Cold Fire (8 page)

The other man scanned the print. “This says the prince of Tarrant offers a reward for the recovery of two Phoenician girls. They belong to one of the mage Houses.”

“Why should we hand girls over to the cursed mages?” said the man with the brick.

“It’s a cursed lot of money, enough to split twelve ways and still make us all rich.”

Outside, the street lay empty except for Roman guardsmen trotting up the streets using their round shields to shelter their heads from the pounding hail. In a moment, Legate Amadou might look in the windows and see us. The man with the bloody nose put his red-stained fingers on the latch and opened the door.

“Over here!” he shouted.

“Go,” I said.

The clockmaker flipped up the counter. Rory went first, Bee after, and me at the rear.

“Thank you,” I said to the clockmaker, and I shouldered past the heavy swags. Ahead, the hem of Bee’s skirt snaked along the plank floor under a second curtain and then too many more curtains to count. It was like chasing a serpent’s tail through baffles down a hallway. An oily smell made my lips pucker. I collided with Bee as the last curtain’s weighted hem slapped down behind me.

We stood in a chamber quite black except where flashes of luminescence flared and died like levers rising and lowering. Taps and creaks and rasps played out as if they were slowly winding down. There fell a last flare of movement. Then the dark poured like pitch over my eyes. The chamber’s air lay heavy with the rancid scent of old oil and a tang of char. My ghost-sword, which outside had flared in response to the cold magic of the storm, hung inert in my hand. A ripple of soft barks, snaps, clicks, and pops spread within the room: goblin chatter.

“Gracious Melqart,” breathed Bee. “We’ve stumbled into a goblin’s den. This must be one of those illicit daytime workshops the prince’s inspectors are always searching for.”

“Cat,” said Rory in an aggrieved and alarmed tone, “many small fingers are touching me.”

“They’ll just guide you to the stairs,” said the headmaster’s assistant from the darkness. “They don’t want you in here any more than you want to be here.”

Fingers tapped up my arms to my shoulders and around my back, as if measuring me for a new riding jacket. Like most people, I knew little about goblins except that sunlight burned them, they hid themselves beneath masks and robes even under starlight, and they were shaped much like humans. They sold their wares at night markets, and their workshops were legally required to close during the day. Which meant we were standing in a place where we could all be arrested.

A voice as brittle as winter grass spoke on my left side as a hand traced my arm. “One stinks of dragons. One smells of the summer sun. This one is bound between the worlds, like her sword. There is a price.”

“You and I have already agreed on the price,” said the headmaster’s assistant. When you could not see his skin, he sounded like an ordinary man, calm but displeased.

“For these three, it is not enough.”

Bee and I had, on a few occasions, bargained with masked and veiled goblin merchants at one of the night markets. “What do you want?” I asked.

“To call on you, spiritwalker, one time, at need.”

“Cat,” whispered Bee warningly. “Be prudent.”

“Done,” I said, for, unlike Bee, I could hear very faintly a commotion in the shop, maybe even the sound of a clock falling and shattering. The soldiers had arrived.

“
Ah
,” rippled down the Stygian depths of the chamber.

“That was rash,” said the headmaster’s assistant.

“It’s her other name,” said Bee.

“There’s trouble in the shop,” I said.

“We know.” The goblin’s cool grasp encircled my wrist. “This way.”

We were led to stairs. The foul breath of the undercity was exhaled in our faces. Into the noxious sewer we descended step by greasy step. The air was like a wet blanket full of rot pressed against my face. That slurping endless sigh was the sound made by oozing sludge. I could see nothing, but a channel yawned to my left like the mouth of a charnel god, or at least his outhouse.

Rory said, “Euw! Is this where the dogs bide?”

“Quiet!” murmured the headmaster’s assistant from ahead of us. “From this point forward, you must not speak. If we’re discovered, we will die, and the goblins who guide us will lose ownership of their breath.” He did not explain, and we dared not ask lest we break silence.

