Cold Fire Read online

  “This won’t work,” said Bee. “That hurt.”

  “Bee can’t cross,” said Rory, “but you will, Cat. Your blood opened the gate.”

  Heaving, I dropped to my knees into a crackling carpet of snow. Nothing came up. My finger smarted. My tongue burned, and I swallowed blood.

  “Someone is peeking at us through the boarded-up door,” said Bee. “I don’t like this place. And that crow looks like it’s hoping to peck out our eyes.”

  Recovering from the wash of weakness, I groped along the wall with Bee in the lead and Rory behind. Unearthly voices rushed and mumbled in my ears as if I stood with one foot in the spirit world. A magnificent stallion cantered out of the wall, muscles rippling along a coat more brown than bay, and then it was gone. A saber-toothed cat lolled in our path, huge jaws widening in a startled yawn as she saw me, and then she was gone. A winged woman emerged from the coal haze that smeared the sky, her skin as black as pitch and yet glowing as with hidden embers, and then she was gone. A leaf trailed across my cheek with a glistening line of dew.

  A shining face, masked and unkindly, filled the alley like a towering cliff of ice ready to calve and bury me. Chill fingers closed on my heart until I couldn’t think or breathe.

  “Cat?” Bee’s fingers closed over my hand.

  Then it was gone, and the voices fell silent. I sagged against Bee, and she held me up.

  “There’s blood on your lip,” she said hoarsely.

  I licked it off, its tang as bitter as seawater.

  We staggered out to the old arched gate just as a company of soldiers rode up the lane.

  “Beatrice! You’ll not escape me this time!”

  Legate Amadou Barry reined up beside us, accompanied by a dozen Roman guardsmen in swirling red-and-gold capes and carrying burnished round shields more decorative than useful. Amadou bent from the saddle with the ease of a man accustomed to horseback and reached for Bee, meaning to sweep her up. She leaped back, the kitchen knife flashing as she took a swipe at him.

  “I’m not yours to take!” she cried.

  “You must get out of here! A riot’s about to break out. It isn’t safe.”

  “Safer here than in a golden cage.”

  “Beatrice, you have no idea of the cruelties of the world. I will protect you.”

  “Legate, you have no idea of how condescending you sound. I’m not interested in your kind of protection.”

  Had I ever thought him a diffident and humble young man? He was not even arrogant. He was simply a man of such exalted rank that he existed above considerations like arrogance and humility. He grabbed Bee’s wrist and twisted until she dropped the knife. “You’re coming with me.”

  Rory leaped. He slammed into Amadou, and Bee jerked free as both men went tumbling to the ground. Guardsmen converged. A sword flashed down at my brother’s head. I parried with my cane as Rory rolled away. A cane made of wood would have been riven by steel, but the soldier’s blade shivered to a dead stop with a ringing shringgg. Rory jumped to his feet, yanked the rider’s leg out of the stirrup, and heaved him off the other side.

  Bee grabbed the knife and sliced the bridle of Amadou’s mount. The harness slipped. We retreated toward the gate as Amadou Barry got to his feet, his expression so blank I wondered if he had actually lost his temper. The bridle was a loss.

  On the other side of the gate, the crack of firearms split the air, punctuated by furious howls and the stiffly barked commands of a military captain: “Turn! Make formation!” More reports answered, sharp and short. The Roman guardsmen looked startled. Those were not muskets.

  “Rifles!” shouted a male voice from afar. “Fire again, lads! We’ve got the muscle now! They’re only got swords and pistols!”

  From the militia, in answer: “Charge! ”

  “Run!” I cried.

  We pelted up the lane away from the old gate. The roar of a full-fledged battle crashed over us. People squeezed through the archway, disrupting the Roman guardsmen as they tried to assemble around their legate. With swords drawn and crossbows leveled, the men drew into a tight formation. Bricks flew from the crowd. The curve of the lane took us out of sight.

  “Blessed Tanit!” cried Bee, near tears, “let him not be harmed! Oh, how hateful he was!”

  “I wish you would make up your mind!” The noise of a district ablaze with fighting echoed around us, as if every lane, alley, and dank alcove had gone up in flames. “He’s not at all what I first thought he was.”

