Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

Ice calved off the high cliff. Caught in the collapse, the wolves tumbled and vanished into the crash of ice. The boom of the avalanche filled the world as it buried the canyon. White mist boiled up in sheets.

“Brace yourself, Catherine.”

A rolling tongue of ice and frozen snow spilled across the tiny peninsula, hissed over the beach, and slumped into the water with a crackling roar like a hundred muskets going off at once. A wave pitched us backward, but Vai kept the boat steady as we were driven partway across the channel. Out in the middle of the water, the choppy waves and wind caught us in a buffeting pitch and yaw. He set to, rowing hard, as I shivered inside his wet wool coat.

“Can you row, Catherine? It would warm you up.”

Looking at his bare hands on the oars made me want to weep. Cold had dug its claws all the way to my heart. Strangely, the bitter air and cold spray off the sea had no effect on him. If anything, he seemed invigorated. “I c-c-can try, but I haven’t before.”

“Then not in these conditions, love.”

The rocking and tipping of the rowboat was beginning to make me feel queasy. “Can’t you make a wind to blow us?”

“You don’t want wind out on the open water in a rowboat. Anyway, it’s not like that. Wind can’t be confined or channeled. I can shift masses of air and freeze rain in the clouds so it falls as sleet or hail…” He glanced past me, eyes widening.

More wedges of ice shook free from the ice shelf. Mist sprayed. The sound of their crashing fall rolled over the channel. A swell rose under us, then a second and a third. He swore in a low voice. I huddled in the wet coat. It would be easier just to go to sleep.

“I didn’t mean that to happen, and I’m not sure what just did.” He frowned at me as if I had said something to offend him. “Talk to me, Catherine. Tell me about your father.”

Fury shook me awake. “I never want to speak of him again!”

“I don’t mean the one who sired you. I meant your father. Daniel Hassi Barahal. The one whose portrait is in your locket. Did you see your father on the beach?”

My father.

Words emerged, although I scarcely knew what I meant to say. “They had just come down from the ice shelf. They were fighting wolves. There was a dead man all bloody. I think his name was Gaius. The Baltic Ice Expedition ended in disaster. Most of the explorers died on the ice, but some survived. Most of the other attempts to explore the ice have ended with the expeditions vanishing forever. I wonder if they accidentally cross into the spirit world and get eaten there. Probably it was just wolves who caught them.”

“Are you suggesting this boat is left over from the Baltic Ice Expedition?” he asked in the calmest voice imaginable, although he looked annoyed and stern in that way he had when he was overcome by a strong emotion. “Tell me about that, Catherine. Keep talking.”

If there was one thing I was good at, it was talking. So I kept talking, even if I stumbled and lost my train of thought. He persisted in asking questions, prodded and poked in a verbal sort of way since obviously because he was rowing the entire time he could not actually poke and prod me, although I had a vague memory that I ought to wish he ought to be able to, but that was a long time ago and anyway it was so very cold and my body ached so much and I was so very tired that eventually I lapsed into silence.

We bumped up on a shore in the lee of a tiny inlet. Ice rimed the shallow water where a stream burbled through a tumble of rocks. A blanket of snow carpeted the hollows, but the wind had swept most of the land clean. There were no trees and little vegetation, only lichen and moss. In the sheltered lee of forgotten boulders and clefts in the earth, waxy-leafed plants spread, laced with frost. Nothing stirred, not even birds a-wing.

Pull up the boat. Turn it over and stow the oars. Fill the bottles with stream water. Walk. Walk. Walk.

I did what he told me to do, as a goblin’s automaton obeys. Was that how the coachman functioned? Was the coachman truly of a goblin’s making, or was that just a story he had told me? Would I ever find out?

There was no wood or we would have stopped to make a fire, even though Vai would have had to leave me. By following the stream, he found an animal trail that he tracked like a hunter.

We rounded a boulder to find ourselves face-to-face with a huge woolly rhinoceros. Its twinned horns dipped as it gave a growling snort. A muzzy instinct woke in the pit of my stomach that the creature could trample and gore us. Vai placed himself between me and the animal. He spoke words I did not know in a cadence whose rhythms sailed past, as if he was politely greeting the beast. It snorted as in answer. As Vai eased us past, it silently watched us go.

For an eternity we walked. Once we ran across a fire pit ringed with stone, sheltered on the lee side of a slope, but there was nothing to burn except straggling patches of gorse, so he decided we should go on.

It was just so hard to put one foot in front of the other because I kept staggering off the path and catching myself at the last moment on the point of my cane. An idea grew in my head, a very compelling idea that I ought to have thought of long before.

“I would be warmer if I took off these wet clothes,” I said.

He was striding up a slope amid winter-whitened grasses and hardy sedge. The thought of trudging after him up such a brutal incline made my legs congeal, so I stopped moving and fumbled at the coat.

He ran back to me. “No! Absolutely not, Catherine.” He kept talking as he dragged me along. “Do you see the prints? There have been hunters or trappers here. The track leads to a place people go. There’s likely a sheltered spot where they camp.”

He broke off as we reached the top of the slope. I really wanted to find a small hole to crawl into. Instead I looked up.

The land ended at a flat shoreline. Beyond it silver waters spread like a mirror. The distant haze of the far shore melted into the encroaching dusk. Maybe there were trees on the other side, but I couldn’t be sure. The near shore was dusted with snow, so the whole land radiated a white sheen. A wide stream was crackled over with a skin of ice. Someone had built a crude wooden pier where the stream flowed into the wide water. Just inland from the pier stood a shed, and next to it huddled a small log house with a sod roof. A rowboat had been tipped onto its side under the low eaves of the hut.

wedges of ice shook free from the ice shelf. Mist sprayed. The sound of their crashing fall rolled over the channel. A swell rose under us, then a second and a third. He swore in a low voice. I huddled in the wet coat. It would be easier just to go to sleep.

“I didn’t mean that to happen, and I’m not sure what just did.” He frowned at me as if I had said something to offend him. “Talk to me, Catherine. Tell me about your father.”