by J. V. Jones
“Finish what you started, Clansman.” The Listener’s voice was thin and hostile. “You wanted answers; dig for them.”
It occurred to Raif that he could kill the man standing above him. Raif was armed now, and though the Listener possessed a wily sort of strength, he would be no match for a fitter, younger man. A blow to the heart would finish him. Not sure if he was comforted or unnerved by the thought, Raif turned back to his task and resumed scraping. The final layer of snow was hard and frozen, stuck fast to the ice by frequent thaws. The knife blade bent as he worked, and he could feel the sweat trickling between his shoulder blades as he put the force of his body behind each blow. The area he was clearing was roughly circular, the size of a man’s chest. When he’d chipped away enough of the surface crust he set down the blade and brushed off the loosened snow.
Something deep inside his spine, the nerve that Tem said was the first thing of a man’s to grow within the womb, sent Raif a warning of pure fear.
The darkness was not upon the ice, it was within it.
Instinctively, his hand rose to his waist. Only the tine containing his measure of powdered guidestone wasn’t there. He experienced a moment of panic as he slapped his hip, searching for the hardness of elk horn, before remembering he had used his last portion on Ash. It had summoned the Sull for her.
Oh gods.
Raif bit off his mitts and spat them away. Holding his hands to his face, he blew warm air upon them. He was aware of the Listener standing above him, perfectly still now, his breaths coming slow and silent. Raif put his hands upon the ice. He felt the coldness leap toward his fingers, questing for fluids to freeze. Quick frost fastened to his skin, but he pushed against it, dragging his palms across the small area he’d cleared, turning opaque ice transparent.
He saw the teeth first. A dark mouth gaped wide beneath the surface, lips pulled back to reveal a jaw of broken teeth. Raif recoiled. Something lay dead and frozen beneath him, something that could not be called a man.
Slowly, he returned his hands to the ice. He was shaking now, and there was little heat in him, yet he had no choice but to carry on. He would not let the Listener see his fear.
An eye socket was revealed next, the skin black and mummified, the eyeball long exploded with the pressure of the ice. Evil was frozen in the densely layered muscles of the face. The shadowy mass of the creature’s body was buried deep beneath the surface, its shoulders and chest receding into grotesquely twisted shapes. Raif told himself the distortions were due to ripples in the ice; he almost believed it until the Listener spoke.
“Thaal Sithuk,” the Listener said, his voice soft with hunter’s awe. “From the War of Shadows. Xaluku of the Nine Fingers killed it with a spear thrust to the heart.”
Raif struggled to find his voice. Beneath his fingers, the last portion of darkness waited to be revealed beneath a crust of white snow. “How long has it been here?”
“Five thousand years.”
Raif closed his eyes. The time seemed too vast to comprehend.
The Listener waited until Raif’s gaze returned to him before saying, “There are many things more terrible hidden beneath the ice.”
I don’t want to know, Raif thought. I just want to find Ash.
“Men and kings, and weapons they forged and cities they built and beasts they slew in the darkness. Ages have passed and most think only the legends remain . . . yet most never look beyond the surface of the ice. All things that die fall upon the earth. The musk ox is eaten by the wolf, the shored whale is plucked apart by gulls, the warrior is found and burned or thrust deep within a tomb. Yet sometimes the ice finds them before scavengers or the hands of men do. Sometimes the ice claims them and bears their bodies away.”
Raif pushed his hands across the snow, clearing the last of the crust. He didn’t want to hear this. His fingers ached, and patches of skin around his knuckles had started to yellow with frostbite. He wanted his clan, and Drey and Effie . . . and Ash. Yet even as he wanted them, he polished the ice under him so he could see what lay beneath.
A hand, with thick black talons that ended in razor points, reached out toward the light, its fist packed with ice. It was so close to the surface Raif could see the fine dark hairs that ran along the skin. Suddenly cold, he said, “Why are you showing me this?”
The Listener jabbed the point of his staff into the snow. “Because telling the truth is seldom enough. A man must see it with his own eyes. The shadows are rising, and beasts and taken men will walk this earth once more. Now is no time to be chasing after things you cannot have. The girl has gone. The Sull have taken her, and what the Sull take they never give back. She’s theirs now. Let her be. Save your strength for the battles you can win. The Long Night has come, and those who thrive in darkness must step forward to fight.”
