Watcher of the Dead

by J. V. Jones

  You kill it, you butcher it. Da’s words concerning hunting were law.

  What would Tem Sevrance make of his son now? What advice would he give to a man who could heart-kill any target he set in his sights? What laws governed Raif Twelve Kill, Watcher of the Dead?

  Resettling the butterflied carcass on his shoulders, Raif entered the camp. Tents had been raised twenty days earlier on new-cleared softwood. The stumps were still oozing pitch. Circles of matted yellow pine needles marked the former positions of the tents, and potholes of blackened earth told of longfires, cook fires and smoke pits. One of the lamb brothers was filling in the latrine. Another was using a long pole to unhook a slab of bear fat from the safe tree.

  Raif shivered. Waiting in the pines had chilled him. The air had been still in the early hours before dawn and the frost smoke had risen: white mist that switched between ice and vapor and then back again. Five hours later and he could still feel it cooling his burned skin. The damaged muscle in his chest had shrunk and stiffened, pulling on the sutures and creating tension between his ribs. The wound on his left shoulder, where the lamb brothers had drawn out the splinter of unmade horn, was healing in unexpected ways. The skin above the exit wound had knitted closed, but the wormhole underneath remained open. Raif doubted it would ever heal. He was not and would never be whole.

  All of us are missing something, Yustaffa had said that four months ago in the Rift. He had been talking about the Maimed Men and their practice of taking a pound of flesh from anyone seeking to join them—Raif himself had lost half a finger in one of their initiation ceremonies. Yet he now understood Yustaffa’s words went beyond physical damage. Maimed Men were outcasts, orphans, fugitives, runaways: they had a world of things to miss beyond flesh.

  Drey. Effie.

  Raif named his brother and sister in his head and then pushed all thoughts of them away. He had developed a sense about when it was safe to think of the people he loved, when it was possible to picture them in his mind without the pain of losing them. Today was not such a day.

  “Got yourself a pretty doe,” Addie Gunn called in greeting. The Maimed Man had led the ewe to the sole hardwood stump in the camp, and the creature was lipping the reservoir of hardened sap that had pooled on the flat surface. “Sheep like their sweeties,” Addie said, scratching the back of the ewe’s neck. “Milk’ll be like honey tonight.”

  Raif made no reply. Bending at the waist, he shucked off the yearling and let it fall to the ground. Her fawn spots were nearly gone and the white mating blaze on her rump was beginning to come in. She’d fallen with her eyes open—a steel arrowhead piercing the right ventricle of the heart rarely gave a creature time to do anything save die—and her gaze rested on a fixed point in the distance. Raif wondered if the point marked his position as he lifted his finger from the bowstring. Had she heard the soft twang of the recoil as the arrow shot toward her heart?

  Reaching down, he closed her eyelids. “We leave at noon.”

  Addie’s hand stilled on the ewe’s neck. He looked carefully at Raif before nodding. “Aye.”

  Raif Sevrance and Addie Gunn had traveled hundreds of leagues east together through crippling cold and hostile terrain. There was no need to say more between them. They were Maimed Men and failed clansmen: both knew the dangers of becoming too attached to people or places. Addie had been a cragsman at Wellhouse and consumption had lost him his herd and clan. His fellow cragsman had carted his failing body north to the Rift and given him a choice. Jump into the deepest crack in the earth and die an honorable death, or cross it and join the Maimed Men. Addie had chosen to live.

  Most clansmen would have jumped. Raif had been born into Blackhail, the oldest and hardest of clans, and of all the Hailsmen he knew he could not imagine one of them leaving Blackhail to become a Maimed Man. Clansmen were proud. They had few good words to say about people who weren’t clan, and nothing but curses for Maimed Men. They were robbers, murderers, freaks. No oaths or code of conduct bound them. They tilled no fields nor practiced any professions. Their living was made from raids, robbery, extortion, kidnapping for ransom.

  And he, Raif Sevrance, would be king of them.

  Raif glanced at the position of the sun. A lone bird of prey soared across its swollen face. Two hours until noon. He had known for the past twenty days that he would have to leave this place, this hillside south of the Lake of Red Ice, and return to the Rift and the Maimed Men who lived there, but he had imagined the decision of when to leave would be his. Now the lamb brothers had made it for him. They were departing, and they had not informed him they had planned to go. Raif told himself it was their privilege to do so, but he still meant to move out before they did.

