by J. V. Jones
Ahoooooooooo.
The wolf. So close now the horses would be stirring in the stalls and the chickens pecking at the wire in the coop. Inigar knew how they felt: uneasy, restive, trapped.
Sucking in icy air, he listened for a response. Every summer since the Hundred Year Cull, bands of Hailsmen rode out along the far borders to hunt pack wolves that ranged too close to the hold. The slain animals were skinned, not butchered. For while no Hailsman ate wolfmeat, many enjoyed the pleasure of walking on wolf-pelt rugs. In recent times the cull had grown sparse as packs moved north and west, out of range of Hailish steel. Pack wolves were cautious. They had pups and yearlings to protect, and their collective wisdom gave them an advantage over solitary beasts.
The animal that howled this night was not part of such a pack though, for nothing but deathly silence returned its call.
A lone wolf.
Fear and understanding slowly began to coalesce in Inigar’s thoughts. Something terrible was about to happen. Here, in the exact and sacred center of clan.
The Hail Wolf had returned home.
Inigar stood perfectly straight and still and decided what he would do. Mist from the guidestone glided across his face yet he did not shrink back or blink. Quite suddenly his greatest mistake was clear to him. It had not been misjudging Mace Blackhail or taking an oath from Raif Sevrance that he knew from the very beginning the boy was doomed to break. No. Grave though those errors were they did not match his failure to train an apprentice guide.
He had wanted Effie Sevrance so badly he’d refused to consider anyone else. She was so powerful, that was the thing, the augers that preceded her birth so potent. And she had been born to the stone. No one in any clan at any time Inigar could remember had been born to the guidestone. Yet that was the girl’s lore, and he had coveted its power for his office and himself. Possessiveness had made him blind. Other candidates had been worthy—Jebb Onnacre, Nitty Hart, Will Sperling—yet he had rejected them out of hand.
Now who would guide Blackhail when he was gone?
A sound, pitched so low it was almost beyond hearing, pulsed through the guidehouse like an earth tremor. This time Inigar heard it clearly, instantly recognizing the source. The Hailstone. The vast chunk of black granite and blackened silver that had been cut from the great stone fields of Trance Vor seven centuries earlier and floated a thousand miles upstream along the Flow was returning the call of the Hail Wolf.
Ice mist switched violently, sending waves rippling out from the stone. Inigar could smell it now: cold and vast, like the sky on a clear winter night. It was the smell of gods. A part of his brain, made just for this moment, came to life solely to recognize the scent. Tears sprang to his eyes. Here was everything he had ever wanted: to exist in the presence of gods. To regard them and be regarded. To know and to be known.
AHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO . . .
At his last moment what should a man do? Inigar thought of all he had been and all he had hoped to be . . . but he would not dwell on his failings. The time for that was done. He thought of clan; of the Shanks and Sevrances, the Blackhails, Murdocks, Ganlows and Lyes. Imperfect men and women, but the sum of the whole was good. He thought of Embeth Hare, the girl who would have wed him if he’d asked. “Inny,” she had said to him on that perfect summer day as they lay out on the hay piles, soaking in the sun. “If you decide to become Beardy’s apprentice you must never forget two things. It’s not enough that we fear the gods. We must love them also.” When he had asked her what the second thing was, she had pulled up her skirt and made love to him. His first and only time.
Embeth had always been smarter than him. Wind whipped against his face as ice mist started to rotate around the guidestone. Faster and faster it moved, round and round, blasting tools and smoking embers from its path. The gods were leaving Blackhail. And what sort of gods would it make them if they left quietly without a sound?
No longer able to stand in the hurricane, Inigar dropped to his knees. The air was full of debris now; strips of leather, shammies, ashes, woodchips, and dust. The oak workbench he’d sat at every day slid across the room, legs squealing. A powerful blast of air sent it smashing against the wall. Inigar felt little shards of oak pierce his shoulder. A moment later something punctured his hip. Looking down he saw his chisel poking from the pad of muscle at the top of his thigh. He took its handle in his fist and yanked it out.
