“You are a bold man,” Dercy said, as if paying me a compliment.
“Very bold,” I agreed, chuckling uneasily. He was taking this well. “And you know what they say about boldness: it’s the bold that… er, well. Lots of good sayings about boldness. I’m sure you’ve heard them all well enough.”
He fingered his wiry beard. “And stupid.”
“Occasionally stupid,” I agreed.
“And an idiot who would have had twenty claims for the throne and no real support for a war few would believe in.”
I shrugged. “It was a long shot to begin with.”
After a long pause, Dercy cleared his throat. “Consider it forgiven.”
What a fantastic conclusion. If this had been Braddock, I would have endured threats of my head being chopped off, my cock being clamped by a vise and injected with poison and so forth. Dercy Daniser — he was an understanding man. Calm, cool, collected.
“If,” he said, “you inform me which of my bannermen agreed to your proposal so that I may hasten their meeting with their maker.”
“Consider it done.”
“Let us talk for a moment about logistics,” Vayle said. “When should we march?”
“How long do you need to mobilize your bannermen?” I asked Dercy.
“Ten days,” he answered. “I can make it to the walls of Edenvaile in thirty days, provided we don’t get interrupted by a conjurer army.”
“They’re unlikely to attack you in the open,” Vayle said. “Sitting inside a castle is the safest course.”
I climbed off the phoenix and made my way to the horse. “You’re sure your bannermen will march?”
“The North had kidnapped their king,” he answered. “Pride, if nothing else, will move them. They don’t need to know we’re fighting conjurers, not until they see the bastards with their own eyes.”
I patted the horse’s long face. “This isn’t part of the conjurers’ plan, but as soon they see you march — and I’m assuming they have scouts posted everywhere — they’ll come to the aid of Edenvaile. They have to. The North is their only hope.”
“What of the South?” he asked.
“Braddock and Kane Calbid are taking care of that. Hopefully.”
“Kane Calbid?”
“Long story,” I said. “Rabthorns are out of the picture, that’s all you need to know.” I put a foot in the stirrup and slung myself up over the saddle. “I’m going to find Patrick Verdan. See if we can’t steal the North right out from underneath Sybil.”
Vayle stretched an experimental hand toward the phoenix. Her flames retreated, and she almost seemed to purr like a kitten as Vayle stroked her. “Where will you go from there?” my commander asked.
“Back to the Hole. I’ve other business to attend to before this war gets underway. Come look for me in about ten days, will you? I’d appreciate a flight back.” I clicked my tongue and added, “Assuming I’m still alive.”
Chapter 23
The Black Mountains’ mere name evokes a sense of dread, but they’re like any other mountains: tall, looming, craggy and unforgiving. The Black Woods aren’t any blacker than most, and the Deep Marshes aren’t any deeper than those found in Writmire Fields. Names are mostly pretty things, that’s all.
But the Widowed Path, now there’s a pretty name with a rather haunting past. Like a river sucked dry by the sun, it winds its way through the western ridge, emptying out into Hoarvous, and throughout the way is the only path to many mountaintop villages and kingdoms, including Patrick Verdan’s.
A long time ago, when the mountaintops weren’t dotted with small villages, tribes of scantily clothed men wearing goat horns and drenched in goat blood — or elk horns and sheep blood, depending on which tales you believe — would pour from the deep crevices of the mountain and prey upon merchants and travelers who had heard of riches buried deep in the heart of the West.
Now, authors have been known to exaggerate, but most of them say there’s never been a time in the great history of Mizridahl when so many wives were left behind as widows.
Fortunately for me, I wouldn’t join the proud tradition of letting the Widowed Path live up to its name… if only because I didn’t have a wife. There’s always a morbidly positive way to look at things.
It took me about three days to reach the mouth of the path, sleeping for no more than two hours in messenger camps. I had traded off ten horses and now owed more than twenty thousand gold coins to the messengers. If I survived this mess with the conjurers, I’d have to go back to selling ebon to make my living.
