my expression I did not know, but his gaze softened. “You never give up, do you, my sweet Catherine?”

“Never. While the courts are busy with their feast, we can go back the way I came, across the bridges and balconies to the ledge, and then back through the jade gate.”

“We can’t escape by their own paths. Some will scent me and come after me. They are faster than I am. The only reason I’m alive is that they can’t climb, and I got up here before they caught me.”

“They weren’t saving you for Hallows’ Night? Maybe after the feast they won’t be hungry for a while.”

He wiped a hand across his brow, smearing a fine white dust across his skin. “I am scarcely likely to take that chance. It’s safer for me to assume they will kill me the moment they get hold of me. But what do you mean by bridges and balconies?” Bands of exhaustion shadowed his eyes, yet he studied me with a look of concern, as if my situation worried him far more than his own dire straits. “Are your eyes veiled by their illusions?”

I rested a hand against his cheek. His skin seemed dry and warm. I hoped he wasn’t getting feverish. “Don’t you see the city? It’s beautiful, just as I thought it would be. All the ribbons and rainbows and bridges and fine white spires and the huge ziggurat with the feasting personages in their elegant robes… however horrible their meal…”

He gathered me against him. “You’re seeing an illusion, love. Close your eyes.”

I shut my eyes. At first I could not think past the sensation of his arms around me and the whisper of his lips against my hair. There was an odd pressure, like a dense jacket of air tucked tightly against his body, that reminded me of the way air felt just before a storm swept in. I swallowed, and my ears popped. My sword tingled.

I was feeling Vai’s cold magic.

“I thought you had no magic in the spirit world,” I whispered.

“I thought so, too. But in the spirit world it just lies so tightly against my body that I can’t reach with it and thus can’t weave magic here. Now keep your eyes shut, love. Here in the pit, your eyes lie to you. See with your heart and your body. They’ll never lie to you.” His voice was a coaxing murmur. He could have talked me into anything.

He had, hadn’t he? In Expedition he had known I was attracted to his handsome face and inviting body, so he had used words and food to persuade me that what I felt for him was love.

“Catherine, you’re not paying attention. We’re not standing in a city. It’s a pit.”

“Hush.” I pushed my awareness of him down as I listened to the story the wind was telling me. A salty dust tickled my nose. Wind scoured empty slopes, spraying grains of dirt. A weight like hot, drying brine masked my face.

“The cleft is a gate,” I whispered. “All the movement in the city eddies around a hidden gate, like water swirling around a submerged and open mouth that’s sucking water into it. It’s as if we have one foot in the spirit world and one in the mortal world. Dust and salt and sand are blowing in from the mortal world. Gather everything up. I think we can just walk out of here through this hidden gate.”

“I see no gate.” He released me. “Of course, I didn’t dare shed my blood to look for one. Anyway, the hunters of my village only know how to cross through standing stones, and then only on cross-quarter days. I have no means of marking time here.”

“I’m a spiritwalker, Vai. I can cut gates between the two worlds and bring you with me whether you’ve shed blood or not as long as you slip through before the gate closes behind me. I can feel there’s a gate already half open, right off this balcony.”

Together, we sorted through the gear to divide it between the two of us. He tied the carpentry apron securely around his body, then scooped up a handful of glittering dust.

I shouldered the pack. “Hold my right hand. Keep your sword drawn.”

I sliced a shallow cut on my forearm. Where the wall of the cleft cut deeper into the base of the ziggurat, I smeared my blood. Grit stung my eyes as I pushed through, pulling Vai with me right through the rock.

Hot sunlight poured its heat over my face. We stood at the base of a crumbling mine shaft. Sun blazed through the opening above. It was brutally hot. Sweat drenched me just from the effort of standing and breathing. Around lay discarded pickaxes, awls, and baskets, as well as a pair of sleds on runners, heaped with raw salt. Horizontal shafts shot off in different directions, fading into gloom.

“Lord of All,” murmured Vai at my back. “We’re at the bottom of a salt mine.”

By the flavor of the air and the presence of the sun, I knew we had crossed back into the mortal world.