  Leaving the doe carcass at the camp perimeter, he made his way to the only standing tent. As he hiked between the stumps he was aware that one of the lamb brothers—Tallal judging by his height and the color of the cloth panel covering his lower face—was attempting to catch his eye. Raif ignored him. The lamb brothers would have to wait to collect their remaining tent. Raif needed to sleep. Addie would make what preparations were needed; quarter and parcel the yearling, fill waterskins, wax leathers, barter with the lamb brothers for tea herbs and salt. The Maimed Man enjoyed sound relations with the lamb brothers: tea and sheep were powerful forces for goodwill.

  As soon as he’d slipped through the tent flap, Raif bent forward to lessen the pressure on his chest. Ignoring the pain during the hunt had been easy enough, but he was paying for it now. Twenty days ago his heart had stopped. Dead. There’d been a length of time when he, Raif Sevrance, ceased to exist. He’d been just another corpse on the ice. Blood had stopped moving and pooled in his veins, muscles had locked, his lungs had slumped to a close as poisons flooded his liver and kidneys. How long he’d lain there, empty and decomposing, was something he never wanted to know. Time served among the dead was something he hoped to forget. He couldn’t avoid the sudden weaknesses and failings, though: his body enjoyed reminding him it had died.

  Inside the tent all was dim and still. The safety lamp had burned out, but the wick was still smoking. Its pitchy scent smelled like wound dressing, and mixed uneasily with the stink of old animal skins. The tent walls, the ground canvas and the bedding were all made from pieced hides. Expertly clarified skins formed the walls. Raif did not recognize what animal they came from, but he appreciated the work that had gone into fatting and leaching the skins until they lost all natural pigment and let through light. The longbones that formed the support struts were another thing alien to him. He had handled one a few days back and was surprised to discover it was as light as a bird bone. The lamb brothers were not from the North. Home was the shifting sands and baked earth of the Scorpion Desert. Perhaps they had birds the size of horses there; Raif did not know.

  Lying on the heaped skins, he tried to sleep. Closing his eyes might have helped. Instead he stared at the parasite holes in the ceiling hides. Needles of sunlight punctured them as the sun moved overhead. When his eyes began to sting, he dropped his gaze to the six-foot-long package that rested close to the tent’s rear wall. The package was raised off the ground by a crude plinth of stripped timber. Ten days back Addie had judged its content vulnerable to damp.

  “It’s damaged goods,” Raif had said in response, as the Maimed Man chiseled wood curls from the plinth. “Cankered, blackened. Why bother?”

  Addie had shaken his head impatiently. He wasn’t a natural wood-worker and the wood curls grew thicker as he spoke. “We bother because this sword deserves respect. It was made for kings. The last man who wielded it died out on that ice, trying to hold back evil so potent that even the gods fear it. Yes, the sword is damaged, but what if underneath the rust the edge is still true? We owe this sword, Raif. The clanholds, the Sull, the Maimed Men. You saw the bodies under the ice—we weren’t winning. We were being hacked and decapitated. Cut in two. I’ve been on fields after battle’s end—Mare’s Rock, Falling Bridge. I’ve seen what close combat with live
steel can do to an army. It’s seldom pretty. The guts. The shit. The blood. Never seen anything like the Red Ice, though. Thirty thousand bodies reduced to parts. Parts. And maybe, just maybe, this sword and the man who wielded it turned certain annihilation into a draw.”

  Raif swung his feet onto the ground canvas. Thinking about Addie’s words stirred him. The gods fear it, he had said. Not feared.

  Fear.

  Abruptly, Raif rose to standing. He would not sleep. It had been foolish to even try. And bloody-minded to force the lamb brothers into delaying their departure by sleeping in their tent. They had shown respect. They had not broken up the tent in his absence, exposing his possessions to the cold spring sun. Raif gathered those possessions now. The recurve longbow, horn arrow case, bedroll, waterskin, gear belt with all its attendant hooks and weapon-care pouches, shammies, hand knife, tin spoon, wood cup, small linens, leather traces, buckskin mitts, Orrl cloak. Stormglass.