An eye was forming above the center of the guidestone. It was beautiful and terrible, a calmness in the storm of spinning clouds. A noise, bass and so full of power it set the walls and floor vibrating, boomed out of the stone. Inigar’s eyes and nose began to bleed. His pigskin cloak was snatched from his back and sucked into the tow. He was beyond feeling pain now, and barely registered the missiles slamming against his side. He was the guide of Clan Blackhail and he had his chisel in his hand, and witnessing the gods’ power was not a bad way to die.
Suddenly everything stopped. Litter dropped from the air, thudding and tinkling. Mist sank away like water down a drain. The guidestone stood still and silent, as old as the earth itself. Wonder and sadness filled Inigar’s heart. Who would guide Blackhail when he was gone?
And then the Hailstone exploded into a million bits of shrapnel and the clan guide knew no more.
The man who had lost his soul approached the house. Timbers framing the doorway were black and shiny. Creosote deposited during the burning gave them the oily iridescence of ravens’ wings. The door that had once been suspended between them had fallen on the front stoop. Its metal hinge pins had popped out of their casings like cooked sausage meat. Charred panels in the door crumbled as the man’s weight came down on them. In a different life he had stained and waxed the panels, proofing them against the brutal winter storms that hit from the north.
Protecting this house from harm.
The man rocked backward, bringing force to bear on the heel of his left boot, crushing the brittle wood, stretching the moment before he entered the house.
When he was ready he stepped into the remains of his hallway. Fire had burned intensely here. The interior walls had been limestone-and-horsehair plaster skimmed onto wood lath. His mistake had been to paint them. Oil in the paint had accelerated the burn, working against the natural retardant of the lime. The smoke produced would have been black and toxic. It would have burned holes in a child’s lungs.
The man did not pause. He could no longer trust himself that far. Walking through the center of the house he passed the stairs and the black skeleton of the stair rail. Snow had found its way in through the partially collapsed roof and open windows, and lay in thin drifts against the risers of each of the nine steps. The man knew snow; knew that what he looked at was dry with age, the granules loosely packed and rolled into pellets by the wind. Footsteps stamped into the drifts held no interest for him. Men had come later, after the house had cooled and the snow fallen. The curious and opportunistic. Young boys on dares; thieves in search of locked boxes, silverware, metal for scrapping; officials gathering information along with a fine story to tell their wives over supper. The man understood the pull of such places. Death and ruin dwelt here, and a person could come and view it and be glad it was not his family, his house, his life.
Ignoring the footsteps, the man headed down the central hall toward the kitchen. His mind was working; cataloguing details, noting absences, testing them against the theory coalescing in his head.
It was the only way to remain sane.
The devil was in the details. The damage to the doors and exterior walls was far greater than in the interior of the house. Here, in the kitchen, the stone fireplace was barely damaged. The fire irons had been stolen, not melted. The facing stones were black, yet the heat had been insufficient to crack the mortar between them. On the opposite wall, where the external door was located, the destruction was far worse. The two windows were black holes. Plaster surrounding them had warped and cracked. Varnish on the adjoining floorboards had blistered. Part of the wall abov
e the eastern window had fallen in taking a chunk of the upper story along with it. The man looked up and saw sky. When he looked down he noticed that one of the house’s exterior sandstone blocks had tumbled in. Its once dusty orange face had been smelted into glass.
Xhalia ex nihl. All becomes nothing: words he’d learned from the Sull. They spoke them in times of grief as a comfort . . . and in times of joy as a reminder. He’d thought them wise and fair.
He was wrong.
His wife and daughters were dead. His three girls and the woman he had loved for half his life were gone.
Murdered.
The moment he had turned the corner in the road and seen the burned house he knew. He had lived with risk for so long that the anticipation of disaster had become a reflex, a string held at tension waiting to snap. A muscle contracting in his gut had told him everything. The walk through the house had simply confirmed it. The blaze had burned from the outside in. Fires had been set at windows and doors. The occupants had been trapped inside and forced to fill their lungs with hot, lethal smoke.
