A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2)

by J. V. Jones

  Raif tucked his head low. There was nothing to do but carry on.

  A meet party gathered around the bonfire as they approached. Live steel glowed orange, and hammers and weapons stranger than hammers cast eerie shadows across the rock floor. All present were silent, waiting. A few were armored, but most were cloaked and wrapped in skins against the coldness of the night. You couldn’t see that none of them were whole, for the flickering light cut pieces from them all. Raif found his attention drawn to one man, a small wiry figure who stood away from the main body of men yet still managed to be its center.

  “Stillborn!” came a high male voice. “I heard your pony got a firing. Too bad you didn’t make yourself known sooner.” A fat man dressed in beaver fur stepped forward. “Could have saved a little hoof.”

  Someone snorted. A few near the back laughed. The slight figure in the shadows did not move.

  Stillborn stared at the fat man, and in his own good time looked away. “Unload the meat,” he said to Raif.

  Raif was glad of something to do. The attention of the Maimed Men was making him sweat. Now he was close enough to them to see their imperfections: a missing hand, a clubbed foot, a broken and badly reset jaw, cheek flesh eaten away by the bite, a humped and twisted back. The pain in Raif’s missing finger flared hotly as he unpacked the sides of frozen elk he and Stillborn had cached from his kill. There was a lot of meat, even considering he and the Maimed Man had roasted whatever they fancied and been none too careful with what was left. The pony was glad to be relieved of her load, and began bucking and shaking her head. She’d need to be scrubbed to get rid of the smell.

  Stillborn stood silent whilst the elk was unloaded at his feet. His face was hard and his gaze never left one man: the figure waiting in the shadows. When all the pieces of iced-over carcass had been arrayed, he dropped his fist toward them. “I bring meat, new-killed. Enough for sixty men. What have you brought since I’ve been gone, Traggis Mole?”

  The Maimed Men around the fire grew very still. The fat man in beaver fur opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. All eyes turned to the figure in the shadows. Uncloaked and seen in silhouette, Traggis Mole seemed whole. Light from the flames did not touch him as he said, “I don’t make account of myself to any man, Stillborn. And if you ask that question again I’ll see you dead for it.”

  Tension lit the crowd. Men shifted weight between their feet, sword hands twitching and tongues flicking out to wet dry lips. The fat man drew a sword breaker—a foot and a half of spike-toothed steel forged to trap and break a longsword—and suddenly he didn’t look fat any more. “Will you take the floor with me, Stillborn?” he asked in his high, musical voice. “I see you found a new sword for me to kill.”

  Stillborn’s gaze flickered from the fat man’s face to his weapon. Raif had only seen one other sword breaker in his life; the treasure of the Gnash chief, Nairry Gnash. Clan did not possess the knowledge to make them. They were said to be forged only in the city of Hanatta in the Far South, by a guild of smiths who guarded the secret of their unbreakable teeth as if they were hoarding gold. Stillborn’s face was controlled, but the weapon made him wary, Raif could tell.

  “Put it away, Yustaffa,” he said. “You step too quickly into this fight. Anyone would think the Robber Chief couldn’t speak for himself.”

  The fat man smiled as if Stillborn had said something amusing. He did a little dance, surprising Raif with his speed and grace, and in the space of an eyeblink the sword breaker was gone. “It’ll be a sad day when you go to the Rift, Stillborn. Who will make me laugh when you’re gone?”

  Stillborn made no response, save to let his gaze return to the Robber Chief, Traggis Mole.

  The man in the shadows bided his time. He had the ability to be very still, Raif noticed, like a hunter coaxing game to draw nearer so he could get a better shot. He waited until a pile of logs in the fire-stack collapsed, creating a wall of heat and sparks, before he spoke. “Stillborn,” he warned in a hard, rough voice. “Your tongue’s this close to being added to that meat.”

  Suddenly there was a blur of motion. Raif tried to follow it, but waves of heat from the fire blurred the air . . . and Traggis Mole moved inhumanly fast. When Raif’s vision cleared, he saw two things: Traggis Mole had a knife at Stillborn’s throat.

  And the Robber Chief was not whole.

