Cold Steel

I knew what I had to do.

As the coach rolled on I unbraided my hair and combed it out with my fingers. Let the courts be dazzled by its beauty! I pinched my cheeks to make sure they glowed, and moistened and bit my lips so they shone. My sire watched in silence, his expression a mask of ice.

Feeling bolder, I opened the shutters on both doors and gazed out over both the mortal world and the spirit world. On Hallows’ Night, the coach traveled in both worlds at once.

The spirit world flashed past in changing aspects, all the possibilities that might ever have been and every gradient between: a world in which the mansa ruled, and one in which he suffered an early death in the hold of a ship, and one in which he owned a shop and sold white damask to women who would take it away and dye it into all the colors and patterns they could dream of.

In the mortal world we sped across the quiet waves of the Mediterranean Sea and past the spice-laden markets of Qart Hadast, the jewel of ports. The fields and trees of north Africa trailed away as bands of desert crept their fingers into the green. A long lonely stretch of golden rock and pale dunes passed beneath us until we reached a salt mine. The enterprising miners in the Malian Empire had broken through to an ancient gateway between the worlds and inadvertently unleashed the ghouls who craved the salt of mortal blood and being.

Wind blew grit into the interior of the coach. The land was so quiet where once people had lived and worked and thrived, where they would do so again. The coach rocked from side to side, bucketing as we descended into the pit. Salt links the worlds. Each gate swirls with energy, the power of transition and transformation. These threads bind us all.

The shutters slammed shut. I caught in a breath, the coach jolted to a stop, and all the air punched out of me. My entire body went numb.

My sire leaned forward until his face almost touched mine. “You must be what I made you to be, Daughter.”

“Yes,” I said, because I had finally understood what he wanted the day he had encased Four Moons House in ice. “After that, Sire, you will give up all claim to me and mine. For that matter, you will also give up any claim to bind any of your children who do not wish to be bound.”

He extended a hand in the radical manner, and we shook to seal our bargain.

“By the way, may I have that big bag of coin?”

“Yes. I have no use for it.”

The latch opened the door; the steps bumped down although the eru had not disembarked. That the eru acted as footman was a courtesy for mortal eyes, for the coach was as alive as I was.

My sire climbed out. I grappled with the bag of coins, slinging it over my back despite its distracting weight. No sensible young woman raised in an impoverished family walks away from a pot of gold, even if she may never get a chance to spend it.

I took in and released a breath for courage, and I went out after him. With a hand braced on the threshold of the coach door and my feet still on the steps, I paused to survey my ground as a general may do before a battle.

The palace of the courts lay before me, the realm of both shadow and light, as deep as the murkiest pit and as high as the brightest peak. What Vai had seen as a nest of starving ghouls determined to drain him of his blood, I had seen as a grand feast populated by elegantly clothed and peacock-feathered personages who had grown accustomed to their harvest. Hard to say which was true. Maybe they both were.

The Hunt surged in the air as a mass of boiling black cloud, my brothers and sisters. I saw crows and spotted hounds, smart-mouthed hyenas and silent vipers. A cloud of wasps and a spinning web of spiders jostled against women with lions’ heads and men with the bodies of fish. Dire wolves prowled in their packs shoulder to shoulder with the tawny beauty of the big cats. Yet the hunters had been bound to serve not nature’s course but the courts’ desire.

The coach and horses were not touching the ground. I was pretty sure they could not.

I glanced back at the eru holding on at the back and ahead to the coachman sitting on the driver’s bench at the front. The eru regarded me with all three eyes. “This is as far as we can take you, Cousin,” she said.

I smiled. “Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the trust you’ve shown in me and the trust I’ve been able to give to you. Should things fall out in such a way that you discover leisure to do as you wish at some later date, my solicitor can be found at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in the city of Havery, where you picked me up.”

The coachman raised his whip in salute.

I jumped awkwardly down into the pit, shifted the heavy bag on my shoulders, and with my sword in hand walked forward after my sire. The pit had become a resplendent plaza crowded with hungry courtiers. They slipped and slid about so much I could not count them, but I began to think they were far fewer than I had first believed. They just took up so much room and never stopped grasping and moving. Eager to get their drop of the rich feast, they parted to make a path for us that led straight to the dais of glittering salt.