The Blackest Heart

by Brian Lee Durfee

  Within an hour the clouds parted and the sun beamed down, causing a frosty wet gloss over the landscape. It had been four days since the oghul attack, and seven total since setting out from Stanclyffe, and Nail had come to realize that the weather patterns of the Glacier Range around the three Sky Lochs were even more fickle than those of the Autumn Range. They had seen no other signs of oghuls since the attack, but so high in the mountains, it wasn’t just oghuls they needed to worry about. It was clear: the weather was liable to kill them all just as easily. And despite the snow and ice all around, Nail knew this climate would leech you dry if you were out in it very long without fresh water. They had been diligent about filling their water skins at whatever streams they crossed.

  By noon the clouds had raced completely into the east and the glacier was a sheet of polished brightness gleaming through the trees—a forest of gaunt birch and pine stricken to the core by the harsh conditions of the altitude. The company wended their way down a snowy slope to the edge of the wooded ridgeline until the great glacier revealed itself fully. To Nail it looked like a twenty-mile-long, five-mile-wide, luminous blue-and-white blanket rippling across the barren valley below, the deep indigo waters of Sky Lochs nestled at its far southern end. To the east of the glacier, lofty mountain peaks of snow were strung like a necklace of glimmering pearls. To the north rose D’Nahk lè, the breathtaking mount from which the glacial ice sprang. The western ridgeline the company stood upon was harsh with afternoon sunlight. The warmth was not enough for Nail to shed his heavy gray cloak, but a welcome relief nonetheless.

  Godwyn guided them down a steep draw leading to the glacier, sharp cliffs on either side. It was slow going, but knowing their destination was finally at hand seemed to hastened their step. Ever since the sun had come out, Seita and Liz Hen and Dokie had been in a jolly mood, all three talking excitedly, all three in utter awe of the dazzling glacier below and the towering hulk of D’Nahk lè to the north. “It’s like walking toward a dream,” Dokie said. “Like nothing in this world could be breathing with more life than this place here.”

  “And the air so crisp and fresh,” Seita followed. “And the sun so bright.”

  While Nail also marveled at the dramatic beauty of the glacier and its surrounding, sunlit mountains, he did not feel the place breathed with any sort of life. In fact, as the company descended the ever-widening draw toward the glimmering ice, a stark apprehension formed within him. He had been here before. He had been born in a small mining camp named Arco at the edge of this glacier—or so Shawcroft had claimed. Nail couldn’t help but feel some dark history resided down on that ice below, in the mountains above, in the loch waters far to the south, a hazy dream hovering just on the edges of his mind, some unknown suffering deeply connected to him. And with each step toward the glacier, he could feel something ominous take root deep within himself, growing and stretching and creaking open the locked parts of his soul. Yes, it was as if this massive, striking, harsh landscape was speaking to him in sorrowful soft tones. You have been here before and suffered great loss.

  Despite Nail’s ever-growing dread, the overall mood of the company seemed the lightest it had been since they had set out from Lord’s Point. In truth, the last four days since the oghul attack had seen the company grow close. Liz Hen had even attempted to joke around with Nail from time to time. And for a moment, he had sensed something almost like kindness in her ribbing—almost, but not quite. In truth, there was more and more casual banter tossed about among everyone daily. But Nail always felt like the odd one out. The gloomy one. Stefan, Seita, Liz Hen, and Dokie had formed a tight comradeship of their own. The four were always sitting together at night before bed, talking quietly and playfully among themselves. Seita and Liz Hen had certainly become immeasurably more tolerant of each other. Nail wouldn’t exactly call the two girls the best of friends just yet, but the tensions between them were gone.

  In fact, as they hiked toward the glacier, he could hear Dokie’s inquiries about the two girls’ new-formed friendship. “Why did you hate Seita so much in the beginning?” he asked Liz Hen.

  “Was Ol’ Man Leddingham who planted a deep loathing of the Vallè in me,” Liz Hen said. “He used to gather all us Grayken Spear serving girls around the hearth at night, tell us ancient stories of the beasts of the underworld, about the ghosts and witches and druids that roamed free, doing their bidding. Scared the britches right off some of us. But he’d always end his tales of fright with tales of the Vallè females of the Val Vallè northlands. Claimed a Vallè maiden was worse even than a witch, worse even than the wraiths. Claimed that a Vallè woman could steal the thoughts right out of your mind. Claimed they had iron claws of rust, and pubis hairs made of icicles.”

