by J. V. Jones
He recalled the moment when his broadhead punctured the white moose’s hide. It was a good shot, for a boy of fifteen. Hitting high on the neck, just below the roof of the jaw, the arrow had carried sufficient force to travel through an inch of dense, skull-supporting muscle before slicing open the jugular. Blood shot out at force, spraying the sedge mats and willow tangles and cratering the bog water. The blood had been a shock. It was warm and red and stinking, and it had made him feel sick about the kill. Stupidly he had thought that the ghostly white pelt and the high and fancy odds added up to the creature not being real. A ghost. A myth.
Raif stood. The lamb brother had more to say to him but Raif decided he didn’t want to hear it. If he and Addie headed out now they had a chance of reaching the Bludd forests before nightfall. Good cover there. Cover suddenly seemed important. The white moose should have stayed above the snowline or amongst stands of silver birches. Damn creature had just made itself a target in the bog.
Tallal rose a moment after Raif. His robe pitched like water finding its level in a glass. Two darkening ovals on his face panel showed the damp weight of his breath.
“You have the wrong man,” Raif warned him before he had a chance to speak. “If the Sand Men find me I will send them back.”
Tallal said nothing. Raif had the sense that the lamb brother was controlling the impulse to call him a self-deluding fool. Time passed as they faced each other. Raif saw himself inverted—a speck in Tallal’s eye.
“I wish you water to weep,” the lamb brother said finally.
The double-edged blessing of the Scorpion Desert. Raif accepted it like a blow. Already the lamb brother was withdrawing his attention: His gaze slid to the tent flap and his long brown fingers formed the hooks required to lift the canvas.
As he stepped away, Raif said to him, “The bodies that were under the ice. What happened to them?”
Tallal did not turn as he answered. “We laid their remains to rest.”
“All of them? The northern armies? The city men? The Sull?”
The back of the lamb brother’s head shook as he raised the tent flap. “We ministered solely to the people of the desert.”
And then he was gone.
Raif stared at the tent flap as it smacked back into place. They had left them to rot. The lamb brothers, with all their talk of God and holy purpose, had rummaged through the bodies, hauled away their own and ignored the rest. Raven Lord’s headless corpse was still out there, rotting as quickly as only thawed meat could, teeming with maggots and coffin flies, unregarded and unblessed.
Raif thought about that, did what he needed to do, and then left the tent.
“Addie, we’re off,” he called as he pulled on his sealskin mitts and squinted into the shrunken noonday sun. A bird of prey gliding parallel to the northern horizon was the only thing moving in the greenly blue sky.
Addie was kneeling on one of the yellow tent circles wrapping severed deer hooves in waxed linen. The little curly-haired ewe did not like the smell of fresh blood, but she did like Addie and was nervously cropping weeds a few feet upwind of him. At the camp’s southern perimeter the three lamb brothers were packing the mules. Girdle straps and neck harnesses were padded and adjusted.
Twisting the last of the packages closed, Addie stood upright. He was a small man, bowlegged and, as he was fond of telling everyone, boweared. Raif could not guess his age. Addie’s entire life had been lived outdoors. His skin was baked against his bones. He’d heard enough in Raif’s voice to spur him to swift action and he scooped up his packs and bedroll and slung them across his back. He glanced toward the lamb brothers and then Raif, who told him everything he needed to know by starting west.
I’m done here.
Addie spat thoughtfully, patted the ewe’s delicate head and then followed Raif out of the camp.
The descent was easy. A deer trail wound through low-growing pines and blackthorns, edging creeks that were wet but barely running and looping around gnawed yews and dogwoods. The ground cover was thawing, and weeds and leaf litter squelched greasily underfoot.