  Brown leather straps formed a “v” across his forehead and slashed diagonally across both cheeks . . . holding a wooden nose in place. Traggis Mole breathed, letting the knife rise with his chest until it pressed against the apple of Stillborn’s throat. The Robber Chief’s face had once been handsome, with a finely shaped brow and cheekbones, and absolutely black eyes. He was small in the way cragsmen were small; hard and flinty as the crags they walked, with nothing spare to slow them. His eyes flicked once to Raif, saw all, then looked away.

  “Do you yield this meat to me, Stillborn?” he said, his gaze dropping to the cache of frozen elk.

  Stillborn’s hand was on the wooden handle of the hammer hooked to his belt. Muscles in his arms were so tense that flesh bulged between the bullhorns. He breathed lightly, for to do anything else would be to push his own throat against the knife. Raif glanced around. More Maimed Men had come to the fire, and a group of women had gathered near the rear. Their faces were hungry and pitiless, and Raif wondered what they wanted most: meat or blood. He cursed his own lack of a weapon. No one here would step forward to defend Stillborn. You could see it in their eyes.

  Just as Traggis Mole began pulling the knife blade across Stillborn’s skin, Stillborn spoke. “I yield the meat,” he said quietly.

  Traggis Mole bared his teeth, and for a moment Raif thought he would make Stillborn repeat his words—louder this time, so all gathered could hear. Yet the Robber Chief took his pound of flesh another way, opening Stillborn’s throat with an expert hand. Blood quickly filmed the length of the foot-long hunting knife, and Traggis wiped it clean on Stillborn’s shoulder.

  “Rift Brothers!” he cried, turning to his men. “I bring meat. Let the women come forward and put it on the fire.”

  A cheer went up. The fat man started a chant, and others quickly joined him. “Mole! Mole! Mole!” Someone hammered a wedge into a barrel, and ale began to flow. Within seconds the atmosphere around the blazing fire changed as women scrambled forward to hack at meat, torches were dipped and lighted, and a little clubfooted child began plucking a tune from a stringboard.

  Stillborn did not move. The blood from the hairline slit on his throat was already drying, so shallow was the cut Traggis Mole had made. His scars were twitching with the effort it took to master himself, and Raif could clearly see the tooth-like thing growing from the side of his neck moving in some hideous imitation of a bite. When he noticed Raif watching him, Stillborn tilted his head back fractionally, warning Raif to keep his place in the background.

  But Traggis Mole was watching, and even though his nose was wooden it twitched as if he’d sniffed something out. Wholly black eyes came to rest upon Raif.

  “I’m taking him as my hunt partner,” Stillborn said casually. “Orrlsman. Found him in Grass Gorge, heading this way. He’s a fair hunter. He’ll earn his keep.”

  “Will he, now?” Traggis Mole looked Raif up and down. “I see you took half a finger from him, Stillborn. Thought to rob me of the pleasure of taking a full hand?”

  “I thought to leave a man with what he needs to hunt.” Stillborn’s voice was dangerous now, all attempts at sounding casual gone. “Or are you so afraid of anyone with four limbs that you’d see a man made useless rather than risk raising a rival to your chiefship?”

  Traggis Mole laughed; a hard, short crow that had nothing to do with joy. “A rival? To this maggots’ nest on the edge of nowhere? If someone wanted it enough to put a point through my brain don’t think I wouldn’t welcome it. We’re all damned here. The frosts eat us alive and the shadows are rising. Show me a man with balls enough to take me and I’ll go willin
gly into the Rift.”

  As he spoke, the wind began to rise along the cliff wall, whipping at the hems of men’s cloaks and beating a fierce heat from the fire. Raif looked out toward the edge and saw little but blackness. The land fell away to nothing, and the distance between the north wall of the Rift and the south one seemed as cold and empty as the space between stars.

  “I know you hate me, Stillborn,” came the Robber Chief’s voice, cutting through the wind. “But you don’t quite hate me enough. How long have you been here? Fifteen years? Yet you still haven’t learned how to stab a man in the back. Look at Yustaffa. Calls me his liege lord and makes my fights his, yet I wouldn’t trust him near me with a knife. All the men here tonight, every last broken one of them, dreams of slitting my throat while I lie abed with my whore atop me. Fear stops them . . . but that’s not what stops you, is it?” The Robber Chief looked shrewdly at Stillborn, the shadow of his wooden nose lying black against his cheek. “That last dram of clannish honor is always the hardest to lose.”

