A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2)

by J. V. Jones

  “Fair bride, share your bounty. Cast the grain.”

  The bride took a handful of something gold out of the sack, and showered it on the crowd. Crope felt little pellets, like hailstones, ping off his shoulders and bounce to the ground. He caught a glimpse of one as it fell at his feet: a tiny nugget of gold cast in the shape of a wheat germ. The crowd surged forward, a cry went up from the red cloaks, and Crope found himself in the middle of a feeding frenzy.

  When he looked up next the pale-eyed man had gone. The bride cast one more handful of golden grain and then withdrew into the tower with her husband.

  Crope stood for a moment, watching the space the pale-eyed man had vacated, and then turned away. The red cloak who had challenged him waved him along with his spear. In the madness of the grab for gold he had more important matters on his mind. Crope whistled for Town Dog, and worried like a mother until the little dog appeared. Taking no chances, he scooped her up and tucked her under his cloak. Ducking his head low, he pushed gently through the crowd.

  Come to me, his lord had commanded. Now Crope had arrived he had to figure out how.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Rift

  The infant’s body was laid on a board, and the Maimed Women crouched beside it and washed it with spirits. The mother stood apart, her belly distended, her bodice stained dark with seeping milk. A Maimed Man was oiling the crude winch fixed to the edge of the rimrock, hunching his shoulders against the swirling snow.

  Raif stood beside the cragsman Addie Gunn and watched as Traggis Mole approached the newborn’s corpse. The infant’s eyes had already been removed, and the eyelids sewn shut with black thread. Traggis Mole scattered the women with the briefest movement of his wrist, and knelt alone beside the board. Gently, and with great care, the Robber Chief lifted the newborn’s head. The baby’s scalp was covered with a fine down of auburn hair, and Traggis Mole ran his fingers through it before reaching for the hood. The Robber Chief’s face was dark. At the left side of his temple Raif could see the pressure line where the straps that held his wooden nose in place had dug into his skin.

  Charms had been sewn into the little woolen hood: glass beads and drilled coins and sprigs of dried touch-me-nots. As Traggis Mole pulled the hood over the infant’s face, all who had gathered became quiet. The Robber Chief nodded to the man with the winch, signaling for him to come forward and take possession of the board. As the winchman secured the board to the cable rope, the Maimed Women began to keen. Raif felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. He had never heard such a sound made by humans; a deep and joyless howling, as if the wind itself blew through them.

  When Traggis Mole gave the word, the winchman began turning the crank, and the board holding the stillborn infant was lowered into the Rift.

  The mother did not move as the barrel turned. She was no longer young, and Addie Gunn whispered that this bairn would likely be her last. A boy stepped forward and handed Traggis Mole a burning torch, and the Robber Chief moved to the edge of the rimrock. It was late morning, and a cold snap had brought the high white clouds bearing snow. Snowflakes danced on the Rift’s updrafts, swooping and soaring; hissing into nothingness if they strayed too close to the Robber Chief’s flame.

  “Poor thing,” Addie Gunn said quietly, dropping his head in respect. “Wasn’t whole enough to live.”

  As the winchman cranked the barrel, Traggis Mole touched the cable rope with the torch. The rope’s tightly bound fibers crackled and charred, and then hot yellow flames caught light. The winchman continued cranking, and the burning section of rope dropped from sight as the infant was lowered deeper into the abyss. The Maimed Women bellowed, their song growing stranger and more terrible until the moment the tension left the rope.

  The mother jerked forward as the rope sprang back. Traggis Mole called out in a harsh voice and the Maimed Women rushed forward to steady her. As the Robber Chief turned away, his gaze met Raif’s. Traggis Mole’s eyes were black and haunted, and there was such a force behind them Raif fought the desire to step back. Harm us and die, the Robber Chief warned him, and then swept his gaze away.

  Raif breathed softly and held himself still. The crowd was beginning to break up. The winchman wound back the rope to the burned stump and cut off the blackened portion with a knife. An old woman the size of a child led the mother away. Someone on the upper terrace began roasting lamb, and the bloody aroma of meat juices drifted down.

  “One of ours,” Addie said, with a look that might have been pride.

