Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

“Camjiata’s skirmishers were last seen near the town of Cena. If I can find his army, I can sneak into his camp to kill Drake, and then return before Vai gets back from Senones and finds out I left. Then I’ll convince him to leave the mage House and fight for the general.”

“That’s your plan? Do you think it will be easy to convince him to leave now that he’s heir? With his monumental vanity, he’ll believe he can change things from within. That the mansa made sure to bestow such an honor on Andevai’s mother makes me respect the man’s devious mind. Has Andevai been unkind to you? Is that what drove you away?”

“Not at all. If anything, he has been overly kind.”

“That being so, you might have chosen a more prudent and less dramatic and public way of expressing your discontent.”

“I did express my discontent! He said that my being there made ‘all the difference,’ to him.”

She laughed. “I can see how that would have rubbed you the wrong way. Yet even you must see Andevai will take this defection very ill.”

“I just had to get out of there.”

Rory slipped onto the bench beside me, winkled the spoon from my hand, and started eating my porridge.

“Are you really willing to kill James Drake?” Bee asked.

“You have no idea how willing I am.” My fingers clutched my cane so tightly that, had it been ordinary wood, I would have crushed it into splinters. “He means to kill Vai regardless, so I must do it to protect Vai. Even if I cannot live in the mage House and he cannot leave it and so we must be parted… at least I will know he lives and thrives in his chosen place.”

Bee clapped one hand to her chest and the other, palm out, to her brow. “How affecting these maudlin ramblings are! I shall expire in their wake!”

Rory pressed a hand to my forehead. “Are you feverish, Cat?”

“It’s not amusing!”

“What isn’t amusing?” Brennan strolled up, looking fresh and handsome without a trace of hangover-sodden eyes. No wonder he was famous for his ability to hold his liquor! He glanced at Bee, then at Kehinde coming down the stairs from the upper floor with spectacles in hand as she squinted shortsightedly across the courtyard. After ordering porridge and ale, he sat next to me. Chartji and Caith joined us at the table. We exchanged morning greetings. Caith began picking through a heaping platter of nuts and dried berries, looking for the hazelnuts.

“Chartji, I’m wondering if you could see that this letter is dispatched to Expedition.” I handed her the letter I had written to Kofi. “I know I have not a sestertius to my name, and that we must already be deeply in debt to the clutch—”

“I have an idea about that,” said Bee.

“—but if you can send it with your regular dispatches to the Expedition office of Godwik and Clutch, they will know how to get it to this person, because he knows your aunt and uncle.”

Chartji’s crest flared with an emotion I could not interpret, but she took the sealed letter and tucked it inside her jacket. “It will be done. An interesting and important person he must be, this Kofi Osafo. The magister has already sent him six letters via my offices.”

“Has he?” I asked, squinting as at a bright light. When was Vai writing to Kofi?

“I have long been in correspondence with Professora Alhamrai from the university in Expedition, whom you know,” said Kehinde. “Recently we have been discussing the question of the ice shelves and whether they are shrinking or growing and how we might measure their extent. She has written about her theories of the properties of cold magic, which like all things”—here she spared such a jaundiced eye for Brennan that he laughed almost nervously, and she frowned as if she judged him a frivolous fellow—“can be explicated using the principles of science alone.”

“Thus am I scolded,” he said with a lightly mocking smile. “But what I want to know is how any fire mage can survive if he has not been accepted into the guild of blacksmiths. Everyone knows that a person born to the flame will die young in a fire of their own making.”

I said, “James Drake survives by channeling the backlash of his fire magic into living people. An ordinary person will die if so used, but cold mages can absorb most backlash without harm.”

Brennan whistled.

“A fascinating struggle between fire, which many natural historians believe releases energy, and this sort of freezing or locking of energy that it might be said the cold mages do,” said Kehinde. “Where does the fire go when it flows into the cold mage?”

“We believe it disperses into the spirit world. The Coalition will fight by using the presence of cold mages to kill the combustion of Camjiata’s superior weaponry. The general will fight by using Drake to throw the backlash into the cold mages, because when cold mages are acting as catch-fires, they can’t kill combustion or work magic. Not to mention he will burn his enemy’s houses, goods, and camps, and generally terrify the population.”

Brennan considered a spoonful of porridge. “This is valuable information, Cat. If the mages nullify Camjiata’s superior weaponry, then without this fire magic, the general may lose. The Invictus Legion is already here, working in concert with Lord Marius. My spies tell me three more legions are on the march from Rome to join the Coalition.”

“Yes. Vai and the Four Moons mansa were sent to Senones to meet them. Camjiata’s skirmishers have been spotted near the city of Cena.”

“You are indeed an excellent spy, because I have not heard that news,” said Brennan appreciatively. “But it doesn’t change the fact that we can’t risk harming the general’s best weapon.”

“Drake is an unscrupulous criminal! He kills people by burning them alive!”

“So does war,” said Brennan. “So does revolution. So do the mage Houses and the princes with their unjust laws. Which deaths do you choose?”