  Stillborn shook his head slowly and heavily, yet he spoke no words to deny it. Instead, he let his gaze travel to the base of the bonfire, where men were reaching in with bare hands to grab at the half-cooked meat. “The Rift Brothers are hungry, Traggis. If I were you I’d set my mind on that. Send men out to hunt, not raid. A coffer full of gold is worth nothing to a starving man. There’s elk three days west of here, and if you were any kind of chief you’d mount a hunt party and bring down as many as you could. And if you were any judge of men you’d bring this lad along with you, for no other reason than I say so.”

  Others in the crowd heard what Stillborn said and stopped to listen. Some drew nearer. One man with frost-rotted cheeks was quick to nod at the mention of elk. Traggis’s black eyes saw all.

  “If you had any love for your life, Stillborn, you’d keep your notions to yourself. I’m lord of this hole in the earth. Not some bullhorned gargoyle who was born dead and should have stayed that way.” Quick as a flash, Traggis Mole’s finger and thumb were on Stillborn’s chin, squeezing the flesh till it whitened. “And I tell you something else, my scarred friend. That Orrlsman’s mine until he’s proven himself. He’s brought no weapons, no goods. Whatever he eats and sups he robs from the mouth of a Rift Brother. And I’ll take my own eyes if you can find one man here tonight who’ll welcome him for it.”

  No one spoke. All the Maimed Men were listening now, hands and mouths greasy with elk juice, the firelight making masks of their faces. Raif felt their hostility like a drying wind against his skin. Traggis Mole had easily directed all their hunger and frustration onto him, an outsider, and Raif knew he’d been trapped by a master.

  Traggis Mole broke his hold on Stillborn, but continued to maintain eye contact for long seconds afterwards. When he was satisfied that whatever silent warning he’d issued had been received, he turned his attention to Raif. “Orrlsman. What skills do you claim?”

  Raif was careful not to make the mistake of looking to Stillborn before answering. “I’m a white-winter warrior. Bowman. Longbow and shortbow. I once brought down a dozen kills in one night.”

  A ripple of interest passed through the crowd, but the Robber Chief was unmoved. “You’re young for a white-winter warrior. Last I heard, it takes ten years to make one.”

  Something in Raif rose to the challenge of those hard black eyes. “Then you heard wrong.”

  Interest moved briefly across Traggis Mole’s face. “Yet you have no bow, and from the looks of it Stillborn didn’t relieve you of one.”

  “He broke it in two in his rush to get my sword.”

  A titter of amusement rippled through the crowd, and Raif knew he had read Stillborn true. The great bullhorned Maimed Man was no bowman; his arms were built for wielding steel, not firing wood. And if the large number of weapons in his weapon stand was anything to go by, he was a collector of steel, too. The Forsworn sword, even sheathed as it was with only its cross-hilt and pommel showing, was clearly a treasure to be hoarded.

  Raif felt relief, yet did not show it. Looking into Traggis Mole’s small and fatally flawed face, he got the distinct impression that he had fooled everyone in the crowd except him.

  Yet for reasons of his own Traggis Mole kept the truth to himself. He said only, “Well, Orrlsman. How shall we test your claims?”

  Raif held the man’s gaze and said nothing. He knew the second trap was about to be sprung.

  “I’ve an idea,” offered the fat man, pausing in the business of sucking marrow from a chunk of thigh bone.

  “Speak it.”

  Yustaffa waived airily with the bone. He had the copper skin and almond eye-whites of a Far Southerner, and although his beaver furs were finely dressed and gleaming he did not sit well in them. He looked like a man dressing up as a bear. “Let him shoot against Tanjo Ten Arrow or whatever he’s calling himself these days. Archer against archer. Bow against bow. Could be quite amusing. Certainly better than watching this rabble throw another dead man to the Rift. I said only this morning—”

  “Enough,” warned Traggis. “Find Tanjo and arrange the match for first light. And you,” he said, addressing a frost-eaten swordsman dressed in the rod-and-slat armor of a seafarer. “Take this Orrlsman to the caves, and hold him overnight. Feed him naught but dirt and water, and make sure he—” a quick glance to Stillborn “—doesn’t get by you. Bring the Orrlsman to the High Mantle at dawn.”