  A giggle burst from Seita—a light giggle that rang like music off the surrounding cliffs and snow. Stefan, walking near Seita, laughed too.

  “It’s true,” Liz Hen went on. “Leddingham claimed Vallè maidens preyed on human boys just for sport. Catch a boy in the woods and seduce him with her pointy ears and wicked charms. Once a boy was completely caught, his noodle clamped inside her icy cooch, she’d run off into the forest, his poor pecker ripped free at the root, intestines unraveling out before his surprised eyes into the scrub and brush until he was dead.”

  “Seems unduly harsh,” Seita laughed.

  “I don’t think a boy’s intestines are attached to his pecker,” Dokie added.

  “Of course they are,” Liz Hen snarked. “Ain’t you ever seen a pig gutted?”

  “I once seen my dad scrape the guts out of a stag he kilt in the forest,” Dokie answered. “I don’t recall its intestines being attached to its pecker, though, more like its butt.”

  A clap of laughter shot from Liz Hen. “Says the boy who don’t even know where his own spinkter is.”

  “I think you mean sphincter,” Dokie countered.

  “I’m just sayin’ it was a bedtime story Ol’ Man Leddingham used to tell us girls,” Liz Hen said. “And that’s why I didn’t care for Seita to begin with. I figured she was gonna gut Stefan and Nail, and possibly even you, Dokie. But I was wrong not to like her. She’s turned out well.”

  “Thanks,” Seita said with another bright little laugh.

  Nail flicked the hair from his eyes and shot a glance backward over the pack mule behind him. There was sheer delight and amusement on the Vallè maiden’s countenance as she trudged down the slope with Liz Hen and Dokie by her side, Beer Mug on their heels.

  With her elegant smile and sparkling big eyes, Nail swore that Seita’s face under the gray hood of her cloak was as beautiful as the pristine landscape around them.

  †  †  †  †  †

  An hour later they reached the bottom of the draw. It emptied them out into a sloping, mile-wide valley of stone and stark skeletal shrub flanked on either side by unfriendly-looking cliffs of towering gray rock. At the bottom of the valley, like a sheet of blinding glass, lay the great glacier.

  Nail’s skin was itchy under his patchwork plate armor. He cursed the old junk, wondering how Culpa Barra felt under all that heavy black Dayknight metal. The sun still beat down, and most of the new-fallen snow had melted underfoot.

  As they picked their way through the gauntlet of wind-blasted boulders and leaning rocks toward the glacier, Nail began to sweat, and his apprehension heightened. It seemed everything was now happening through a muddled fog. His mind felt watery, unfocused, jumping, stretching, trying to recall memories long faded, hazing with spots of nothingness. It was the glacier. It terrified him like nothing ever before. The looming swath of ice stretched out before him, seemingly endless in its bare, white bleakness and haunting history.

  “This is where the mining camp of Arco once stood,” Godwyn announced as they passed over a barren patch of rocky landscape littered with rotted and scattered wood, many of the timbered boards looking half-burnt. Crude stone foundations of long-abandoned structures dotted the valley here and there.

&nbs
p; Roguemoore snatched a pebble from under a weather-worn length of lumber. “A D’Nahk lè timestone.” He held the tiny rock up. It was about the size of his thumb and chalk white. “I hoped we’d find one among this ruin. The glacier spits them out randomly. The miners of Arco used them in the dark of the mines.” Stefan seemed to take particular interest in the stone as the dwarf handed it to him for examination. Seita leaned over his shoulder and gazed at it too.

  Nail had seen similar rocks before. Shawcroft had a small collection of them. They changed from gray to white depending on what amount of sunlight they were exposed to. His old master occasionally used them in the Roahm Mines for telling time in the dark. Set a gray timestone pebble in the sun for a moment and it would turn dull white like the one in the dwarf’s hand now. Inside a dark mine, the chalk-whiteness of the stone would slowly fade over a period of about two days. If one could learn the luster of the stone, one could easily determine how long one had been inside a mine working. They also offered up a tiny bit of dim light in the darkness.

