Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

I had heard that voice before, from a dying man. I stared at her, my skin prickling as with ice, and yet it was a pressure of warm air that pushed in through the remaining gaps in the casement, bringing with it the reports of musket fire and the churning roar of the riot gathering force in distant streets.

Andevai’s hand touched mine. The warm moisture of his blood trickled onto my skin. “Is there something wrong with her? That’s not her voice.”

For a moment, the touch of his hand and the comfort of his presence seduced me into tightening my fingers over his as I looked at him. “I think she’s talking about the Rail Yard.”

He stood very close, his expression not arrogant at all but focused, disciplined, and direct as he stared at me. Only at me. “What do you want me to do, Catherine?”

Kiss me.

I yanked my hand out of his and strode across the chamber. I grabbed Bee just as she shuddered and shook herself, tongue flickering out of her mouth in a way that was not quite human.

“Cat, the airship,” she said hoarsely in her own voice. The cold had cracked her lips, and she licked away a spot of blood. “Look. The snow. A thread of smoke, there. A festival wreath. It might be today. Look how short the shadows are. They’ll be there when the sun’s at its highest. We’ve got to go.”

“Of course.” I shut my eyes and envisioned a map of the city. We stood in the district called Cernwood Fields, and if we made our way through the Bitters and across Dog Isle past Eastfair Market…

“I know how to get there,” said Andevai.

“You don’t even live here,” I objected, opening my eyes. “You’re from the country.”

“I studied maps. Your face is bleeding, Catherine.”

Bee shoved my coat into my arms. “You can argue later.”

I laughed. I am sure I sounded on the edge of lunacy, soon to be howling at the moon, as I tugged on coat and gloves. We pushed through the wreckage of tables and the splintered door. As we paused on the street, deserted but for the four sprawled and bloodstained corpses, Andevai absentmindedly licked the wound on his thumb. I gingerly brushed my gloved fingers over the cut on my chin, which I had thought healed over. A drop of blood beaded on the leather from the reopened cut, and although I had not meant to, I raised my hand and touched my blood to my lips. The blood he had drawn.

“Are you sure,” Bee said, “that we can trust him, Cat?”

I looked at Andevai. He looked at me, not with arrogance or pride but with an expression whose intensity I dared not fathom. He lifted a hand, to indicate that I must cast the lots to judge his fortune.

I said, “I suppose we’re about to find out.”

30

The inhabitants of the district of Cernwood Fields had gone to ground, shutters and entrances closed, although here and there we saw a gate or a door cracked ajar as if to offer a haven for folk fleeing the soldiers. We struck a steady loping pace down the main street and thence into side streets, pausing at each intersection to consider where the worst sounds were coming from. In our winter coats we appeared nondescript, even Andevai. At intersections, we discovered shops with broken windows. We surprised men patching a shattered casement with planks of wood, but once they had a good look at us, they set back to work.

We had to walk some miles northeast to reach the Rail Yard, and soon enough we left the troubled central streets behind us and strode through a frigid morning. An odd quiet gripped us; Bee said not one word, and with Andevai in our company, I could find nothing to say. He remained silent, seeming half absent, as if his concentration were elsewhere.

The usual morning crowds about their business were nowhere to be seen, only a few people like us scurrying on their way with heads down. A pulsing roar of human voices punctuated by the reports of musket fire faded as we made our way through the somber warehouses on Dog Isle to the bridge beside the long roofs of Eastfair Market. My eyes began to sting from a bitter tang in the air. Folk at the market gates called after us, asking what we’d seen. We hurried around to the market’s rear where laborers off-loaded coal cars and men changed out horses and brought in new teams. Beyond Eastfair Market, the lowland plain began its gentle rise toward the steep Downs and high Anderida. Thirty years ago, according to maps in my uncle’s study, this had been countryside. Now three mills built of brick and timber stood one after the next along a line of rectangular ponds and a channel of the Sieve hemmed in by stone banks. Waterwheels groaned where water trapped in the murky ponds raced down toward the channel. Chimneys coughed smoke whose sooty weight swirled over lanes of squalid housing. I tasted the stench of human waste, sweet rot, and hot, gritty ash. Although we were at least half a Roman mile from the nearest of the mills, the sound of the machines made a heart-battering clatter that filled the air. Despite unrest elsewhere, the factories were spinning.

Pausing to catch our breath, we stared over the hard angles and smoky pallor.

Andevai spoke in a low voice, as if the sight pained him. “If you want to go to a place where the mansa will feel some reluctance to follow, that is the place.”

Surprised, Bee glanced at him, and she caught my eye and raised her eyebrows.

I shrugged and began walking again. Yet my thoughts spun over and over as I considered the busy combustion of factories and the fire-withering heart of mages.

The Rail Yard was a field of tracks sown from the burgeoning rail system that, in concert with canals, wound down from Anderida to haul coal, timber, and iron to Adurnam’s port. Workshops and stables crowded one side of the Rail Yard, but we tramped past them to the high brick wall that surrounded the industrial yard. Its iron gates were chained and its guard posts abandoned.

“How do we get over?” Bee asked, surveying the impressive walls and gate.

“I can break the lock.” Andevai searched through the heavy wreath of chains for the lock as I drew Bee back, remembering the force of the shattered cup. After a moment, he laughed and began to haul lengths of chain through the iron railings. A crudely cut lock thumped out of the lacework to the cobblestone pavement. “Someone was here before us.”

He shifted the gate open enough for us to slip through, then closed it and looped chains back through. Parallel to the wall ran a series of long, low workshops with big doors, all chained closed. Some of the roofs were half caved in, and most of the windows were shattered, as if a man had walked the length of each building and smashed each individual pane with a sledgehammer. No one had swept up the debris exploded over the dirt.

o;I studied maps. Your face is bleeding, Catherine.”

Bee shoved my coat into my arms. “You can argue later.”