Cold Fire (4 page)

I found James Drake at the front door instead of the nameless young foreigner. Drake’s lips were tilted up in a funny kind of smile, giving him the look of a man who is expecting a gift or a slap. He set a gloved hand on the latch but snatched it back.

“It’s like ice!” he hissed.

My sword’s hilt waxed cold against my palm. Had the cold mages found us missing and already tracked us down? Or had they discovered Camjiata was in Adurnam and come for him?

“Stand back.” Gritting his teeth against the latch’s cold burn, Drake opened the front door.

Seen past him, a man stood on the stoop, cane in hand.

“These are the offices of Godwik and Clutch, lawyers,” said Drake, as though to a simpleton. “Callers are admitted only by appointment.”

“Isn’t it redundant to inform me that these are the offices of Godwik and Clutch, lawyers,” said the man with the cane, “when the sign out front informs me both in word and in picture of that very fact? Naturally I do have an appointment with the solicitor named Chartji. Otherwise you can be sure I would not have ventured into a neighborhood like this one for legal aid.”

Some men have the unfortunate propensity to look exceptionally well in the clothing they wear, and the effect must therefore be amplified when they dress with full attention to the most fashionable styles, the best tailors, and the most expensive fabric. In fact, he wore a greatcoat of an exceedingly fine cut, magnificently adorned by five layered shoulder capes rather than the practical one or the fashionable three. Its wool was dyed with patterned lines and sigils that reminded me of the clothing the hunters of his village wore when out in the bush. Altogether, the coat was one worn to be noticed and admired.

It was also unbuttoned, as if the ferocious cold did not bother him at all. Beneath he wore a dash jacket tailored to flatter a well-built, slender frame and falling in loose cutaway folds from hips to knees. The fabric’s violently bright red-and-gold chain pattern made me blink. How any man could wear cloth that staggeringly vivid and not look ridiculous I could not fathom. Yet there he was, him and his annoyingly handsome face. I should have known.

“My very question,” said Drake with a cutting smile. “What
is
a cold mage doing in this neighborhood? A mage of your ilk must despise the scalding technology of combustion. He must regard with contempt the clever contraptions and schemes made by trolls and goblins in their busy workshops. Which rise all around you, in all their industrious vigor.”

I expected sparks to fly. The two men, as they say, stared daggers.

“So polite of you to inform me of what I must despise.” The man on the stoop examined Drake as he might a man who has the bad taste to dress in provincial fashion when venturing into the city. “But unnecessary, since I’ve found I can make such judgments for myself.”

Drake’s free hand curled into a fist. A tremor kissed the air, expanding like the unseen pressure of a hand or an invisible dragon’s sigh. I tasted smoke. A ripple swirled as shimmering heat across the threshold.

“Stop that!” The cold mage raised a hand as if brushing away a fluttering moth. The pressure and heat ceased so abruptly I coughed.

He looked past Drake and saw me. Wincing back as if he’d been struck, he lost his footing and staggered down a step before catching himself. His surprise gave me hope. Maybe Four Moons House and the mansa had not yet tracked us down.

He jumped back up to the door, his gaze fixed on me the way a hammer seeks a nail.

The cold magic pulsing from him coursed down my sword’s hidden blade. If I twisted my draw just right, I could pull a blade into this world out of the spirit world where it currently resided. Not that cold steel would avail me much against Andevai Diarisso Haranwy, the very cold mage who had destroyed the famous airship. I was surprised the incognito guards Camjiata had posted on the lane had not raised the alarm, but then again, you could not identify a cold mage by looks. He might be any particularly well-dressed young man born to a family of high status and notable wealth. They could not have known he’d been born to neither but risen to both.

“You’ll have to return another time, Magister.” Drake started to close the door.

The man I was obliged to call my husband thrust out an arm and, with the tip of his cane, halted the door’s swing. He pushed inside, closed the door, and on the entry mat paused to stamp snow off his polished boots and tap the dusting of snow off his hat.

“I have an appointment with the solicitor Chartji,” he said as he set hat, cane, and gloves on a side table. “You cannot deny me entrance.”

