Cold Steel

19

“Which way did we come from?” I whispered, trying to get my bearings.

He indicated a trail of scattered salt receding into the darkness of one of the horizontal shafts, then opened a hand to reveal the last bits of the dust he had gathered. “I left a trail to follow. This seems too easy.”

“Except for being stuck at the bottom of a mine shaft with no rope or ladder.”

He looked up. “I may be able to cut hand- and footholds up the shaft. It’s cursed hot. I wonder if this is old Mali. Imagine if we have come to the birthplace of my ancestors…”

“To the very place where the salt plague began,” I whispered, shuddering.

A shuffling slip-slop echoed out of the darkness.

Slow as molasses, a creature emerged from the gloom of one of the other tunnels. Its steps had the creak of an elder’s, but its body was not frail, only stiff. It had the form of a perfectly proportioned person, not ugly or beautiful, neither male nor female, but all white. Not pale-haired and pale-skinned as northern Celts are, but the stark white of a being whose flesh has solidified into salt, like a salter in the final, morbid phase of the disease. Its eyes were salt-white and blind.

I knew what it was although I had never read a description of such a thing in the tales penned by travelers. Who could see such a sight and live to speak of it? No one could.

It was a ghoul.

A tongue licked the air as it tasted the scent of mortal blood.

The lick of its tongue scraped me despite the gap between us. The blood congealing on the cut on my arm began to flow as if it were being suckled out of my body. A drop of my blood struck the ground, its impact shivering a vibration through the soles of my feet. A bell-like clangor echoed through the tunnels, followed by a dead silence as the ghoul halted.

Chiming cries echoed from the tunnels. Unseen tongues licked the air, tasting for blood. Pebbles and dirt spat down on our heads. Far above us ghouls clustered at the mine’s mouth, eager to taste blood. One walked right off the cliff. It plunged through the spinning dust motes. Vai yanked me back as it hit with a sickening crunch. The ghoul heaved itself up, unbroken, unmarred.

“We have to go back,” said Vai.

I hadn’t known they could move so fast. They were on us, me beating at clawing hands and biting mouths. Cold steel stopped them in their tracks but it did not turn them to salt, not as the cut of my blade had dissolved the salters who had blundered into the sea on the beach at Salt Island.

“Vai! Move!”

Bell voices rang down the mines. Too late I heard a scrape behind us.

A ghoul staggered out of the darkness and lunged at Vai. Just as its mouth was about to close on his arm, he thrust his blade between its jaws. The blade caught its teeth a finger’s breadth from his sleeve.

I rammed into the ghoul with a shoulder. Fiery Shemesh! It was like shifting rock. It moved just enough for him to jerk back out of reach. It did not claw at me because now the advancing ghouls were all fixed on him, not on me.

“Catherine! I can’t see the gate.”

More thumped down from above. The breath of the ghouls was like the burrowing tongue of a craving that can never be eased. They would never stop coming. They swarmed toward him, but I had the scent of the spirit world in my lungs, all the gate I needed.

“Vai! Take my hand!” I thrust wildly to give them pause, then dragged Vai backward.

The memory of sun vanished as we crossed the gate. We staggered to a halt, panting, on the balcony where he had taken refuge. The city spread around us in its false beauty. Winds rippled color through ribbons. Bridges vaulted in graceful, intertwined arches, slender spans spun out of gold and silver. I swayed, a hand pressed to my sweaty forehead. A scraping shuffle sounded from the broken staircase as an unseen creature clawed uselessly at the rock.

“No! No! No!” I cried, ready to burst with sheer raging fury. “I’ll kill them! I’ll kill them!”

“Love, love. It’s all right.” He embraced me. I wasn’t sure if he was comforting me, or comforting himself by comforting me. “They can’t climb without stairs or ramps. They lack both the agility and the strength. We’re safe on this ledge.”

“We’re not safe! We have enough water for a day, at most. And no food! No way out—”

“Catherine! Enough!”

I broke off, my breath ragged.

His dark gaze met mine. “I saw a salter one time in Expedition, when I went out to the country with Kofi. It was before you came to Aunty’s boardinghouse. I saw her beg her brother to kill her. Then I saw her no longer able to speak, dead of mind but still alive in her body, a ravening beast. Worse, for beasts have purpose and their own sort of intelligence. Her family used spears to push her mindless flesh into a pit, but spears did not kill her. They poured salt water over her, and that did kill her, only she shrieked in such agony I have never forgotten the sound.”

I would not look away even though I did not want to hear what he was going to say next.

His voice emerged in a harsh whisper. “Promise me, Catherine. Promise me you will kill me cleanly rather than make me suffer that death.”

He did not flinch from my answering gaze, nor did his unwavering trust allow me to flinch.

“I promise you,” I said, each word a knife in my heart.

He gave a nod so final that my heart squeezed tight with love and terror.

“Now, Catherine, as I was about to say before that unfortunate but understandable venture into the salt mine, I have a plan.”

“A plan? What plan?”

“You don’t think I’ve been sitting here with dry maw waiting to die, do you?” He laid out the carpentry apron on the ground. His tools were stowed in pockets, and he removed each one, running his hands over it as if reintroducing himself to its qualities. By the stiffness in his movements and the occasional wince, he was hurting, but I doubted he would ever mention it and I would certainly never dare say a word to him about the shadows under his eyes or the way my sire had effortlessly taken him captive. “I’ve considered many possible paths, most of which involved your help and some of which involved you being clever enough to bring my carpentry tools.”