  “That’s why it makes me so angry!” She looked ready to carve her anger into one of the houses we passed. “I thought I could trust him, but I can’t!”

  A deep vibration knifed through my body. The somber bass of the bell dedicated in the temple of Ma Bellona, he who is valiant at the ford, cried across the city. The authoritative tenor of the bell dedicated in the temple of Komo Vulcanus, who keeps his secrets, answered. The sister bells joined, followed by the droll bass of Esus-at-the-Crossing and Sweet Sissy’s laughing alto. Last and most unexpectedly, because it was so rare, the raw contralto of the queen of bells, the matron of plenty and protection who guarded the shrine of Juno Lennaya, filled the air with a din that shook houses. Through the voice of its bells, Adurnam had joined in the conflagration.

  We pressed on. The cursed lane tossed us straight back into the churning chaos of a street as wide as Enterprise Road. Its pavement was lined with the newest gaslight fixtures, although half of the glass shades had been shattered. The sheer mass of people surging along the street brought us up short. Everyone was shouting and cursing, the buzzing of voices like a nest of angry bees.

  Rory used the bags to batter a way through the crowd. We plowed in his wake.

  “Watch it!” A man threatened me with a cane. My blow broke it in half, and he fell back.

  As we reached another intersection locked with wagons and carts, thunder rumbled.

  Rory cocked his head. “That’s not horses.”

  Bee pointed to a shop whose sign bore a clock-faced owl. “There! We have to go in there.”

  We reached the awning. Bee opened the door and went in with Rory. An icy taste ground through the gritty flavor of coal smoke. My ears popped as the air changed. My sword’s hilt burned. I shut the door hard behind us, shop bell jangling.

  The man at the counter had silver hair, spectacles, and a shop full of ticking clocks, no two of which showed the same time. He set down calipers.

  “Maester,” I said, “begging your pardon for the intrusion, but if you have shutters, I recommend you close your shop now. A storm’s coming.”

  “Maester Napata, they’re here,” he called, not to us. “Just as you said they’d be.”

  A howl of wind shook the windows. Hail pummeled the streets like the peppershot of muskets. People scattered, seeking shelter anywhere they could. The shop door burst open and a dozen weathered toughs in patched laborers’ coats staggered in. One had a bloody nose, which he was staunching with a crumpled handbill. Another held a hand over his ear. A third brandished a brick, cursing magisters and princes in equal measure. They fell silent as a young man stepped out past a curtain.

  The man’s uncanny blanched features might have been those of a ghost called from the miserable gloom of Sheol. Then he saw Bee, and he blushed, easy to see because he was an albino. He was no ghost. He served the headmaster of the academy.

  What on Earth was the headmaster’s loyal dog, as we had always called him, doing here?

  “If the head of the poet Bran Cof once spoke to you,” said the young man, his words burred by a foreigner’s accent, “please to come with me now. The Thrice-Praised poet spoke to the headmaster at dawn.”

  “Blessed Tanit!” muttered Bee, looking at me. She remembered as well as I did the day we had sneaked through the headmaster’s office and heard an uncanny voice say the words “Rei vindicatio” as if to warn us. Mere hours later, Andevai had showed up at her parents’ house to use those same words to claim legal ownership of the eldest Hassi
Barahal daughter.

  The men huddled by the door murmured to each other at this mention of the famous head of the poet Bran Cof.

  “What said the head of the poet?” demanded the man with the brick.

  The headmaster’s assistant ignored everyone except Bee. “The head of the poet Bran Cof said he had a message for Tara Bell’s child. He said to meet you here.”

  I was glad he was looking at Bee, so he didn’t see me shudder.

  “Last time, the headmaster turned me over to the Romans,” said Bee. “How can I know he won’t do so again?”

  “That was a mistake.” He gazed at Bee in the way a well-trained but hungry dog stares at a bone out of its reach, for he was yet another young male who had fallen in love with her beauty during our time as students at the academy. “On his honor and dignity, he will not allow it to happen again. If you wish to hear, come with me.” He vanished behind the curtain.

  “He smells clean of lies,” said Rory.