Raif felt his face stiffen at the Listener’s words. He wanted to deny them, but the little tribesman thrust out a hand to stay his reply.
“Yes, Clansman. I know who you are. I have seen the raven riding on your back. I have heard the sound of footsteps at your heels. Death follows you. She named you. Watcher of the Dead. Yes, you are cursed. But you are young and whole, and I am old and have no ears and can find little sympathy for you. We cannot choose our skills. A boy with a gift for nets and lines must fish. A man with a hunter’s eye must hunt. If you’re born to the darkness, claim it. Find yourself a weapon and fight.”
Raif pushed himself upright. He was stirred, but didn’t want to be. This was not his world, this place of shadows and darkness and beasts held in ice. He had no weapon, no training. How could you banish shadows except with light? Kicking the mound of snow at his feet, he scattered dry crystals across the clear and gleaming ice. Ash, think of Ash. Where was she now? Had they harmed her? Was she waiting for him to come?
He said simply, “Where are they taking her?”
The Listener watched him closely before answering. “They will carry her east to the Heart of the Sull.”
“Then I’ll go east.”
“Men have died searching for the Heart of the Sull. The ways are long and twisting, and there are forests where every tree looks the same. Some say time itself is woven into the paths, but the Ice Trappers know little of that. We know the legends, some of them. And I can tell you that although Bluddsmen have been known to cross the borders of the Sull Racklands no clansman has ever entered the Heart.”
“Then I’ll be the first.”
The Listener almost seemed to smile. “You are young, and your arrogance becomes you so I won’t tell you all the reasons why you are wrong. Know this. I have walked this land for a hundred years, from Wrecking Sea to Endsea, from the Ice Horn to the Lake of Lost Men, and not once in that time have I found the Sull ways. They ride for the mountains—I know because I have watched them, even followed them in my youth—but as soon as they pass into the foothills they cease to be. Now your eyes may be good, but mine were better, and I never discovered where they went.”
Raif bowed his head. He couldn’t argue with the Listener’s words; he knew all about Sull ways. He wouldn’t be here if the two Far Riders hadn’t deigned to leave a trail. Still. He could make his own way east. Softly, almost to himself, he said, “I will find her.”
“What makes you think she wants to be found?”
Raif glanced up at the hard ice-tanned face of the Listener. What he saw made him wary. “She was taken against her will. Drugged, snatched away in the night, forced to ride east to gods know where. Of course she wants to be found.”
The Listener tapped snow from the tip of his staff. “Oolak is bitter and stringy, and stinks like dead fish. Only men are fool enough to drink it.”
Again, Raif felt a stab of wariness. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Your friend was not drugged. She only took one sip of the oolak. She went of her own free will.”
“No.”
“They did not force her. She is the One With Reaching Arms. She knew she had to go.”
&
nbsp; Raif shook his head savagely. She wouldn’t leave him without saying a word, not after all they’d been through. Not after the Cavern of Black Ice. He said coldly, “You lie, old man.”
The Listener nodded. “Often, about many things. The kind of truths I know destroy men. Mothers do not want to know that the child they carry will be born dead, or that their sons will die before they do, and that their husbands will be maimed during the hunt. You cannot be a Listener without knowing how to lie.” As he spoke, the old man reached into the soft inner furs that lay beneath his sealskins and pulled something out. “But to you I speak the truth.”
Opening his fist, the Listener let something small and dark fall upon the ice. “She asked me to return this.”
Raif stared at the object by his feet. Black and hooked, as long as a child’s finger, with a hole bored through the bridge for threading string. Raven lore. Here it is, Raif Sevrance. One day you may be glad of it. No matter how hard he tried to lose it, it always came back.
It changed everything, and both he and the Listener knew it. Calmly, because there was nothing else to do, Raif bent and picked up his lore. It felt thin and brittle, like something he could crush in his fist. Instead he pulled a short thong from the Orrl cloak and fastened the lore around his throat. It was his and he would wear it . . . and he would not think of what Ash had done.
“She made her choice,” the Listener said. “Now it’s time you made yours.”
Raif found himself looking at the ice, at the dark and monstrous shape rippling beneath him. Guard yourself, she had said, her last words. How could he do that when the things that cut the deepest couldn’t be fought? After a moment he crossed to the crater wall and began to pull himself up. His choice was made.
