Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“Heal people? You burned those salters alive!”

“I used them as catch-fires, that’s true. Was that life, what they suffered? I ended their misery through a quick, merciful death that healed Abby. To burn out all the teeth in someone as far advanced in the disease as she was would have killed me. I think it was a fair trade.”

“So speaks the man who said he could heal me if I would just have sex with him.”

“Cat, you were drunk. You can’t expect to have understood exactly what I meant. Anyway, I thought you knew your own mind. You’re an independent young woman, traveling on your own. And you’re a Phoenician girl.”

I put a hand on my sword’s hilt. “I would be very cautious about what you say next.”

He took a step away from me just as it occurred to me that it might be a mistake to make a fire mage angry. But his voice remained patient. “I meant only that a young woman of your background can do as she wishes. I would never have suggested otherwise had I thought you were under the thumb of a father or brother.” He smiled pleasantly. “Or beholden to a husband.”

I could not speak out of sheer choked consternation. My cheeks flamed.

Then he surprised me. “My sincerest apologies, Cat. I meant no harm, and certainly no disrespect. A remarkably pretty girl like you is hard to resist.” He raised both hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I hope we can make peace.”

“Whatever else,” I muttered grudgingly, “you did get me off Salt Island.”

“So I did.” With a nod, he groped his way by guide rope to the stern, where he began to chat with the sterns-man at his rudder.

I did not want to drown in my anger, so I went over and knelt beside Abby. “I’m so sorry,” I said to her brother.

“I know yee,” she said with that horribly puzzled smile.

She began to comb through the tangles of my hair with her fingers. I did not want to interrupt something that comforted her, so I settled cross-legged in front of her. Knife man brought over a comb, and Abby worked through my hair, never yanking although the snarls seemed intractable. The woman who had laughed offered me a gourd bottle, and I swallowed a juice that made my eyes water and my mouth sting. Or maybe I was just tired and shaken. With Abby still combing my hair, my eyes fluttered and shut.

I woke leaning against the side of the basket, my hair a smooth curtain falling over my shoulders to my hips. Abby stood at the prow of the basket with her brother, his arm around her, watching phosphorus dance its glamour on the waves. Staring into their future, which must have seemed very dark. Wasn’t it sometimes better to be dead?

I shut my eyes rather than look.

I woke as the air changed, and we bucked like a skittish horse. The clut-clut-clut slowed to a lazy clunk-cluunk-cluuunk. I rose. We drifted over land, a hulking beast of ridges grown with a breathing exhalation of forest. I remembered Bee’s sketches of airships. What had seemed funny then, when she had drawn hapless passengers falling from the basket to deaths far below, seemed indecent now. Easy to joke about a thing you have no experience of and will never suffer.

Off to our right, firelight dappled a hollow.

Knife man paid out the ladder, and the woman who had laughed went over with a grace and strength I admired. I grasped Abby’s hand just before she went over, and she smiled at me, and her brother said, “Thank yee, maku,” in a way that made me glad she had been saved, even what was left of her. Even in the face of the deaths of others, two of which I had caused. Even so.

Over they went, climbing away into a life hidden from me. Below, on the ground, a rushlight shivered into life. After some time, it wavered away and vanished. The woman who had laughed swung a leg back over and hopped in. We began to move as knife man hauled the ladder back up.

A shape dropped beside me, startling me so badly I cried out. The fourth crewman was a petite, white-haired woman with a lined and leathery black face, her eyes hidden behind goggles. Her sleeveless singlet exposed wiry arms, and she wore loose trousers, a harness with four knives, and a bracelet molded in the shape of a running wolf. She said a word whose meaning I could not guess at, and swung back up into the rigging.

“Uncommon quiet, this night.” The woman who had laughed leaned companionably beside me against the basket’s rim. The land slumbered silent beneath like behemoth asleep. We watched together. I was content not to speak, and she felt no need to chatter. After a while, knife man moved up on my other side.

“We saw what yee wrought, there on the beach,” murmured the woman. “That blade yee carry turned them to salt. They dissolved when salt water washed them. Yon fire mage never saw. Peradventure, yee don’ mean to tell him.”

Under the circumstances, I settled on a truthful answer. “I don’t. Do you plan to tell him?”

“We’s paid for the conveyance, that only. Not for secrets.”

I smiled, for she sounded exactly like my uncle, scion of the Hassi Barahal clan that made its living stealing and selling secrets. “Who are you, if I may ask?”

“Folk hired to do a job,” she answered.

“Yon fire mage is right, yee know,” said knife man, the weight of him very noticeable on my other side.

“About what?”

“It were a kindness to let they salters die.” He nodded toward my belt. “No ordinary manner of blade, that one.”

I fixed a hand possessively on the hilt. “Only my hand can wield it.”

He said, “Surely bound to yee. Some manner of cemi.”

“It’s just a sword.”

The woman laughed with a kind of wavering howl. It was not a laugh I would soon forget.

“Have it that way, then, Perdita.” Knife man grinned. “Kiskeya is a beauty, is she not?”

“Who is Kiskeya?” I asked, pleased I could frame a useful question to move the topic on.

“Why, Kiskeya is this island. She is the mother of we all.”

The hills plunged in jagged shadows down to the foamy white rim of a beach. The airship skipped and rolled as air currents eddied and battered us from two directions. Then we turned and headed parallel along the coastline. Under the moon’s light, the sea became a dark mirror in which stars were caught. I smelled a flowery fragrance, a heady perfume blown into my face by the night wind. A bird called in a mournful loop. Far in the distance, I saw a shimmering glow as of a city burning night candles.

“What city is that?” I asked.

“Expedition,” said the woman.

“So this island is part of the Taino kingdom. While Expedition is a free city on this island ruled by mage Houses and princes. But how could a free city have been established here?”

“When the first fleet, that one out of Mali, come across the Atlantic, it come to land here, on the south shore of Kiskeya. The island was then ruled by many caciques, each with he own territory. One of these caciques, named Caonabo, dealt with the fleet’s officers. He gave them territory in exchange for allowing the Taino to trade and ship through they port.”

“And in exchange for the maku not starting a war,” said knife man with a sardonic chuckle.

“Is that where the law about the salt plague comes from? The one that all salters or anyone bitten by a salter have to be quarantined on Salt Island?”

“Yee have it right,” she said. “’Tis all written down in the first treaty, that one which established Expedition Territory. But yee’s mistaken in thinking Expedition ruled by princes and mages. A Council rule in Expedition. Why, mages is not even allowed to form professional associations or corporations or guilds in any wise. The Council don’ like mages much. So besides the insult to Taino law for a take yee two gals off Salt Island, Expedition’s wardens shall be after yon fire mage for another reason. Because in Expedition ’tis against the law for a fire mage to use a catch-fire.”