because she is touched with the summer breath of the unreachable maze.’”
“When did Maester Godwik say that?”
She cocked her head. “He wrote it. We received dispatches yesterday from Adurnam.”
“Any for me?”
“No. There will not yet have been time for you to receive a reply to the letter you sent for your cousin who is after all here in Expedition.”
“Then how did Maester Godwik know I was here?”
“We also veil our secrets. If the meeting must be made, let us go.”
Let it not be said cats and trolls cannot act decisively and in concert. I wrapped myself in threads of magic. Accompanied by two young trolls who were some manner of kin, Keer and I walked upriver to Iron Bridge. The factories clustered on the eastern bank, smokestacks belching. Like most trolls in Expedition, Keer favored clothing that mixed a wild combination of colors and cuts, the kind of thing I would have pieced out of a ragbag had I no alternative. The few trolls I had seen in Adurnam had had more muted tastes, which had only seemed outrageous because we in Adurnam had never met the trolls in Expedition. But it was not until we reached the glittering wall marking the environs of troll town that I realized Keer dressed to fit human taste.
Troll town had a boundary rather than a wall, a fence of wire from which hung fluttering ribands sewn with polished shards of glass or metal. The instant I stepped beneath, my veil shredded as if cut to pieces, leaving me visible and vulnerable. Ahead lay a confusing maze of oddly-shaped structures wound about by paths and mirrors.
“This way,” said Keer.
As we ventured into the maze, my head began to ache with a pulse right between my eyes. No pattern or landmark distinguished one path from another. Structures like five- and six-sided gems popped up right in my way, only to seem to veer aside as the path took a sharp turn. Copses of nesting houses, some with tiled roofs and others with roofs like plaited hats, clustered around wells. Trolls busied themselves everywhere, watching me pass as if they were hungry. Their cacophony assaulted me, shrills, clicks, whistles, trills, and a constant tapping with no discernable rhythm that washed over me until I felt myself sinking. Bile rose in my gorge.
A white-hot pain slicing through my eyes staggered me. Keer’s hand fixed on my elbow, and she steered me into shadow. Her breath on my cheek smelled of dry summer grass. I was blind.
“Not the place to look weak. You are safe with me, but some here will be discourteous and eat you, thinking you need to be culled. Close your eyes.”
I hadn’t known they were open. I squeezed them shut, fumbling at the cloth to draw the cane free. “Let them try to eat me,” I whispered.
“Put it away.” Keer spoke so close to my ear I could almost feel the bite of her teeth into the inviting flesh of my cheek. “It is too shiny. It will attract vultures and killers.”
Blindness gave me no succor. As painfully as the shots and glints had struck me, it was not glass and mirror that made me reel. Not until this moment had I understood how much I oriented myself by winding myself into the threads that bind and interlace the worlds. I did not see these threads with my eyes but felt them through my whole being. Here, I was completely cut loose.
I found a hoarse scrape to serve as a voice. “I am going to throw up.”
“Quickly.”
I clung to the troll as she guided me what way I did not know, to the slaughterhouse or to rat country, I could not tell, nor dared I look, for all my efforts were fixed on not puking. The most vivid image overtook me, of me on hands and knees on the dusty ground vomiting while lean, deadly predators circled in, watching my struggles until they darted in for the kill…
“Sit,” said Keer. I heard the other two trolls whistling to each other, perhaps discussing which part of me would be tastiest.
My legs gave way. Swallowing bile, I sat on a hard surface, face in my hands.
“That was harsh,” added Keer. “You must be a spiritwalker. Ditch behind you.”
With something I could only call kindness, the troll held me by skirt and jacket while I retched into a rubbish- filled ditch. The stinking remains of my breakfast mottled a sole-less shoe upper and a fraying basket strewn with cracked chicken bones. After a bit, I rose. A man stared curiously as he trundled past pushing a cart filled with bricks. We were back in rat country, on a backstreet lined with ramshackle workshop compounds between weed- ridden empty lots.
“I could use something to drink,” I said, my words tasting quite foul.
Keer hissed, her head slewing around. Three unknown trolls wearing only ribbons and strings approached in a crouching posture whose stealth made me extremely apprehensive. Were they about to spring? Had they followed us out of troll town?
“I feel much stronger,” I said in a loud voice.
Keer’s young relatives dipped their heads, baring teeth as they placed themselves between the strangers and me. The other trolls backed off.
Unmolested, we returned to the law offices, but I felt too queasy to draw the shadows around me. I had to hope the general’s spies hadn’t been able to follow me to troll town.
A clerk brought a tray in with a steaming pot of tea and a flask of rum.
“Tea, or rum?” asked Keer, talons poised above the tray and teeth flashing wickedly.
“Might I have rum? Why did you call me a spiritwalker?”
She handed me a shot glass and poured tea for herself. The rum burned down my throat. She poured tea again, this time for us both.
“The world is a maze. It is twisted and layered. Like a knot, perhaps you rats would say. No, that is not a good analogy. Anyway. Some of you rats can navigate to places in the knot where none of my kind can go, just as we have our secret pathways.”
I sipped at the tea. The flavor breathed with the scent of late summer flowers, dusty and tart. “Your own secret pathways? Does the Wild Hunt hunt your people?”
“Such a question demands we enter the circle.”
“I can’t play the game, Keer. My head feels like it’s being squeezed in a vise. My feet feel like they’ve been chopped out from under me. If that makes you want to eat me, or if I lose all the height I’ve gained on Triumph Spire, so be it. Just give me another shot of rum first.”
Keer eyed me in the peculiar way trolls had, looking with one eye and then the other. “You have given me the gift of your weaknesses. Now we are like clutch mates. I can either consume you to strengthen myself or…”
She had the most interesting eyes, in one way so human with round black pupil and silver iris and in another way so gleaming and deadly, rimmed by the tiny feathers of a metallic golden-brown color. I almost felt I could see in that lens the secret pathways known only to trolls.
“Whatever the second is sounds more appealing than the first,” I interposed, for one of the things I liked about trolls was that the ones I knew appreciated a sardonic sense of humor.
She poured me a second shot of the very dark rum. “Your very entertaining pamphlet and its colorful tales is a rat story, not one of ours. We have our own enemies, and maybe you have met them. But no Wild Hunt like the one you describe rides through troll country.”
“I don’t see how it could track anything in that maze.” I raised the glass to my lips, then set it down without drinking. Could Bee hide in troll town on Hallows’ Eve? “Keer, do you think the Wild Hunt only hunts humans? Or have you found a way to protect yourselves against them?”
“They are not the ones who hunt us. Once, long past and beyond telling, my ancestors were almost wiped out. A few pockets survived in valleys amid the great ice shelves. Now we grow again. But the eye of our older brethren lies upon us, and the unwary are taken.”
“Who are your older brethren?”
“I think you rats call them dragons. It is not our word for them.”
Now I did drain the second shot glass, and followed it with a chaser of tea to purge the sting from my throat. The printing press wheezed in the workshop out back, and pens scritched in the clerks’ office. “Fiery Shemesh! Not even my father knew that!”
“Not even the ancients know every secret that exists in the world,” mused Keer. “At the heart of all lie the vast energies which are the animating spirit, if you will, of the worlds. The worlds incline toward disorder. Cold
