by J. V. Jones
Dagro’s dress would be forever ruined with sweat, she thought sadly, as perspiration poured from her body into the fabric. Perhaps it was just as well. It made her act like someone else when she wore it.
Stannig Beade knew something Raina did not, for when they drew close enough to the flames to smell their hair and clothes crisping, he made a small gesture with his finger and stepped ahead of her.
As he moved forward the flames died and he entered a world of smoke. Confused, Raina followed him. The stench of burned soil was sickening, and the ground she stepped on was hot. Fire had dazzled her eyes and she thought she saw a figure slipping away from the opposite side of the trench.
“Light the Menhir Fire,” Beade ordered, his voice ugly now that they were out of earshot of the crowd.
Raina was glad to get away from him and crossed the short distance to the platform. Fire had tarnished the silver, and the platform’s walls were almost black. Above them, the hides covering the Scarpestone were smoking. Bending at the waist, Raina pushed the torch toward the small stack of sticks laying on the platform’s edge. With a jolt of surprise she realized the hides did not reach all the way down to the hole. The foot of the Scarpestone was visible and she could clearly see the pale circle of new stone that had been exposed by Stannig Beade’s drill. The hole in its center was the blackest thing Raina had ever seen in her life. It was the color of all things forsaken.
Stannig Beade is right, she realized with a chill. This is no game we play. That hole was a passage for the gods, and if they did not like what they saw tonight they would not take it. Yes, Stannig Beade had his tricks—someone had flash-doused the flames for him—but this was no trick. And he and she wanted the same thing: the gods to return to Blackhail.
Sobered by her thoughts, Raina lit the Menhir Fire and prayed for the Stone Gods to notice.
TWENTY-THREE
Hard Truths at the Dhoonewall
The only remaining hillfort in the Dhoonewall that remained livable was a kidney-shaped mound of dressed stone that had a second roof built on top of its original slate roof. The second roof consisted of massive panels of copper soldered together and bent in place, that were secured, as far as Vaylo Bludd could see, by man-size needles that had been driven through the copper and between the slates and into the original wooden beams underneath. Had to be about a hundred of those iron rods sticking out of the roof, Vaylo reckoned, and he wouldn’t be surprised that if he actually decided to take the roof stair all the way up to the top, walked across the scaly green carpet of verdigris and stood by one of those black needles he would see it was a spear. Fighting men had erected this roof, using whatever resources they had at hand; copper stockpiled from the mines to the south and clumsy spears they did not need. Vaylo could imagine it. Their roof was leaking and they were wet and miserable. They’d applied to their chief and been ignored. Attacks were coming from the north, their equipment was rusting, their clothes black with mold; a supply wagon had failed to arrive. Pissed off, they’d forged this roof, using a fortune of Dhoone’s precious copper in its making and sending an angry message to their chief. Behold us, we are sons of Dhoone. The force with which the spears have been thrust into the roof, punching great dents in the metal, told all.
Of course the second roof barely worked better than the first. The soldiers never did seal up the dents, and rain found its way through them and ran down onto the first roof and along well worn paths to the mold-barrel fortress below.
Vaylo didn’t like to breathe the air. He frowned at the slimy black film on the walls and found it surprisingly easy to imagine it invading his lungs. He had bid Nan do what she could, but she was one woman fighting against a horde of spores and quick as she flung back shutters to let in the wind the little black devils were invading her mop bucket, infiltrating the very agent of their own destruction. Nan laughed about it, and staunchly refused help. Vaylo had a feeling she liked being the only woman amongst a hundred and eighty men.
Well close enough to a hundred and eighty . . . but he would think about that later, when the sun wasn’t shining in squares upon the flagstone floor that were almost warm when you walked on them, and the laugher of the bairns wasn’t tumbling down the spiral-cut stairs.
