Cold Steel

The horseman reined his mount to a halt in front of the dais. My sire was glowing, ruddy with a surfeit of blood. Slowly he bowed his head. Every line of his body was tense and tight.

Certainty infused me like a bolt of hot anger through my flesh: He hated the creatures who sat in those thrones. He wanted to slash his spear through every watching, waiting presence but could not because eight chains bound him, one to each chair.

Those chains like whips snapped, bringing the horse to its knees.

A voice like a hammer blow cut through him, turning the mounted horseman into a kneeling eru with wings furled as in pain. He knelt before them. Blood is power because blood binds.

A prince among slaves is still a slave.

He hadn’t been talking about Andevai. He had been talking about himself.

“Give us what is ours.” The eight personages spoke in one voice. “As you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”

The Hunt was merely the conduit. The courts could not walk into the mortal world, so only their servants could bring them the mortal blood they craved.

The blood of the sacrifice poured out of a hundred wounds. Through the chains of binding they sucked the fresh blood of the kill out of his flesh and into theirs.

I licked the air. I tasted the blood of the kill, so rich and sweet, laced with the spice of power, the salt of life. My hunger swelled together with the hunger of all the many presences, the denizens of the spirit courts. The force of their ravenous appetites built like the front of a storm. I took a step, thinking to race back across the bridge that spanned the cleft and regain the staircase, for surely I could rush up to the height and claw in to take my share before they had drained it all.

An unseen person coughed as though waking from a dusty and uneasy doze. The cough startled me back to my own self as I remembered who I was and why I was here.

“Vai? Can you hear me? Is that you?”

“Catherine?” His voice was hoarse.

The ribbon-ornamented balcony above me could only be reached by a skeleton of what had once been a stair-rail as delicate as crystalline branches. Rungs and railings had been shattered by savage blows to make the stairs unusable. I didn’t need stairs. I checked my sword to make sure it was secure, found a fingerhold on a jaggedly broken rung, and scrambled up. The weight of the pack threw off my balance, but I was determined. A presence loomed over me.

He said, “Give me your arm. Reach up.”

I did so blindly, slipping as I let go. A callused grip caught my wrist. He hauled me over the side and to my feet. His hands on my waist were like fire, I felt them so. His beard was a little unkempt. Streaks of powdery dust smeared his right cheek.

“Catherine.” His voice was balm on my yearning heart.

I dislodged his grasp and retreated to the edge of the balcony. The white rock wall behind him was pitted with gouges and holes. A frail ladderlike stair, leading up the cliff face to the next level, had also been smashed. From the far side of the balcony, the cleft cut away deep into the heart of the massive structure, shearing away into the inky depths.

It was strange he was so disheveled and dust-stained when we stood on a spotless white balcony with ribbons streaming off the railing. His trousers were ripped at one knee. A cuff on his dash jacket had torn, and ragged slashes raked through the fabric of its left shoulder, although no blood stained the cloth. The smell of mortal blood lay heavily on him, yet he might be my sire, flown down to confound me with blood still coating his tongue.

“Show me your navel!”

He turned his back on me. “I’ll let you find it yourself, if you can tell me how many buttons this jacket has.”

“Are you telling me all your jackets are cut to the same pattern? For if they are, then that one has fourteen.”

He turned back with a suspicious frown that made him look a little like the mansa. “After all, I am reminded you might have counted them. You’ve assaulted me before in the guise of my wife.”

“Are you saying my sire has tried to seduce you more than that one time in the carriage?”

“How could you know about that?”

“Such secrets are best left unspoken within hearing of they who can see and hear all.”

He took a step back, halting beside an object I had mistaken for a boulder but that I now realized was the bundle of stolen clothes, food, and leather bottles from Salt Island. Such a bolt of joy flooded through me that I had to struggle to catch my heart before it crashed right out of my chest. Only Vai would have thought to drag the bundle with him out of the coach. His sword lay sheathed on the ground. I was almost certain my sire could not touch cold steel.