  The man with the injured nose straightened out the bloody handbill. “You think these two is the ones mentioned for the reward?”

  “What’s that?” said the man with a hand on his ear. “The head of the poet Bran Cof speaks at last, did you say? Did he recite a poem to the just cause of our discontent? Or pronounce on the legal principle of men being allowed to vote for a tribune to represent us on the prince’s council?”

  The other man scanned the print. “This says the prince of Tarrant offers a reward for the recovery of two Phoenician girls. They belong to one of the mage Houses.”

  “Why should we hand girls over to the cursed mages?” said the man with the brick.

  “It’s a cursed lot of money, enough to split twelve ways and still make us all rich.”

  Outside, the street lay empty except for Roman guardsmen trotting up the streets using their round shields to shelter their heads from the pounding hail. In a moment, Legate Amadou might look in the windows and see us. The man with the bloody nose put his red-stained fingers on the latch and opened the door.

  “Over here!” he shouted.

  “Go,” I said.

  The clockmaker flipped up the counter. Rory went first, Bee after, and me at the rear.

  “Thank you,” I said to the clockmaker, and I shouldered past the heavy swags. Ahead, the hem of Bee’s skirt snaked along the plank floor under a second curtain and then too many more curtains to count. It was like chasing a serpent’s tail through baffles down a hallway. An oily smell made my lips pucker. I collided with Bee as the last curtain’s weighted hem slapped down behind me.

  We stood in a chamber quite black except where flashes of luminescence flared and died like levers rising and lowering. Taps and creaks and rasps played out as if they were slowly winding down. There fell a last flare of movement. Then the dark poured like pitch over my eyes. The chamber’s air lay heavy with the rancid scent of old oil and a tang of char. My ghost-sword, which outside had flared in response to the cold magic of the storm, hung inert in my hand. A ripple of soft barks, snaps, clicks, and pops spread within the room: goblin chatter.

  “Gracious Melqart,” breathed Bee. “We’ve stumbled into a goblin’s den. This must be one of those illicit daytime workshops the prince’s inspectors are always searching for.”

  “Cat,” said Rory in an aggrieved and alarmed tone, “many small fingers are touching me.”

  “They’ll just guide you to the stairs,” said the headmaster’s assistant from the darkness. “They don’t want you in here any more than you want to be here.”

  Fingers tapped up my arms to my shoulders and around my back, as if measuring me for a new riding jacket. Like most people, I knew little about goblins except that sunlight burned them, they hid themselves beneath masks and robes even under starlight, and they were shaped much like humans. They sold their wares at night markets, and their workshops were legally required to close during the day. Which meant we were standing in a place where we could all be arrested.

  A voice as brittle as winter grass spoke on my left side as a hand traced my arm. “One stinks of dragons. One smells of the summer sun. This one is bound between the worlds, like her sword. There is a price.”

  “You and I have already agreed on the price,” said the headmaster’s assistant. When you could not see his skin, he sounded like an ordinary man, calm but displeased.

  “For these three, it is not enough.”

  Bee and I had, on a few occasions, bargained with masked and veiled goblin merchants at one of the night markets. “What do you want?” I asked.

  “To call on you, spiritwalker, one time, at need.”

  “Cat,” whispered Bee warningly. “Be prudent.”

  “Done,” I said, for, unlike Bee, I could hear very faintly a commotion in the shop, maybe even the sound of a clock falling and shattering. The soldiers had arrived.

  “Ah,” rippled down the Stygian depths of the chamber.

  “That was rash,” said the headmaster’s assistant.

  “It’s her other name,” said Bee.

  “There’s trouble in the shop,” I said.

  “We know.” The goblin’s cool grasp encircled my wrist. “This way.”

  We were led to stairs. The foul breath of the undercity was exhaled in our faces. Into the noxious sewer we descended step by greasy step. The air was like a wet blanket full of rot pressed against my face. That slurping endless sigh was the sound made by oozing sludge. I could see nothing, but a channel yawned to my left like the mouth of a charnel god, or at least his outhouse.

  Rory said, “Euw! Is this where the dogs bide?”

