Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

A salter grabbed at me. My training snapped me into a lunge, weight and force thrusting the blade’s tip into his shoulder.

His gaze met mine, unreadable. Blank and dead.

Cold and hot together, blood racing, I rotated my elbow out and yanked free the blade, able to think only that it hadn’t been a killing blow. The salter dropped at my feet. A wave spilled over the body, and it turned white and began to dissolve like a ridge of salt crumbling away.

Maybe I screamed in sheer shocked surprise. Someone screamed.

The salters scattered, stumbling away from me. The two closest to Drake began to croon in a moaning whoop whose rise and fall made my skin crawl. A glow like fireflies winked along their skin until their complexions shone as if they were turning alchemically into burnished gold. Flames licked along their ragged clothing. Sparks spun in their eyes.

Furious shouts and curses rose from the rooftops.

A fourth salter limped toward me, his white gaze fixed purposefully on me. He was the one who had bitten me. As he licked his teeth and smacked his lips with the obsession of hunger, he looked me right in the eye with what I knew, like a knife to the gut, was the dregs of the mind that had once dwelt happily in a youthful, healthy body.

“Kill me. Kill me.”

I thrust. My blade caught him just below the ribs. Then I pulled free.

He toppled into the sea, and the crystalline remains of what had once been a man hissed away in the swells.

I fell back as a wave of heat blasted off James Drake. The two glowing salters burned in earnest. A third joined them. Their greasy, bitter smell gagged me.

A hand caught my arm. I jerked around to stare straight at a muscled and very bare black chest wrapped with knives. Two old, ropy scars drew a starburst pattern over his left shoulder and across his heart. Once, he had taken the worst of a bad knife fight. Or perhaps he was the one who had won.

“Up! Hurry, Perdita!” With a disturbing shriek of a laugh, the woman leaped off the ladder and landed with a resounding splash next to me.

The burning men weren’t even screaming because the flames were consuming them so quickly. The reek of singed flesh dizzied me. I sheathed and fastened my sword, grabbed a stiff rung, and began to climb. I had to work around the knife man, and as I passed he spread a hand across my backside most invasively. But he merely shoved, with astonishing strength, to help me on my way.

Up!

My mind had shut down. Keep climbing. One foot. The next foot. One hand. The next hand. My shoulders strained and my fingers cramped, so I concentrated on pushing up with my legs. One more, and one more again. Keep climbing.

Hands grabbed me from above and hauled me up. I half hung over the rim of a huge basket. Below, fire roared through the pens. A figure stood in the flames, not moving. If you were dead already in every way that counted, wouldn’t true death come as a blessing?

Kill me.

I collapsed onto a swaying floor, wet, exhausted, and numb.

Clut-clut-clut.

The sound penetrated my dulled mind the way Bee’s little sister Astraea’s whining complaints in time pierced even the most heartlessly impervious. Not because you cared, but because you just wanted it to stop.

The basket pitched. I grasped at the rope railing, clinging as my rescuers hauled in the rest of their catch. First came Abby, then Drake. Was he glowing slightly?

I shut my eyes. Glittering salt crystals poured onto the sand in the shape of a man’s body, hissing away as the sea dissolved them. I had killed two men. Yet were they still men if their minds and maybe their souls had been eaten?

As the basket rocked again, I looked up. The knife man and the woman who had laughed swung easily into the basket and rolled up the ladder behind them. Abby was led toward the stern by a young man who had his arm around her. A seventh individual, small and agile, clambered in the rigging to investigate the bloated creature above us. An eighth person fiddling at the stern of the basket worked a crank. As the clut-clut-clut increased its clamor, the creature under which we labored began ponderously to part the currents of air. Heat rose from a metal cylinder like the breath of a dragon, pouring upward into the oblong whale with its thrumming skin.

We were sailing in an airship.

A small airship, to be sure, but an airship nonetheless.

I pulled myself up to see the isle falling away behind us, looking like leviathan at rest in the midst of the slumbering sea. The wind rumbled in my ears. Knife man and the woman who had laughed braced themselves against the basket, examining me. They were kissed by the pearly glamour of a waxing moon now sliding free from clouds.

Drake settled beside me. “You were slow. You need to do a better job following orders.”

“Yes, certainly I was slow, since it’s every day I have an opportunity to be trapped on an island filled with victims of the salt plague and then be rescued by buccaneers in an airship. No reason to be surprised by any of that!”

The eerie glow around his person had faded, but his blue eyes shimmered. “Please don’t be so annoying.”

I was so angry that I thought maybe the top of my head was going to blow off. And, if we were fortunate, propel the airship faster. “You lied to me!”

“Maku bastard!” The man who had had his arm around Abby grabbed Drake’s shoulder, threatening with a hand in a fist. “She mind rotted. Yee promised to heal she!”

Drake’s eyes burned hot blue. “Take your hand off me. Or I’ll burn it off.”

Knife man rocked the basket. Abby’s man stumbled to his knees. Drake caught himself clumsily, bellying against the basket’s rim. I shifted to balance, and the woman who had laughed grinned at me.

The young man burst into tears. “She me dear good sister. Dey behiques tell we it too late. Den dey take she a Salt Island. But den we hear dat in Expedition der some folk can heal any salter. Dat how I find yee. Now she don’ know she own name. She don’ know me, she own brother.”

“She is healed. There’s no salt plague in her. You have what I could save. And you thank me for the risks I took by assaulting me?”

“God’s blessing for saving she,” wept the young man.

Drake rested a hand on the man’s plaited hair. “What happened to the salter who bit her?”

“We drive dat salter in a pit and we pour salted water over he.”

“That was done well. I would have acted sooner, but if I had, I would have been arrested and imprisoned and she would never have gotten off Salt Island. Go back to her. She needs you.”

With both hands on the guide rope the brother staggered back to where Abby sat as in a stupor at the stern, her hands lax on the untidy mess of her rumpled pagne.

I shook out and retied my pagne. I was not ready to talk about Abby. “Drake, when did you leave Adurnam? What happened to the general? Why are you here?”

“I’m here because Expedition is my home. I was born in the Ordovici territories, but I left home at seventeen. I’ve lived in Expedition Territory for twelve years. Once my business in Adurnam was complete, I sailed back to Expedition.”

“What was your business in Adurnam?”

“Why, to rescue the general and bring him over the ocean to Expedition.”

“He’s in Expedition?”

“At the moment, he is not. He went west to a city called Sharagua to pay his respects to the cacique’s court and person.”

“You didn’t travel with him?”

“In the Taino kingdom, all fire mages serve the cacique. So I’m forbidden from traveling into Taino country. I wouldn’t want to anyway. Their laws are unreasonably strict. They won’t allow me to heal people.”