by J. V. Jones
Traitors aren’t allowed to bear the stone. Bitterness welled up in him, and he was glad because it shrank his fear.
Even without a measure of powdered guidestone, Raif knew he could not leave the dead man before him unblessed. The corpse belonged to a Forsworn knight, and so was an enemy to clan and clannish gods, but he had died alone and untended. Like Tem. Closing his eyes and touching both lids, Raif murmured, “May your god take your soul and keep it near him always.”
It was all he could do. Bending low, he tugged at the knight’s purple cloak, freeing it from beneath the man’s shoulders and covering the face. The knight’s eyes were open and the irises had rolled back in his head, showing nothing but white. It was a relief not to look at them any longer.
Straightening, Raif inspected the gate. Unstripped logs, tarred and bound, mounted on an X-shaped frame. The outpost had not been established long. Everything about it had the look of something hastily erected. No clansman would raise a defensive structure with raw timber. So why had these knights?
Raif considered what he knew about the Forsworn. They were wealthy, it was said, with temples known as Shrineholds scattered throughout the North. They called themselves the Eye of God and made war against heretics in his name. The Listener said they made pilgrimage to the Lake of Lost Men, but Raif did not know why. He didn’t know much, he realized. Clan had few dealings with outsiders, and Blackhail had even fewer than most. Growing up clan meant learning little of other men.
Raif dropped his pack and walked through the gate into the narrow, packed-earth bailey beyond. His breath was doing strange things in his windpipe, hurting his back as he breathed. He felt like a child carrying a grown-up sword, and found he could not remember a single form Shor Gormalin had taught him. The Listener was right; I need to learn how to use this. But not tonight. Gods, not tonight.
He almost passed the second body, so deep were the shadows that surrounded it. The redoubt had been built on a groundsill of rubble and timber to keep it raised above the frozen tundra and protected from sinkage during spring thaw. The first floor of the structure overhung the foundation pile, creating a trap for shadows and moss. This body lay in two pieces beneath the overhang, sheared through the gut so that only strings of sinew and intestines joined the two halves. Raif retched. Be thankful for the shadows, he told himself, spitting to clean his mouth. Without them I’d see worse.
There was nothing to do but speak the same blessing over the dead knight and cover his face.
Slowly, Raif mounted the quartered-log stairs leading to the redoubt’s main door. Time and effort had been spent on the door: the timbers were dressed and sealed, the joints shod in lead. The Eye of God had been painted above the arch, and someone had even brought gold leaf to burnish the pupil so it looked as if God were gazing upon a golden field. Raif felt the Eye upon him as he put a hand to the door and pushed.
Darkness and stillness waited on the other side. The stench of accelerated rot and strangely charged air made him doubt that anyone within had been left alive. Seconds passed as he stood on the threshold, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the blackness. He appeared to be in a small defensive ward, fashioned with louvered floorwork to slow an enemy’s charge. One wrong step and a man’s foot would slip through the boards to the groundsill below, halting and trapping him, and possibly breaking his leg. Who did they fear?
The Eye was here too, painted huge upon the walls. Only now it was not something watchful and benevolent, it was an angry eye, fearsome, shot with red veins. Raif found himself discomforted beneath it, and felt a pang of guilt at being so easily awed by a foreign god.
Carefully, mindful of his steps, he crossed the ward and entered the main chamber of the fort. The inner door had been torn from its hinges and two dead knights lay to either side of it, swords drawn and visors down: they’d had more warning than those outside. But it had not saved them. Beautifully worked scale armor made one man’s corpse glitter like a faceted jewel. He bore the spiked collar of a penitent, and all his metalwork had been greased with reddish-brown bone oil. The weapon that had killed him had struck so deeply that Raif could see the floorboards beneath his chest; they had been ripped up and splintered as the weapon was pulled free. Raif shuddered. What creature could break down a strongdoor and do this to a man? Bullhammer, the most powerful man Raif had ever known, had never torn the middle from an enemy in a single strike.