Vaylo passed through the hillfort’s central hall and into its northern ward. The building and part of the wall it defended was wedged between two hills. It was a basic structure with three rounded wards at groundlevel, three smaller ones on the floor above, and a warren of cells and store rooms on the upper level. Upwall, about two hundred feet to the east, a broken bit of watchtower with a partially collapsed roof remained standing. Vaylo hadn’t gone up there yet, but he intended to do so soon as he had noticed Cluff Drybannock spent much of his time there. Drybone had visited the other five hillforts in the chain and pronounced them larger and better sited, and wholly destroyed. “Tumbled stone and freestanding walls are all that are left,” Dry had said. “The roofs are gone and fox pines have seeded in the wards.”
The hillforts still made little sense to Vaylo, though he was glad for his own sake that Dhoone had built them. Situated on the northern edge of the Copper Hills, they looked down over the scrubby fellfields, heaths and uplands that lay to the north. They had seen hard fighting in their time, that much he could tell, for there were places in the curtainwall where you could see the ghosts of long-past impacts: spider cracks of the kind that were caused by heavy shot, sections of stone that had melted to glass, craters and burn rings. The sight of them gave Vaylo a queer feeling in his chest. He knew the Maimed Men controlled a broken city somewhere to the north, but he wasn’t sure if they had ever been capable of such a violent assault.
The Dog Lord chided himself as he passed through the ward door and onto the battle terrace. He should have learned the histories from Molo Bean and Ockish Bull. It would be reassuring to know exactly what the deal was here. It could be that a thousand years ago some bold Blackhail chief had launched a fiendish attack from the north. Maybe, gods bless them, the Lost Clan had been in ascendancy and Dhoone had felt threatened by their closeness. The clanholds were nothing if not stingy with their histories. Withy and Wellhouse kept tally, so the stories went, and there was something about a locked room at Castlemilk that was said to contain precious scrolls. For fifty-odd years now the Dog Lord had—in the deep and longstanding tradition of Bludd chiefs—disdained learning the history of the clanholds, but he was beginning to regret his ignorance.
Mistakes have been made. Gods willing I’ll make no more. Thinking of Ockish Bull made the Dog Lord smile. His words performed the alchemy of placing contrition right next to defiance.
Vaylo’s smile held as he spread his hands wide on the stone balustrade and leaned out into the fresh air. He was looking north over the fort valley and the headlands beyond it. The afternoon sun was blocked by the fortress at his back. This was the best spot in the entire building, this broad, half-roofed battle terrace that extended out from the northern ward. Standing here a man could imagine he was sailing north on a great ship through a strait that passed between two islands. The wind blew in your face no matter what time of day or night you came here and you could not see the earth below your feet.
Nan had commandeered part of the terrace as a playground for the bairns, and pretty much every man in the entire hillfort came out here a couple of times a day to breathe some good air instead of moldy foulness. A couple of men were out here now, sitting on the crates Nan had brought out for the bairns. Mogo Salt and Odwin Two Bear were sitting with their backs against the fortress wall, spearing carrots from a copper bowl with the tips of their swords. At the opposite end of the balcony a man whom Vaylo did not recognize was keeping watch, armed with a beautiful limewood self bow.
Vaylo called across to him. “Where is Drybone?”
The man turned, revealing the high cheekbones and finely sculpted bonemass of the Sull. “Sir, he is in the tower.”
He was accoutered with tokens of Bludd—the red leather grip o
n his sheathed sword, the hollowed-out bone containing his measure of guidestone, the carbuncles of garnet on his cloak brooch—yet Vaylo did not know him.
“What is your name?”
“I’m Kye Hillrunner, once of Trenchland, now of Bludd.” His voice was proud but Vaylo detected the nervousness underneath it. He was young, and this was the first time he had met his chief.
“Drybone took your oath?”
“Yes, sir. Eight months back while I was housed at Bludd.”
Now that he had gotten a better look at the boy, Vaylo saw that his features lacked the icy perfection of full-blooded Sull. “How long have you been with us?”
“Five years. I worked on Ockish Bull’s horse farm. That’s where I met Cluff Drybannock and he began to train me.”
Vaylo nodded; he thought the young man needed it. “So you met Ockish?”
“He died soon after I got there. His son let me stay on.”