An enormous curtain of wavy rock edged along both sides of the path, sometimes thinning the passage to allow no more than a single horse through at one time. At other points, it would open up like the sea, and you very well could have steered a ship between its bosom, provided you had enough water to fill the gully.
The sheer face of the mountain seemed to streak straight upward for miles, mottled with clomps of snow and ice that bespeckled the cracks and ridges. Spikes and pillars of rock were at the forefront, surging into the clouds until the thickness of the sky concealed them.
My horse, who was given the rather boring name of Chester, scooted along the lumpy roads of dirt, snow and stone, swaying as its hooves discovered just how deep the gashes ran along the passage.
Chester trotted slowly along for four days, covering about a hundred miles in total. The deeper the passage ran, the higher the peaks curved over top of us like a ceiling of bone. Scythes of ice would sometimes break off for a two-mile-long descent. The only warning you got was a slight whistling, which in the language of the mountain means “haul your ass.”
I camped for a few hours a night. Longer than I would have liked, but an exhausted horse — or worse, a dead one — would serve me about as well as a cat in water.
We came to the gate of Icerun on the fourth day in the passage, or the seventh since I’d parted with Vayle and Dercy.
Gate in this case is a metaphor, because you can take a gander for as long as you please and you won’t find any steel doors or wooden beams or levers or anything that resembles a gate. Not down here, at least. The gate to Patrick Verdan’s kingdom was what looked like an unending slope apparently crafted by the hands of either a winter god who thought it would be hilarious to create the world’s largest sledding ramp, or Mother Nature when she was on a bender.
At the top lay the kingdom of Icerun, hidden behind a veil of fog and snowdrifts.
I clambered down from Chester and took with me my hulking burlap sack with two trekking poles tied to the strings. I’d bought the supplies from a messenger camp near the mouth of the Widowed Path. I offered Chester a couple stale carrots, which he chomped down eagerly, and then patted him on the butt.
“Thank you, friend. Off you go, now.” I slapped him on his haunches hard and shouted, “Go home! Go home! Go home!”
As he was trained by the messengers, the lemon-colored steed wheeled around and trotted back the way he had come. Hopefully the good man would reach the camp he came from without starvation setting in.
The morning sun poked its head out of the clouds, and slivers of golden light swam across the glacier shelf in front of me. Frozen crystals winked at me with prisms of blinding light, as if the mountain was taunting me.
“What are you?” I asked it. “A big pile of rock with decorative frosting, that’s what. Not so scary now, are you? You’re just an oversized wedding cake. How does that make you feel?”
It whistled back at me haughtily as a powerful wind swept over its peaks and broomed off a large drift of snow.
“We’ll see about that,” I said. I opened my burlap sack, dug through stale bread wrapped in sieve cloth, ointments that supposedly sealed cuts, oils to keep my blade singing a sharp tune, and other various purchases I’d made at messenger camps. At the bottom of the sack was a pair of snowshoes.
They were simple looking, but highly efficient for when the need to climb a mountain struck you. The soles wer
e of expertly stitched leather lattice, ensuring your feet did not sink five feet beneath the snow, thus rendering you the next human statue upon the mountain.
I untied the trekking poles from the sack, put my feet in the shoes, threw the sack over my shoulders and drew in a deep, calming breath.
“Fuck!” I spat, coughing on the bitter air. “When am I going to learn not to take deep breaths in the North?”
The mountain whistled again, as if in laugher.
Silt crept across the sky from below the mountaintop. Hopefully a storm would not be in my future. There were few places I was less eager to camp than on the middle of a bloody mountain.
I shoved my trekking poles into the snow and propelled myself forward.
Ice crunched under the iron feet of my poles, and snow flattened under the lattice of my shoes. I was a conqueror of this mountain, beating it into submission with my primitive tools.
At least until nature decided to show me just how insignificant we two-footed, blabbering idiots truly are.
