Cold Magic (Untitled Kate Elliott Series #1)

by Kate Elliott

  If I did nothing, then it was the innocent people gathered in the common room listening to the djeli’s tale who would suffer. Probably me, too. But them most of all.

  “Peace upon you and all your undertakings,” I said to Chartji in the old Kena’ani way.

  In perfect mimicry, she said, “Peace upon you.”

  I put out my hand and took her claw in farewell. “I thank you for your hospitality. I will not forget it. Now I have to go.”

  I ran to the door and tugged it open, and thanks be to Tanit that Andevai looked up, and while I could not see my own expression, he could. We did not know each other at all, not really. We were strangers. But I looked at him, and he rose and spoke briefly to the old man as he stepped over the bench.

  “Maestressa Barahal?” said Brennan, looking startled as I strode past him, as if he hadn’t noticed me go back into the supper room.

  “Fare you well,” I said to him over my shoulder. I met Andevai with every gaze in the place sidelong on us, no one wanting to be quite so bold as to stare directly on a cold mage.

  He said in an undertone, “What?” and I murmured, “Torches, a big party,” and he said, “This way.”

  We walked to the back of the inn as the djeli rolled on with his tale. The innkeeper at his bar set down a pair of mugs as if he’d meant to offer them to us but thought better of it. Andevai pushed open the door into the kitchen, where a lass about my age looked up, red-faced, from the steam of a big kettle of some sickly sweet brew. Her eyebrows flew up as she gaped at us, but we were already through and out the back door into a kitchen yard coated in frost. I grasped my ghost sword, but I had forgotten my coat and gloves, and it was too late to go back because we were already committed. Out here under the cold sky, I could distinctly hear the clatter of hooves, although Andevai did not yet seem aware of the sound. He cast his gaze first toward the wall of the stables and then toward the woven hazel hurdle that fenced off the rest of the kitchen yard.

  He spoke under his breath, as to himself. “Where are those plague-ridden wraiths?”

  He whistled four low notes.

  I twisted the ghost hilt, and to my utter astonishment, the sword drew smoothly free. The naked blade gleamed, its length and weight perfectly balanced in my hand.

  Its light cast an odd luster on Andevai’s profile, making him look, for an instant, unsure rather than arrogant. As he stared at the blade, his gaze flared and his chin lifted belligerently. “Where did you get that? That’s cold steel. Only mage Houses forge and possess cold steel.”

  There were many things I could and ought to have said, but instead I smirked. I might be dead by midnight’s bell. This might be my only chance to gloat. “It’s my black cane. You never saw what it really was.”

  He grabbed my right wrist, and I braced, because I thought he meant to wrest the sword out of my left hand, but instead he tugged me after him to the gate of the kitchen yard.

  “Do you know how to use it?” he asked.

  “I’m a Barahal.”

  He unbound the rope and shoved open the plaited gate. We staggered onto a muddy lane crackling with frost where wheels had left their imprints. The lane led away behind a block of row houses. He looked skyward, hearing clearly now the approaching hooves, the ring of harness, a man’s call: “There’s the Griffin Inn!”

  “They might be a party of innocent travelers caught late on the road,” he said as we trotted briskly down the lane toward open ground. The sky was overcast except in the north, where stars glittered.

  “No. They’re looking for you. They mean to kill you for destroying the airship.”

  “We should never have stopped here. How well can you actually use a sword?”

  Gracious Melqart, but the man had a knack for being annoying at the most inconvenient times!

  “Barahals begin training at the age of seven. It’s in the family, if you will, rather like cold magic runs in the House lineages.” Yet honesty compelled me, as if the sword’s cold steel spelled my tongue. “But I’ve never fought in anything but the practice hall.”

  “Here.” He cut a hard left onto a narrow lane, blocks of houses on either side.

  “Where is the carriage?” I said to his back as I followed. What I really meant, I dared not say out loud: Where is the eru, with its wintry gale? “Where are we going?”