With his lips pressed together and his dark gaze mocking, he surveyed Drake with the disdain that came so easily to him. Drake’s clothes were indeed undistinguished, although practical and sturdy, but in any other company a man with Drake’s striking eyes and attractive face might expect his looks and smile to render his clothing invisible. In this company, he just looked drab.

As the gazes of the two men met, Drake’s blue eyes seemed to blaze. My lips stung as with the bite of a kiln’s heat. My lungs felt choked by unseen smoke and ash. My skin crawled as if licked by invisible tongues of fire. I gasped, sure the air was about to burst into flame.

A chill descended as decisively as a curtain falls at the end of an act. The burning taste of fire was utterly extinguished. Ice brushed my lips like a cold kiss, but it was only sensation, not actual frozen water.

Andevai uncurled a fisted hand as if he were carefully releasing a captured bird. “You’re strong, but not nearly strong enough.” He spoke in a bitingly arrogant tone whose sheer cool vainglory would have been sufficient to bestir a herd of calmly grazing elephants into a maddened, city-flattening stampede. “It’s a bit dangerous, don’t you think? Playing with fire?”

Drake’s grin popped, but he looked furious, not amused. He took a step toward me. With narrowed eyes, Andevai placed himself between me and Drake. Then he met my wary gaze.

I had last seen him two days before. He had not changed. His hair was cut close against his black head, and his beard and mustache were trimmed very short and with absolute perfection, no doubt to encourage young women to look at him. The less said about his beautiful brown eyes, the better. Especially when I recalled the unkind and even cruel things he had said to me when we had first been thrown together, when he had dragged me against my will from the only home I had ever known.

His voice was soft now, emotion tightly controlled. “I suppose your presence here means you have managed yet another escape, Catherine.”

“I can’t tell you anything. Your allegiance lies with Four Moons House.”

He regarded me coolly enough that I felt obliged to admire his composure, considering the things he had said at our last meeting.

“Considering the things that were said at our last meeting,” he said, as if his thoughts aligned with mine, “it may surprise you to hear that my arrival here has nothing to do with you.”

“Considering the things that were
said
 !” I muttered, for it was hard to know what to say to a man when, the last time you saw him, you had shared a potent kiss. But I found words. “Every mage House has advocates trained in the law who can argue cases in the law courts. What use can you possibly have for Chartji’s services?”

“A question I might ask you.”

“You might, but my answer would be the same as yours.”

He flashed a smile of such astounding sweetness and humor—as if he appreciated my wit!—that it would have been easier for me if my heart had simply stopped and I had dropped dead. I had not known the man could smile like that.

His smile vanished and he said in a serious tone, “Perhaps you’d best sit down, Catherine. Are you going to faint?”

“I never faint,” I said hoarsely. “I’m just tired from all the
escaping
my cousin and I have had to do.”

“You never answered her question, Magister.” The spark in Drake’s tone made my neck tingle as with a warning. “Why on Earth would a magister visit the offices of an ordinary solicitor who is also a troll? Have you lost something you want back?”

It was clearly a wild guess, but Andevai swung around as fast as if he’d been ridiculed. When his gaze met Drake’s, such a flare of mutual dislike flashed between them that it felt as if all the air had been sucked from the entryway. The history of the world begins in ice, and it will end in ice. So sing the Celtic bards and Mande djeliw of the north. The Roman historians, on the other hand, claimed that fire will consume us in the end.

Ice, or fire? As the two men faced down, I had a sudden and terrible premonition I was about to find out.

A trill, like speech, slid down from the stairs to interrupt the end of the world. Chartji descended from the first floor with the odd hitching walk typical of her kind. She reached the entry and stuck out a hand in the manner of the radicals. “Magister. Here you are.”

Andevai shrugged as if letting anger roll off him. Then he turned, taking her hand in his without the least sign that he, the scion of an influential and wealthy mage House, found this style of greeting plebeian. “My thanks for remembering our earlier meeting and agreeing to my request for an appointment.”