Raif spoke blessings to both men and moved on. The main hall of the redoubt made him sad, for he recognized the pain these knights had taken to honor their One God. The only local resources were timber and rock, and they had used both to raise a massive altar block that had been draped with cloth of purple. Here the Eye was not a crude wall-painting but a crystal set into an almond-shaped mounting of pure gold. Seeing it, Raif felt the sword move in his hand. Of course, a knight’s blade. The rock crystal surmounted on the pommel seemed to pulse in time with the Eye.
Light poured in from a window high in the hammer-vaulted roof as the moon rose overhead. Raif saw crudely carved chairs and box pallets, prayer mats woven from coltgrass, oak coffers lining the far wall, a rope ladder leading to the external battlements, and an ancient book laid open on a dragon-pine stand. They had not been here long, these men, and he could not understand what had brought them to this place.
More knights had fallen in the farthest reach of the hall, defending, it seemed to Raif, the small Eye-carved portal beyond. Seven men dead. Seven blessings given. All of the knights’ eyes were open and rolled back, and all had the same black fluids oozing from their skull cavities and wounds.
Breathing thinly, Raif made his way through the Eye portal and into the small chamber beyond. In the same way that the Hailstone was heart of clan, this chamber was the heart of the fort. Raif felt its power. The timber walls had been stained white, and in the center a font hewn from speckled granite held a pool of water in an eye-shaped bowl. Instinctively, Raif kept his gaze from alighting too long upon the water. Something told him he didn’t want to see his own face reflected there.
A soft noise made him start. Spinning, he raised his sword.
“Morgo?” came a weak murmur. “Is that you?”
Raif peered into the shadows in the corner behind the portal. Someone, a knight, lay fallen in a pool of blood. He saw immediately that the man was not dressed like the other knights, in fine armor and cloth of purple, but was unarmored and mantled in a cloak of skin. Dimly, Raif remembered that as the Forsworn rose through the ranks they cast more and more of their worldly possessions aside, until they were left with nothing more than their swords and what clothes they could stitch with their own hands. That meant this man lying before him was of a high order, possibly even the commander of the fort.
Raif dropped to his knees beside the knight. The man’s wounds were terrible to see. His left hand was gone and his left thigh had been laid open by a series of chopping blows. His skull had taken a slicing cut, and part of his right ear hung from a flap of skin. The same purge fluids that leaked from the other knights’ wounds leaked from his, mingling darkly with his blood. On his right side lay a sword not unlike Raif’s but of finer make, with a bluish crystal surmounted on the pommel. The sword’s edge was warped and blackened, as if it had been held to a flame and burned.
The knight’s face was gray. His lips were parched, and bits of skin flaked from them as he spoke. “Morgo?”
“Hush,” Raif said, not gently, stripping off his inner coat of seal fur and bundling it to form a pillow for the knight’s head. “I’ll bring water.”
“No,” murmured the knight, suddenly agitated. “Don’t leave me.”
He had once been powerful, Raif saw, with the lean muscle of one who fights rather than trains. He was not young, for there was much gray in his close-cropped hair, but his strength of will persisted. Gods alone knew how he still lived. Raif tore a strip from the soft rabbit fleece he wore next to his throat. Almost he did not know where to begin to tend this man, but he knew
that he could not leave him like this.
The knight, seeing what Raif meant to do, waved him away. “No.” He paused for breath. “You cannot save me, not this way.”
Gray eyes dull with pain met Raif’s, and Raif found he could speak no lie. Silently, he let the rabbit strip fall to the floor. “What happened here?”
“Evil walked amongst us . . . broke down our door.”
“How many attacked?”
The knight’s eyes clouded. His fist clenched and unclenched. After a time he repeated, “Morgo?”
Raif folded his own fist around the knight’s, forcing his flesh to be still. Helplessness roughened his voice. He was clan, and every clansman knew what was owed to a fatally wounded man. “No. Not Morgo. A friend.”
“Then why do you have Morgo’s sword?”
Raif felt the world switch beneath him. He glanced at the sword Sadaluk had given him, resting now on the plank floor, well clear of the knight’s blood.
The knight’s gaze sharpened. “Tell me you did not kill him.”
