Cold Fire

“Cat! Don’t come out of the water!” Drake shouted, but I could not see him.



A thread slithered down from the sky to slap the water. It was a rope ladder, lowered as by Ba’al’s heavenly messengers. I stared at it as if it were a serpent sliding close to strike, for its swaying bounce hypnotized me. Two figures scrambled down. The first gripped a lamp’s hook in strong white teeth. As he turned to take in the scene on the dark shore, he spotted me, let go one hand from the ladder, and drew a very impressive knife from a harness crossed on a dark chest.



I brandished my sword to make sure he knew I had it. I could take a cursed knife, but I wasn’t so sure about taking him, for he had the posture of a man who knew how to fight and kill. Although his willingness to raid a plague island filled with brain-rotted dying people who could easily infest him did not inspire confidence in his intelligence.



The person above, the one without a lamp held in his mouth, spoke. “Gal! Yee hear me?”



“I’m just a lost woman, no threat to you,” I cried. “Can you get me out of here?”



“No salter, she.” By the voice it was a woman. She seemed to be explaining things to the man with the lamp and the knife, thus giving me even less faith in his wit. “She be in the water, see? Therewise not a salter.”



I kept my guard up although he sheathed the knife and swung around to peer at the beach.



“Cat! Get on the ship! Go up now!” Definitely that was Drake’s impatient voice.



He pushed down through the salters without fear, dragging Abby. She lurched like a broken toy, sobbing in fear. He led her to the edge of the water. A wave brushed up over her bare feet and she whimpered with a horrible hurt dog sound. The salters backed away from Drake as from poison, but yet they so yearned for my blood that they kept coming back and retreating, all in time to the sough of the waves.



Drake tugged Abby against him as in an embrace. He ripped away her blouse, uncovering her torso and breasts. The gleam of my sword and the light of the ladder man’s lamp illuminated a suppurating wound gouged into her side. The wound oozed with a slime that glittered like phosphorous. Drake pressed a hand against it, fingers smeared into the oily mess. She cried out, then stilled as abruptly as if he had stabbed her. I yelled a protest and splashed forward to save her.



A salter grabbed at me. My training snapped me into a lunge, weight and force thrusting the blade’s tip into his shoulder.



His gaze met mine, unreadable. Blank and dead.



Cold and hot together, blood racing, I rotated my elbow out and yanked free the blade, able to think only that it hadn’t been a killing blow. The salter dropped at my feet. A wave spilled over the body, and it turned white and began to dissolve like a ridge of salt crumbling away.



Maybe I screamed in sheer shocked surprise. Someone screamed.



The salters scattered, stumbling away from me. The two closest to Drake began to croon in a moaning whoop whose rise and fall made my skin crawl. A glow like fireflies winked along their skin until their complexions shone as if they were turning alchemically into burnished gold. Flames licked along their ragged clothing. Sparks spun in their eyes.



Furious shouts and curses rose from the rooftops.



A fourth salter limped toward me, his white gaze fixed purposefully on me. He was the one who had bitten me. As he licked his teeth and smacked his lips with the obsession of hunger, he looked me right in the eye with what I knew, like a knife to the gut, was the dregs of the mind that had once dwelt happily in a youthful, healthy body.



“Kill me. Kill me.”



I thrust. My blade caught him just below the ribs. Then I pulled free.



He toppled into the sea, and the crystalline remains of what had once been a man hissed away in the swells.



I fell back as a wave of heat blasted off James Drake. The two glowing salters burned in earnest. A third joined them. Their greasy, bitter smell gagged me.



A hand caught my arm. I jerked around to stare straight at a muscled and very bare black chest wrapped with knives. Two old, ropy scars drew a starburst pattern over his left shoulder and across his heart. Once, he had taken the worst of a bad knife fight. Or perhaps he was the one who had won.



“Up! Hurry, Perdita!” With a disturbing shriek of a laugh, the woman leaped off the ladder and landed with a resounding splash next to me.



The burning men weren’t even screaming because the flames were consuming them so quickly. The reek of singed flesh dizzied me. I sheathed and fastened my sword, grabbed a stiff rung, and began to climb. I had to work around the knife man, and as I passed he spread a hand across my backside most invasively. But he merely shoved, with astonishing strength, to help me on my way.