Cold Fire

“Bee!” I said in an undertone, pinching her arm. “It’s rude to interrupt an elder.”



“I’m the one fated to be dismembered and my head thrown into a well! I assure you, Aunt, I do not mean to be rude.”



“Mmm, yes, you are drenched in nyama.”



“What is that? Energy? Heat? Light? Magic?”



“It is the foundation stone. It is a thread. It is that which can be shaped. A potter molds nyama like clay. A blacksmith forges nyama into steel. A hunter must know how to protect himself from the dangerous nyama released when he kills an animal, by adding it to his own. Cold mages manipulate nyama. How any of them do this I do not know, for I do not know their secrets.”



“Cat told me she once met a djeli who called nyama the handle of power. Is that like an axe handle? If you can grip it, then you can wield the axe’s blade?”



“I would not say so. But those who can shape nyama can shape and change the world.”



Bee nodded. “With the right connections to power and a strong will, you can shape and change the world! Like Camjiata did, and means to again.”



“Bee!” I whispered, “we’re supposed to listen to elders, not interrupt them!”



“How are we supposed to learn if we don’t ask questions?” cried Bee.



“We are here,” said Fati.



Slump-shouldered sandstone towers rose before us, marking the four corners of a walled town. The eroded walls looked much as a seashore castle built of sand looks after a wave runs over it: melting ruins soon to be obliterated. No dogs barked. No wagons rolled or voices called. Not even the wind moaned. If anything lived in the dusty, deserted ruins, I could not hear it.



A road as black and slick as obsidian speared away from the half-collapsed main gate. As straight as a Roman military road, it cut through uninhabited countryside toward distant hills. A shadow raced toward us from those hills.



“The tide comes,” said Fati. “Get up on the road, for it is warded ground. Hurry.”



I grabbed Bee’s hand and ran, even though I was suddenly sure that the instant I touched the pavement something terrible and irrevocable would happen. Yet I had to get there. Perhaps that desire was part of the compulsion that had driven me to the well.



“Aunt, hurry!” called Bee over her shoulder.



“Onto warded ground I cannot cross,” said Fati. “You must go forward alone. This is your journey. My path is different.”



The knife of darkness cut over us just as we stumbled up onto the road. Bee flung her arms around me. Fati stood in daylight, surrounded by grass. With me in shadow and her in the bright, I could see clearly how my husband resembled her in the planes of his face, the glow of his complexion, and the clarity of his eyes. A vibration rumbled like drums in the earth. A towering wall of fire washed toward us, scorching the grass to ashes. Fati smiled, lifting her hands in greeting.



“Blessed Tanit!” I breathed. “Grandmother!”



Flames obliterated the scene. The town walls rang like a struck bell as the ripple of fire boomed out around the stone.



The tide passed. Pale daylight, like dawn, rose on a world utterly changed.



Fati was gone.



11



On either side of the road lay fields. Three-horned antelopes grazed on grass as green as emeralds. Fields tilled in spirals marked patterns on the ground that would, I felt sure, create beautiful images if seen from the sky. Thick-leaved vines of sweet potatoes flourished on a field of dirt mounds, the only crops I recognized. Elsewhere, huge stalks were crowned by flowers whose petals blazed with streamers like orange flame; that is, unless they were really burning. Others wept green tears. A vine strung along posts burst pods into a cloud of butterflies. Small winged creatures with faces like bats swooped down, snapping them up, until the air drifted with shimmering scraps.



Fati was gone. She might have been anywhere or anything. A stone about half the size of my fist lay on a patch of earth beside the road. I scrambled down.



“Don’t touch that!” said Bee.



But I did. The stone was waterworn to a smooth finish, deep brown in color, like sard. The veins in its surface flowed like speech against my skin. I felt I knew its voice. “Do you think the tide…turned her into this stone?”



“And you thought I was the credulous one?”



“Spirits change, just as the land does.” I touched my father’s locket, the familiar ache in my heart, the one that could never be filled. “So after all, maybe I can’t ever find my parents, not if they were caught in the tide.”



“Wouldn’t everything be caught in the tide? How could you escape it?”