Cold Steel

The man considered his gloved hands. “My people have been living in these lands since the dawn of time, my lord. Then in my father’s youth, the outsiders came. You mages brought down the anger of the god over all the countryside.” He glanced at me. “The mage houses and their princely allies rule us now. They take our young men to build roads and to fight, and our young women to be servants and to be shamed. For this privilege, my lord, we must be paying a tithe of our furs and meat to the mages likewise.”

Snow dusted down over us. The men watched with the caution of servants. They were five and we were two, and yet they showed no sign of being eager to attack us.

Vai spoke. “Did you know there is a man, General Camjiata, who has written a legal code that outlaws clientage? A law that says no person may own another person as property or claim another community as its possession?”

“Do you mean the Iberian Monster, my lord?” asked the senior man. Unaware of how he was twisting his hands, he had almost pulled off one of his gloves.

“You have the look of a soldier about you,” I said. “Perhaps you fought in the war twenty years ago.”

His gaze flashed to me before settling back to Vai. “We should go on, my lord. We’ll nurse the horses along and get to the next hostel. There is moonlight, and your magic, to light our way.”

“I’ll scout ahead.” In full sight of the riders I wrapped the shadows around me. They exclaimed as I vanished, and I was glad of it, because if they refused to like or trust me, then I wanted them to be scared of me.

Vai walked in front of the horses with a lamp fashioned of cold fire. The clop of horses’ hooves and the stamp of the men’s footfalls faded into winter’s silence as I ran ahead. It was so quiet that the ambush revealed itself by the heavy breathing and restless shifting of men hiding alongside the road in a ditch. There were only ten, armed with iron weapons. I trotted back to the coach.

“Wait here,” Vai said to the attendants. “By no means come forward until you hear sounds of fighting. Catherine, no killing unless we have no choice.”

“They mean to kill us!”

“Maybe so, but they are not without fair grievances and no means to gain a hearing. If we have no choice, we won’t spare them.”

I acquiesced rather than argue; I would do what I must when the time came. Sparks of cold fire bobbing along the ground gave us just enough light to creep off the road and thus up behind them. At the ditch I stalked in among them where they shivered, waiting patiently.

“Did ye hear a footstep?” one whispered.

“Hsss! Look!”

A carriage and horses glided down the road, fitted with a coachman and footman. It was an astonishing illusion, except for a lag in the turning of the wheels. Still, the ambushers should have been instantly suspicious of it for the lack of sound. Instead, wound up and eager, they leaped.

The carriage and horses dissolved into a hiss of falling ice.

Cold magic hits like a hammer, so sing the bards and the djeliw. Air becomes ice. Iron groans. I dropped to my knees just as all the iron in their weapons shattered in a burst of shards and screams. Only cold steel was safe.

Wreathed in my threads of magic, I ran among them. The smell of their hot blood and the scent of their panic lanced through my veins like lust. My sire was a killer and my mother a soldier, but I remembered what Vai had said, so I only pricked them in shoulder and thigh. Many were already bloodied. Two had to be carried by their fellows. Routed, they fled into the night.

When I gave the all clear, Vai joined me on the road. I laughed, exultant at our easy victory.

He looked grim and said only, “You are unharmed?”

“Yes. That was spectacular!”

He sighed. “I cannot help but think there would not be this kind of trouble if not for the inequity of the law and the burdens placed on people bound into clientage.”

“You’re kinder than I can be toward people who meant to do us harm! Bandits and troublemakers! You need to work on the wheels of the carriage. They didn’t quite look right.”

In the light of a perfectly shaped illusion of a candle lantern, we walked back the way we had come as Vai rolled illusory wheels ahead of us, trying to fix the lag. Soon we met the outriders approaching at a brisk trot, for they had heard the screams. When the servants saw the stains of blood upon the ground and the fragmented remains of the weapons, they turned as grim as Vai.

The night hung suspended as we traveled on as through a dream.

After some time one of the young men abruptly asked Vai what he had meant by “a legal code.” The senior man harshly told the lad never again to speak of such matters.