The man pushed a fist against the charred plaster and took a breath. And then another. His wife and girls had trusted him with their safety. And he had failed them. He, who knew more than most about evil and the men and women who practiced it, and knew just how long they would wait for an opportunity to bring harm. He, who had dedicated his life to opposing the dark and unfathomable forces of destruction.
Those forces had come to bear on this house—he had led them here. How could he have been such a fool? How could he have imagined that it was possible to outwit them? They were beyond his comprehension; unbound by earthly forms. What had he been thinking when he’d made the decision to hide his most precious girls from them in plain sight?
Eighteen, five and one; those were their ages. Add them up and you’d get exactly the number of years he’d known his wife.
The man breathed. Inhaled. Exhaled. Pushed himself off from the wall.
The back door was there so he took it. Never again would he enter this house.
He had one job to do, and he did not care how it was done. Those who had planned and executed this would die. He had one cold and empty lifetime to take care of it.
Outside, the late-afternoon sun was shining. In the woods beyond the yard a woodpecker was drilling a softwood for lice. A brisk wind spun clouds to the south and drove the stale smell of char back in the house. The man’s gaze swept over the remains of the kitchen garden. A row of unharvested winter kale was yellowing in a raised bed. Tarp still covered the wood-pile. Three distinct earthen mounds beneath the shade oak caught his attention.
The ground had been too hard to bury them.
The man swayed. His first act of will was to steady himself, to force his knees to rigidity and suck air into his lungs. His second was to kill his lifelong instinct to call on the gods for comfort. The gods were dead, and he was no longer bound by their commands.
Moving forward, he cut a straight path to the graves. Only three. The baby must have been buried with her mother. A different man would have taken comfort in that.
The man without a soul refused it.
All becomes nothing, he murmured as he knelt by the graves and began to dig.
ONE
Want
Ash.
Raif woke with a start, immediately sitting upright. His heart was pumping hard in his chest and there was a rawness in his throat as if he had been screaming. A quick glance at Bear showed the sturdy little hill pony’s ears were twitching. Probably had been screaming then.
Ash’s name.
Raif shook his head, hoping to drive away all thoughts of her. Nothing could be gained by them. Madness lay in wait here, in the vast and shifting landscape of the Great Want, and to worry about Ash March and crave her presence was a sure way to drive himself insane. She was gone. He could not have her. It was as simple and as unchangeable as that.
Rising to his feet, Raif forced himself to evaluate the landscape. Thirst made his tongue feel big in his mouth. He ignored it. Light was moving through the Want and the last of the bright stars were fading. In the direction that might have been east, the horizon was flushed with the first suggestion of sun. The landscape seemed familiar. Scale-covered rock formations rose from the buckled limestone floor like stalagmites, craggy and jagged, silently farming minerals as they grew. On the ground, a litter of lime fragments and calcified insect husks cracked beneath his boots like chicken bones. Bear was snuffling something that a while back might have been a plant. As Raif’s gaze moved from the distant purple peaks floating above the mist, to the canyon lines that forked Want-north across the valley floor, he felt some measure of relief. It looked pretty much like the place he had set camp in last night.
Anchored, that was the word. The Want had not drifted while he slept.
Grateful for that, Raif crossed over to Bear and started rubbing down her coat. She head-butted him, sniffing for water, but it was too early for her morning ration so he pushed her head back gently and told her, “No.”
The puncture wounds caused by the Shatan Maer’s claws had stiffened his left shoulder muscle, and as he worked on Bear’s hooves he felt some pain. When he made a quick movement up her leg, a cold little tingle traveled toward his heart. Stopping for a moment, he put a hand on Bear’s belly to steady himself. Something about the pain, a kind of liquid probing, had unsettled him, and he couldn’t seem to get the Shatan Maer out of his head. He could smell its rankness, see its cunning dead eyes as it came for him.
Shivering, Raif stepped away from the pony. “Do I look mad to you?” he asked her as he massaged the aching muscle.
Bear flicked her tail lazily; a pony’s equivalent of a shrug. The gesture was strangely reassuring. Sometimes that was all it took to drive away your fears: the indifference of another living thing. The pain was just the last remnants of an infection, nothing more.