From barbed clefts came a wind so fierce, it howled like a symphony of female cats being mounted by their mates. Snow and ice convened into one, blasting into my cheeks, sanding the protective layer of skin from my face until what lay beneath was raw and burning. Snot leaked from my nose and froze almost instantly on the curl of my lip, and my eyes had been sucked dry.
My calves ached, my ass felt like I’d been a naughty boy and endured five hundred spankings, and my toes… what happened to my toes? Where did they go? I couldn’t feel them any longer.
The ascent steepened with each step I took. I stumbled and fell and tripped, ate snow, chowed down on ice, and swallowed frozen crystals through my nose. I coughed up something thick and yellow and tasted iron swirling on my tongue. A tightness clamped my chest, numbness toyed with my fingers and sweat dripped from my balls. My breath climbed out of my lungs like a stricken animal desperately clawing itself out of the hole its predator had dragged it into.
Everything hurt. Everything burned. But some hours later — many hours later — I stood with a snowy beard, icy brows and a cold tongue hanging out of my mouth and looked at the grotesqueness that was Icerun.
Most kingdoms are constructed with aesthetics in mind just as much as they are with defensive advantages. After all, how would the people of Mizridahl know your kingdom is grand unless you have perfectly symmetrical walls, soaring towers and — gasp — a castle to die for?
Icerun was not like most other kingdoms. Personified, it would be considered a freak. A mangled mess that by chance alone was permitted to survive in this world.
Its malformed, uneven walls spread across the choppy mountain like lines drawn in the sand by a skittering crab. A gargantuan blockade of stone here, and then a stubby finger’s worth here, joined together by cylindrical towers that sat precariously upon sloped hills. At least the keep was square and mostly normal.
It should have been comforting to find myself in a place where a king didn’t give a shit about how his land looked to the rest of the world — you rarely find such a distant disposition in those with power — but something bothered me.
Something was wrong.
Something wasn’t quite there. That is to say, no one was quite there.
Snow drifted along the battlements like wheels of sand and straw and sticks in an empty desert. There were no threatening displays of aggression by archers whose bows should’ve peered from the slits of the towers, no demand from guards to declare my name and my reason for visiting.
This kingdom felt empty. Abandoned.
The gate was open, so I went inside.
There were houses. Many, many houses, because this kingdom served not only as the castle, but as the refuge for all villages that would normally flock to fertile, nearby lands in most kingdoms.
The houses were empty. Doors were shut and there was no smoke billowing from the chimneys.
Snow thickened in the center of the city. The last time I made an appearance here some six years ago, the inhabitants of Icerun had kept not only their streets plowed but also their alleys. Huge fire pits had sprawled across the vastness of the city, and torches affixed to the keep had roared fiercely, always under assault from the wind but never bowing to its power.
Snow had covered the fire pits now, and the torches were barren.
The mountain whistled eerily, and then stopped.
Weariness churned my stomach and sent a shiver across my shoulders. Could the cold have taken them? Were there bones beneath this ocean of snow? Frozen flesh?
No, couldn’t be. The houses would have been covered, and the unruly snowdrifts would have masked their doors. This looked like a city that had been bustling and teeming with life not long ago. The cold doesn’t take a populace in a matter of days or weeks. It’s a slow, torturous process.
And disease? That can be quick, but there always those few who are resilient to its effects. A handful would have survived. But a handful can’t clear the streets. Can’t keep the fires going, wouldn’t have the mind to light the torches. They’d need to keep warm, huddle together, keep fed.
The keep, I thought. Maybe that was where they were. I trudged through the uneven terrain, up to the doors of the keep. They opened without resistance, creaking into the darkness of the castle.
“Hello?” I called out.
My echoing voice replied.
“Is anyone here?”
Again, the lonely echoes.
It was cold in there, certainly no sign that a fire had been struck recently.
I backed away, shut the doors and surveyed my surroundings.
That’s when I noticed a peculiar sight.