  Sliding the finger of glass from its rawhide pouch, Raif tried to sort through his thoughts. Once in a very long while when lightning touches sand it turns to glass. The stormglass felt good and heavy in his hand. Light tumbled within its chambers even when he held it still. It was rarer than diamonds, a gift from the lamb brothers. And it had endangered and then saved his life.

  Tht.

  Raif glanced up at the sound of gravel hitting the tent wall. No sand here, in the far north of the clanholds. The lamb brothers were reduced to throwing stones to request entree into another’s tent.

  Raif returned the stormglass to its pouch. “Come.”

  Brown hands, oiled and meticulously trimmed, parted the tent flap. Tallal entered. Custom dictated that host speak before guest, so the lamb brother waited, head low, gaze down, face panel swinging to vertical. With a small thrill of unease Raif realized there were now five black dots tattooed in the space between Tallal’s eyebrows. Yesterday there had been three.

  “Sit,” Raif said, indicating the piled hides. Aware at this point he was expected to offer refreshment to his guest, Raif struggled to come up with something—anything—that could be drunk or eaten in fellowship. As Tallal knelt effortlessly on the hides, Raif frowned at the deflated waterskin. It had been on the deerhunt with him. Ten hours of resting against his rump. This wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  An awkward moment passed where Raif assumed Tallal would untie his face panel and reveal his lower face, yet the lamb brother was still. The two new dots on his forehead looked raw. Clear liquid oozed from the one closest to his left eye. Finally understanding that Tallal meant to retain the formality of the veil, Raif pulled the waterskin from the floor. Uncorked it and squeezed the last shot of water into a cup. He offered the cup to the lamb brother without a word.

  And without a word it was accepted. Tallal slipped the cup under his face panel, drank, and then swallowed. Handing back the cup, he said, “Do not consider returning the stormglass. I will not accept it.”

  Raif blinked. How had he known? Until three minutes ago, Raif had barely known himself. It was the unlowered face panel that had decided it for him.

  The lamb brother’s brown eyes with their strange bluish whites assessed Raif. “Drink,” he said, “and we will speak.”

  Raif drank. The water tasted exactly as he imagined: stale, meaty, warm. Returning the cup to his pack he noticed dried deer blood wedged beneath his fingernails. Outside, the wind had strengthened and gusts were whumpfing against the tent. Raif sat by one of the struts. Spine against bone.

  Tallal waited for a lull in the wind before speaking, his eyes were focused on a distance beyond the tent canvas, and the face panel sucked against his lips with each inhaled breath. “In my land there are three seasons. Summer, Rain, and Scourge. If we are blessed the Scourge lasts sixty days. The winds blow and do not stop and the air becomes desert as the sand is torn off the dunes. A man exposed overnight will be skinned. The sand is sharp. It moves faster than an arrow shot from a bow and strips all hides in its path. We dig ourselves deep into the earth and pray. We speak the Petition For Good Fortune, which is a cycle of eight prayers. The prayers ask for grace, forgiveness, deliverance from the Scourge, water for our animals, milk and dates for our children, patience for ourselves. The final prayer in the cycle asks for something more. It is the Prayer of the Fortunate Stranger. Please God, we ask, bring us new friends in our time of need.”

  Tallal paused. The face panel hung still as he delayed his next breath.

  “My people have a saying, Mul’ah ri ashanna. We must meet prayer halfway. One of the ways we do this is by giving gifts. We believe it is not enough to hope that a stranger will dig us out if our cave beneath the sand collapses, so we increase the odds. Turn strangers into friends. We offer food and shelter and what small tokens we can. It is the custom of the dunes.

  “That is why you received the stormglass. Not because we knew you would lead us to the Red Ice, but because we thought: Here is a stranger who could dig us from a cave.”

  Raif thought and did not speak. Somewhere in the heavy rawhide packs being loaded onto the mules by the two other lamb brothers were thousands of leather pouches. Each pouch represented the reclaimed soul of one of their dead. The battlefield beneath the Red Ice had rendered tens of thousand of frozen corpses, many of them belonging to the people of the Scorpion Desert. By recovering the sword named Loss, Raif had also recovered the long lost remains of their ancestors. He’d helped the lamb brothers plenty. Question was, had they helped him?

