Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

The glittering chain with which another djeli had bound me to Andevai flowed into the mirror. I brushed my fingers across its gleam. Magic thrummed like a pulse anchored to Vai’s heart.

“Catherine? Where are you?” Vai whispered, as if he felt my attention. “Beware, love. Think with your mind, not your body.”

The tremor of his beloved voice so shocked me that I yanked on the chain.

It moved. Or I moved. Or the world moved.

Past the surface of the mirror, my gaze spanned the depths as if I were an eagle gliding above and watching the land roll past beneath. Mountains and valleys skimmed by below. Outside a walled town, peaceful eru worked and laughed and gossiped in the same manner as ordinary people did in the mortal world, only the eru were creatures of the spirit world with wings, third eyes in the center of their foreheads, and magic more powerful than that of any cold mage. The fields they farmed were sown in spirals. The beasts they shepherded were antelopes whose triple horns were studded by gemstones and glazed as with silver. A bloated beast like a slothfully blinking airship drifted past above the black line of a road and the warded triangle of a watering hole. A clan of tawny saber-toothed cats had gathered to nose at the pool, lick at a pillar of salt, and lounge in the shade of a tree.

Light flashed on the horizon. Where the land ended in a long straight shoreline, it met not water but the ashy ocean that we had traversed in the belly of a dragon, the Great Smoke. A tide of dark mist washed in, spilling over the land like the sweep of a broom. Beneath the smoke the land vanished. Only the road and warded ground remained unmoved and unchanged. My rope of magic held firm, but when the tide receded back into the smoky churn of the depths, the shoreline had changed.

The once-straight shoreline was now cut by fingerlike bays, as if the Great Smoke had taken bites out of the spirit land. The bloated air beast had vanished, although a large animal lumbered over a field of thorns, crushing all under its hooves. Eru rose in a cloud from the warded walls of their town, but they did not see me. I thought that maybe I wasn’t even really there, that the chain acted like a hunter’s scent to lead me toward my prey. Was this chain how Vai could always find me?

A white cliff towered above a lake riddled with icebergs. At first I thought it was an ice shelf, but as I swooped closer I realized it was a fortress built of crystal.

I slammed right into its wall.

The impact jolted me out of the vision. I found myself back on the first-floor landing with my right arm halfway into the mirror as if plunged up to the elbow in water, and the rest of me standing in front of the mirror blinking back tears. The heat of summer baked like sun on the arm that was thrust into the spirit world, while the rest of my body shivered in the cold house.

Bakary spoke behind me. “Don’t touch her, Your Excellency.”

“If Lord Marius stabs her with his sword, will she die?” asked the mansa.

Never let it be said I could not throw caution to the winds and just take the leap.

“Rory, take off your clothes. Bee, the mirror is water. You can cross if you will come.”

“Of course I will!” cried Bee.

I cut my skin. Blood streamed from the gloomy spring chill of the mortal world into the hot blaze of the spirit world. When my sword’s tip grazed the surface, the mirror peeled back like an eye opening. Was this part of the power I had as a spiritwalker? With my blood to seed it, could cold steel open a gate through which others could cross?

Steel flared at my back, felt on my tongue as the gritty remains of a blacksmith’s forge. Lord Marius had drawn his sword.

“She can’t be allowed to escape!” cried Amadou Barry.

“Follow me!” I cried.

I fell through, pouring like blood through the gash.

17

My knees thumped onto stony ground. Black night enveloped me, unrelieved by moon or stars. As I lifted my sword arm defensively, fire waxed the blade as a shimmering steel gleam.

“Ah! Something stung me!”

“Bee?”

I held the sword aloft, searching for her in the aura of the blade’s light. Just in front of me a wall rose into the darkness, its face too smooth and high to climb. The surrounding land was covered with tall grass as far as the light from my sword reached. I did not see Bee, but I heard a whine like insects swarming.

“Bee!” I called.

Grass crackled. A huge cat with wicked curving canines and eyes as golden as my own sprang up to me. He nudged me with his head, then licked my forearm where a trickle of blood oozed along my skin. The rough trail of his tongue startled me into a laugh.

“Cat?” Bee’s voice rose out of the darkness. I still could not see her, but she sounded panicked. “Everything hates me here. This wasn’t a good idea! Ouch!”

“Where are you?” I cried.

Rory loped into the darkness. The whining spiked into a shrill buzzing. The big cat returned out of the gloom with Bee pressed to his side. She was waving an arm frantically in the air. I made a few cuts of my sword around her. The buzzing vanished as a cloud of tiny creatures scattered.