So Ockish had taken the boy in as a tied clansman. It fit, for all Sull, even Trenchlanders, were known for their skill at breeding horses. And Ockish always had a soft spot for strays. Vaylo knew better than to ask Kye who his father was or what claim he had to Bludd. If he was a bastard that was his business. Subject closed.
“Keep the watch for Bludd,” the Dog Lord said to him in parting. “We are chosen by the Stone Gods to guard their borders.”
It was part of the clan boast and Vaylo hardly knew what made him say it, yet if he was surprised by his own words, he was surprised more by the young man’s response.
“I know it. That is why I am here.”
A cold finger of fear touched the base of Vaylo’s spine. He looked at the young warrior, saw the slow burn of purpose in his inhumanly bright Sull eyes. It was not easy to turn away from it, yet Vaylo did, and headed back into the dampness of the fort.
What was happening here? he asked himself as he headed for the east ward. What trick was Ockish Bull playing from his grave? And what was Drybone’s part in this? How many more Sull Bluddsmen would he stumble upon within these walls? Oh it was true enough Bludd had always taken in its share of Trenchlander mongrels—they shared a border after all—yet Vaylo could not set aside his agitation. The boast, the damn boast. We are Clan Bludd, chosen by the Stone Gods to watch their borders. Death is our companion. A life long lived is our reward. Fifty-three years he had lived with those words, fired by their hard-driving pride. When had they changed on him? How could words mean one thing one day and then the next day something else?
The blond swordsman Big Borro opened the fortified east door for him, tugging back the greasy hank of leather that hung in place of a pull ring. “Snow tomorrow,” he said as Vaylo stepped out onto the Dhoonewall.
Snow? Vaylo frowned at the sun and cloudless sky. It didn’t seem possible, yet he was wise enough not to voice a contradiction. It had been sixty years since a Borro man was last caught in a storm.
The Dhoonewall was cracked and weather-beaten. Its northern edge had been carved by the wind, and the breakwall had tumbled so there was nothing to stop a man from stepping over the brink. Entire sections of stone walkway were missing, the gaps overlaid with loose planks. In others areas the stone had buckled and erupted upward, forming shambling mounds where weeds thrived. Vaylo was careful where he put his feet. From where he stood he could look both north and south, and the great breadth of the earth was visible. The Copper Hills rolled out around him in purple and rust-brown waves, a sight to thrill a clansman’s heart.
Now the tower was another matter, and as Vaylo closed upon it he had some fear for his head. Chunks of stone had fallen recently. Others looked imminent. Unlike the main building, the tower had not been capped with copper and its collapsed and black-rotted roof timbers still gripped a tinkling deathtrap of slates. Vaylo made a dash for the door. Reminding himself that when he’d held the finest structure in the clanholds—the Dhoonehouse at Blue Dhoone Lake—he’d never much enjoyed it, the Dog Lord entered the collapsed tower.
It smelled like a wellshaft, and echoed like one too. Both the tower and the Dhoonewall sank their foundations deep into the cleft between the two hills, and the first thing Vaylo spotted was a way down. Should have brought a torch, he thought, for although the roof had fallen in, six stories still came between him and the light. A single arrow slit high on the west wall provided the only source of illumination. Vaylo moved cautiously. Underfoot, the mold was as slick as ice.
“Dry!” he called out, frustrated. “Are you there?”
The sound of footsteps echoed along the tower’s rounded walls. A line of masonry dust sifted from the ceiling. Vaylo’s gaze tracked a movement across a dark space he had assumed was solid stone and Cluff Drybannock came into view.
“I apologize for not lighting a lamp.”
Vaylo huffed. “You did not know I was a-coming. Here. Take my arm. Lead me up.”
It did not occur to Vaylo to doubt Dry’s ability to see in the darkness. From boyhood Cluff Drybannock had always fared best by night. Whilst boys older than him slept peacefully in their beds, he was out on the redcourt, practicing his forms. Vaylo remembered spotting Dry once when he didn’t realize he was being watched. A boy of twelve rendered blue by the moonlight, repeating the same sword stroke a hundred and twenty times.