The lamb brothers watched them leave. Raif didn’t turn around to confirm it but he knew they did. He also knew that as soon as he and Addie descended sufficient distance to pass out of sight, they would collapse the remaining tent. In their eagerness to be gone from a land they had no love for the brothers would work in haste: rolling two or more skins at once, balling the ground canvas and binding it tightly with rope. Chances were they would miss it. Chances were it would get bounced into a crease and lie there, undetected, until the tent was next unpacked. And the tent wouldn’t be unpacked until the lamb brothers returned to the Scorpion Desert. It was the fifth tent, the spare. Four other tents existed—one for each brother and one for God—they wouldn’t need it on the journey home. Only when they reached their destination and all their official duties had been discharged would they turn their attention to the business of checking and repairing their gear. That was when they would find it: the stormglass in its dun-colored leather pouch, tucked away in the folds of the fifth tent canvas, a message received months after it was sent. Raif Sevrance would wear no beacon for the Sand Men. No amount of lightning would reveal his whereabouts in a storm. He was dead to the people of the Scorpion Desert, as dead as the raven lord’s headless corpse.
Addie seemed to understand much about Raif’s parting with the lamb brothers. The Maimed Man was silent for the first hour, quietly and efficiently steering them from trail to trail. When he unrolled a pat of sheep’s cheese to eat afoot, he did not offer any to Raif. A few minutes later when he moved on to deer jerky, he tapped Raif on the arm and passed him a stick of the black and leathery meat. No words passed between them but Raif understood that while the cheese had come from the lamb brothers the jerky had been cured by Addie himself.
The chewed in silence, their jaw muscles aching as they worked long cycles on each bite. After Addie swallowed his final mouthful, he nodded at the northern sky. “Hawk’s been up there since noon. You’d think it would have bagged itself a squirrel by now.”
Raif frowned at the last of his jerky—Addie must have cured it with cement. Tucking it into his gear belt, he said, “It’s a gyrfalcon and it’s been aloft since dawn.”
Addie mulled over this information for the better part of an hour. As they reached the valley floor and started south through the red pines toward the Bludd border, the eweman said, “It’s hers then, Yiselle No Knife’s.”
Raif nodded as he moved ahead of Addie to take the lead. He was being watched by the Sull and there was nothing he could do about it. The lamb brothers would send the Sand Men north even after they discovered the stormglass, and there was nothing he could do about that either. The sword named Loss bounced against Raif’s back as he leapt across a shallow creek. He was known now, marked, judged.
Followed.
CHAPTER 2
A House in the City
SNOW FELL ON Ille Glaive on the night known as Gallows Eve. Warmed by the spring sun during the day, the black mass of the city melted the snow on contact. Paved streets were slick with grease. Dirt roads were sodden and stinking, slowly disintegrating into rivers of animal waste and mud. The rats were out. Thousands of rodents scuttled along ledges and drain ditches, up crumbling walls, armless statues, soot-blackened trees and lead roofs. The explosive snap of traps being sprung was the only noise that broke the silence before dawn.
The watcher crouching in the shadows heard but did not heed it. His cloak of boiled wool was topped with a second layer of waxed pony skin so he felt neither the cold nor damp. The pony skin had been purchased at Tanners Market seventeen hours earlier, and the watcher had sat and waited in a nearby alehouse while the vendor had dyed the skin to his specifications. “Matte black?” the vendor had cried upon hearing the watcher’s requirements. “A fine blond hide like this and you want to ruin it with cutter’s ink?” It mattered little to the watcher whether the vendor’s protestations were a result of g
enuine indignance or a plot to drive up the price. The watcher had haggled because a person buying an expensive waterproof cloak and requesting that it be rendered worthless by cheap dye was unusual enough. A person refusing to haggle for such a cloak would be the talk of the market within an hour. Vendors loved to crow about their takings. This particular horse-and-donkey skin vendor would never crow again however. Once the watcher had picked up the cloak he’d had a change of mind. Despite its growing population and the continual redrawing of its walls, Ille Glaive acted like a small town. People knew people. Word got round. And the watcher crouching in the shadows could not risk word of his arrival entering the wrong ears. He knew the game. He had lived it. Better to kill a man quietly and bloodlessly by snapping the small bones in his neck than risk alerting enemies to one’s presence.