“I did not.” Raif thought quickly. “Morgo lost his way on his journey to the Lake of Lost Men. The Ice Trappers found his body, and gave me his sword.” He had no idea how long the Listener had held the sword, but he’d imagined it lying in that foreign-made chest for decades. He asked, because he could not help himself, “Who is Morgo?”
The knight’s throat began working but words took long to come. “. . . took the Lost Trail. A boy . . . only fifteen. I told him to wait. Wait.”
Something in the knight’s voice made Raif say, “He was your brother.”
“Dead now, long dead.”
Forty years dead, Raif guessed, feeling weary and suddenly old. “Rest now,” he murmured. “I’ll watch you.”
Time passed as the knight slept. Raif crouched by his body, thirsty and hungry but unwilling to move away. The font in the center of the room cast a shadow that circled the chamber as the night passed. Sometimes the water rippled and plinked, though Raif could detect no breeze. The knight rested fitfully, jerking and shivering, each breath gurgling wetly in his throat. He awakened before dawn, and Raif could see the livid fever lines spreading up his neck.
“Only one,” the knight rasped. “A shadow that was not a shadow, bearing a sword as black as night.”
Raif felt his gooseflesh rise. The knight was answering his question from earlier, and the words of Heritas Cant sounded in his head. They ride the earth every thousand years to claim more men for their armies. When a man or woman is touched by them they become Unmade. Not dead, never dead, but something different, cold and craving. The shadows enter them, snuffing the light from their eyes and the warmth from their hearts ... Blood and skin and bone is lost, changed into something the Sull call maer dan: shadowflesh.
Slowly Raif’s hand rose to his lore. When he looked up he saw the knight watching him.
“Take me,” he said. “Before the shadows can.”
Raif breathed and did not speak. Although he had not wanted to see it he knew that the purge fluids had collected in the knight’s wounds, sending tendrils of darkness smoking across his skin. Oh gods. The other knights are lost.
But not this one, not yet. Raif found his strength and his voice. “Tell me one thing. Why did you build this place?”
The knight raised his clenched fist. “We search.”
“For what?”
“The city of the Old Ones. The Fortress of Grey Ice.”
Raif felt himself begin to shake, not strongly but intensely, as if something within him were vibrating. As he looked on a wisp of shadowy fluid rolled over the knight’s eye, and he knew it was time to reach for his sword.
The knight knew it too, and drew himself up a fraction against Raif’s coat. Raif hefted the sword, testing its weight. Drying blood sucked at the soles of his boots as he took his position above the knight. He was still shaking, but he didn’t think it was from weakness or fright. Gravely, he raised the point of his sword to the knight’s chest. The knight’s eyes were open, and they were clear and shining, and Raif found a measure of understanding there.
Kill an army for me, Raif Sevrance.
Putting the weight of his body behind the blow, Raif thrust his sword through the heart.
He must have lost time after that, for he could not remember freeing the sword from the knight’s flesh, or closing the man’s eyes, or entering the main hall and taking the purple cloth from the altar and laying it over the knight’s corpse. He remembered only a feeling of terrible weariness and, as he stumbled over a pallet in the main hall, deciding then and there he needed rest. He remembered the luxury of curling up in wool blankets, and then nothing but the deadness of sleep.
When he woke many hours later, sunlight was streaming down on his face. For a long moment he did not open his eyes, merely lay still and enjoyed the play of light and warmth on his eyelids. How had he not noticed such a beautiful thing before? Hunger and the need to relieve himself eventually roused him, and he swung his feet onto the floor and looked out across the hall.
All that remained of the bodies were skeletons and gristle. Longbones were darkly stained, and the tendons still attached at their heads curled strangely in the freezing air. Wisps of smoke rose from the ribcages like fumes. Seeing them, Raif thought he must be the greatest fool in the North. How could he have fallen asleep here? It was madness. And for some reason he found himself thinking of Angus. His uncle had once told him that the best way to stay alive in a hostile city was to walk through its busiest streets jerking your arms and muttering wildly to yourself. No one would interfere with a madman. Perhaps not even fate.