Cluff Drybannock took his chief’s arm and guided him up the stairs. At some point between the first and second story the light increased, yet neither man made the motion to pull apart. Vaylo told himself that Dry was probably worried that his old chief would slip and break his neck.
Wind drilled through the tower. Vaylo wondered how much longer there was to go. The soft and familiar pain below his heart was letting him know that it resented stairs. Finally Dry slowed the climb and led his chief through a stone arch into a circular, vaulted chamber with boarded-up windows. The center of the vault had collapsed and a heap of stones, black lumber and roof tiles lay on the floor beneath it. Vaylo peered up through the hole and saw sky.
“The floor above holds up the remains of the roof.”
This did not seem like an especially comforting statement. Vaylo ignored it and crossed to the north-facing window. It seemed odd that Drybone had removed the middle boards from this window but not the one facing south. “I met one of your new men today,” he said. “Kye Hillrunner.”
Cluff Drybannock nodded, but did not speak. Vaylo supposed he had no reason to; no question had been asked.
Dry was dressed in serviceable gray wool pants and a tunic of gray suede. The quarter-moon he’d painted just beyond the crown of his hairline had faded, and although opal rings still bound his waist-length hair, Vaylo was gratified to see that his wrist leathers and the grip of his longsword were red.
“It is clear enough this day to see the Rift.” Drybone’s fine and powerful hand fell again on his chief’s arm, his touch light as he directed Vaylo to the exact direction. “It is the dark line on the break of the horizon.”
Vaylo saw it. Without Dry he would never have recognized it for a gap in the world so little did the line in the far distance give away. “Is that where the Maimed Men live?”
“No. They lie east of here where the Rift is at its deepest.”
“You watch it.”
Again there was no question and Cluff Drybannock was silent.
“I set off for the Rift once,” Vaylo said, his gaze still ahead. “I was nine and I was mad at Gullit. Decided to take off and never come back. Rode all the way to the Deadwoods, three whole days, before the anger finally left me and I turned for home with my tail between my legs. Had an idea about joining the Maimed Men.”
“This Bludd warrior is glad you did not join them.”
Vaylo was glad he was facing forward. Tears spiked in his eyes and he could let the wind blow them away. Seven sons and not a kind word or touch from one of them. He had been a bad father, he knew it. Obsessed with matters of clan, short-tempered, selfish, but surely he had never been cruel? You were, countered a hard voice in his head that s
ounded suspiciously like his father’s. You resented your sons for being born legitimate, for not having to fight tooth and nail as you did. It was true enough, that was why things were different between him and Dry. They were bastards, and they knew all the small and big things that meant.
Keeping his voice level, Vaylo said, “Tell me why you watch.”
Seconds passed and the wind blew and then Cluff Drybannock replied, “My blood makes me.”
The same cold finger that had touched Vaylo earlier touched again in the exact same place. He had not expected such an answer, but now that he heard it he could not claim surprise. All along he had known his fostered son was made of a different, older substance than he himself. Others had known it too. Ockish Bull had helped rear Dry, and upon his death had left him a small purse. The great swordmaster Vingus Harking, great-uncle to the HalfBludd chief Onwyn HalfBludd, had come out of retirement, wheeling himself north in a cart pulled by dogs, just to train Dry for one year. Vingus had worked with others during his time at Bludd, but it was word of Cluff Drybannock’s burgeoning skill that had roused him from his fossilage at HalfBludd. You could not meet Cluff Drybannock and not realize his worth.
Something glinting in the headland beyond the fort valley drew Vaylo’s gaze. “Is there a stream over there?”
Drybone followed his gaze. “No. It is the Field of Graves and Swords. I have walked there. Most swords no longer stand. Those that do are rusted and no longer have their points.”
A myth made true. As a boy Vaylo had heard of the Field of Graves and Swords, a graveyard where warriors were buried with their swords sticking up through the soil. He had thought it a fine thing, for the field was said to form the first line of defense for a legendary fortress—even in death the warriors guarded the fastness. It was strange to learn that this small hillfort was the site of such a legend.
“What happened to the nine missing men?” Vaylo asked, no longer sure if he even changed the subject.