  “To the turnpike. Quiet.” Bending his head like a man bowed by heavy thoughts, he stared at the ground, lips moving but no sound emerging that I could hear.

  And I could hear plenty. Music drifted from the inn falling farther away behind us; the song chased on as the story unfolded, drums a pattern grounding my running feet. A voice called from an upper story, “There! There!” Shouts and cries rose as our pursuers reached the temple square. There was no possible way that we, on foot, could outrun them.

  A horn’s cry rose shrill and clear, and a great shout as from a host of soldiers shattered the night on the turnpike ahead. Horses whinnied, hooves pounded, and a whistle pierced the air.

  “Move,” said Andevai in a hoarse whisper. “I can’t hold this long.”

  He lurched on up the rutted lane at an awkward lope, as if his limbs were not truly under the command of his mind. I followed a step behind, and once I had to grab his elbow to stop him from tumbling headlong when he stumbled over a rut. As I steadied him, I saw, on the road ahead where it crossed in front of our dark lane, a company of stern soldiers armed in the House style: The soldiers carried crossbows and spears and wore quilted coats; their horses were caparisoned in the bold designs favored by the Houses, manes braided and stiffened, legs ornamented with bracelets woven of falling threads of fabric that shimmered as the horses paced forward in a stately measure. A House standard hung with amulets stabbed the air within the ranks.

  Andevai stumbled again, and I caught him as he winced. “Blacksmith… fire’s mage… powerful. Fighting me.”

  The soldiers shouted in unison and pushed forward.

  “Aren’t those House soldiers?” I demanded. “Shouldn’t we call to them?”

  “Illusion,” he hissed. “Must move, get to the inn ruins. Hold them off there until the carriage reaches us.”

  Two figures darted into the lane behind us. By the way they moved, I knew at once that they carried weapons. Yet it seemed they had not yet seen us within the darkness; they were, perhaps, looking beyond us toward the turnpike where the House soldiers still rode past in a seamless illusion.

  “Stay here,” I said to Andevai. I broke into a run, grateful for the excellent cut of my riding clothes, which did not impede my strides or my reach.

  Too late they registered my approach. I parried a clumsy thrust from the closer one, then shifted sideways to strike a blow upward with the hilt alongside his head that dropped him to his knees. I spun with a backhand sweep that caught low on my blade a staff blow aimed at my head by the other man. Grappling, I kicked him as hard as I could in the knee. He shrieked and collapsed backward. I bolted back the way I had come. Andevai had staggered to a halt; the cursed fool was pulling a useless knife from under his jacket.

  “Move!” I barely forced out the word. Sweat broke over my body, and I heaved once but nothing came up.

  Andevai moved. He ran down the lane and I pelted after, glancing back once, but I’d laid them down well enough; obviously they were not trained soldiers but rather crude, angry men without much more experience than fistfights outside an inn after an evening’s wallow in ale. We reached the junction of lane and wide turnpike. To our left, red fire burned in the square where the doors of the smithy were laid open, white sparks blazing as they showered out of the door and spat onto the vanguard of the House soldiers, but amazingly the illusion held under this rain of sparks. I ran after Andevai toward the ruins.

  Men shouted in confusion, their shattered cries of disorder and fear like a counter-rhythm to the patter of drums that fluttered at the edge of my hearing. Was the djeli still singing? Music is its own spell. Who knows what power it wields?
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  We dashed along the road, the confrontation falling away behind us. Andevai fell onto his knees in the char and ashes of the burned inn, hacking as he bent double. I halted between the stone pillars that had once marked the gate into the inn yard. The lintel slashed a black line above my head. The gates had been smashed and hauled into the courtyard. A harsh light glowed above the temple square; I had an awful premonition that the smithy had caught fire.

  Far away, across the river, I heard a bell ringing.

  The rain had stopped, but I shivered as the chill seeped into my bones. The sound of footfalls brought me spinning around, my hand so cold it was hard to grasp the hilt. I groaned. There came my assailants, one limping behind and the other jogging ahead. I could not suck in enough air. I didn’t think I could kill. And if I couldn’t, what would they do to us?

