Cold Magic

Two strokes, and they fell, dead.

He wiped his brow with his left hand, his expression pure in its anger and not remotely directed at me. Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage severs the soul from the body, so common wisdom has it: They need only draw blood, the merest cut, to kill you.

In the distance, I heard the sounds of a company in disorder, shouting, confusion, a pair of whistles calling for scattered men to form ranks. I stared at the corpses sprawled in the gateway, a step away from me. A wind stirred ash. Andevai looked east down the road.

“Late!” he exclaimed with withering scorn. His brow furrowed as he looked at the sword in his hand. Then he looked at me, and his eyebrows raised, and he offered the sword, hilt first. “If you think I’m going to try to keep it, then you don’t understand the properties of cold steel.”

“My thanks,” I said hoarsely as I snatched it out of his hand.

There came the carriage out of the night, the horses gleaming rather like the sword, as if they, too, were forged of cold steel. Blessed Tanit! Could they be? Or maybe that breathlike mist rising from their nostrils was akin to the exhalations of steam, dangerous and powerful if the pressure grows too high. The coachman hauled the vehicle to a stop in front of us, and the footman leaped down from the back to slam open the steps and wrench back the door.

“Where were you?” demanded Andevai.

“There’s more trouble here than what you see,” said the coachman. “We discovered a cache of rifles, several hundred in crates—”

“Rifles! Within a two days’ journey of Four Moons House? Catherine, get in!”

I clambered in and sagged onto the bench. I sheathed my sword as Andevai climbed up and dropped onto the seat opposite me.

“Rifles!” he said, to the air, to the ancestors, to no one.

The footman closed door and stair; the carriage creaked and shifted as he—she?—leaped onto the back. Andevai slammed back the shutter and stuck out his head.

“What did you do with the rifles?” he called.

“Trouble coming!” called the coachman with a laugh. “Your illusion has melted, Magister.”

“It will have vanished when I touched the sword,” retorted Andevai. “Not because I lost control of the illusion! Or was too weak to sustain it. Cold steel cuts soul and magic alike. You know that.”

“I don’t think he was doubting you,” I muttered under my breath. “Just reporting a fact.”

“The rifles are so much scrap metal now, Magister,” said the footman from up behind.

Andevai glanced at me, then closed the shutter so hard the carriage resounded. I twisted the hilt of my ghost sword, and the blade slipped back inside its intangible sheath, although it still appeared doubled in my vision. As the carriage slewed around, he pulled a wisp of illumination like a disembodied flame out of the air and stared at the sword with narrowed eyes.

“It looks like a black cane,” he said irritably. “I can think of no possible way the Barahal family could possess cold steel. Where did your people get it?”

I kept my mouth closed tight as a burst of voices shouting in frustrated outrage rose from the town behind us. The carriage gained speed along the road, our ride so smooth I began to wonder if we were actually running along on the surface of the turnpike or if we had risen above it on a tide of magic. My head swam dizzily. My teeth began to chatter.

He swept the thick fur blanket off the seat beside him and thrust it onto my lap. “You look like you need this. You may as well rest, as it’s obvious from that mulish expression you’re not going to tell me anything.” He stared at his hands as if staring at death, his brows drawn down and his expression resolving again into his habitual scornful anger.

I scooted into the corner farthest from him and bundled myself into the blanket, wrapping it tightly around me because I was shuddering. Maybe most of my convulsive shivering was from the bitter cold and maybe it was just exhaustion that had drained all warmth from me. I rested my head against the padded side and closed my eyes.

Perhaps I dozed.

At some indeterminate point, I opened my eyes to see him, wedged in the opposite corner in his smudged and disheveled traveling clothes, with no coat or blanket, staring at his hands as he wove light into helmets and horses, let them dissolve, and pulled new illusions into miniature form.

“The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion,” he muttered to himself as he manipulated the patterns of light lifting and shadow falling.

Tiny soldiers faded, and a face appeared: lips, nose, eyes, and a shadow’s skein of long black hair. My face. He was weaving my face in light.