  Raif made himself nod. The raid had been a success: three ewes, two with lamb, a newborn, an old pollard good for mutton, plus grain and rendered elk fat, salt, horsemeat, cheese, two dozen bantams, and a keg of young malt.

  Stillborn had commanded the raid with an iron hand, driving the villagers into the sheep pen whilst the looting was under way. Some villagers had taken wounds. One of them was dead. Raif had watched as Linden Moodie rode him down; a big aging Dhoonesman trained to the ax. The Dhoonesman had made the mistake of organizing a defense, perhaps imagining that Maimed Men on hill ponies were no match for fully-mounted clansmen. He had not counted on the Maimed Men’s complete disdain for horses. Horses had no currency in the Rift. They could not be made to cross the swing bridge, would not take to the heights, sudden drops and rocky stairs of the cliff city, and needed absurd amounts of feed to sustain them. A hill pony lived on what he could tug from the cliffs and scrounge from the grain stores, and they suited the Maimed Men well enough.

  Raif and a second archer, a city man with spider-veined hands, had been commanded to target the horses. They shot the clansmen’s mounts from beneath them, and then Linden Moodie and his crew rode the clansmen to ground. Moodie’s crew possessed self-control enough to stay their hands when the Dhoonesman and his companions surrendered, but Linden Moodie himself had passed beyond reason to rage.

  “Thought you could best us, eh?” he screamed, closing in on the Dhoonesman with his broadblade. “We’re not clan like you. Not perfect. Not whole. Well, let’s see how you fare when I cut something from you. See if you can put up a fight.”

  Linden Moodie had hacked off the man’s arm at the shoulder before Stillborn and the other Maimed Men could restrain him. Stillborn gripped Moodie in a mighty bear hug, squeezing the breath and anger from him. As he gradually eased his hold, Stillborn commanded Raif to escort the remaining villagers to the sheep pen. When Raif hesitated, his gaze flicking to the wounded Dhoonesman, Stillborn snapped in a harsh voice, “Him. He’s already dead.”

  It was true, Raif knew it—the Dhoonesman was losing too much blood—but there was something else here. Stillborn never rebuked Linden Moodie for his violence, and as Raif led the clansmen to the pen, he heard Stillborn call for the liquor flask, shouting that a Rift Brother had need.

  The rest of the night had passed swiftly. The clansmen’s stone cottages were looted, the grain cellars pried open, the coops emptied. The horses were slaughtered for meat. Raif butchered a gelding and caged the bantams. By the time dawn came he was shaking with exhaustion. The penned clansfolk were quiet, some sleeping. There were not many, really, perhaps six families in all. Raif had taken his turn guarding them, along with every other man in the raid party. He walked circuits of the stone-walled enclosure, his borrowed sword ill-balanced in his hand, a band of muscle in his chest strangely tight.

  Stupidly, he had thought the villagers would know him for clan. Yet when he looked into their eyes he saw fear and contempt.

  He was just another Maimed Man.

  It was daylight when his watch ended and the raid party broke camp and headed for the hills. The return journey took two days, the ponies were so heavily laden. Linden Moodie and his crew got drunk on young malt the last night. They’d made camp amidst the bald hummocks and sedge barrens that formed the northernmost swell of the Copper Hills. The first wave of black flies had hatched from the snowmelt and the ponies were under assault. The Maimed Men huddled around the longfire for protection, passing th
e sheep’s bladder from hand to hand. Linden Moodie drank deep and often. The thick black beard that covered his lower face was a trap for flakes of food and ash, and he raked his knuckles through it as his gaze fell on Raif.

  “To clan,” he said, raising the flaccid sheep’s bladder above the fire. “Gods damn the lot of them.”

  Releasing his grip, he let the sheep’s bladder fall to the fire. The small quantity of alcohol remaining ignited instantly, whumping as it shot up a ball of violet flame. Addie Gunn, Stillborn, and the rest of the Maimed Men nodded tersely, their faces lit grotesquely by the pure-burning alcohol. Stillborn murmured, “Gods damn them all,” and after a moment others echoed him.

  Raif felt the blood come to his face. He wanted suddenly to run, to escape these men who were not whole in ways he was just beginning to understand. But he didn’t. He sat and stared into the fire, and knew with cold certainly that if any man tried to push him just then he’d go straight for their heart.

