Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

The latch opened the door; the steps bumped down although the eru had not disembarked. That the eru acted as footman was a courtesy for mortal eyes, for the coach was as alive as I was.

My sire climbed out. I grappled with the bag of coins, slinging it over my back despite its distracting weight. No sensible young woman raised in an impoverished family walks away from a pot of gold, even if she may never get a chance to spend it.

I took in and released a breath for courage, and I went out after him. With a hand braced on the threshold of the coach door and my feet still on the steps, I paused to survey my ground as a general may do before a battle.

The palace of the courts lay before me, the realm of both shadow and light, as deep as the murkiest pit and as high as the brightest peak. What Vai had seen as a nest of starving ghouls determined to drain him of his blood, I had seen as a grand feast populated by elegantly clothed and peacock-feathered personages who had grown accustomed to their harvest. Hard to say which was true. Maybe they both were.

The Hunt surged in the air as a mass of boiling black cloud, my brothers and sisters. I saw crows and spotted hounds, smart-mouthed hyenas and silent vipers. A cloud of wasps and a spinning web of spiders jostled against women with lions’ heads and men with the bodies of fish. Dire wolves prowled in their packs shoulder to shoulder with the tawny beauty of the big cats. Yet the hunters had been bound to serve not nature’s course but the courts’ desire.

The coach and horses were not touching the ground. I was pretty sure they could not.

I glanced back at the eru holding on at the back and ahead to the coachman sitting on the driver’s bench at the front. The eru regarded me with all three eyes. “This is as far as we can take you, Cousin,” she said.

I smiled. “Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the trust you’ve shown in me and the trust I’ve been able to give to you. Should things fall out in such a way that you discover leisure to do as you wish at some later date, my solicitor can be found at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in the city of Havery, where you picked me up.”

The coachman raised his whip in salute.

I jumped awkwardly down into the pit, shifted the heavy bag on my shoulders, and with my sword in hand walked forward after my sire. The pit had become a resplendent plaza crowded with hungry courtiers. They slipped and slid about so much I could not count them, but I began to think they were far fewer than I had first believed. They just took up so much room and never stopped grasping and moving. Eager to get their drop of the rich feast, they parted to make a path for us that led straight to the dais of glittering salt.

On the dais stood four chairs beaten out of gold and four stools carved from obsidian. As my sire approached, human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: they who ruled as the day court and the night court, for the spirit world was washed by both light and dark. What manner of people they were I could not tell: Were they spirit creatures who had begun to lose the ability to change and had thus become more and more solid? Ancestors who craved a rigid sort of immortality? Elders who stood in relation to humans much as dragons did to the feathered people? I did not know, and right now I was not going to find out.

The courts awaited the sacrifice. Chains like whips lashed my sire to his knees before them. He knelt, but he did not bend his head; his lips were drawn back as if he wished to growl. The Hunt stirred with myriad hisses and chortles and howls and snarls.

“Give us what is ours.” The voice of the courts thundered, many in one. “So 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.”

They ignored me, so I walked past him and planted myself in front of the dais, facing up to their chairs.

“Peace to you,” I said with my friendliest smile. “Does this night find you at peace?”

A vast and horrible silence smothered the world. Their golden eyes chained me with a will as heavy as eternity. I fell into the rip current of their gaze, into the breathing heart of the ice.

At their deepest levels, the worlds vibrate. A force flows through every part of existence. Cold mages can redirect this flow; fire mages energize and disperse it. As for what exists in the spirit world beyond our ken, courts and dragons are just names we give to powers we do not comprehend and cannot escape.

Because I was my father’s daughter I could make a story of it, a way to understand and put words to something far bigger than I was: In the worlds there is an ancient and unending duel between dragons and courts. In the Great Smoke, the mothers of dragons dragged innocent girls into the ocean of dreams, using mortal women to midwife their fragile hatchlings.

Thus the duel tipped to favor the dragons, and so the other side had fought back.

In the old village tales written down by my father in his journals, the Wild Hunt did not take blood. Death comes to all things in the mortal world, and the Wild Hunt rode on Hallows’ Night to gather in the souls of those fated to die in the coming year.

Perhaps the cold mages had come to the attention of the courts because powerful cold magic caused changes in the flow and ebb of energy in the spirit world. Perhaps mages shone so brightly and their blood tasted so sweet that, once one had been taken to bind the Wild Hunt the very first time, the courts developed a taste for their blood and then a need for it and then a desperate craving. By drinking the blood of mortals they had in the end become what we called ghouls: creatures who devour the essence of others in order to live.

I did not have to devour the essence of others in order to live. I could live perfectly happily working in a humble office with my dear cousin, building up a respectable business that involved spying and sneaking, although obviously I would be first to volunteer to do the most dirty, adventurous, and strenuous work. I could sleep perfectly happily on a mat on the floor with the man I loved, even though obviously I would prefer to lie in a bed he had built for us, because it was more comfortable. I was eager to teach my brother to cheat at cards, to nurse Vai’s mother through her weak spells and nurture Vai’s sisters into women, to hope Luce survived the war, to get to know Doctor Asante, and to write about everything to Professora Alhamrai, and maybe even to return to Expedition someday to visit the people I had become so fond of. I wanted to introduce batey to Europa. That would be something, a ballcourt in every city and town!

The courts tried to hammer me flat under the crushing cold of the ice, they wanted me to be afraid, to give up, to give in. But I braced myself on my sword and warmed my hands on my locket. I answered the polite greeting they had not made, for they did not know how to reciprocate in the traditional way.

“I have no trouble, thanks to my power as a woman. I just want to clarify two things. There is one sacrifice each year. There cannot be another, and it is this sacrifice that binds the Wild Hunt and indeed all your servants for another year. So you all agree and accept me as the sacrifice?”

“We accept.”

They were so hungry and impatient and greedy that they threw their chains off my sire and onto me. Their touch tore at my skin as a hundred sharp nails of ice, a net of barbs poised to puncture me and drink me dry.

“That being so, you take my mortal blood. Is that not right? Mortal blood seals the contract by which you first bound the Hunt and all your other servants?”

e dais stood four chairs beaten out of gold and four stools carved from obsidian. As my sire approached, human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: they who ruled as the day court and the night court, for the spirit world was washed by both light and dark. What manner of people they were I could not tell: Were they spirit creatures who had begun to lose the ability to change and had thus become more and more solid? Ancestors who craved a rigid sort of immortality? Elders who stood in relation to humans much as dragons did to the feathered people? I did not know, and right now I was not going to find out.

The courts awaited the sacrifice. Chains like whips lashed my sire to his knees before them. He knelt, but he did not bend his head; his lips were drawn back as if he wished to growl. The Hunt stirred with myriad hisses and chortles and howls and snarls.

“Give us what is ours.” The voice of the courts thundered, many in one. “So 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.”