  “Gather any similar stone you find in the rubble,” the dwarf advised. “That’s if the oghuls haven’t already picked the place clean of them. Arco and every other such mining camp in these hills were abandoned after heavy oghul raids fourteen, fifteen years ago. Few men venture into these high mountain climes anymore.”

  Dokie asked, “Are there still many oghuls around this high up?”

  “Yes,” the dwarf went on. “Over the last century, the oghuls of Jutte and Tok have spread out. Mostly they’ve taken over the uninhabitable reaches of Gul Kana’s far north. And they continue to pirate the north shores of Gul Kana. And the Silver Throne has mostly left them to it. There’s not much left up here for human or Vallè or dwarf anyway. Over the years, it’s been predominantly oghul clan verses oghul clan fighting and quarreling among themselves, killing each other off. King Borden Bronachell thought the oghul squabbles best left alone. Whilst some of the northern nobles wished Borden would have sent the Dayknights to put an end to it all, so they could mine these mountains once again, no one really wanted to waste soldiers’ lives on an outright war with the oghuls. But it’s always been a possibility.”

  “Ew,” Liz Hen exclaimed, and stopped. “Dead bones.” She was pointing to a collection of sun-bleached bones scattered among the rocks that Beer Mug was sniffing at. Human bones. The girl backed away, doing the three-fingered sign of the Laijon Cross over her heart. Then both she and Dokie, hand in hand, skirted around the bones warily.

  “Probably a victim of the oghul raids,” Godwyn said.

  “The whole world is naught but a boneyard,” Roguemoore said. “All the trillions that’ve died over the centuries, people and critters of all kinds, dead and slowly sinking into the soil over time. Likely ain’t one place in all the Five Isles you couldn’t dig a hole and not run into bones of some type.”

  Val-Draekin bent and shoved aside a flat rock, digging one of the bones from the frozen ground, a small jawless skull. “Just a child,” he said, then tossed it aside.

  Nail shuddered as he watched the skull clack hollowly against the rocks. Hazy, dreamlike images of the oghul raid that had likely claimed the child’s life suddenly assailed him. His muddled brain swam with a foggy and foreboding gloom. When he looked up, the glacier before him seemed naught but a giant, stark-white shroud thrown over a graveyard, a white veil thrown over the memories hovering just at the edges of his mind.

  I have been here before, walked this very spot.

  The company moved on. And the nearer they drew to the glacier, the more random bones and shattered skulls and half carcasses they saw. “The terribleness of it all,” Liz Hen would murmur at each new bone in her path.

  Roguemoore never did find a second D’Nahk lè timestone by the time they reached the edge of the glacier. With Arco behind them, the cliff-lined valley came to an abrupt end—a wall of ice stretching to the north and to the south. In some places the ice was twenty feet in height, in others over a hundred.

  “Last I was here,” Godwyn said, “and mind you, this was fourteen or more years ago, the miners had cut many access stairways into the wall of the glacier. The mines are about five miles’ journey north up the ice, their many openings scattered at the base of D’Nahk lè. The miners would hike atop the glacier to the mines. It was dangerous going, but with those cliffs”—he pointed to the sheer cliffs surrounding the valley—“the glacier route was their only choice. As it will be our only choice.”

  Liz Hen grumbled. “So we have to carve a staircase into that solid blue ice wall? I don’t think so.”

  “We’ll hike under the edge of the ice to the north a bit toward the cliff,” Godwyn said, hand thrown over his brow to block out the sun as his gaze ranged north over the glacier. “Perhaps if we’re lucky, we will find the ice dips low enough somewhere and we can just walk up on it.” He glanced back at Liz Hen. “I don’t want to carve any steps either, and I’d prefer the pack mules to come with us as far as they can.”

  They found their access point onto the glacier half a mile to the north, in the shade of the cliff edge itself. The jagged rock ledge rose high above, blocking the sun, casting shadow over the low swale in the ice. The towering ice shelf dipped to about waist-high in this one spot. Still, it took some effort to climb onto it. They had to guide the mules one leg at a time, pushing from behind.