  Perhaps Stillborn saw the intent in Raif’s eyes, for he drew attention to himself by plucking a blood sausage from the heart of the fire and dancing the scorching offal between his fingers like a hotcake. Soon the Maimed Men were laughing and making jest, and the subject of clans was dropped or forgotten. Only Linden Moodie remembered. He sat and watched Raif from the far side of the fire, his fingers rubbing the garrote scar that circled his throat.

  Raif pulled his Orrl cloak close as he walked the length of the rimrock with Addie Gunn. They’d made it across the Rift by sundown the following day, and a feast had been planned for tonight to spread the bounty. Stillborn would be celebrated. He informed Raif the salt would be divvied up—a thimbleful for each man, woman and child—and the horsemeat would be smoked and portioned. Raif, as a member of the raid party, was entitled to extra, but he knew better than to accept it. An outsider shouldn’t take more than his share.

  “I set a piece of that ewe to roast this morning,” Addie said to him. “There’s enough for two.”

  Raif started to shake his head, but stopped himself. Addie Gunn had once been clan. “That sounds good.”

  He let the small, dark cragsman lead the way to his fire. Addie slept close to the collapsed east wall, high on the cliff where eagles made their aeries and winds from the Want smoothed the edge of the rimrock into glassy waves. By the time they’d completed the ascent the snow had stopped falling, and Raif’s heart was pumping hard.

  “Aye,” the cragsman said, noticing Raif’s shortness of breath with satisfaction. “It takes newcomers that way.”

  Addie kicked a handful of loose stones out of his path as he headed for the fire that burned low at the entrance to his stone cell. They were close to the edge here, and Raif could see white cranes in flight below him, turning great circles in the Rift as they paused on their journey north. Addie squatted by the fire and started turning over the embers with a moose bone. A shoulder of mutton, covered in a creamy skein of fat, sat upon a little iron trivet above the flames. Addie took a handful of dried leaves in his fist and crumbled them over the meat. Almost immediately the sharp fragrance of mint rose with the smoke. Addie looked expectantly at Raif, and Raif showed his appreciation with a solemn nod. He was beginning to understand that many things were rare in the Rift, and when a man crumbled herbs into a dish you would share that man did you honor.

  Taking a chance, Raif leant against the cliff and asked, “Were you from Wellhouse?”

  Addie said nothing, merely prodded the meat joint with his moose bone, testing to see if it was done. Pink juices hissed into the flames. Just as Raif thought he’d made a mistake—asking a Maimed Man about his past—the cragsman said, “Is it the ears that gave me away?”

  “They are big,” Raif conceded, grinning. “And the eyes, too,” he added hastily, not wanting to insult Addie further. “Like Dhoone’s, only grayer.”

  Addie nodded. Wellhouse had been sworn to Dhoone for fifteen hundred years, and intermarriage had bred similarities between them. Wellhouse called itself Dhoone’s Hand, and its boast was Our past bears witness to our glory. The future is ours to write. They kept the histories of the Great Settlement and the age before it, when clans lived in the Soft Lands to the south. Rumors told of a great, lead-lined strong room sunk so deep into the bedrock below the Wellhold that groundwater now surrounded it, sealing it shut for the past hundred years. The Wellhold had been built around an ancient stone well known as the Kings’ Fount, for every Dhoone king had been laved in its water before being crowned. The Kings’ Fount was said to hold the purest water in the clanholds, and in the dark times following the Wars of Apportionment, when clan upon clan fell victim to river fever, only Wellhouse pulled through without loss. Tem always said that Wellmen brewed the best malt in the clanholds because of that water.

  “It was a long time ago,” Addie said, spearing the meat joint with his hand-knife and lifting it from the fire. “And I never took the oath.”

  Raif recognized the pride in the cragsman’s words. I might have deserted my clan, he said, but I broke no oath. Even a Maimed Man had his self-respect. Raif exhaled softly. He knew what that made him.