“They didn’t all involve me being clever enough to bring your carpentry tools?”

He smiled without looking at me. “Ghouls can’t climb, but you and I can.”

“There are ghouls on this side, too? I’ve not seen any.”

“They’re all ghouls, in their way. What you see as personages in elegant robes, I see as gaunt creatures clawing for my blood. They’re not solid on this side, not like the ones we just saw in the mine. Over here they can change their aspect, just as all spirit creatures can do.”

The way he set each tool down on the ground precisely in line next to the others told me more than words. He was calming himself through orderly action, methodical, precise, just as the cacica had observed. I could not help but watch his hands, the ones that knew exactly how to do the meticulous work he wanted them to do.

He glanced up as if I had made a noise, then raised an eyebrow in that way that made him look supercilious but that was also, I realized, just a way of showing he was puzzled or concerned. “Catherine?”

My lips parted but no words came out. No words I expected or meant to say.

“I love you so much, Vai.”

Had another voice and intelligence spoken through my mouth I would not have been more surprised. His eyes widened, as if I’d blurted out an embarrassing secret he knew he ought not to have heard. Yet the weary slump of his shoulders straightened with new determination as he turned the awl through his fingers and set it down beside the claw hammer. He unrolled the last fold in the heavy leather kit to reveal a set of chisels and a two-bitted hatchet.

“Catherine, can you trust me enough to step blindly off a cliff no matter how it looks to you?”

“Always, Vai. But what is your plan?”

He began to put the tools back. “I’ve had a lot of time to examine this pit. It is a maze, all connected to this central tower of rock. The maze walls are like low cliffs. If we stay on the walls, they can’t get to us.”

“They can walk on the bridges and balconies.”

“Those are paths within and above the pit. We should be able to climb sideways along the walls all the way to the edge without having to drop to the ground. I’ve been able to map out a route where it seems there will be plenty of foot- and handholds and a series of ledges where we can rest along the way.”

“Are you going to chip out handholds with a chisel and hammer?”

“I likely can’t get enough swing on a hammer but we do have them if we need them. We can easily smash stairs, if we need to. We’ll stay above and below the ghouls, climb out of the pit, find warded ground, and cross back to the mortal world. We have no money, but we can work our way wherever we need to go with my carpentry and your sewing. So you see, now that we are together, we have everything we need. Are you ready?”

I nodded. He ripped a scrap of cloth from one of the old pagnes and tied it around his neck like a buccaneer’s kerchief. Tying the apron back on, he rigged his sword and the hatchet so he could grab them easily. I bound up my skirts, binding my sword and the now-lightened pack across my back. We drained one flask of spring water and, thus fortified, set out.

Handing me a chisel, he said, “Don’t look at anything except me.”

For once, I had no teasing retort.

We worked our way off the balcony with its decorative ribbons. For the very first part I saw the same thing he did: the uneven face of the cleft. Its manifold protuberances and hand-width shelves were easy to negotiate. But then I had to follow him as onto open air. It was like walking out over a chasm. His shoulders bunching and releasing beneath his jacket became my lodestone. The sweat beading on the back of his neck fascinated me. He had a really beautifully shaped head, brown and lovely.

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.”

The latch’s eyes glimmered into life as two stripes of light on brass. Its mouth was a flat line. It said nothing. And it stayed stubbornly locked.

The other door slammed shut. The coach lurched forward, swinging in a wide turn. I tumbled onto the upholstered bench opposite my sire as Vai pushed past me and, in his turn, grabbed the latch. Sparks spat with a cracking cascade of pops. With a grunt of pain Vai hit the bench and sat down hard next to me. He swore as he shook his hand.

My sire touched fingers to the spot I had kissed. “A transparent ploy. Truly, I thought better of you, Cat. You might have known I would have anticipated such a move.”

He rapped on the ceiling of the coach with his cane.

“Back to the pit,” he said in a conversational tone I knew the coachman could hear. His gaze settled on me. “You’ve done well, Daughter. You’ve proven you are strong and stubborn, but still not quite smart enough. You’re still not quite thinking things through. Affection weakens you. I gave him a chance to survive so he would still be living when you found him. This time I will dump him straight into the pit. I don’t need him any longer. Let me assure your tender heart that he will feel no pain once they’ve drained his blood, for the blood of mortals is the force that gives the courts power over the rest of us. He’ll become something like them, only without a mind.”

I hadn’t known I could move so fast. My sword slid like lightning out of its sheath. I knew exactly where to aim: up under his ribs at his heart.

Vai slammed into me, jostling my point so it skipped off the upholstery and lodged in a corner. I cursed and tugged it free.

“A killing blow will kill you, not him!” He kicked past my legs and shoved open the door that led back into the spirit world. “Stay where you are, Catherine.”

“Vai!”

“Better this than the salt plague, love.”

He jumped out of the rushing coach into the path of the incoming tide of light.

I did not think. I leaped after him.

The dragon’s dream roared down over us in a rainbow of violent colors. The call of a bell split the world, air from water, fire from stone, flesh from spirit. The vibration rang up through the ground and down from the sky until there was no existence except the tremor of sound shivering the entire world as if the world were the drum being beaten.

I threw my arms around him, and I kissed him. Let his embrace be the last thing I knew. He held me tightly. A cloak of magic rippled from around his body to envelop me as within wings.

The tide ripped over us like sea spray followed by the pounding of a huge crashing wave. We were driven down as an abyss opened. Every part of existence yawed sideways, then tipped upside down. We fell into smoke as the world around us vanished.