The watcher had felt some tension in the minutes leading up to the kill and then nothing after it. His thoughts had not returned to the vendor since. He was different now, burned. All that was combustible had gone up in flames and only case-hardened iron remained.
Rocking onto the balls of his feet he kept his leg muscles limber. Out of habit he read the wind. It blustered south to north and then east to west as if it were trapped within the city walls. Not a good night to loose arrows or hunt deer. If the people in the house he was watching had kept dogs they would be alerted to his scent by now. There was no blind spot, no downwind to conceal oneself from animals with exceptional senses of smell. The watcher knew this house and its two occupants though, knew they kept no dogs and set no watch. Despite this he would take no chances. Circumstances may have changed.
It was the watcher’s one wish in life that they had changed in his favor.
Two lamps were burning in the house. The brighter one was set close to the lower rear window on the left. Thick oak shutters had been closed against the darkness but the house was old and damp and its owner had no interest in spending money on repairs and the shutters were warped and poorly fitted. Light poured through knotholes and around the frames. The second lamp burned in an interior room, showing itself as a faint glow around the windows on the east side of the building. Like many dwellings in Ille Glaive the house was narrow but deep. It was built from amber sandstone that had aged badly. The bricks were soft and porous. A heavy rainstorm would strip them, leaving milky orange puddles around the foundation. It was a problem with entire generations of buildings in the city, resulting in the strangely rounded skyline of Ille Glaive.
Silently the watcher rose to standing. Time to get a closer look.
The three-story house was unusual in that it commanded an acre of walled land in the rear. The property had once belonged to some minor lordling who had used the grounds closest to the house as his pleasure garden, equipping it with a copper-roofed folly, a fountain carved to resemble a lake trout and a courtyard laid with alternating black and white stones. The lower half of the land had once been a working kitchen garden, complete with boxed vegetable beds, a stock pond and caves for storing ice. All of it was overgrown, tumbled-down and streaked with bird lime. A litter of rat droppings and poisoned rat carcasses had killed the lawn. Weeds had grown to man-height in beds once raised for artichokes, and a thick crud of algae now booby-trapped the pond. The entire property—both the house and grounds—looked as if no one had tended it in thirty years.
The watcher knew this to be untrue. To tend meant to care, and the owner of the house very much cared about its setting. Over the three decades he had occupied the building he had cultivated the shambled, run-down appearance it presented to the city of Ille Glaive. Despite its well-regarded address, this house did not appear to be lived in by people with money or consequence. Thieves gave it the once-over before moving on to richer prospects, fishmongers and milkmaids seldom bothered to solicit for business, passersby rarely gave it a passing thought.
If they’d looked more carefully they would have seen the locks and bolts. Vor-forged iron, the finest in the North, had been hammered at high heat to form the door hinges. The locks themselves had once secured cell doors on the infamous Confessor’s Walk in the Lake Keep. The house’s owner had received them in exchange for a favor—he specialized in turning a blind eye into hard goods. The Lake stamp could still be seen on the lock plates if you knelt very close and studied the mark below the keyhole. It was the same with the rickety shutters: put your eye to a knothole and the truth was there to see.
Wrought-iron grillwork, posts sunk deep into the sandstone and fortified with cement, barred entry to the house through its windows. This did not worry the watcher. He knew these people and their routines.
And he was prepared to wait.
Dropping to a crouch he approached the lamplit window. Broken glass had been spread on the ground beneath the lintel. The man toed away the debris as he moved. Although he’d been taught stealth a quarter century earlier, entire years had passed where he’d had no reason to use it. In many ways his life had been arranged like the checkerboard pattern of the courtyard: black and white, black and white. Stealth, weapons-training, secrets and surveillance were part of the black, part of the life that he’d once believed was his calling. His missions and travels were all in the black. The white . . .
The white was gone. Over. Even a child knew that if you burned something to a cinder the only thing left was black.