  “I was never one for clans and clannish business,” Addie continued. “Rooms with closed doors were too much like prisons to me. Was always drawn to the heights, to the uplands and the bluffs. Would rather spend the night camped on a rock, with nothing but a green-burning fire to protect me, than sleep within four walls. Everyone said I was moon-touched, and my Da tried to beat it from me. He was a fountsman, one of the ten best warriors in the clan, and gods help him if his middle son was going to turn into a herder of sheep. He got his way, o’ course—my Da always did—and I was trained to the ax.” Addie snorted. “A short-arsed fool like me! ’Course, when it came time to take the oath my mind was set. Ran away the night before my swearing. Ran for the hills and never looked back.”

  As he was speaking Addie had been shaving the fat off the joint, revealing the tender gray-pink mutton beneath. He sliced deeply against the bone, freeing a wedge of meat. “Here,” he said, offering it to Raif with his knife. “Best eating to be had in the Rift.”

  Raif came forward to take it. Kneeling by the fire, he tore a piece from the mutton and pushed it in his mouth. The meat melted on his tongue, shedding the strong pungency of mint and sheep. “It’s good.”

  Addie nodded, unsmiling but pleased.

  “Did you stay in the clanhold,” Raif asked, “after you ran away?”

  “Mostly. Cragsmen live by the oldest laws in the clanholds, the Sheep Laws. We move through the territory of every clan, following our flocks. If our flocks graze in a foreign clan for over nine days then we owe that clan a sheep—that’s why we’re always on the move. ’Course, if you’re herding the bighorns, like I did, you favor the high country. And in the high country there’s few to tell whose toes you’re treading on and whose heather your sheep are grazing. There’s freedom, or something like it. You’re close enough to know you’re clan, yet not so close as to be ruled by it.”

  “Then why did you leave?”

  Addie set down the joint. His fingers were coated in grease and he wiped them against his tunic as he spoke. “Leave? Leave? No one leaves the clanholds. You’re either driven out or shunned. Look at Stillborn. Finest swordsman in his clan—but did they love him for it? No. They saw a monster, not a man. Me, I caught the bone fever the winter the Flow froze over. A pair of Blackhail cragsmen stole my sheep while I was passed out in the snow. When you get the bone fever real bad it takes years to rebuild your strength. You shake. There’s days when your vision shrinks to dots. And your legs, your damn legs, are like twigs soaked in water beneath you. And every time you take a step you fall, and every time you think to yourself I’m going to get the bastards who stole my sheep you make it as far as the first hill and your vision turns dark and your legs set to wobbling, and you might as well be dead.”

  Addie stopped and took a breath. When he spoke again his voice was softer, almost puzzled. “I wasn�
��t driven out so much as . . . disregarded. A cragsman who loses his hill legs is about as much use a pitchfork with no tines—at least, that’s what you’re told. I drifted around for a few years; spring lambing at Wellhouse, husbanding at the Dhoone Fair. But there’d be lapses, and my legs would go, and it wasn’t long afore no one would hire me for day-work.

  “That was the autumn I had my worst lapse. Walking east of Wellhouse, in the home of the Lost Clan. A fair name, I suppose, since I was lost myself. Woke up to find I’d been carted north to the Rift and left for dead. They call it a Cragsman’s Farewell. If you’re old, sick, or injured they cart you there and leave you. They give you a day’s food, and a choice. Either throw yourself in the Rift or cross it, become a Maimed Man.”

  Addie stood and faced the Rift. The white cranes were forming up for the flight north, and their mournful whoops filled the air. The cragsman didn’t seem to hear them. His attention was set upon the gray mists and stony peaks of the clanholds. He was quiet for a long time, and Raif waited, knowing he wasn’t done.

  “And you know what was the worst thing?” Addie said when he was ready. “The worst thing was that I actually believed I should jump. I cracked open my horn of guidestone and walked to the edge. Drew the circle, named the gods, and . . .” He snorted softly. “I couldn’t do it. Thought myself a coward at the time, but not anymore. I survived. And it seems to me that when you judge a man’s worth his ability to survive should be no small part of it.”

  Addie turned to face Raif. The cragsman looked worn and strangely vulnerable, but the pride was back in his eyes. “In the clanholds Stillborn was a monster and I was a fever-addled weaking. But look at us, look at every man, woman, and child in the Rift: we not only endure, we thrive.”