The dungeon of Icerun lay beneath the ground, on an island of flat rock. A bridge had been constructed to connect the island to the city, spanning a gap where the mountain fell away a good hundred feet.
On this island, snow did not exist. In fact, a subtle wave of warm breath appeared to float low across the ground.
When you find yourself in a suddenly abandoned kingdom where shelves of ice surround you and white powder rises up like a swollen sea, it is not a comforting feeling to see a patch of dry, hot dirt. It’s spooky as fuck.
Ebon blade in hand, I crossed the bridge at the pace of a snail, because I’d be damned if my death came from falling off a bloody bridge. Once I reached the island, I laughed.
Not a sincere laugh where you put your hand over your belly and you slap your thigh because the hilarity of the situation is just too much to handle. No, a laugh that slowly tumbles out of your mouth and falls lamely to your feet. A laugh that a man might cough up when he finds himself surrounded by three hundred foreign pikemen who do not understand what the word “surrender” means.
The ground was burning. I touched the dirt lightly with the back of my hand. It was a soothing kind of warmth, much like bathwater. Snow that fell upon it melted instantly.
Part of the island was still snow-covered; the burning patch seemed to be focused mostly in the middle, but it wasn’t in the form of a circle. There was a broad vertical strip. Jutting out from the sides of that strip were much broader, much longer horizontal swaths.
If you looked at it long enough, it somewhat resembled a bird. A very large bird.
Something began rumbling beneath my feet. A voice.
I hurried over to a square cutout in an overhang of rock, the entrance to the dungeon, and listened. A boorish voice sang a song.
Piss on your bruises
Piss on your cuts
I’ve gotta fuckin’ eat
So I’ll eat your fuckin’ guts.
Piss on your mother
Piss on your father
I’ve gotta fuckin’ drink
So I’ll drink your fuckin’ blood.
And on and on it went.
“Think you’ll eat my guts and drink my blood if I come down there?” I hollered.
The singing stopped abruptly. “Hey! Hey! Get me fuckin’ outta here. They left us to rot. Get me
outta here. I ain’t even guilty of what they say.”
That’s a favorite saying among prisoners.
The steps spiraling into the dungeon were cut crudely from the frozen earth and the ribbonlike rock that colonized Icerun. Most proper dungeons are deep, hollow and dark. And you’ve really got to hit all three of those qualities. Otherwise, you have what is more a little hole in the ground than a dungeon. And no one’s ever confessed to their crimes for fear of being stuck a few feet beneath the dirt, where the light still reaches them. It’s deep down, where only the bats and sightless creatures venture, that’ll shiver your teeth right from your gums.
But, as I quickly came to discover, the dungeon of Icerun was an exception. It was shallow, but no less dark than Edenvaile’s and inexplicably more rancid than that of Lith’s.
The rotten stench of carcasses and old, festering blood hung in the air like the hot stickiness of a swamp. It clung to the hairs on my arms. It drizzled down my face. It percolated through my pores and seeped into my mouth, where the foulness of death and engorged maggots made me gag.
“You get used to it,” the man said.
I waved my sword around, letting it be my guide in the all-encompassing blackness. I stepped on something slimy and wet. The sole of my boot squashed it, and a noxious gas sizzled and oozed from its wound. I gagged again.
“Yeah, that’s foul,” the man said, coughing. “That there is really fuckin’ foul. Don’t do that again, eh?”
His voice was very near, and so I stopped.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Gorf. Goofy fuckin’ name, yeah? Father thought it unique, thought I was going to grow up to be some warrior that’d topple kingdoms.” He laughed a mucousy laugh and coughed. “Drank too much, got in too many fights, became a wanderer instead. Ended up here some years ago. The Lord Patrick Verdan took me in. And now he throws me in here for stealing. Stealing!”
“Consider yourself lucky you didn’t have the mind to head south and steal something from Dercy Daniser. I hear he chops off the hands of thieves to solve their addiction.”
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 27