  Andevai appeared beside me. “Give me the sword,” he said.

  The two men closed inexorably on us, big, burly, unstoppable men who held their weapons like they knew how to kill with them. In another six steps they would cut us down.

  I recalled words scrawled in one of my father’s journals:

  My thanks to the gods that fortune has spared me from that most terrible act, that I have never taken another person’s life.

  “It is yours for this one act.” I pressed the sword into Andevai’s right hand.

  Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage is a wicked thing.

  Two strokes, and they fell, dead.

  He wiped his brow with his left hand, his expression pure in its anger and not remotely directed at me. Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage severs the soul from the body, so common wisdom has it: They need only draw blood, the merest cut, to kill you.

  In the distance, I heard the sounds of a company in disorder, shouting, confusion, a pair of whistles calling for scattered men to form ranks. I stared at the corpses sprawled in the gateway, a step away from me. A wind stirred ash. Andevai looked east down the road.

  “Late!” he exclaimed with withering scorn. His brow furrowed as he looked at the sword in his hand. Then he looked at me, and his eyebrows raised, and he offered the sword, hilt first. “If you think I’m going to try to keep it, then you don’t understand the properties of cold steel.”

  “My thanks,” I said hoarsely as I snatched it out of his hand.

  There came the carriage out of the night, the horses gleaming rather like the sword, as if they, too, were forged of cold steel. Blessed Tanit! Could they be? Or maybe that breathlike mist rising from their nostrils was akin to the exhalations of steam, dangerous and powerful if the pressure grows too high. The coachman hauled the vehicle to a stop in front of us, and the footman leaped down from the back to slam open the steps and wrench back the door.

  “Where were you?” demanded Andevai.

  “There’s more trouble here than what you see,” said the coachman. “We discovered a cache of rifles, several hundred in crates—”

  “Rifles! Within a two days’ journey of Four Moons House? Catherine, get in!”

  I clambered in and sagged onto the bench. I sheathed my sword as Andevai climbed up and dropped onto the seat opposite me.

  “Rifles!” he said, to the air, to the ancestors, to no one.

  The footman closed door and stair; the carriage creaked and shifted as he—she?—leaped onto the back. Andevai slammed back the shutter and stuck out his head.

  “What did you do with the rifles?” he called.

  “Trouble coming!” called the coachman with a laugh. “Your illusion has melted, Magister.”

  “It will have vanished when I touched the sword,” retorted Andevai. “Not because I lost control of the illusion! Or was too weak to sustain it. Cold steel cuts soul and magic alike. You know that.”

  “I don’t think he was doubting you,” I muttered under my breath. “Just reporting a fact.”

  “The rifles are so much scrap metal now, Magister,” said the footman from up behind.

  Andevai glanced at me, then closed the shutter so hard the carriage resounded. I twisted the hilt of my ghost sword, and the blade slipped back inside its intangible sheath, although it still appeared doubled in my vision. As the carriage slewed around, he pulled a wisp of illumination like a disembodied flame out of the air and stared at the sword with narrowed eyes.

  “It looks like a black cane,” he said irritably. “I can think of no possible way the Barahal family could possess cold steel. Where did your people get it?”

  I kept my mouth closed tight as a burst of voices shouting in frustrated outrage rose from the town behind us. The carriage gained speed along the road, our ride so smooth I began to wonder if we were actually running along on the surface of the turnpike or if we had risen above it on a tide of magic. My head swam dizzily. My teeth began to chatter.

  He swept the thick fur blanket off the seat beside him and thrust it onto my lap. “You look like you need this. You may as well rest, as it’s obvious from that mulish expression you’re not going to tell me anything.” He stared at his hands as if staring at death, his brows drawn down and his expression resolving again into his habitual scornful anger.

  I scooted into the corner farthest from him and bundled myself into the blanket, wrapping it tightly around me because I was shuddering. Maybe most of my convulsive shivering was from the bitter cold and maybe it was just exhaustion that had drained all warmth from me. I rested my head against the padded side and closed my eyes.

