Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

Wardens and riflemen knelt in ranks on the main plaza, their faces masked with the anger and shame of the soldier who has had his sword removed by his own captain. I glimpsed Gaius Sanogo standing at the rear of the ranks, hands clasped behind his back as he surveyed the scene with his ominously bland smile. In the darkness beyond the light stood companies of Taino soldiers, but I could not judge their mood.

The crows flew onward to the central ball court, which was ringed by a hundred ordinary lamps. That so many lamps burned despite the presence of so many fire banes made the cacica’s power seem even more impressive. In the center of the ball court, the proud Council members, the wealthiest and most powerful of Expedition’s ruling families, knelt with heads bowed. Their families and households and kinfolk huddled at the base of the risers like a discouraged losing team. Behind them stood other Expeditioners notable enough to be forced to attend this ceremony. All looked crushed and defeated. I saw no trolls at all.

ked him. But I turned my heart toward the enemy I sought.

“General Camjiata. Lion of war. Leonnorios Aemilius Keita.”

I closed my left hand at my waist as if I held the hilt of the sword Camjiata had stolen from me. As at my command, my kinsmen bolted on the paths that net the world: loping wolves, baying hounds, rippling cats, silent sharks, winged raptors. From the smallest to the largest, they raced on the scent I envisioned more as a face and a figure and a presence than as a smell.

My senses slammed up against the border between Expedition and Taino country as against a spirit rope strung with amulets and charms. The Taino had woven a barrier around their kingdom not just with wealth and weapons but with what Vai’s grandmother might have called the nyama of their behiques. Yet it took me, half mortal as I was, only a moment’s negotiation a tear a rip in the spirit barrier. I slipped through, and the hunt poured through after me.

The island of Kiskeya slumbered, as yet unaware of this invasion, but her beating heart pulsed in the rhythm of the wedding areito. I heard its chant and rattle but I could not see the plaza or the ball courts; I couldn’t see the people celebrating. They were hidden from me because they were wreathed in shadow. I knew Camjiata was close, but I could not find him.

Yet the world was lit. Flames like gas lamps marked each behique, some burning fierce and strong while others simmered with a fire humble or frail. Yet in truth the presence of all those fire mages was difficult to distinguish against the brightest blaze. Most were like candles held next to a bonfire. The cacica’s magic burned so brightly that she almost blinded all else. How she did not kindle into an inferno I did not at first understand. She ought to be dead. The backlash of her power ought to have consumed her long since, but it had not. Nor was she surrounded by the charred corpses of her catch-fires. She was surrounded by a net of magic that shone as a dew-moistened spider’s web might when the rising sun catches in the filaments and breathes light over them.

Threads pulsing as with the flow of energy stretched from the Taino plaza across great distances into the faraway masses of the huge ice sheets, through the spirit world, and back into the mortal world. These threads did not have color, precisely, nor did they glow as flame does. Like spirit, they were animate, or at least shot through with energy and force. Were these threads cold magic? Each led back to a different point, and those points were not flames but intangible wells of power that reminded me of the deep blue pool on Salt Island that Drake had told me was considered sacred by the Taino.

Those wells of power were cold mages. For at last, I understood what I was seeing. Her catch-fires were all fire banes. She was continually casting off heat into an entire troop of catch-fires linked to her as if they were knitted into one garment. She did not pour the backlash into a single catch-fire but divided the stream into many, so no single one was overwhelmed and thus consumed, as I had almost been killed by Drake. Anyway, the fire banes who were her catch-fires were not killing her combustion, or even absorbing it. Their bodies were conduits. The cool depths of their spirits like wells swallowed the constant pillowing outwash of the cacica’s fire magic and expelled it through glimmering threads into the spirit world.

The brilliance of her power obscured all scent or taste or sound of the general.

I could not find him.

But there was one spirit she did not obscure. Right next to the cacica, a well of dazzling purity plunged into the bottomless blue waters of the spirit world. Its play of welcoming light and restless energy beckoned like the surface of water seen from below when your lungs are almost out of air.

“Vai,” I whispered, but my lips made no sound.

Crows scattered on the vanguard of the storm. Their eyes belonged to the master of the hunt. Clothing myself in their wings, I flew so that I could see into the mortal world with their eyes.

