Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

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.

The horseman reined his mount to a halt in front of the dais. My sire was glowing, ruddy with a surfeit of blood. Slowly he bowed his head. Every line of his body was tense and tight.

Certainty infused me like a bolt of hot anger through my flesh: He hated the creatures who sat in those thrones. He wanted to slash his spear through every watching, waiting presence but could not because eight chains bound him, one to each chair.

Those chains like whips snapped, bringing the horse to its knees.

A voice like a hammer blow cut through him, turning the mounted horseman into a kneeling eru with wings furled as in pain. He knelt before them. Blood is power because blood binds.

A prince among slaves is still a slave.

He hadn’t been talking about Andevai. He had been talking about himself.

“Give us what is ours.” The eight personages spoke in one voice. “As you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”

The Hunt was merely the conduit. The courts could not walk into the mortal world, so only their servants could bring them the mortal blood they craved.

The blood of the sacrifice poured out of a hundred wounds. Through the chains of binding they sucked the fresh blood of the kill out of his flesh and into theirs.

I licked the air. I tasted the blood of the kill, so rich and sweet, laced with the spice of power, the salt of life. My hunger swelled together with the hunger of all the many presences, the denizens of the spirit courts. The force of their ravenous appetites built like the front of a storm. I took a step, thinking to race back across the bridge that spanned the cleft and regain the staircase, for surely I could rush up to the height and claw in to take my share before they had drained it all.

An unseen person coughed as though waking from a dusty and uneasy doze. The cough startled me back to my own self as I remembered who I was and why I was here.

“Vai? Can you hear me? Is that you?”

“Catherine?” His voice was hoarse.

The ribbon-ornamented balcony above me could only be reached by a skeleton of what had once been a stair-rail as delicate as crystalline branches. Rungs and railings had been shattered by savage blows to make the stairs unusable. I didn’t need stairs. I checked my sword to make sure it was secure, found a fingerhold on a jaggedly broken rung, and scrambled up. The weight of the pack threw off my balance, but I was determined. A presence loomed over me.