  Perhaps I dozed.

  At some indeterminate point, I opened my eyes to see him, wedged in the opposite corner in his smudged and disheveled traveling clothes, with no coat or blanket, staring at his hands as he wove light into helmets and horses, let them dissolve, and pulled new illusions into miniature form.

  “The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion,” he muttered to himself as he manipulated the patterns of light lifting and shadow falling.

  Tiny soldiers faded, and a face appeared: lips, nose, eyes, and a shadow’s skein of long black hair. My face. He was weaving my face in light.

  Before he could glance up to study me and see me looking, I shut my eyes.

  The carriage rocked, jostling me, then steadied.

  With my eyes closed, I could not fight off exhaustion. Thought faded.

  When I woke again, he was asleep, propped as uncomfortably upright in his corner as I was in mine. It was the first time I had seen him asleep, his face in repose. Bee would have proclaimed his lineaments handsome: his lean face set off by the beard trimmed very, very short around a well-shaped jawline, his long black eyelashes, his skin the brown of raw umber seen in painters’ studios.

  But Bee had not been forced to marry him. It is easy to admire what you must not endure, as my father had written years ago during the Iberian war.

  My husband had killed two men in front of my eyes, and how many more in Adurnam’s Rail Yard I would likely never know. I fixed the ghost sword in its sheath between my body and the carriage and shut my eyes, but could not find rest.

  14

  Yet in the end I did sleep as we traveled east through the night, into dawn, and across the morning and came to a town on whose outskirts rose a House inn. I now understood these inns must be wrapped around with protections able to fend off assaults from whatever enemies the Houses had accumulated over the centuries since their founding. Should be able, although they had failed in Adurnam and in Southbridge Londun behind us.

  We pulled into the inn court as hostlers hurried out. I staggered in Andevai’s wake into a parlor furnished with a sideboard, two couches, and a polished table with four chairs. While Andevai exchanged formal greetings with the steward in charge of the inn, I collapsed on the blessedly comfortable and unmoving daybed with my cane tucked against me. I fell asleep at once, waking when the door opened and servants carried in food on trays and set the covered dishes on the sideboard with platters and utensils and cups gracefully laid on one of the
tables.

  “We’ll serve ourselves,” said Andevai. He was standing at the window, as far away from me as was possible in the chamber. The servants shot nervous glances at him and hurried out, shutting the door behind them.

  I staggered up onto unsteady legs and stumbled over to the sideboard, thinking I might expire just from the glorious smell. After washing, I uncovered every dish and heaped up a platter with so much food that my eyes hurt even as my mouth watered. I sat down and started eating.

  After a while, having devoured about half the bounty, I paused.

  He was still staring out the window into the gauzy light of an overcast day, the light beginning a subtle shift that heralded the arrival of one of the cross-quarter days that divide the year. The festival of Samhain was observed throughout much of the north, marking the end of the light half of the year and the beginning of the dark half. As day follows night, so light follows dark, and thereby Samhain, also called Hallows Night and Hallows Day, was celebrated by some as the end of the old year and the beginning of the new.

  “Why don’t you ever eat?” I asked.

  Without looking toward me, he spoke softly. “Every time I work magic, I am fed.”

  I set down my knife and spoon, the path of destruction I had cut across the platter looking suddenly ominous. “What do you mean?”

  His gaze flashed my way before he turned back to survey the out of doors. “The secret belongs to those who know how to keep silent.”

  “The mage Houses would have to say so, wouldn’t they? Secrecy is the key to power.”

  He left the window and walked to the table, standing with a hand on the back of a chair. “What do you mean?”

  Was that anger that creased his eyes? We were both exhausted, and he looked considerably worse for the troubles we had encountered: His right sleeve was torn, his jacket rumpled, and his trousers stained black at the knees where he had knelt in the ashes.

  “It’s what my father always said.”