Although he didn’t much feel like it, Raif set about taking stock of his meager supplies. Fresh water had become a problem. The aurochs’ bladder rested slack against a block of limestone, its contents nearly drained. The little that remained tasted of rawhide. Raif doubted whether it would last the day. There was food—sprouted millet for the pony, hard cheese and pemmican for himself—yet he knew enough not to be tempted by it. He wanted to be sure where his next drink was coming from before he ate. Yesterday he’d learned that it wasn’t enough just to see water. In the Want you had to jump in it and watch your clothes get wet before you could be absolutely certain it was there. Yesterday he and Bear had tracked leagues out of their way to pursue a glassy shimmer in the valley between two hills. They stood in that valley today. It wasn’t just dry, it was bone dry, and Raif had been left feeling like a fool. You’d think he would have learned by now.
Unable to help himself, he flicked the cap off the waterskin and squirted a small amount into his mouth. The fluid was gone before he had a chance to swallow it, sucked away by parched gums. He was tempted to take more, but resisted. His duty to his animal came first.
As he poured a careful measure into the pony’s waxed snufflebag, Raif wondered what heading to take next. As best he could tell, five days had passed since he’d left the Fortress of Grey Ice. The first few days were lost to him, gone in a fever dream of blood poisoning and pain. He did not recall leaving the fortress or choosing a route to lead them out of the Want. He remembered waking one morning and looking at his left arm and not being sure that it belonged to him. The skin floated on top of the muscle as if separated by a layer of liquid. It leaked when he pressed it, clear fluid that seeped through a crack Raif supposed must be a wound. The strange thing was it hadn’t hurt. Even stranger, he could not recall being concerned.
At some point he must have regained his mind, although there were times when he wasn’t sure. The wounds on his neck were healing. He’d stitched the deepest one without use of a mirror, so gods only knew what he looked like. As for his arm, it certainly looked a lot better. And
he was definitely sure it was his. His mind was a different story though, a little foggy around the edges and prone to fancies. The first day that he tried to ride his head had felt too light, and he’d convinced himself he was better off walking instead.
He hadn’t been on Bear since then, and he’d spent the last three days stubbornly walking. Occasionally Bear looked at him quizzically, and had once gone as far as head-butting the small of his back to encourage him to ride. She had wanted to help, he knew that, and the one thing she had to offer was her ability to bear his weight.
Raif licked his lips. They were as dry as tree bark. Reaching inside the grain bag, he scooped up a handful of millet. Bear, whose thoughts were never far from food, trotted over to investigate. She ate from his hand, lipping hard to get at the grains that were jammed between his fingers. She didn’t understand that in many ways she was the one who was caring for him. Her company alone was worth more than a month’s worth of supplies. Bear’s stoic acceptance of her situation lightened his heart. Caring for her needs—making sure she had enough food and water, tending to her coat, skin, and mouth, and keeping her shoes free of stone—kept him from focusing on himself.
And then there was her Want sense. The little hill pony borrowed from the Maimed Men had an instinct for moving through the Great Want. Instead of fighting the insubstantial nature of the landscape, she gave herself up to it, became a leaf floating downstream. As a clansman trained to navigate dense forests, follow the whisper-light trails left by ice hares and foxes, and hold his bearings on frozen tundra in a whiteout, Raif found traveling through the Want frustrating. The sun might rise in the morning, but then again it might not. Entire mountain ranges could sail on the horizon like ships. Clouds formed rings that hung in the sky, unaffected by prevailing winds, for days. At night a great wheel of stars would turn in the heavens, but you could never be sure what constellations it would contain. Sometimes the wheel reversed itself and moved counter to every wisdom concerning the stars that Raif had ever been taught. Orienting oneself in such an environment was close to impossible. As soon as you had established the direction of due north, decided on a course to lead you out, the Want began to slip through your fingers like snowmelt. Nothing was fixed here. Everything—the sky, the land, the sun and the moon—drifted to the movement of some unknowable tide.