Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

He turned sideways as if to swipe at me but hesitated when he caught sight of something behind me. Like a beaten animal he hissed, head hunched, ears down. I pressed back against the railing as I turned with my blade ready to block.

The personage who approached paid me no notice. I might as well have been invisible.

Such a proud and imposing woman could walk at her ease through any princely court or mage House estate. Her robes shimmered with peacock hues. A headdress and cloak of rustling ornamental feathers made me stare. Her graceful hands had long fingernails painted red, as if she had dipped them in blood.

“There you are, precious.” She fastened a gem-studded collar around the neck of the angry cat without the least sign that his size, teeth, and annoyance disturbed her. “It is time for the Hunt.”

Unexpectedly she turned, fingers closing like iron around my wrist. Her eyes had neither iris nor pupil; they looked like shards of ice stabbed into her face. Without so much as asking my leave or apologizing for the discourtesy, she pressed the raw cut to her lips.

Winter leaches warmth from the air. Ice forms into chains that bind quivering souls.

My heart, my thoughts, my very spirit drained into the chasm of winter, crushed under the weight of a glacial shelf. I was the food and the drink; I was the thread of power being tasted and sipped; I was the one bound and chained…

The hand released me. I collapsed to my knees, hacking as if I were coughing out the dregs of my soul. Despair curdled in my gut. I would never find him. He was already dead. Bee and Rory were lost in the mortal world where I could never reunite with them. My tasks undone, my promises unkept… all lost…

“This is weak fare, not the prisoner whose powerful blood you promised us,” she said in a cold voice to my sire. “He continues to defy us and has placed himself out of our reach and it seems yours as well. If only he would surrender, as you claimed he would, he would nourish us with that astonishing strength. But since he refuses to feed us, and the time is come for the renewal of the binding, then you, my pet, must hunt in the mortal world for our feast.”

With fingers wrapped around the leash, she climbed toward the ziggurat. My sire followed, tail lashing, exactly as might a beast bound into obedient but unwilling servitude.

For the longest time the ice in my veins held me frozen. As they ascended the magnificent stairs, the woman and the cat were joined by elegant personages splendidly garbed in gowns and capes sewn of pearls and silk and shells. Up they climbed to the very crown of the ziggurat. There a cloud of darkness swirled.

Hounds yipped anxiously. Wolves howled and hyenas cackled. Wasps massed in a cloud. My sire changed from cat into a man riding a black horse. He raised a hand, commanding the air.

A churning eye like the center of a hurricane boiled into existence in midair. It reminded me of the goal in batey, a window in the heavens between the spirit world and the mortal world. A smear like a bolt of night surged up from the ziggurat, piercing the air as a deadly lance.

Thunder cracked. A gate between the worlds swirled open.

The Wild Hunt had been released.

In a howling, chirping, chortling pack, the Hunt passed through the gate of the hurricane’s eye. My sire galloped in their midst with a spear in one hand and fear in the other.

On a second thunderclap, the eye closed and the Hunt vanished.

The dark clouds cleared away. The city fell silent, as if holding its breath. But it was not still. The boiling movement that spun along the bridges and balconies flowed merrily along. Its constantly shifting pattern contracted and expanded like a flock of birds in flight, spinning around and around the center like a whirlpool around an unseen eddy.

My finger twitched. My arms were my own again. I rubbed my eyes to break free from the trance.

Blessed Tanit! If the Wild Hunt rode into the mortal world, then Hallows’ Night had come again. Months had passed in what had felt to me like a single day. Bee and I had walked in Adurnam in late March. Now it was the end of October in the mortal world. The Hunt would pursue a person whose blood hummed with the power and energy we humans called magic. It would corner, kill, and dismember the hapless victim, and toss the severed head down a well. Yet looking at the silent personages awaiting their feast atop the ziggurat, I had to wonder: Was my sire the master, or a slave to others’ bidding?

This mystery lay beyond my grasp right now. I had to concentrate on what I had come here for. If the crowning feast was the center of the city, then surely my sire would hold his prisoner close to the celebration yet hidden from it. The spirit world did not have shadows but it did have brighter places and places more gray and indistinct. It had places that drew the eye, and places the eye slid away from as water slides off a duck’s back.

I found it on the fourth staircase, the broken one. Along the outer rim of the towering crack that split the staircase ran a narrow balcony like an outgrowth on a glassy stone cliff. A figure sat there, unmoving. It was too small for me to see features or even to discern the colors of the clothes it was wearing, although it looked a lot like a dash jacket and he looked like a man. The only way to reach the spot was to be lowered by rope, to climb by ladder, or to fly.

Could I fly? Wasn’t I an eru’s daughter?

I turned my thoughts inward, searching through my body for a memory of wings, but I remained stubbornly Cat, locked into the mortal flesh my mother had given birth to.

So I did the only thing I could: I plotted out a route and hastened toward the broken stair. Once I reached its jagged steps, I raced up them to the point where the huge gash like a notch made by a giant’s knife had cut through the stone into the interior of the ziggurat. A bridge no wider than my hand spanned the gap between the sides of the gash; the balcony lay on the other side of the crevice. I balanced across the gulf of air until I reached a flight of floating steps, some of them missing because they, too, were broken.

After clambering up, I paused to catch my breath on a tiny platform not even wide enough to sit on. Above me rose the sheer face of a cliff, as ominous as a wall of ice. A pretty balcony ornamented by ribbons lay above me, and above it rose more cliff. Below me, the cleft fell away into darkness.

Even from halfway within the ziggurat, my doubled vision could still see the top of the pyramid’s flat crown, as if part of me still stood inside one of the threads of power and spirit that weave the worlds. Overhead a churning circle of brilliance swirled in the sky. The eye of the gate opened. Howling and roaring, the Wild Hunt spilled back into the spirit world in a boiling mass of turbulent beasts. The layers and levels of the city emptied as all moving things converged on the height. Human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: four black as obsidian and four white as snow. They had no faces as I recognized a face. Instead they surged with a force I could only describe and feel as hunger.

o;This is weak fare, not the prisoner whose powerful blood you promised us,” she said in a cold voice to my sire. “He continues to defy us and has placed himself out of our reach and it seems yours as well. If only he would surrender, as you claimed he would, he would nourish us with that astonishing strength. But since he refuses to feed us, and the time is come for the renewal of the binding, then you, my pet, must hunt in the mortal world for our feast.”

With fingers wrapped around the leash, she climbed toward the ziggurat. My sire followed, tail lashing, exactly as might a beast bound into obedient but unwilling servitude.

For the longest time the ice in my veins held me frozen. As they ascended the magnificent stairs, the woman and the cat were joined by elegant personages splendidly garbed in gowns and capes sewn of pearls and silk and shells. Up they climbed to the very crown of the ziggurat. There a cloud of darkness swirled.