Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

“Will you tell them?”

“Not good for business to tell tales,” said knife man.

“The Taino on Salt Island shall tell them,” said the woman. “Yon fire mage shall have some trouble hereafter.”

I could only hope! But their words puzzled me. “Are there truly no cold mages in Expedition?”

“What is a cold mage?” asked knife man.

I was too surprised to answer, but fortunately the woman did.

“Fire banes,” she said.

“Fire banes? I suppose cold mages could be called fire banes.”

“They who come from Europa speak such stories of fire banes as mighty as hurricanes, but I don’ believe them,” remarked knife man. “Yee ever see such power in a fire bane, gal?”

I was really too astonished to answer. In the east, the light had changed yet again, black of night easing to a charcoal pallor. The wind began to soften as dawn crept up the horizon. We were drifting down, sinking closer to the waves and a length of beach.

“Why would there be no powerful cold mages here?” I asked.

I could see them better now: He was a big man, broad-shouldered and powerful, with black skin and a shaved head. The ropy scar that patterned his left torso was not the only old wound marking a violent life. Yet the woman who had laughed scared me more. Not that I thought she was about to strangle me to get my sword, but that she surveyed me with a measuring eye, as if wondering if I were a secret she could steal and sell to the highest bidder. She could have walked down Adurnam’s streets without looking the least out of place, with brown skin dusted with freckles from constant sun, reddish-brown kinky hair, brown eyes, full lips, and a thin Celtic nose. But then when she laughed, you would shudder.

Knife man smiled. “Because ’tis just a story di maku tell. I hear they don’ even have gaslight in they cities in Europa, so they tell this story about cold mages to fill dem shoes.”

“It’s true!” I retorted indignantly. “In Europa, cold mages can extinguish fires, call down storms of ice and snow, and twist and shatter iron-”

Knife man began to laugh, and he punched me on the shoulder as at a good joke well told. “With dem honest eyes and fierce look, yee almost had me believing, Perdita,” he said, grinning. “Until that yee said about iron. That was too much.”

From the rigging shrilled a whistle.

“Time to go,” said the woman.

“Where are we?”

“Why, we have crossed into Expedition Territory, Perdita. We don’ go into the city. The wardens shall shave off we asses and chop off we hands to decorate the council square. We shall drop yee and yon fire mage at Cow Killer Beach. Yee can find a canoe to take yee along.”

“What’s a canoe?”

Knife man punched me again on the shoulder, not quite so lightly this time. When I held my place by sinking into the blow, his grin widened. “Yee a real maku, ja? New come to the Antilles?”

“A foreigner? Isn’t it obvious?”

He was still grinning, but the amusement faded from his eyes, and it took every thread of courage I had not to step back from the edge that cut through his voice. Not only physical scars can mark you. He was a killer, and not one bit sorry to be so. He just happened to like me, and to have been paid. “Remember, Perdita. Yee a pretty gal, and yee healthy and shapely and with that fine fall of hair. Yee brave, and yee strong, and yee have that cemi yee carry. But Heaven’s Breath, gal, yee are but a babe fallen in wild country.” He raised a hand, forefinger up to scold me. “Don’ yee go getting drunk around men. What yee think will happen?”

He clucked disapprovingly as he shook his head at me, so like a fussing old uncle that I blushed bright red rather than getting angry.

“Yee think about it, Perdita,” he finished, and he went over to toss out the ladder.

The woman had a scar along the line of her jaw, so fine it was easy to miss. “Me grandmother was Phoenician-born. No man ever lied to she daughters and lived to speak of it. For the insult, she’d a stick that arseness of a fire mage with a knife in he gut before he knew what hit him. Then twist it and pull his entrails out, to make sure he suffer longer.”

She wasn’t teasing. “Your grandmother was Phoenician-born! What clan?”

“Don’ go asking, for I don’ want to have to refuse to tell yee. We’s just folk hired to do a job. One piece of advice. Wear long sleeves until that bite heal.”

“My thanks.” I offered a hand in the radical’s manner. With a grin she shook it.

Knife man slapped me hard on the ass as I went over the side. “Don’ forget what I told yee!”

I climbed down first, Drake coming after. As soon as his feet hit the sand, they drew up the ladder. A hand waved; I waved back as the little airship took a course out to sea.

“Cat! Come along!”

He was already halfway down the beach, walking toward a ridge beyond which smoke rose. I winkled out my jacket from the bundle.

“Hurry up!” he called.

“I’m covering the bite with long sleeves.” I considered the boots, and decided it was better to walk barefoot on the sand. “Who were they?”

“Criminals of the worst sort. You must keep the bite covered until it heals. Tell no one where you were. I hope to reach Expedition before any word of the incident on Salt Island gets there. I’ve got to sort out what I have to do, and there’s you besides to complicate my situation.”

Dawn rose as we climbed on a sandy path over the ridge and down to a hamlet ringed by garden plots. Smokehouses steamed with the savory aroma of meat being cured.

Gracious Melqart! I had forgotten how hungry I was!

Women walked out of the forest, carrying pots of water on their heads. Round houses circled a raised plaza paved with stone and a long dirt field where children were playing a game with a ball. Except for the cry of brightly plumed birds, the soft wash of waves, the blat of a goat, and the casual morning chatter of folk and chickens going about their daily business, it was too cursed quiet. If anyone saw us, they gave no sign. We might as well have been ghosts.

“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.