The Taino had chosen this night, Hallows’ Night, to receive Expedition’s surrender.

Wardens and riflemen knelt in ranks on the main plaza, their faces masked with the anger and shame of the soldier who has had his sword removed by his own captain. I glimpsed Gaius Sanogo standing at the rear of the ranks, hands clasped behind his back as he surveyed the scene with his ominously bland smile. In the darkness beyond the light stood companies of Taino soldiers, but I could not judge their mood.

The crows flew onward to the central ball court, which was ringed by a hundred ordinary lamps. That so many lamps burned despite the presence of so many fire banes made the cacica’s power seem even more impressive. In the center of the ball court, the proud Council members, the wealthiest and most powerful of Expedition’s ruling families, knelt with heads bowed. Their families and households and kinfolk huddled at the base of the risers like a discouraged losing team. Behind them stood other Expeditioners notable enough to be forced to attend this ceremony. All looked crushed and defeated. I saw no trolls at all.

The Council was surrendering to Prince Caonabo. His fire magic was difficult to see under the glare of his mother’s power, and even so it was nothing more than a sober, quiet flame. He stood straight and somber, receiving a copy of a written document that I assumed was the First Treaty. On the stone risers, like spectators to the final game in a prestigious tournament, sat many Taino, both women and men. Some seemed skeptical, even disapproving, while others looked pleased and triumphant.

The cacica sat on a carved duho, her seat of power, placed on a raised wooden platform at one end of the ball court. Some of her catch-fires sat near her, while others were scattered around the ball court and some even outside it. The geometry of their placement was too convoluted for me to follow. Nor did it matter, for out of them all, only one caught my eye.

Vai sat cross-legged on a mat on the ground next to the cacica’s duho. With his hands relaxed on his thighs, he looked perfectly at ease as he turned to speak to the queen. I did not like the way she looked at him! Suddenly those rumors that she forced male fire banes to marry her did not seem far-fetched or scurrilous. What did she care about the marriage laws of Europans and the chains that bound him and me? I had a hankering for a chisel.

His demeanor I could not fault, for he displayed toward her the respect he always showed women. She was, I thought, pointing out to him the geometry of her catch-fires, dispersed in a pattern that extended farther than my crow’s eyes could see. Like lamps turned low, each visible fire bane was limned by a nimbus of silvery mist. No nimbus touched Vai. She was not diverting any of the backlash into him.

His eyes widened and his head cocked to one side as if he heard an unexpected sound. After a comment to the cacica, he rose, his gaze lifting to sweep the darkness beyond.

I was sure he had sensed me.

The crows swooped low over the ball court. Behind Caonabo, set between the prince and the platform where the cacica presided, rose six wooden posts. A person was lashed to each post as to a mast. One of the prisoners was Juba, who gazed over the assembly with the look of a man who knows he has been condemned and is not sorry for the crime that has brought him to this place of execution. Juba and Caonabo truly had uncannily identical features, but once you had seen them together, you could never mistake one for the other, for Caonabo was grave and self-contained while Juba was impassioned and impatient.

The crow settled on top of one of the posts. To my utter horror, I recognized the woman tied there. Abby’s clothing was so humble and dirt-stained you could tell she had been snatched from the fields. She had her eyes shut. By the way her lips moved, she seemed to be singing.

Yet even she was not the person I needed to find.

The crow looked into the darkness and fixed on the great stone eye through which the players could score a goal. From the shadows, General Camjiata observed the proceedings, flanked by Captain Tira and the one-eyed proprietor of the Speckled Iguana.

On the ball court, Caonabo was speaking to the Expeditioners. He sounded weary but unswerving, a man who does not like the task he has been given but will carry it out to its fullest.

“Always, we the Taino have held in every regard to the First Treaty, which our ancestors made with your ancestors. We respect the words and agreements of those who came before us as if they were our own, for they are our own. You have allowed the threat of salters to live among you. The bitten must be exiled to Salt Island, even if they are healed. They are dead. That is the law. We did not unearth this disease. You brought it on your ships. We allowed you to build your city as long as the agreement we made was honored. But it has not been honored—”