Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

I had rarely received a compliment that pleased me more. “My thanks, Your Highness. Since we’re here, will you drink?”

“Your manners are improving. Yet is it safe to drink here?”

“Here on warded ground, from this water, it is.”

“Then I will do so, for I wish to taste the waters of these springs.”

I cradled her in my hands so she could lap, rather like a dog, but it went well enough. I drank to satiety, filled the bottles, and stowed them in my pack. My sire’s whispered words nagged at me, but I dared not discuss them aloud with the cacica lest unseen ears overhear. Had he been taunting me, or warning me?

“We must go to the palace,” I said.

“In Sharagua, such a central compound would be the cacique’s domain. That suggests the palace is the home of the spirit courts of Europa. We can discover what lies within by entering.”

Buoyed by this truism, I advanced, with the cacica’s hair clutched in my right hand and my sword in my left. We walked at least a mile, if one could measure distance here as in the mortal world, and I was pretty sure one could not. I was pretty sure distances might expand and contract. How else could the cats have reached me so quickly when I called to them? They paced alongside, escorting us. The littlest several times bumped into me on purpose, until I finally swatted her with the flat of my sword.

“Little beast! No wonder Rory finds you annoying!”

She sulked away so like Bee’s spoiled little sister Astraea that I laughed. The adult females coughed in what I imagined was shared amusement.

Strange to think that laughter brought us to the walls.

White walls like seamless ceramic rose to the height of ten men, so high I could not hope to climb. A massive sea-green door promised an entry, but it was closed tight. Fortunately, warded ground formed the tongue of the gate, with a smooth pillar, a spring of water rising in a stone basin, and a sapling ash tree. Standing safe between the wards, I examined the huge doors.

The lintel was carved of jade in the form of two eru with hands braced against each other’s, their lips about to meet in a kiss that would never be consummated. Did the entrance always look like this, or was it formed this way to taunt me? The doors had neither ring nor latch. When I pushed with a foot, neither budged. The cut on my forearm was still oozing, but a smear of my blood wiped onto the jade did nothing.

Frustrated, I murmured my sire’s words. “ ‘The palace where those without blood cannot walk.’ ”

“The dead have no blood to offer,” said the cacica. “Perhaps the dead cannot cross.”

“I could go forward alone. But it seems wrong to leave you behind. I should have sent you with Bee.”

“Hers is not the responsibility. You can hang the basket from the tree and return to get me.”

“What if someone steals you, Your Highness? What if I can’t return this way? Or get out at all?”

“If you are unable to get out, I will be lost regardless.” Her clear gaze measured me. “I do not fear you will abandon me. You have proven yourself loyal.”

“My thanks, Your Highness.” Her praise startled me into an unexpected spike of optimism.

I returned her to the basket, hung the basket from a branch, and from the spring drank my fill of water so cold it numbed my lips.

This time, when I smeared blood onto the jade, the stone parted as easily as curtains. As I pushed through, my first step took me into light so bright it blinded me. My second step brought me to the brink of an impossibly vast chasm. The silence made me wonder if I had gone deaf.

An entire world fell away from my feet like a bowl with tiers. Each of these tiers marked a landscape as wide as continents, and each landscape was surrounded by the Great Smoke. I looked down as might a star, hanging so high that the whole of existence lay exposed as I watched the surge and flow of the spirit world. Tides of smoke swept up from the waterless ocean to engulf swaths of land, then rolled back into the sea. Everything the tide touched was changed, except for the steady gleams that marked warded ground, the straight lines of warded roads, and a few patches that might have been briny salt flats.

According to the story of creation told by the Kena’ani, Noble Ba’al had wrested land out of ocean in his contest with the god of the sea. The sages of my people said that the world was created out of conflict. Was this not similar to what the troll lawyer Keer had told me? “At the heart of all lie the vast energies which are the animating spirit of the worlds. The worlds incline toward disorder. Cold battles with heat. When ice grows, order increases. Where fire triumphs, energies disperse.”

In the spirit world, land and ocean warred, one rising as the other fell. Where the ocean receded, the span of the land grew. When the ocean swelled, the measure of the land shrank.

How could I see it all, and all at once? For here, on the brink, I was not standing in the spirit world and yet neither was I standing in the mortal world.

The threads of life and spirit stitch together the interleaved worlds. Mages drew their power through these threads, and I used the shadows of the threads to weave concealment and enhance my sight and hearing in the mortal world.

Now it seemed to me that I was standing both inside and outside. I was caught within a single translucent thread that pulsed with the force of life and spirit that some call magic and others call energy. Its span was no greater than the span of my outstretched arms and yet it was also boundless. The contrast so dizzied me that I swayed. The lip of the abyss crumbled away beneath my feet. Flailing, I tipped and fell forward through another flash of blinding light.

My knees smacked onto solid ground. After I sucked down the pain and blinked the afterimages of spots from my vision, I looked around.

I had come to rest on a ledge cut into a cliff side that overlooked a deep bowl of land like a crater. Inside the crater the ground was cut up by narrow ridges and steep prominences in the manner of a maze. A city of bridges and wide balconies wove through this labyrinth of air and wind. Every surface had a crystalline glimmer. The spacious balconies and winding bridges were ornamented with ribbons colored blood-red and melting-butter-yellow and the stark blue those who lived in the north called “the mark of the ice.” Rainbows rippled as on invisible currents of water.