The watcher took up position beneath the window. He had been observing the house from a distance since nightfall and had seen nothing out of the ordinary in the sequence of lamps lit and snuffed. No one had arrived or left—also ordinary—and the footprints stamped in the mud on the front and back paths revealed little. During the eight hours of darkness, the watcher had kept his speculation to a minimum. Too early to draw conclusions. Too little information to rule anything out. Now, though, as he rose level with the knothole and took his first look into the house’s interior his breathing pattern changed. It slowed with readiness.
And anticipation.
The coin-sized knothole was partially obscured by the underlying grillwork so his view of the room was restricted to a narrow wedge. The watcher could see a closed door. A worn but exceptionally fine silk rug covered the floor beyond the entrance. Its colors had faded to drab rusts and grays and its design of fully fanned peacocks’ tails and halved figs was barely legible. Bookcases stained a color close to black lined the walls. Folded manuscripts, rolled scrolls, chained psalters, loose papers, glazed and lidded pots, specimen jars, wood boxes and books, hundreds of books, had been jammed at force into the space between shelves. The house’s owner spoke seven languages and could read more than twenty. His body had been wheel-broken thirty-one years earlier by an enemy shared by both him and his watcher, and he could not rise from a chair unaided nor walk without the aid of sticks. Yet he possessed one of the finest minds in the North.
The watcher respected the mind. He knew enough to accept that he could not comprehend all the powers that the mind possessed. He had been careful with his actions and thoughts. Mental restraint had been taught to him along with stealth, but it had never been a discipline he had mastered. He knew enough to approach the house long after midnight, when its owner’s mental capacities were likely impaired by fatigue and red wine or stalled by sleep. He knew enough also to avoid strong spikes in his thoughts, and he did not name what he hoped to find.
The owner was slouched in a padded, high-backed chair in the center of the lamplit space. The chair was angled away from the window and the watcher could view only a sliver of its side profile. He saw a hand extending beyond the heavily cushioned armrest; the wrist slender, the fingers crowded so close they looked fused, the nails as yellow as dog fangs. The hand trembled but executed no voluntary movement.
The watcher settled in to observe the hand. It was likely its owner was asleep, but nothing was certain.
Darkness endured. Snow stopped falling and the temperature dropped. Ice skinned puddles and formed a crust around the watcher’s boots. He listened and did not move. The house was
quiet, undisturbed by footfalls and opening doors. When the second, interior lamp went out he guessed its fuel was spent as no noise accompanied the sudden darkness. Neither of the two known occupants of this house was capable of quiet movement. Still. If there was a third occupant, a newcomer . . .
If.
The owner’s hand jumped off its padded perch. The watcher reined his thoughts. The hand hovered, suspended in space, and the watcher held his breath as he waited for its tendons to relax. As seconds passed he imagined its owner questing, taking stock of his surroundings, assessing change. The watcher doubted whether the strong emotion in his thoughts had roused the owner, but he could not rule it out. Coincidence as a concept left him cold.
Finally the hand relaxed. It moved inward and then disappeared as the owner brought it to his lap. Cushions stuffed with horsehair creaked, and the watcher caught a glimpse of the owner’s head as the owner tilted forward in the chair. The skull was close shorn and the small white crater behind the left ear was clearly visible. Their mutual enemy had not been wholly satisfied with the results of the wheel-breaking and had ordered the drill. He, too, had been aware of the fineness of the owner’s mind and had sought to limit it. The watcher suspected that their enemy had miscalculated, for when the drill bit emerged from the skull, globs of gray matter clinging to the bore, the owner had entered a fugue-like state that lasted a year. He awoke the next spring to find the hole in his skull patched with a plate of hip bone and his mental abilities expanded in ways that no one could have anticipated and very few people alive could comprehend.
The watcher pushed his lips into a hard line. A hole in the head. Worse things could—would—happen.
He remained still as the owner angled his torso sideways and attended something on the opposite side of the chair. Pottery clinked. Refracted light streaked along the bookcases as the owner raised a glass to his lips and drank. Done, he resettled his weight against the backrest. The watcher waited for the owner to reach for one of his canes and beat it against the floor in summons, but the man remained still. After a time his breaths grew shallow, and the number of seconds between exhalations became constant. The watcher knew this because he counted them.