  The sword was now his. There it lay, wrapped in deer velvet, sitting on a throne of wood. Names came at a price, Raif knew that. How much was Loss going to cost him to bear?

  He glanced at Tallal. The lamb brother waited, his head perfectly level and his long fingers resting on the sable wool bridging his lap. He had appealed for an amicable parting. Raif searched for a way to give him one.

  I am two now, he realized. Raif Sevrance, son of Tem, brother to Effie and Drey. And Mor Drakka, Twelve Kill. The lamb brothers had not helped Raif Sevrance—they had sent him on a journey that had ended with him dead on the ice—but they had helped Mor Drakka, Watcher of the Dead.

  They had armed him.

  Who had armed Raven Lord? Raif wondered. The last man to wield Loss must have been someone’s son, brother, friend. Had he felt the same way that Raif did now: that the sword’s first cut would be to himself?

  “Tallal,” he said, “you and your brothers saved my life. For that I thank you.”

  Tallal was no fool. His response to the carefully framed thanks was to let his gaze alight on the plinth.

  Raif blinked and saw Raven Lord’s headless body beneath the ice; the black and spiny armor entombing the frozen torso, three gray and bloated fingers still clasping Loss’ hilt. “Ask me in ten years if I thank you for the sword.”

  If I live that long.

  The lamb brother shrugged, not lightly. “When the Sand Men head north I will remind them to ask you.”

  A gust of wind shook the tent, rattling its bones. Raif heard air whistling in cavities once filled with marrow. “Why will the Sand Men head north?”

  Tallal smiled: Raif could see it in the crease of the face panel. But not the eyes. “Sand Men will head north when they hear what this lamb brother has to tell them.”

  “And that is?”

  “That lightning has struck twice. First to create the stormglass and second to anoint it.” Tallal paused, letting silence do his work for him. Here was something dipped in the deep and biding stillness of prophecy. Men had been waiting for this moment. Raif waited right along with them.

  When he was sure his point had been made, Tallal nodded at Raif’s hand. “That is a piece of my homeland. Dunes burned into glass. Only once in ten thousand strikes will lightning fuse sand. This lamb brother has not studied with the mathematicians of Hanatta and so cannot reckon the odds of lightning striking those same grains of sand once more.”

  Raif squeezed his fist around the stormglass. He could feel it strai
ning to pop out of its pouch like seeds in a pressed grape. His uncle Angus Lok had explained the laws of chance to him two springs back as they’d tracked and then cornered a rare white moose in the stink bogs north of Cold Lake.

  “Have you seen one before?” Raif remembered asking, excitement making his voice high.

  Angus had shaken his head. “Nay, lad. A wee beastie like this is a once in a lifetimer. Take it down and skin it and you’ll have yourself the only white moose pelt in Blackhail, and only the second of two in the entire clanholds.”

  Raif had been quiet for a while, thinking. As always with his uncle there was a lot of information packed between the words. You’ll have. Not we. You. Angus had ceded killing rights to Raif. And also, Raif realized gradually, the decision whether or not to make the kill.

  “If I let him go will he mate and make more white moose?” Raif had asked as they stood, ankle deep in tannic-brown seep water.

  “Nay. Odds are against him winning a rut. He’s an aberration, poor little bugger. He won’t smell right, his eyesight’s dodgy, he’s liable to get burned in the sun. Parasites’ll love him. Decrepit one-eyed wolves will be able to track him. He’d be lucky to get a whiff of a cow. He’s already beaten a mess of odds by reaching maturity. You’d have to times those odds by themselves to reckon the likelihood of him mating and producing another little ghostie like himself.”

  As he resettled his spine against the tent strut, Raif considered the odds of lightning striking the stormglass twice. It was some kind of big number, one bigger than the odds of the white moose reproducing.

  “The Sand Men are singular amongst our people,” Tallal said. “They live apart. They ready themselves for battle. They wait.”

  Raif met gazes with the lamb brother and Tallal nodded imperceptibly. He didn’t need to. Raif understood what they waited for. It made him afraid; afraid of losing himself, of becoming something brighter and less human than Raif Sevrance, something that men and armies would follow. A battle standard. A war cry. A myth.