FIVE
Into the Fire
Effie Sevrance crouched behind the great copper distilling vat and watched as Gat Murdock sampled the low wines. The low wines were the halfway point in the distillation, Longhead said: too weak to be named a full malt, but strong enough to send a man to his knees if he sampled too often and too long. Effie wished Gat Murdock would drop to his knees . . . soon. It was hot and dark in the distilling well, and vapors bubbling from the cauldron made everything clammy and damp. Effie could feel the heavy wool of her dress sticking to her back like wet oats. Stupid thing. Why hadn’t she thought to wear her linen shift instead?
Gat Murdock closed the spill hole on the bell-shaped vat and held his final sample up to the lamp. The sea-glass cup glowed green, revealing liquid still cloudy with dregs. Effie willed him to swallow and be done. She was on a mission for Bullhammer and Grim Shank, and she didn’t want to disappoint them. They’d chosen her to brew the iron juice. There were a score of boys in the roundhouse, all doing nothing more than waiting around the Great Hearth each day in the hope of sanding the rust from a hammerman’s chains or mending the shearling that couched the hammer itself. Yet when it came to the matter of the stain for the hammermen’s teeth, Bullhammer had decided that Effie Sevrance would do a better, quieter job than any one of them.
“Effie’s your girl,” Bitty Shank had said to his older brother Grim last night, as they stood in the dry and dusty shadows of the stable block. “She’s clever with her hands, knows how to keep a secret, and she’s sister to a hammerman herself.” Bullhammer and Grim had nodded gravely, the dim glow from the safe lamp sparking strangely off their tarnished plate. A hammerman’s sister was good enough for them.
Iron juice, Bullhammer had explained, was as black as the Stone Gods’ tears and only a little less likely to kill you. It had to be strong enough to stain a hammerman’s teeth, and keep them good and black for a season. “It’s no good using lampblack or ashes—the stain barely takes for a week. And as soon as a man sets to frothing at the mouth his spittle’s likely to run black.” Effie had nodded in understanding. If you were going to stain your teeth so you looked fierce in battle then it would be better if the stain didn’t wash off halfway through. Else you might end up looking foolish instead.
The problem was that Blackhail hammermen hadn’t stained their teeth since Mad Gregor had led three hundred men to their death in the fast-rising waters of the Flow. All but a dozen of their number had been hammermen. Their bodies had been dragged downstream by the spring rush, across the rocky shallows known as Dead Man’s Ribs and over the towering, misty drop of Moon Falls. Effie had heard it said that the river rock had peeled the flesh from their bones, and the only things left for the widows to wrap were white skulls with grinning black teeth.
Effie frowned. It seemed to her that there were far too many clan stories involving skulls and violent deaths. Still, it was interesting how afterward no Blackhail hammerman would stain his teeth for fear of riling the gods, and the recipe for iron juice had been lost.
“Sour as piss,” Gat Murdock pronounced to the now-empty sampling cup. “Good enough for a tied clansman—or his wife.” Satisfied, he upended the cup onto a basswood rack and spat to clean his mouth. Like many older clansmen he was missing fingers, yet he moved no slower for it, and sealed the taps and dimmed the lamp as quick as if he had ten fingers, not eight. Effie watched as he moved to leave then stopped himself before reaching the stair. Turning to face the very corner that concealed her, he sent his gaze darting this way and that, checking if he was being watched. Effie held her breath, imagining herself still as the very stone the well was built from.
Long seconds passed before the clansman’s pale-eyed stare passed her by. Satisfied that no one was looking, Gat Murdock reached for the high shelf where Anwyn Bird kept her twenty-year malt and slipped one of the precious wax-sealed flasks under his coat. Effie forgot she was being still as a stone and let her mouth fall open in amazement. Anwyn’s twenty-year malt! Wasn’t there a curse upon it? Anwyn swore that any clansman who drank her malt without her blessing would find himself short of his man parts within a week. Effie closed her mouth. She had learned all about man parts from Letty Shank. Any man who lost them was bound to be sorely displeased.
Uttering a small grunt of satisfaction, Gat Murdock put his foot to the stair and began the short climb from the well. Effie forced herself to listen for the sound of his feet treading the floor above before emerging from her place behind the vat.