She was taller than he was, with the wide-set eyes and feathered ruff typical of trolls. When she opened her snout in imitation of a smile, her sharp teeth certainly presented a threat, but her greeting was pleasant enough and her speech so human that its precision sounded peculiar.

“Well met, Magister. I admit, I was not sure you would venture to this district, where lies so much technology to disturb you. I am pleased you did so. If you will follow me to my office, we can discuss your business.”

Drake said, “What business might that be?”

She bared teeth at Drake, bobbed her head at me, and gestured to Andevai. “We guarantee privacy for all who seek our services.” Opening the nearest door, she indicated he should precede her into the office.

He hesitated. “Will you be here afterward, Catherine?” he said in a low voice.

This was one answer I could honestly give. “Until Four Moons House gives up all attempt to claim my cousin Beatrice, I can have nothing to do with any mage House or magister.”

He stiffened. “Of course. I admire you for standing loyal to your family above all.”

He sketched an ambivalent gesture, halfway between greeting and leaving, before he crossed into the office. Chartji shut the door behind them. With my exceptionally good hearing, I heard the rustle of curtains being dragged open inside.

“How do you know this arrogant cold mage?” asked Drake.

“The tale is quite a labyrinth of intrigue,” I said, wishing he would leave me alone so I could eavesdrop.

“Phoenician spies must be quite at home with labyrinths of intrigue.” Yet he smiled to take the sting out of the words.

When in doubt, we’d been taught to distract through misdirection. “We call ourselves Kena’ani, not Phoenician.
Phoenician
is a Greek word, and it’s the one the Romans called us.”

He chuckled. “I’ll remember that, Maestressa. I make it a point never to trust a cold mage. I hope you don’t think it might be possible to do so.” His eyes had the strange quality of seeming vivid in the dim entryway. He watched me, waiting for an answer.

I did not want to speak, but I kept wondering if Camjiata’s armed attendants might decide to attack Andevai. “I’m very sure the cold mage doesn’t know the general is here. I don’t know what his business is, but it’s not about Camjiata.”

“Your insight interests me, Maestressa,” he said with a smile meant to flatter, and indeed I blushed, because I was not accustomed to flattery. “Nevertheless, I’ll need to go report the cold mage’s arrival.”

He went downstairs.

I sidled to the office door and leaned against it. First I tightly furled my senses, blocking out sounds, sights, and smells around me. Then I reached to the threads of magic that permeate all things, the insubstantial threads that can’t be seen or touched in any common way. My awareness crept on those threads into the office.

Andevai was talking. “…If the principle of
rei vindicatio
were turned on its head. What if people bound by clientage could say they want to reclaim ownership of themselves? Is it possible?”

“
Rei vindicatio
means to take possession of something you already own. Such a ruling would turn on the legal status of those people bound by clientage.” Chartji spoke in her eerily perfect diction and accent. “Is clientage legally equivalent to slavery? If they do not possess their own persons in any legal way, then there is nothing to reclaim. Unless the law declares slavery to be illegal, as the law does among my people. So it is difficult for me to say if it is possible here. I will need to make a thorough examination of the law codes and the rulings of jurists. I will need to interview bards and djeliw, because they keep the oldest laws in their memories. I know of no such case being brought before the princely court in the principality of Tarrant. In Expedition, the law is handled quite differently. Just a moment…”

I was straining so hard to hear that when the door exhaled away from my face I stumbled forward into the office. The way the troll pulled back her muzzle was not unfriendly, but it was distinctly unnerving to stare down those predator’s teeth. The crest of yellow feathers raised.

“When I assure people that I offer private meetings, I must be able to fulfill that promise.”

I am sure my face turned as scarlet as if I had been painted. “My apologies.”

Andevai was seated on a settee by the desk. “You may as well let her stay, solicitor. There’s something she needs to hear.”

“I thought you said this appointment had nothing to do with me,” I retorted.

Chartji shut the door. Because I was not about to join Andevai on the settee, I remained standing. Chartji waited beside me. Fox Close lay quiet but for the noise of a coal man shoveling coke into the coal chute and the rumble of a wheelbarrow being pushed along the lane.