by Jim Butcher
But the most recent rest period had been a mere hour ago. The next would not come until after dawn.
Marcus stood in the prow of the ship as it followed its companions east. The night sky had not yet begun to brighten with the approach of dawn, but it couldn’t be far away. He watched the fleet soar over the endless ice road before them for a time, his thoughts turning in circles that slowly grew quieter and less important. A little while later, when the first blue light had begun to form in the east, Marcus yawned and turned to pace back down the deck toward the closet-sized room that was his cabin for some sleep. He didn’t know if the jolting ship would allow him any rest, but at least, for a change, his own thoughts wouldn’t be keeping him from his sleep.
He opened the door to his cabin, paused at a sudden scent, then scowled and stepped into the unlit room, shutting the door behind him. “Bloody crows. When did you get on the ship?”
“At the last stop,” Sha rumbled in the quietest voice he could manage.
Marcus leaned his shoulders back against the door and folded his arms over his chest. In the cramped confines of the cabin, he was all but touching the lean Cane, and he had no intention of triggering a potentially violent response by making physical contact with the Hunter. “What word do you bring?”
“None,” Sha said. “For there is none to bring. Our problem remains unchanged.”
Marcus grunted. “Meaning that your leader and mine will be forced to duel.”
“So it would seem,” Sha said philosophically. “Though they have both faced such things before and survived them. The stronger will prove it upon the other.”
Marcus grimaced. “That’s a loss to both of our peoples, no matter who wins.”
“Has a solution occurred to you?”
“Not yet,” Marcus said. “But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.”
Sha let out a thoughtful growl. “It may yet be possible to strike down my lord’s enemy, Khral.”
“I thought his proper title was Master Khral of the Bloodspeakers.”
“Khral,” Sha repeated.
Marcus felt himself smile in the darkness. “Gaining what, by removing him?”
“Time. There will be a delay while a new leadership is established among the bloodspeakers.”
“Which could create additional problems of its own.”
“Yes.”
“What would be the cost of buying such time?”
“My life,” Sha said simply, “offered in apology to my lord after the deed was done.”
Marcus frowned in the darkness. He was about to ask if the Cane was willing to make such a sacrifice, but the question was a foolish one. If Sha said that he would go through with such a thing, he most certainly would. “Is your life yours to end?”
“If, in my best judgment, it is in the service of my lord’s honor? Yes.”
“Would not the loss of your service greatly hamper your lord in the long term?”
There was a brief, intense silence. “It might,” Sha said, a growling undertone of frustration in his voice. “In which case, I would be neglecting my duty to him by following this path. It is hard to know the honorable course of action.”
“And yet you do not serve his interests by continuing to allow Khral to hold power.” Marcus narrowed his eyes in thought. “What you need to do . . .”
Sha waited in patient silence.
“You can’t assassinate this Cane for fear of making him a martyr among your people. Correct?”
“Even so.”
Marcus scratched at his chin. “An accident, perhaps? These ships are dangerous, after all.”
“My lord would never condone the collateral loss of life that would require. Or forgive himself for it. No.”
Marcus nodded. “Difficult to push him under the runners of his ship without being seen.”
“Impossible,” Sha said. “I spent the last two days looking for the opportunity. He hides in his cabin, surrounded by sycophants. Cowardly.” He paused a beat, and allowed, “If practical.”
Marcus drummed his fingertips on the cool steel of his armor. “What happens if he isn’t assassinated? What if he just . . . disappears. No blood. No evidence of a struggle. No one ever sees him again.”
Sha let out another rumbling growl, one that raised the hairs on the back of Marcus’s neck despite the fact that he was beginning to understand it as a sound accompanying pensive moments for the Cane. “Disappear. It is not . . . common to our service.”
“No?”
“Never. We serve our lords, but in the end we are his weapons, his tools. He abides by our work as if he had done it with his own hands. If my lord could best solve his problem by killing another Cane, he would do so with his own blade. When he cannot do so, for reasons of tradition or because of the code, and his Hunters are sent, it is understood that they are yet his weapons.”