Descending, we left behind the sewage’s reek. Where the stairs ended, we continued in pitch-darkness along a tunnel whose pavement was smoother than any Adurnam street. The touch that guided me never pinched or slackened. The road ran straight and true, punctuated by alcoves and archways sensed as spaces of air rank with a charred scent like the ashes of a dead fire. At intervals I heard gears ticking over steadily. We would walk close and yet closer to the sound and then a gap would open to right or left with a tickle of warmth and a pressure like wind confined by a veil. With a swallow, I would pop my ears, and as we moved on, the ticking would fade.

Goblins were so legendarily ingenious that I had always doubted the impressive tales told of them could be true: Could they really breathe life into stone and metal? But these deep, smooth paths mined beneath the city made me wonder if it might be true. What had I bound myself into? What did goblins who worked in an illegal daylight workshop want? What was “ownership of breath”?

The beat of a tick-tock measure brushed my ears. To our left, a glow limned a vaulted chamber. Its depths lay smothered in darkness, but seen through arches, the front of the chamber gleamed with a milky luminescence. Creatures were lined up in ranks whose columns vanished away into the gloom beyond the aura of light. At first glance, I thought them soldiers at parade rest. But as my steps faltered and I stared, I realized they were not breathing and not human. Their slender limbs and torsos were speckled as if they were stone. Their faces were human in having lips, noses, and ears, but the hollows where they should have had eyes glistened with patches like wet velvet. Most wore sleeveless tunics woven of a fabric that might have been thread spun from fog. In the shadow-drenched depths, unseen sleepers inhaled and exhaled.

My guide hissed faintly. I looked at it. It was almost as tall as Bee, golden in color, lithe as a dancer, and not remotely human in expression, having no eyes to mark its heart and soul. Beyond it stood Bee, Rory, and their guides, but the headmaster’s assistant led the way without a guide. How could he see in blackness so complete it blinded
me
?

An emphatic
thud
sounded from the back of the chamber. A ticking ratcheted up with a groan of air as of steam being released. Mist like a cloud of fireflies chased along a murky shadow. Gears whirred. A head slewed around, and claws like edged blades winked in the pale light.

The goblin whispered, “Run.”

We ran. For the first twenty steps, I thought the gods were with us, Blessed Tanit offering sanctuary beneath her hand, Gracious Melqart a shield, Ba’al a harbor against the storm. I looked back over my shoulder.

A creature stalked out from the arches. It looked like a troll skeleton knitted out of gears and metal bars. Its head swayed as it turned to look back the way we had come, into the black pit of the far passage. If it just looked that way a moment longer we might escape into darkness.

With a dip of its head and a menace of teeth, it swung around and bounded after us with weighty tick-tock steps. A hiss of steam sprayed from its gaping mouth.

Rory stepped past me and heaved a bag at it. The bag slammed into its shoulder and knocked the creature sideways. It jolted to a stop against the wall, groaned and shook, the head rearing back before it lowered again to seek us. Rory kept spinning all the way around and with the extra force gained released the second bag. It sailed across the gap and smashed into the head. The creature toppled, hitting the wall hard, then staggered the other way, hit the opposite wall, and tumbled down. A spark spiraled up and winked out. Gears whirred busily as the creature strove to right itself.

The cursed creature was not getting my father’s precious journals.

“Cat!” cried Bee as I bolted past Rory.

“Go! I’ll follow!”

I grabbed the closest bag. Metal claws closed around the ankle of my boot. I dropped the bag on the elbow joint. The weight slammed the arm into the floor. But it was already shifting to dislodge the obstacle. The head reared up, metal jaws gaping. Teeth gleamed. A red heart of fire pulsed deep down in that throat, as if making ready to scorch me.

From far above, linked as by an intangible chain threaded through the earth, cold magic—Andevai’s storm—flared down the length of my sword. The hilt flowered; I twisted it free, and thrust the slim blade down that yawning gullet.

Combustion died. The creature sagged on a final stuttering
tock tunk tick
.

My heart lurched as if under a pounding of fierce hail, and my gaze hazed as a pulse not my own roared in my ears: “
Catherine!
 ”

I was hallucinating Andevai’s voice. I sheathed my sword, grabbed both bags, and ran blindly after the others. My head was reeling and I am sure I could not have told anyone my name or indeed anything except that I was not giving up the bags, not even to death.

