Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

“Stay here, Cat,” said Drake.

I waited as he walked to the beach where men were loading baskets and barrels into a pair of long, narrow wooden boats. I watched as he negotiated. The men looked my way, and the bidding got steeper. I knew this dance. They’d be arguing: “Ah, but Maester, you understand that if we add the girl, we’ll have to take out two baskets, and then where’s our profit?”

At length Drake gestured to me, and I walked over, all too aware of the men’s scrutiny.

“Get into the canoe,” Drake said.

“I hate to mention this, but I’m terribly thirsty.”

“I only paid for passage. Have you any funds at all, Cat?”

“Do you think I wouldn’t offer to pay my own way if I could?”

“I wish you would stop that. A simple ‘No’ would suffice.”

I thought it wiser to say nothing, so I clambered into the canoe and arranged my bundle to cushion my backside. He sat in front, his back to me. The men paddled with long blades that cut the water. I clutched the gunnels, too paralyzed at being surrounded by water to worry about thirst.

It was not such a long distance, no more than an hour or three, but my life crawled past my eyes at a creeping baby’s pace and then limped back as an aged crone before we came around a headland. There, spread before us, lay the infamous city of Expedition.

Buildings stretched along a jetty that ran for at least a mile along the shore. At a river’s mouth, the embankment broke into a harbor where masted ships clustered. Proper city walls rose down by the harbor. Where the river opened onto the sea lay a flat island ringed by six skeletal towers like the points of a prince’s coronet, stately airships moored to two of them. On the eastern side of the river, a pall of drifting smoke darkened the morning sky, streaming in billows into the west on a stout wind. Smokestacks grew like shafts of blackened grain. The distant clatter of engine works and busy machines hammered a faint counterpoint to the wind’s bluster and the slap of swells against the canoe’s hull as we parted the waters.

Founded by refugees from the Empire of Mali and their Phoenician shipmasters and allies, the population had swelled with the ranks of criminals, indentured servants, unscrupulous merchants, fortune hunters, and the discontented and maladjusted flotsam and jetsam borne across the ocean from Europa and Africa. More recently, so history told, trolls had emigrated south from their homeland to make common cause with like-minded rats, as Chartji would call them. I wondered if there might be an office of Godwik and Clutch I could approach for aid in securing passage back to Adurnam and Bee once I had accomplished my task.

We passed slim canoes and chubby sailboats, men out fishing who waved to us in a friendly manner that our boatmen returned. We skimmed not toward the river’s mouth and the big wharves where the oceangoing ships lay to harbor but toward a crowded comb of piers farther west. Boats crammed the shore.

I pressed a hand to my breast, feeling the locket’s warmth like a promise that I would soon find a safe haven. Caught by an inexplicably sharp thrill, I leaned forward. The jetty spread before me in all its magnificently confounding bustle, folk hauling and carrying and bargaining and loitering and tossing out line and drawing in skiffs. The life and light of the place seemed about to break over me like the tide of a dragon’s dream.

We bumped up against a pier. The steersman offered a gap-toothed leer as I scrambled out with my bundle and my cane. My bare feet slipped on fish guts and less savory spume. I gritted my teeth and plowed on.

“Come along, Cat,” said Drake over his shoulder as he strode down the long wooden pier.

Men working on or lounging in canoes and skiffs looked up as he passed, expressions incurious or passively hostile; then they would see me, and a wolfish kind of grin would flash as they took a good look along me from my head to my toes. My pagne had plastered itself down the length of my thighs. I regretted leaving my jacket unbuttoned, because my shift and bodice were still damp enough to cling. I crossed my arms over my chest.

“Fished a river siren out of the water, did yee?” called one young man to the men in the canoe. “Look at that hair!”

Men within earshot all agreed, quite vocally and with a great deal of amusement, about my cursed hair. I could not imagine why I had not braided it back.

I had no trouble keeping track of Drake in the press of bodies, for his red-gold shock of hair stood out like fire. Men stepped out of his way, not making a scene of it, but it was clear Drake need not ask for passage. They knew what he was. And he was glad they knew.

We stepped onto a vastly wide, stone-paved avenue slimed with a thin layer of mud and oil churned by sun and yesterday’s rain and the constant trammeling of the exceptional amount of traffic coming and going. A high-wheeled cart driven by a bored-looking man and drawn by a hairy but quite small mammoth—if that was not a contradiction in terms—trundled past as I stared gape-mouthed. A four-winged bird feathered in bright colors reminiscent of a troll’s crest glided overhead, a white tube clutched in its fore-talons. Four soldiers casually carrying rifles over their shoulders strolled along the jetty, now and again pausing to speak to young men as if recruiting.

Two men uniformed in red tabards hurried along the avenue, each carrying a long staff and wearing a stiff black cap. Drake dropped at once into a crouch, head bent to conceal his face. He fiddled with his sandals as if he had caught a pebble until the men walked out of sight past a company of women who were striding along with laden baskets on their heads.

“Come along, Cat.” He rose and began walking east, in their wake, toward the distant city walls.

I caught his wrist and pulled him to a stop.

“What’s that?” I pointed to a wide dusty open work area set off behind a low fence and rimmed with long thatch-roofed shelters with no walls. Men worked at beams and planks. In truth what had drawn my eye was the rear view of a young man stripped to the waist and plying an adze along a beam. I could not help but admire his muscled back.

“That’s a carpentry yard. Strange you should need to ask, as they have the like in Adurnam.”

He tugged, but I held my ground.

His gaze narrowed. “Didn’t you see the two wardens? They can arrest me. I’m taking you to the Speckled Iguana. You’ll stay there in hiding until I sort out if the general is back in the city.”

I ripped my gaze away from the carpenter’s decorative back and stared at Drake as if he had sprouted two heads. “You’re abandoning me here?”

“I’m not abandoning you, Cat. You’ll lie low in a safe place. I’ll pay your room and board, and the innkeeper will watch over you. He’s a partisan, an old soldier and countryman. An Iberian.” He sighed, as if exhausted by having to explain things to a persistently dim-witted child. “I need you to keep your mouth shut and your head down until I return. As soon as I know what the situation is here, we’ll sort things out.”