Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“Mmm. This is knowledge that is not mine.”

“Not yours to share? Or you just don’t know?”

“Bee!” I said in an undertone, pinching her arm. “It’s rude to interrupt an elder.”

“I’m the one fated to be dismembered and my head thrown into a well! I assure you, Aunt, I do not mean to be rude.”

“Mmm, yes, you are drenched in nyama.”

“What is that? Energy? Heat? Light? Magic?”

“It is the foundation stone. It is a thread. It is that which can be shaped. A potter molds nyama like clay. A blacksmith forges nyama into steel. A hunter must know how to protect himself from the dangerous nyama released when he kills an animal, by adding it to his own. Cold mages manipulate nyama. How any of them do this I do not know, for I do not know their secrets.”

“Cat told me she once met a djeli who called nyama the handle of power. Is that like an axe handle? If you can grip it, then you can wield the axe’s blade?”

“I would not say so. But those who can shape nyama can shape and change the world.”

Bee nodded. “With the right connections to power and a strong will, you can shape and change the world! Like Camjiata did, and means to again.”

“Bee!” I whispered, “we’re supposed to listen to elders, not interrupt them!”

“How are we supposed to learn if we don’t ask questions?” cried Bee.

“We are here,” said Fati.

Slump-shouldered sandstone towers rose before us, marking the four corners of a walled town. The eroded walls looked much as a seashore castle built of sand looks after a wave runs over it: melting ruins soon to be obliterated. No dogs barked. No wagons rolled or voices called. Not even the wind moaned. If anything lived in the dusty, deserted ruins, I could not hear it.

A road as black and slick as obsidian speared away from the half-collapsed main gate. As straight as a Roman military road, it cut through uninhabited countryside toward distant hills. A shadow raced toward us from those hills.

“The tide comes,” said Fati. “Get up on the road, for it is warded ground. Hurry.”

I grabbed Bee’s hand and ran, even though I was suddenly sure that the instant I touched the pavement something terrible and irrevocable would happen. Yet I had to get there. Perhaps that desire was part of the compulsion that had driven me to the well.

“Aunt, hurry!” called Bee over her shoulder.

“Onto warded ground I cannot cross,” said Fati. “You must go forward alone. This is your journey. My path is different.”

The knife of darkness cut over us just as we stumbled up onto the road. Bee flung her arms around me. Fati stood in daylight, surrounded by grass. With me in shadow and her in the bright, I could see clearly how my husband resembled her in the planes of his face, the glow of his complexion, and the clarity of his eyes. A vibration rumbled like drums in the earth. A towering wall of fire washed toward us, scorching the grass to ashes. Fati smiled, lifting her hands in greeting.

“Blessed Tanit!” I breathed. “Grandmother!”

Flames obliterated the scene. The town walls rang like a struck bell as the ripple of fire boomed out around the stone.

The tide passed. Pale daylight, like dawn, rose on a world utterly changed.

Fati was gone.

On either side of the road lay fields. Three-horned antelopes grazed on grass as green as emeralds. Fields tilled in spirals marked patterns on the ground that would, I felt sure, create beautiful images if seen from the sky. Thick-leaved vines of sweet potatoes flourished on a field of dirt mounds, the only crops I recognized. Elsewhere, huge stalks were crowned by flowers whose petals blazed with streamers like orange flame; that is, unless they were really burning. Others wept green tears. A vine strung along posts burst pods into a cloud of butterflies. Small winged creatures with faces like bats swooped down, snapping them up, until the air drifted with shimmering scraps.

Fati was gone. She might have been anywhere or anything. A stone about half the size of my fist lay on a patch of earth beside the road. I scrambled down.

“Don’t touch that!” said Bee.

But I did. The stone was waterworn to a smooth finish, deep brown in color, like sard. The veins in its surface flowed like speech against my skin. I felt I knew its voice. “Do you think the tide…turned her into this stone?”

“And you thought I was the credulous one?”

“Spirits change, just as the land does.” I touched my father’s locket, the familiar ache in my heart, the one that could never be filled. “So after all, maybe I can’t ever find my parents, not if they were caught in the tide.”

“Wouldn’t everything be caught in the tide? How could you escape it?”

“You escape it by sheltering on warded ground, like this road.” I closed my fingers over the stone and, ignoring her protest, tucked it into a pocket sewn on the inside hem of my jacket. “Although that doesn’t explain how we escaped being swept away at the river-”

“Cat.”

A sound like the rushing of river water swelled behind us. I turned. Out of the walled town, human-like creatures rose in a tide of dark wings.

Bee said, “Blessed Tanit protect us!”

A mob circled above us. Their vast wingspans half blotted out the sky. They swept down over us, claws gleaming.

“Down!” I snapped.

Bee dropped, and I straddled her back, feet braced on either side of her. My sword blazed with an icy light so bright it burned. I slashed and stabbed as they attacked. Where my blade nicked flesh, they shrieked, scattering in all directions.

“Cat, what are they?”

“Don’t move.” I shifted so my skirts belled over her. “They don’t like my sword.”

The mob resumed its circling above us. One landed out of reach of my blade.

Tall, broad-shouldered, and powerfully built, she looked much like a human. Her short black hair stuck up in spikes. Her narrow face was as translucently pale as watered-down milk, and she had the stark blue eyes we in the north called “the mark of the ice.” A line of purple-blue tattoos like falling feathers spun down the right side of her face and neck. She wore a sleeveless calf-length tunic covered with amulets sewn onto the fabric much as hunters fixed such talismans onto their clothing to protect them in the bush. Her wings certainly amazed me. But it was the third eye in the center of her forehead that riveted my attention.

“You are an eru,” I said, choosing offense over defense. “My greetings to you and your people. May we be at peace rather than at odds. I ask for guest rights, if such can be offered to peaceful strangers who have stumbled here by accident.”

She spoke in a voice like a bell. “You are well come here, Cousin. Our hearth is open to you. All we have is yours. All we are is at your service. But we have to kill the servant of the enemy. That is the law.”

“Cat,” Bee whispered from under my skirts, “I think they mean me.”

The eru cried out the same way the great bells of Adurnam cried out the alarm when the city was threatened. “It speaks! Beware!”

I shifted my sword’s angle; the eru took a step back. “She is not my enemy, and therefore she is not yours.”

More eru landed out of my reach, ranging in a circle around us. The tall ones had third eyes as bright as gems. The shorter bore marks on their foreheads like a mass of cloudy veins, and I had the oddest feeling they could see with those blinded, blinkered third eyes onto sights invisible to me. It was very disturbing. Worse, it seemed likely these eru could rip us to pieces in short order with their claws. And how could I predict what damage they could do with their magic, for weren’t eru fabled as the masters of storm and wind?