Her arm was stiff and she rubbed it softly as she squeezed past copper pipes. Other parts hurt too; places where Cutty Moss’s knife had sunk deep, opening ragged hard-to-heal wounds that still wept water at night. She wouldn’t think about those now, though. She was a clanswoman of nearly nine winters, and men returning from the Clanwars had worse hurts to bear.
She just wished Cutty’s knife had spared her face.
Effie stopped her treacherous hand from rising to touch her cheek. Wouldn’t have been a beauty even without the scars, Mace Blackhail said so.
Quickly, she turned her thoughts to iron juice. She needed good strong liquor to proof the potion. Anwyn’s twenty-year malt was too mellow—and too cursed. She needed something that could burn a man’s gums, and possibly his tooth enamel as well. Thoughtful, she scanned the flasks on the highest shelf. Will Hawk’s Dhooneshine in its odd sparkly flask stood beside Dagro Blackhail’s Chief ’s Malt, and Shor Gormalin’s Gutbreaker with its crossed swords burned into the wood. So many dead men’s brews. Then she saw it, in the darkest corner, its leather flask hairy with cobwebs, its wood stopper near forced-out with age: Tem Sevrance’s Special Brew. Da must have distilled it himself.
It was late: the roundhouse had grown quiet and Effie knew she’d better hurry, yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself from reaching for Da’s flask. It smelled like him: leathery and horsy. And when she pulled the stopper out she nearly laughed. This would do the job. It surely couldn’t kill anyone, not after this long, and Da had been a hammerman himself. He’d help her with blackening his companions’ teeth.
Something behind Effie’s eyes began to hurt, and she recorked the flask with a hard thump and began the short climb from the well.
It was an odd
night in the roundhouse, dark and still with only half the torches lit in preparation for the Feast of Breaking. It had seemed like a good idea to gather the ingredients for the iron juice tonight, for few liked to travel the halls on the night the Stone Gods walked the earth. Now, though, as she wound her way through the roundhouse’s crumbling lower reaches, she began to feel little prickles of unease. Her lore felt cool against her skin.
The small granite stone was suspended around her neck once more, heavy as a new-laid egg. Inigar Stoop had found it, clutched in a severed hand. It had been the clan guide’s job to gather the remains of Cutty and Nelly Moss. Back bent double against the wind, wicker basket in hand, he had pried their frozen flesh from the snow. Effie had heard it whispered that nothing whole remained, that the dogs had eaten Nelly’s eyes and tongue and torn out Cutty’s spleen. She supposed she was lucky no dog had swallowed her lore. Inigar would not let her wear it at first. Instead he had taken the lore to the guidehouse where he’d spoken words of power over it, and then laid it atop the guidestone where it could draw strength and be renewed.
It felt different now. Older. Harder. Inigar said lores changed and grew with their wearers; so did that mean she was older and harder too?
Nearing the oil-blackened stair that spiraled up to the clan forge, Effie slowed her pace. Normally she liked this part of the roundhouse, with its low ceilings and narrow ways. It was darker than normal, but she didn’t mind that. No Sevrance had ever been afraid of the dark. Still. There was something else . . . something watchful and waiting. And her lore didn’t move, didn’t push, but something inside it shifted as if a drop of liquid mercury had flash-hardened in its core. She stopped. Listened. Almost she heard something, but it was probably just a fancy. You couldn’t hear the sound of a man holding his breath.
Go back, Effie, said a little voice inside her. Run to your room and lock the door.
No. She was on a mission for Bullhammer and Grim Shank. And she wouldn’t bolt like a rabbit every time she was afraid. Besides, things were different now she was armed. Bitty Shank had given her a knife. A maiden’s helper, he called it. “As nice a piece of flint as you’ll find strapped to a goodwife’s thigh.” He taught her how to use it, too. It wasn’t like stabbing someone with a sword. A flint knife’s strength was in its blade, not its tip, and unless you fancied the tip breaking off as soon as you hit bone it was wiser to slash than stab. Effie had practiced slashing moldy and worm-holed sheepskins in the tannery, reducing the thick, useless rams’ hides to strips. The knife’s edge had been knapped to a sharpness beyond steel, so thin in parts that light shone through the stone. It was spoils, Bitty said, seized from a group of Ille Glaive trappers caught setting wires on Ganmiddich soil.