  Once on the ice, footing was slippery for all as meltwater raced under their feet. Nail fell to his knees twice. He noticed several of the others did too. Still the company made its way slowly east, up the gentle basin of ice. They hiked carefully for several hundred feet before they crested the sloping white ridge and stumbled out into the sun again. The entirety of the glacier’s overpowering brilliance and stark menace lay before them, and under them. Bare and bleak and full of sharp ridges and deep crags of lustrous blue, it stretched, seemingly forever. Heaps of mountainous white ice jutted haphazardly from the mazelike landscape—like colossal standing stones they loomed randomly in the distance. The blinding white of this tortured landscape tore at Nail’s eyes. He blinked away the pain and looked toward the great D’Nahk lè that rose up over the head of the glacier five miles to the north. He found his heart was hammering with fear at the sheer size of the mountain and everything else around him.

  “I don’t think this is the right path,” Liz Hen said.

  “I agree,” Dokie added. “How are we supposed to walk across this? It’s far too jagged and strange.”

  “We must now turn and proceed north,” Godwyn said. “The mines are at the head of the glacier at the base of D’Nahk lè. Half a day’s journey, if I remember right. We’ll skirt the cliff on the left as best we can. Safer that way. No sense in getting lost out in this labyrinth if we can avoid it.” He nodded to the vast expanse of treacherous ice to the east.

  Culpa Barra and Val-Draekin began separating two coils of rope from the rest of the gear strapped to the mules.

  “It won’t be easy,” Godwyn went on. “This glacier ice is deceptive, with many perilous traps. I will teach you what warning signs to look for on the ice as we go. Follow my tracks exactly. Be wary of your footing. And do not venture too close to any crack or crevasse, for it may hide a drop that can kill. We’ll rope ourselves together like the miners of old. If you fell into a crack without the rope at your waist, you’d fall and fall until you were wedged in between the narrowing chasm walls like a cork. There you’d die a slow, cold death if the fall hadn’t already killed you. Many miners of Arco were lost in just such a way. But that won’t happen to us. If any one of us slips into a crevasse, or if a hole opens up underneath and swallows any one of us, the rest will just sit down and don’t move. The combined weight of all of us will stop whoever is falling.”

  “My pa said he watched a fellow topple off a cliff above Arlish once,” Dokie piped up. “Hit every outcrop of rock on the way down, opened his skull and ripped his body into five separate pieces before he hit the bottom.”

  “Rott
ed angels, you stupid.” Liz Hen smacked Dokie hard on the shoulder. “What did you have to go and mention that for?”

  “My pa swore it happened that way,” Dokie said, rubbing his shoulder.

  “Well, who bloody cares?”

  “What of the mules?” Dokie asked as Culpa Barra tied one end of the rope around his waist. “Will they be tied to us too?”

  “No,” Roguemoore answered. “The mules will travel with us as far as they can. Then we’ll stake them to a safe place on the glacier and journey on. I doubt any oghuls or other predators will bother them out so far on the glacier.”

  “But they will freeze if we leave them with no fire pit,” Dokie said. “They’ll have no wood to burn.”

  The dwarf said, “Mules are hardy creatures. I reckon they can withstand a brittle night or two under the stars.”

  “Are you also going to tie Beer Mug to a stake in the ice?” Liz Hen asked. “I couldn’t bear the thought of him fallen down some ice crack. I know him well enough; he wouldn’t do well down some crevasse all alone.” She ruffled the dog’s head.

  “Don’t worry,” Val-Draekin said as he tied the rope around her next. “The dog will do fine on the glacier, better than the rest of us put together, I reckon. He can come with us as far as he chooses.”

  “Still,” Liz Hen said. “All things considered, this glacier doesn’t look like much of a place for a shepherd dog or a couple mules to go a-walkin’.”

  “Or dwarves, for that matter,” Roguemoore added. In his bulky armor, the squat dwarf looked entirely out of place on the glacier. They all did. The only ones who seemed even slightly at ease were the two Vallè, both lithe of foot on the slippery ice where everyone else seemed to slide and stumble.

  Godwyn, Seita, Stefan, Dokie, and Val-Draekin were tied to the lead rope in that order. Culpa, Liz Hen, and Roguemoore were tied to the second line, Nail at the end of it.