Feeling strangely light-headed, Raif skirted the knights’ remains and made his way outside.
Retrieving his pack near the gate, he decided to walk the short distance to the trees. The sun was low and weak, but it felt good on his back. It felt good also to drink the meaty-tasting water from his seal bladder, and to feast on the Ice Trappers’ peculiar idea of travel food. There were cakes of caribou marrow streaked red with berries, rolled strips of seal tongue, and the last of the boiled auk. Raif sat down amidst the pale gray needles of the dragon pines and ate and rested and did not think. Overhead the sky was the rich blue of twilight, though it was barely midday. An osprey was rising on thermals channeled by the lake, and the warning cries of small birds pierced the calm.
Raif packed and stowed his provisions. He was feeling the lack of his inner coat now, and the bitter cold sank against his chest. He didn’t want to return to the redoubt and had no intention of retrieving his seal coat from its position beneath the dead knight’s head, but he had to know if the knight had been spared the fate of his companions. And he had to bear witness for them all.
In the low light that passed for day the redoubt looked little more than a fortified cabin. Eight men had crossed hundreds of leagues to build here and now they lay dead. What had the knight said last night? We search. Raif felt the sadness of those words. And the hope. Grimly, he crossed the defensive ward and reentered the main hall.
The cold, otherworldly odor to which his slumbering body had grown accustomed rose to meet him anew. It was subtly changed now—staler and less concentrated, like smoke dissipating after a fire. The knights’ remains had stained the timber flooring in dark, man-shaped patches. Raif thought he would like to torch this place, but the knights were not clan and he did not know if such an act would honor or further defile them. The marrow had been sucked from their bones, and their skulls were hollow except for the black liquid trickling from their teeth and eye sockets. It was hard to believe these men had been dead less than a day. Raif thought about the blessings he’d spoken over them, and then quickly turned away. I arrived too late.
The knights’ souls were already gone. Taken.
Crossing to the stone and timber altar, he raised a hand to touch the Eye of God. Its price was unimaginable, so heavy and pure was the gold that surrounded it, yet it seemed to Raif that it would be safe here. It woul
d cost a man much to walk through this hall and steal it in sight of the dead. The crystal in the Eye’s center sparkled so brilliantly Raif wondered if it might be a diamond. But he had little knowledge of gems and doubted if something the size of a sparrow’s egg could be anything other than rock crystal. Hesitating at the last instant to touch it, Raif stepped back. He already knew what it would feel like: ice.
His gaze found the carved wood of the dragon-pine stand, and the book laid open upon it. The book was very old, bound in animal hide that had been inexpertly tanned so that a nap of fine hair remained. The pages were yellow and warped, and their edges had been darkened by countless generations of fingerprints. The book was opened to a charcoal drawing of an icebound mountain and a passage of ornately rendered script. Meg Sevrance had taught both her sons to read, but Raif still had difficulty deciphering the words. They were set down in High Hand, an archaic written form of Common, and they bore little resemblance to anything he’d learned at his mother’s knee. Mountain he thought he recognized, and the phrase North of the Rift, but the script was too stylized for him to be able to read much more. Frowning, he turned his attention to the drawing. It was of no peak he had ever seen, craggy and spiraling, with nothing green or living upon it.
He thought about turning the pages and seeing what else the book held, then decided against it. It seemed to him that while he stood here, first at the altar, now at the lectern, the hall was changing around him, settling into the silent deadness of a tomb. This place should be sealed.
Suddenly eager to be gone, he went to fulfill his final obligation.
The small chamber the head knight had fallen in was so cold Raif’s breath whitened as he entered. The water in the font should have been frozen, but it wasn’t. Raif worked to keep his gaze from settling upon the gently rippling liquid. He still did not want to see what it showed.
The knight lay where Raif had left him, his body wholly covered by the altar cloth. Taking the corner of the cloth in his fist, Raif began naming the Stone Gods. Ganolith, Hammada, Ione, Loss, Uthred, Oban, Larannyde, Malweg, Behathmus. Please may this man be whole.