“And that protects him from the consequences of his actions?”
“Provided his Hunters are not caught,” Sha said. “It is the proper way for a great lord to defend his honor when a foe hides behind the law. Khral speaks lies to our folk, tells them that my lord intends to destroy the bloodspeakers. Warns him that they will know he has begun when he is murdered.”
“Which gives him the status of a martyr without paying the price,” Marcus mused, “as well as making it impossible for Varg to act without harming himself.”
“Yes. And Khral’s lackeys lead many bloodspeakers, and have said that they will withdraw their support should such a thing happen. Losing their strength now would be inconvenient and embarrassing.”
From what Marcus had seen of the ritualists’ power in battle, their sudden absence could prove downright fatal. “You haven’t answered my question,” he said. “What if Khral simply vanished?”
There was a rasping sound, the Cane’s stiff-furred tail lashing against the walls of the tiny cabin. “It is not our way. My lord would not be held responsible. But Khral’s followers would cry that the demons had done it—and there are demons on every ship in the fleet, using their powers to hold them together.”
“So it must happen where none of the woodcrafters could possibly do it,” Marcus said. “And then?”
A rumbling chuckle came from Sha’s chest. “It is a long-standing tradition, among the bloodspeakers, to set out upon meditative pilgrimages, alone and unannounced, to establish one’s piety and devotion to the Canim people and seek the enlightenment of one’s mind.”
“It could work,” Marcus said.
“If it was possible,” Sha said. “Is it?”
Marcus smiled.
The most difficult part of the plan was getting to Khral’s ship without being observed: The various vessels of the fleet had been exposed to a tremendous variation of strains. Some had encountered losses of their sails or yardarms, slowing their progress. Others had suffered fractures in their keels or rudders, requiring a lengthy halt for repairs. The original formation the fleet had assumed had been completely upset by the unpredictable nature of the voyage, and now Aleran and Canish ships alike were thoroughly intermixed.
Each ship had acquired a similar routine in two days of swift travel. At the rest stops, virtually everyone aboard, crews and passengers alike, would pile off onto solid ground. Even the saltiest hands aboard the ice ships had begun to turn a bit green around the gills (or wherever it was the Canim turned green, Marcus supposed), and they were glad of the chance to stand in place without being jolted from their feet or flung into a companion.
The Aleran woodcrafters who fought to hold the ships together were no exception. Marcus watched as the four men aboard Khral’s ship staggered drunkenly down the ladders to the ground. Then they shambled away to sit on a fallen tree trunk nearby and pass among themselves a bottle of some vile concoction the amateur distillers in the Legions had created. Dazed legionares and limp-eared Canim warriors alike took the opportunity to stretch their legs, united by a torturous common foe—or at least by a common torture.
Khral’s caution remained vigilantly in place. His ship had been brought to a halt better than eighty yards from any of the others, and sentries had been posted fore and aft, port and starboard. Against the backdrop of rippling white ice, anyone who approached would be spotted immediately.
Marcus and Sha padded down the length of an Aleran ship parked parallel to the larger Canim vessel, and Marcus waited until a gust of unseasonably chill wind had driven a cloud of snow and sleet into the air, swirling it around them in a freezing veil. Then Marcus drew his sword, grunted with effort, and hacked a hole in the sheet of ice a little larger than his own foot. He put a hand down through the ice to the bare earth beneath, called upon his earth fury, Vamma, and the ground quivered, the ice cracked, and the cold earth swallowed both him and Sha without making a sound.
The Cane clutched at Marcus’s armored shoulder with one paw-hand, and the steel plates creaked in protest at the strength of the grip. Marcus gritted his teeth and tried to keep the damage to the ice sheet to a minimum as he parted the earth around them as if it had been water. He held a compact sphere of open space around them, small enough to force Sha to hunch over almost double. Marcus was acutely conscious of the Cane’s hot, panting breaths sliding over the back of his neck.
“Easy,” he said. “We’re fine.”