  “Quiet!” murmured the headmaster’s assistant from ahead of us. “From this point forward, you must not speak. If we’re discovered, we will die, and the goblins who guide us will lose ownership of their breath.” He did not explain, and we dared not ask lest we break silence.

  Descending, we left behind the sewage’s reek. Where the stairs ended, we continued in pitch-darkness along a tunnel whose pavement was smoother than any Adurnam street. The touch that guided me never pinched or slackened. The road ran straight and true, punctuated by alcoves and archways sensed as spaces of air rank with a charred scent like the ashes of a dead fire. At intervals I heard gears ticking over steadily. We would walk close and yet closer to the sound and then a gap would open to right or left with a tickle of warmth and a pressure like wind confined by a veil. With a swallow, I would pop my ears, and as we moved on, the ticking would fade.

  Goblins were so legendarily ingenious that I had always doubted the impressive tales told of them could be true: Could they really breathe life into stone and metal? But these deep, smooth paths mined beneath the city made me wonder if it might be true. What had I bound myself into? What did goblins who worked in an illegal daylight workshop want? What was “ownership of breath”?

  The beat of a tick-tock measure brushed my ears. To our left, a glow limned a vaulted chamber. Its depths lay smothered in darkness, but seen through arches, the front of the chamber gleamed with a milky luminescence. Creatures were lined up in ranks whose columns vanished away into the gloom beyond the aura of light. At first glance, I thought them soldiers at parade rest. But as my steps faltered and I stared, I realized they were not breathing and not human. Their slender limbs and torsos were speckled as if they were stone. Their faces were human in having lips, noses, and ears, but the hollows where they should have had eyes glistened with patches like wet velvet. Most wore sleeveless tunics woven of a fabric that might have been thread spun from fog. In the shadow-drenched depths, unseen sleepers inhaled and exhaled.

  My guide hissed faintly. I looked at it. It was almost as tall as Bee, golden in color, lithe as a dancer, and not remotely human in expression, having no eyes to mark its heart and soul. Beyond it stood Bee, Rory, and their guides, but the headmaster’s assistant led the way without a guide. How could he see in blackness so complete it blinded me?

  An emphatic thud sounded from the back of the chamber. A t
icking ratcheted up with a groan of air as of steam being released. Mist like a cloud of fireflies chased along a murky shadow. Gears whirred. A head slewed around, and claws like edged blades winked in the pale light.

  The goblin whispered, “Run.”

  We ran. For the first twenty steps, I thought the gods were with us, Blessed Tanit offering sanctuary beneath her hand, Gracious Melqart a shield, Ba’al a harbor against the storm. I looked back over my shoulder.

  A creature stalked out from the arches. It looked like a troll skeleton knitted out of gears and metal bars. Its head swayed as it turned to look back the way we had come, into the black pit of the far passage. If it just looked that way a moment longer we might escape into darkness.

  With a dip of its head and a menace of teeth, it swung around and bounded after us with weighty tick-tock steps. A hiss of steam sprayed from its gaping mouth.

  Rory stepped past me and heaved a bag at it. The bag slammed into its shoulder and knocked the creature sideways. It jolted to a stop against the wall, groaned and shook, the head rearing back before it lowered again to seek us. Rory kept spinning all the way around and with the extra force gained released the second bag. It sailed across the gap and smashed into the head. The creature toppled, hitting the wall hard, then staggered the other way, hit the opposite wall, and tumbled down. A spark spiraled up and winked out. Gears whirred busily as the creature strove to right itself.

  The cursed creature was not getting my father’s precious journals.

  “Cat!” cried Bee as I bolted past Rory.

  “Go! I’ll follow!”

  I grabbed the closest bag. Metal claws closed around the ankle of my boot. I dropped the bag on the elbow joint. The weight slammed the arm into the floor. But it was already shifting to dislodge the obstacle. The head reared up, metal jaws gaping. Teeth gleamed. A red heart of fire pulsed deep down in that throat, as if making ready to scorch me.

  From far above, linked as by an intangible chain threaded through the earth, cold magic—Andevai’s storm—flared down the length of my sword. The hilt flowered; I twisted it free, and thrust the slim blade down that yawning gullet.