Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)

I laughed. I am sure I sounded on the edge of lunacy, soon to be howling at the moon, as I tugged on coat and gloves. We pushed through the wreckage of tables and the splintered door. As we paused on the street, deserted but for the four sprawled and bloodstained corpses, Andevai absentmindedly licked the wound on his thumb. I gingerly brushed my gloved fingers over the cut on my chin, which I had thought healed over. A drop of blood beaded on the leather from the reopened cut, and although I had not meant to, I raised my hand and touched my blood to my lips. The blood he had drawn.

“Are you sure,” Bee said, “that we can trust him, Cat?”

I looked at Andevai. He looked at me, not with arrogance or pride but with an expression whose intensity I dared not fathom. He lifted a hand, to indicate that I must cast the lots to judge his fortune.

I said, “I suppose we’re about to find out.”

30

The inhabitants of the district of Cernwood Fields had gone to ground, shutters and entrances closed, although here and there we saw a gate or a door cracked ajar as if to offer a haven for folk fleeing the soldiers. We struck a steady loping pace down the main street and thence into side streets, pausing at each intersection to consider where the worst sounds were coming from. In our winter coats we appeared nondescript, even Andevai. At intersections, we discovered shops with broken windows. We surprised men patching a shattered casement with planks of wood, but once they had a good look at us, they set back to work.

We had to walk some miles northeast to reach the Rail Yard, and soon enough we left the troubled central streets behind us and strode through a frigid morning. An odd quiet gripped us; Bee said not one word, and with Andevai in our company, I could find nothing to say. He remained silent, seeming half absent, as if his concentration were elsewhere.

The usual morning crowds about their business were nowhere to be seen, only a few people like us scurrying on their way with heads down. A pulsing roar of human voices punctuated by the reports of musket fire faded as we made our way through the somber warehouses on Dog Isle to the bridge beside the long roofs of Eastfair Market. My eyes began to sting from a bitter tang in the air. Folk at the market gates called after us, asking what we’d seen. We hurried around to the market’s rear where laborers off-loaded coal cars and men changed out horses and brought in new teams. Beyond Eastfair Market, the lowland plain began its gentle rise toward the steep Downs and high Anderida. Thirty years ago, according to maps in my uncle’s study, this had been countryside. Now three mills built of brick and timber stood one after the next along a line of rectangular ponds and a channel of the Sieve hemmed in by stone banks. Waterwheels groaned where water trapped in the murky ponds raced down toward the channel. Chimneys coughed smoke whose sooty weight swirled over lanes of squalid housing. I tasted the stench of human waste, sweet rot, and hot, gritty ash. Although we were at least half a Roman mile from the nearest of the mills, the sound of the machines made a heart-battering clatter that filled the air. Despite unrest elsewhere, the factories were spinning.

Pausing to catch our breath, we stared over the hard angles and smoky pallor.

Andevai spoke in a low voice, as if the sight pained him. “If you want to go to a place where the mansa will feel some reluctance to follow, that is the place.”

Surprised, Bee glanced at him, and she caught my eye and raised her eyebrows.

I shrugged and began walking again. Yet my thoughts spun over and over as I considered the busy combustion of factories and the fire-withering heart of mages.

The Rail Yard was a field of tracks sown from the burgeoning rail system that, in concert with canals, wound down from Anderida to haul coal, timber, and iron to Adurnam’s port. Workshops and stables crowded one side of the Rail Yard, but we tramped past them to the high brick wall that surrounded the industrial yard. Its iron gates were chained and its guard posts abandoned.

“How do we get over?” Bee asked, surveying the impressive walls and gate.

“I can break the lock.” Andevai searched through the heavy wreath of chains for the lock as I drew Bee back, remembering the force of the shattered cup. After a moment, he laughed and began to haul lengths of chain through the iron railings. A crudely cut lock thumped out of the lacework to the cobblestone pavement. “Someone was here before us.”

He shifted the gate open enough for us to slip through, then closed it and looped chains back through. Parallel to the wall ran a series of long, low workshops with big doors, all chained closed. Some of the roofs were half caved in, and most of the windows were shattered, as if a man had walked the length of each building and smashed each individual pane with a sledgehammer. No one had swept up the debris exploded over the dirt.

I looked at Andevai. “Did you do that?”

“How could—” demanded Bee, and then closed her mouth.

A clink of dropped metal falling on metal came quite distinctly from beyond the workshops, followed by a curse in a male voice.

I raised a hand for silence and gestured that they should stay hidden. Then I padded down a lane between empty workshops toward the open space beyond. I drew on my glamor and became brick and dirt and broken glass, the battered surroundings of an industrial yard inhabited by the ghosts of projects abandoned because of destruction. A twisted hulk sprawled across open ground. Its vast ribs curved as high as the surrounding roofs, and flaps of shredded skin stirred in the breeze. Within the ribs mounded more fabric in coils and rumpled hills like the collapsed internal organs of a whale. Pockets of hard snow had settled into crevices and corners, making the remains sparkle. Although torn and burned, the airship’s skeleton had a graceful beauty.

Rats scrabbled in the wreckage: Three figures huddled around a fractured wood-framed basket, the remains of the gondola. A man plied a shovel; a woman knelt and picked through a heap of debris, trying to free something. The third figure had a troll’s plumage, and although its back was to me, it had turned its head so far around it was looking right at me. No head should be able to turn that far. I shuddered, and then, at last, I recognized them.

Fiery Shemesh! Chartji, Brennan, and Kehinde.

Chartji raised a hand in a gesture humanlike if odd in its rhythm, meant to beckon me forward. Then—thanks be to gracious Melqart—she turned her head back properly round to watch what Kehinde was doing.

I ran back to my companions.

“Come, quickly. They’re here! Just as you said, Bee.”

Andevai had his back to me, and his head positioned in the normal way, but he gestured in the direction of the main gate. “I’ll stay here.”

“Are you afraid to see the results of your handiwork?”

“I know what it looks like.”

“How can you know what it looks like? You were at the inn when the explosion hit.”

“Say what you will and think what you must, Catherine,” he said with so much force it seemed my lips prickled as though freezing into ice. Bee shivered, eyebrows drawing down dangerously as she frowned. “Someone must stay here to keep an eye on the gate. If I whistle, that will be your signal to run.”