Sha growled. “How long will it take to reach Khral?”
Marcus shook his head. “Depends on the ground between here and there. Earth will only take a moment. If there’s much stone, it will be more difficult.”
“Then begin.”
“Already have.”
Sha let out a pensive rumble in the close darkness. “But we are not moving.”
“No,” Marcus said. “But the earth around us is, and carrying us with it.” He took a shuddering breath. He hadn’t used a tunneling crafting in fifteen years. He’d lost his appreciation for how strenuous they were. Or perhaps he was just getting old. “I need to concentrate.”
Rather than make any affirmative response, Sha simply fell silent.
Crows, but it was good to work with a professional.
The ground between their entry point and Khral’s ship was heavily scattered with megalithic boulders, the leavings of some long-vanished glacier, freed from the ice and sunk into the silt in the following thaw, most likely. He detoured around them. Passing directly through would have been possible, but stone was an order of magnitude more difficult to craft than earth. Though it doubled the distance the tunneling had to travel, Marcus judged that, even so, he would come out ahead in terms of energy expended—though time would be a concern. It took them nearly twenty minutes to reach their destination, which was under the safety margin he’d estimated in planning, if only barely.
It was impossible to feel the ship itself through the baffling layer of ice upon the surface, but it was easy to sense the pressure of the ship’s weight, transferred through the ice and pressing down upon the soil. He guided the tunneling to the ship’s aft and began to nudge slowly upward. The temperature inside the little bubble of air suddenly dropped, and the earth of its curved top was replaced with chill, dirty ice.
They couldn’t afford to simply rip up through the ice. Breaking ice could cause great whip-crack bolts of sound. Sha went to work. He drew a tool from a scabbard at his side, a curving blade the shape of a crescent moon, but with its grip suspended between the moon’s points, so that the outer curve ran along the wielder’s knuckles. The blade was toothed like a saw, and the Cane went to work with great, ripping motions of his arms and shoulders. It took him less than a minute to slice out a hole in the ice large enough for him to fit through, and when the block of ice fell in, the black-stained hull of a Canim ship was revealed above it.
As the Cane carefully stowed the odd knife, Marcus rose, laid a hand on the wooden hull, and called upon his wood fury, Etan. As his fury surged into the ship’s hull, he felt his own senses extend through its superstructure. The timbers were all under strain, of course, and the evidence of recent, heavy furycrafting was everywhere. Excellent. Amidst all of those marks of activity, a few more gentle touches would never be noticed.
Marcus murmured to Etan beneath his breath, made an effort of will, and watched as the timbers of the hull gathered and puckered like a suddenly opening mouth. Sha watched this with his eyes narrowed, then nodded once and slithered through the opening. Marcus waited for a few breaths, so that Sha would have time to give warning of any trouble. When no such warning came, he hauled himself into the ship and found himself standing in the deep shadows of the ship’s aft cargo hold.
Sha went to the edge of the hatch, centered himself in the hold, and took seven quick silent paces directly toward the stern. He turned directly to his right, took two more paces, then reached up to put his fingers on the hold’s ceiling. He glanced at Marcus, to be sure the Aleran had seen the spot.
Marcus nodded and slid up to stand in the indicated position. Sha turned to interlace his fingers, creating a stirrup of his hands. Marcus stepped up into the Cane’s grip and found himself lifted lightly upward until he could touch the Canim-scale ceiling. He focused on the planks, narrowed his eyes, and with a sudden spreading motion of his hands, forced the thinner deck planking apart just as he had the hull. Even as the opening gaped, Sha heaved, and Marcus found himself shooting upward through the hole. The stench of rotten blood and musky Cane flooded his nostrils. He landed on one knee, oriented rapidly, and found a lean, reddish-furred Cane sitting on his haunches at a low table, a dozen rolls of leathery parchment spread out before him over its surface. Khral.
Marcus took two swift steps and smashed into Khral, overbearing the Cane by sheer surprise and momentum. Fangs raked at his face, until he drove a hard fist upward, slamming the Cane’s muzzle closed just as Khral began to let out a cry.