  The swordsman nodded brusquely, and Raif felt an ungentle hand upon his arm. He was not given the chance to speak a word to Stillborn before he was led away.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Tower on the Milk

  The five Dhoone warriors entered the old riverhouse under heavy guard. Iago Sake’s face was white in the starlight, his dread half-moon ax drawn and ready. He and Diddie Munn escorted the five warriors through the strange roofless arcade that formed the entrance to the broken tower at Castlemilk.

  Bram was surprised to see the five men still armed, and wondered why his brother Robbie had not given the order for their weapons to be ransomed. Water steel flashed at their backs and thighs, making river-like ripples upon the blued surfaces of their breast and back plates. The tattoos on their faces showed them to be veterans of many campaigns. One of their number, whom Bram recognized as the master axman Mauger Loy, had whorls of ink so densely sewn across his cheeks that you could not see the true color of his skin. Even his eyelids were blue. All five had the fair hair of the Dhoones, and Bram realized that he was one of only a handful in the room with dark eyes and dark hair.

  “Couch your ax, Iago,” came Robbie Dhoone’s voice from the tower’s vast circular chamber. “These men are our brothers. They’ll offer no fight.”

  Iago Sake, the deathly pale axman known as the Nail, nodded but did not speak. He and Mauger had been companions of the ax before the slaying of the old Dhoone chief, yet all the years spent training and campaigning meant nothing to Iago when compared to his loyalty to Robbie Dhoone. Iago thrust the three-foot ax under his gear belt rather than couch it against his back as ordered. Bram knew other men might mistake Iago’s lack of obedience as defiance, but Bram knew it was done out of love and protectiveness for Robbie. If weapons were drawn, Iago Sake would get to his first.

  The five Skinner Dhoone-sworn warriors could not hide their interest as they stepped into the principal chamber of the broken tower. It had once risen thirty storeys above the Milk, legend said, higher even than the tower on the Ganmiddich Inch. But the living was harder here in the northern clanholds—storms could rage for weeks and frosts had been known to last for half a year—and the tower had long since fallen. All that was left were a few lower storeys, and all but the ground one were broken. Even that let in moonlight and rain, and if Bram looked up he could see great cracks and absences of stone. If he looked down he could see a pool of water as large as a fish pond that had formed in a pocket of sunken flooring. The water had been frozen when they’d first occupied the tower ten days back, but it was
thawing now under the sufferance of torchlight and man heat. Once or twice Bram had seen things flitting beneath the glaze of ice, and had wondered briefly how fish had made their way in here.

  Few had answers to questions concerning the tower, not even the Castlemen who had lived with its closeness all their lives. The Milkhouse was barely a league to the west, its rounded walls and domed roof constructed for the most part from stone quarried from the tower. When the first clan settlers had come upon the ruins north of the river, they had named the pale, pearlescent blocks they were built from milkstone. Centuries later, when the first roundhouse was raised in the shadow of the tower, the clan chief had forsaken his old name and called himself Castlemilk instead.

  The Milk River still ran white each spring, when rushing water and thawing ice ate away at the remaining deposits of milkstone that lay in a series of open quarries upstream. Bram had once heard said that the quarries were now overrun by forest and pokebrush and near impossible for anyone but cragsmen to find.

  Even now, after months of living in Castlemilk where milkstone was plentiful and many structures were built from it, Bram still found the pale rock beautiful. It glowed like teeth in firelight.

  The five warriors crossed the round chamber to where Robbie was sitting at the head of a camp table. Robbie was uncloaked and unarmored, dressed in a fine wool shirt and linen vest, his moleskin pants tucked into high leather boots, and a heavy belt of beaten copper plates circling his waist. His hair had been recently washed and braided, and wet strands still clung to his neck. Another man might look disarrayed in such a state, but Robbie Dun Dhoone looked like a king.

  He watched the five men gravely, his hands resting on the leather-bound armrests of his chair. “Mauger. Berold. Harris. Jordie. Roy,” he named and greeted them, clearly surprising them by this feat of memory. “Come. Sit. It’s a hard ride from Gnash, and the river banks are thick with mud. Have your horses been fed and watered?”