Cold Steel

We worked our way off the balcony with its decorative ribbons. For the very first part I saw the same thing he did: the uneven face of the cleft. Its manifold protuberances and hand-width shelves were easy to negotiate. But then I had to follow him as onto open air. It was like walking out over a chasm. His shoulders bunching and releasing beneath his jacket became my lodestone. The sweat beading on the back of his neck fascinated me. He had a really beautifully shaped head, brown and lovely.

Watching him helped me not look at my hands groping through empty air or across illusory vistas that still looked to me like streaming masses of ribbons. Often I shut my eyes and felt along the rugged cliff rather than grow dizzy from the confusion between what I could see and what I could touch.

Hadn’t it always been that way with Andevai? When I had first met him, I had seen one man, but I had had to discover the part of himself he kept concealed.

“Catherine, are you paying attention? Don’t grab there. Up a little… with your right hand… there.”

Often we rested on ledges no wider than my feet, leaning against the rock wall, and I was grateful for each respite because my forearms were beginning to burn and my fingers to get as dry as if they were being sandpapered. But we could not fully relax until we reached what I saw as a polished clamshell of a platform tucked along the curve of an ebony tower. After he smashed the rungs of what looked to me like a glass ladder that led up from below, we sat huddled against the wall and shared half of the water in the second flask. He dozed off, slumped against me. I could not sleep; my hands were smarting and my arms felt numb.

Were the courts still feasting? No movement troubled the bridges and spans and balconies whose complex patterns haunted me. I stared at the beautiful city and I hated it for lying to me. I hated myself for seeing it as beautiful, for believing it must be so because all the tales said it was.

People told so many stories whose fractured truths hid as much as they revealed. What we did not know could hurt us. What we chose to ignore could cause harm, maybe to ourselves and maybe to others.

Vai sighed in his sleep. I rested my head against his. We had come by twists and turns more than halfway to the outer wall. I thought surely I could let him rest for a few more breaths, but then I heard a scuffling and scratching below and above. The rasp of tongues tickled the cut on my arm, and my blood oozed. The cursed creatures were tracking us again.

Vai stiffened, going so tense that I thought he had woken, but he was still asleep. He murmured words in the village dialect he had spoken as a child. Most of the words slipped past, too thickly patois for me to understand. Then he spoke almost desperately. “Don’t touch me!”

He jolted awake and shoved me away so roughly that he almost pushed me off the edge.

I grabbed his arms, dragging myself to a stop with his weight. “Vai! It’s me. It’s Catherine.”

He sucked in air. For an instant I was frighteningly certain he did not recognize me. Then all the air went out of him. He pulled an arm out of my grasp and rubbed his eyes.

“What were you dreaming?”

He looked away, jaw clenched. “Nothing.”

I pressed a hand on his chest. He flinched.

I sat back, withdrawing my hand. He curled his hands into fists, and I watched him climb the pinnacle of disdain as his expression settled into the scornful arrogance that had so scalded me when we had first been thrown together. One wrong word and he would lash out. Not with his fists—as Auntie Djeneba had once said, “He don’ seem like that kind”—but with words meant to cut and intimidate.

“I don’t understand how you can see through the illusion,” I said soothingly. “I still see the city. The ziggurat is quite splendid if you don’t mind knowing you’re meant to be the main course at the feast. I’m ready to go on, if you are. You know I trust you, my love.”

“We can’t get out of this foul pit quickly enough.” His voice was harsh, but I understood the anger was not directed at me.

I took a swallow of water and offered him the rest.

He wiped his mouth, his lips so dry they were cracking. “I hear them. They’re following us again. There’s one gap we have to clear. That gap is the one you described as a moat. But I have a plan for that. If you’re sure, Catherine, utterly sure the creatures can’t harm you.”

“I’m sure,” I lied. I could have become an actress in the theater after all, because he did not guess how my heart trembled. “Remember, I was bitten by a salter and not infested. The teeth of the plague can’t take hold in my blood.”