“Cat! This way!”

I followed Bee’s voice past a series of curtains whose fabric slithered like woven metal. As the last one slipped down my back, my leading boot stubbed a step.

“Now we owe you a debt for saving us,” said a goblin, hidden behind the last baffle. “Your price is paid.” I could not tell if it was grateful or disappointed.

“I’ll take them up from here,” said the headmaster’s assistant. “You’d best scatter before your lords come looking for the trouble we’ve caused.”

I heard the rustle of the baffles as the goblins slipped back into their underworld so quickly I didn’t have a chance to thank them or ask them a question or even to think. Startled by the sound of footfalls, I set down the bags and drew my sword. A young man with a long black braid dangling over his shoulder like a rope took the bags from beside me. After a moment, I realized it was Rory, and there was light enough for me to see. They were already climbing. I followed.

Up!
The steps went on forever. My air came in bursts. Did I hear ticking? What if there were other creatures stalking after us?
What was that thing?

The headmaster’s assistant glanced back.

“Your sword is glowing,” he said in a low voice.

The light came from my blade. Its harsh glow revealed him clearly. He hadn’t the creamy-white complexion of the northern Celts, although he was very pale. He had broad Avar cheekbones and the epicanthic fold at the eyes commonly seen among people who lived in the vast lands east of the Pale. It was his white hair that was most startling. It had been cut in an awkward approximation of the short local Celtic style, swept back over his ears. His fashionable indigo dash jacket was too strong a hue for him. The backs of his bare hands bore tattoos, like faded blue ink, of a curling design that might have been vines, or serpents. It reminded me of the old Roman saying:
Beware the serpent in the east
.

“Bee does stink of dragons,” said Rory, pausing on the steps, “and so does he. It wasn’t a good idea to come with him.”

“I do not stink,” said Bee, “and you will apologize at once to Maester Napata. It’s very rude to tell people they stink.”

“Even if they do?”

“He’s sorry for being rude, and I’m sorry he was rude to you,” she said as she halted two steps below the headmaster’s assistant. He had the expression of a man used to hearing people whispering about his looks, and not in the way Andevai was likely accustomed to admiring sidelong glances directed his way.

“If
you
are sorry, that is enough.” Having made this bold statement, he hastened up the stairs as if his own courage were about to bite him.

“Really, this isn’t the time for you two to fight so childishly,” I said as I climbed past them. Rory looked offended and Bee surprisingly chastened. “Maester Napata, what was that thing? What kind of agreement do you have with these goblins? How do you know about these tunnels?”

“I am not the one who can answer your questions,” he said. “The men in the clockmaker’s shop will not have much trouble tracing us if they wish to alert the militia. Hurry.”

We climbed with my sword as our candle, but the gleam on its blade faded as a pallor of natural light seeped in from an unknown source, turning darkness to gloom. We emerged into a musty vaulted chamber.

“Just give me a moment to catch my breath.” I leaned against the stone wall, coughing.

Rory set down a bag and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I smell bones and ashes.”

“We’re in a tomb,” said Bee, looking around.

Alcoves sheltered votive statues, dusty jars sealed with painted lids, and hammered metal plaques recording names and clans. Two stelae guarded the space. One was cracked through and listing. The second was carved on one side with the sigil of Tanit—a triangle capped by a small circle and straight arms—and on the other with a bull, a lion, and a crescent moon sheltering a sun.

I ran a hand down the length of my now ordinary black cane. “What
was
that thing?”

Bee glanced nervously toward the darkness that hid the stairs, but we heard no ticking. “It looked like someone built a clockwork automaton in the shape of a troll’s skeleton, powered by steam. Do you suppose goblins really are that ingenious?”

“I killed its combustion with my sword just as it was about to breathe scalding steam over me,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t have been able to do that. It felt like I pulled Andevai’s cold magic through the blade.”

Bee frowned as she touched my cheek with the back of a hand. “I hope you don’t expect me to explain what just happened. I must say, dearest, our lives were a great deal quieter before that awful night when my parents handed you over to Four Moons House.”

Maester Napata beckoned. “Maestressas. This way. Please to hurry.”