Surrounded by wood and far from the earth below, Marcus had no way to call upon Vamma again, to borrow of the fury’s power, and as a result he was at a lethal disadvantage in close combat with an adult Cane. He delivered a quick, hard strike to Khral’s throat. The blow wasn’t nearly strong enough to be lethal, but it did turn a second attempted shout into a croaking sound, then the Cane grabbed hold of Marcus’s armor and flung him halfway across the cabin.
Khral looked around wildly until his eyes lit upon one of the pale leather pouches the ritualists all carried, hanging from a peg on a wall. The Cane lunged for it.
Marcus lifted a hand and made a sharp beckoning gesture, willing Etan into motion, and the peg wavered and dropped the pouch just as Khral reached for its strap. It hit the deck with a sludgy, sloshing sound, and droplets of blood spattered the wall.
Sha came slithering up through the small hole in the floor like an eel racing from its burrow. The Hunter soared across the cabin in a single bound and landed atop the struggling Khral. Sha’s arms moved in a lashing motion, and Khral’s eyes bulged even farther as a leather cord whipped tight around his throat. Sha rode Khral down to the deck, leaning back against the strangling cord as they went.
Marcus strode across the room and replaced the pouch upon the peg on the wall. He touched the wall and coaxed Etan into absorbing the droplets of gelatinous blood into the wood, drawing it deep into the grain, where it would not be seen from the surface. He turned to Sha, who was holding tight to the strangling cord, pulling with just as much strength though Khral had stopped moving several seconds before.
When Sha saw that Marcus was finished, he glanced at the wood, gave Marcus a respectful nod, then twisted the strangling cord so that he could keep it looped around Khral’s throat while gripping it in one hand. He used it like a boat hook, dragging the senseless ritualist over to the hole in the floorboards, and made his silent way back down into the hold.
Marcus replaced several pieces of the fine, pale hide upon the table, examining his memory to be sure they were returned to the same spot they had been when he entered. Then he checked the cabin door, finding it bolted from the inside, and finally made his way back to the en
try point.
Marcus smiled. No one within the ritualist camp was going to know what to make of this.
As he was about to descend, he saw Khral’s bunk and stopped to stare at it in fascinated horror.
The bunk was covered with a heavy hide blanket, its fur still upon it. For a moment, Marcus couldn’t think of what kind of beast would leave such a mottled, mismatched, patchy coat behind. Then he understood what he was looking at.
There were perhaps a hundred human scalps in the grisly blanket. Many of them sported hairs so fine that they could not possibly have come from an adult. Some of the scalps were, in fact, quite small.
Marcus fought down his gorge and made his way almost blindly into the hold. Up on the deck of the ship, he heard a trumpet blow, a call that was taken up generally, the quarter-hour warning. The fleet was preparing to move again.
Marcus and Sha went back to the opening in the hull and leapt down into the open pocket beneath it, dragging Khral with them. Marcus called up Vamma with a snarl, and within a moment, they were enclosed in earth once more.
“Is he alive?” Marcus demanded a moment later.
“In the strictest sense of the word,” Sha replied.
“Wake him.”
Sha was silent in the darkness. Then he growled something beneath his breath. There was the sound of several sharp blows. Khral began to make sputtering sounds.
“He speak Aleran?”
“No,” Sha said.
“Translate for me, please.”
“Yes.”
Marcus reached out a hand and felt blindly until he encountered Khral’s hide. Then he shot out a hand, seized the Cane by the ear, and dragged him forward with all the strength Vamma could give him.
“I am about to kill you,” he said quietly, and Sha echoed him in rumbling Canish. “In a moment, we will leave. And I’m going to leave you here. Ten feet beneath the earth and the ice. The dirt is going to press against you, press into your mouth, your nose, your eyes.” He gave the ear a savage twist. “You’re going to be crushed to death, slowly, Khral. And no one will so much as know whether you are alive or dead.”