by Kate Elliott
“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.
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.
&nb
sp; “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.