by J. V. Jones
Cluff Drybannock touched the container made of bone at his waist. “I sent them on a sortie northeast. They never returned.”
“What was their purpose?”
“To gather intelligence on the Maimed Men, and hunt freely if they so chose.”
“You rode out to find them?”
Silence, and then as if by pre-arrangement both men moved out from the window and turned to look at each other full-on. Dry’s brick-colored face was grave. “I headed a search party. Their tracks were not hard to follow and we found . . .” he struggled for a word, “their remains within the day.”
Vaylo touched his container of powdered guidestone. “Who died?”
Cluff Drybannock listed their names in perfect formal ranking beginning with the longest-serving sworn clansmen, Derek Blunt, and ending with the yearman, Will Pool, brother to Midge, who had taken his first oath seven months back. Vaylo knew them all. “Gods keep them.”
Knowing he had no choice but to press on, he said, “Their horses?”
“Also gone.”
“Dead or taken?”
Dry’s nostrils flared. “Both. This warrior does not know a word to describe what was left of the men and their horses. Their shadows were left behind, burned into the grass.”
Oh gods. “How long ago did this happen?”
“Sunset will mark the eleventh day.”
Vaylo had to walk, and began to circle the vaulted room. His brain twitched as shocks ran through it. Bluddsmen dead. Derek Blunt had been forty-three, an experienced headman and an expert mounted swordsman. How could a heavily armed party come upon him without warning? “Was there sign of the enemy?”
“Big Borro found something close by, a sword-shaped hole cut into the turf. We dug and tried to find what had caused it. Six feet down we hit rock, but the sword-shaped object had burned through it and could not be reached.”
Halting by the pile of roof debris, Vaylo turned over a rotten timber with the toe of his boot. Wood lice scuttled away from the light. “What’s happening, Dry? What is the threat we are facing?”
Cluff Drybannock stood to attention, shoulders straight and chin high. “I fear the worst, my lord and father. In the days before I came to Bludd I heard things. The Trenchlands are full of whispers. Some say the trees start them. I was a boy and much ignored. Men and women would talk freely in the tavern where I served them. They did not believe a boy of seven had ears. Most were Sull or part Sull, and sometimes when the hour grew late their talk would turn to the threat growing in the darkness. They spoke of Ben Horo, the Time Before, and Maer Horo, the Age of Darkness. War had visited them in the past and would again. Most agreed the auguries were bad. Xalla a’mar, night is rising, they would say. Li’sha mut i’scaras. We must grease our swords.
“The words pulled the iron in my blood like a magnet. Why, I cannot say. A thousand years have passed since the shadows last rose, and the Sull believe they are due to rise again. I fear those shadows, my father. I fear our clansmen died by hands that were formed from maer dan, shadowflesh. I fear we stand at the closing of an Age and if we are not vigilant and fail to fight, the Age will see an end to the Stone Gods and to clan.”
Vaylo breathed steadily and showed no reaction to his fostered son’s words. Many things struck him at once, yet in the silence that followed it was sadness that took hold and grew. It had been unsettling to hear Dry speak those Sull words with such casual precision. Twenty-five years in clan yet it seemed the language of his birth was undiminished. Unsettling also to hear him speak for the first time about those years before he came to Bludd. Vaylo had known nothing about Dry’s boyhood in the Trenchlands, save that when he arrived at the Bluddhouse he was badly beaten and close to starving. Yet even unsettled, Vaylo had been stirred with pride. Cluff Drybannock was a man worthy of respect. My eighth son. And much though Vaylo wanted him to be clan, he was not. A divide stood between them and if Vaylo looked forward he saw a parting in the distance, a dark line on the horizon. Like the Rift.
Not realizing he was massaging the pain beneath his heart, Vaylo said, “Tell me what killed my men, Dry. If we encounter them again we must understand what we fight.”
Shadows in the tower vault lengthened and grew richer as Dry spoke. Light shining between the slats of the boarded-up west window threw horizontal stripes across the walls as the wind died to a murmur.
“It is told that what the universe creates it will destroy. Gods are birthed with stars to give us light, and Xhan Nul, the Endlords, are birthed into the void of space to bring destruction. These powers are locked in a war that is finite. For many Ages, the gods and the light have prevailed. Earth has thrived. The sun shines and makes life. Civilizations grow and people have inhabited all lands that can sustain them. The Sull are taught this cannot last. From the moment of its creation the world was doomed. It exists and therefore must end. The destiny of the Endlords is to bring about that destruction.
“The destiny of the Sull is to stand against them. Many Ages ago, after the War of Blood and Shadow, the Sull sealed the Endlords and the creatures they had taken in a prison named the Blind. How they did this, I do not know. The walls of the prison are said to exist in a place beyond the physical realm. We cannot see or touch them. Once in a thousand years one is born, Jal Rakhar, the Reach, who can approach these walls and break them. I have heard whispers from the forests east of Bludd. The Reach exists and she has caused a crack in the wall between worlds. And the Sull make ready for battle as the first of the Endlords’ creatures force their way out.”
It took a moment for Vaylo to realize Cluff Drybannock had stopped speaking, for his words lived on in the quiet of dusk that followed. How long had they been in this tower? To Vaylo it felt like days.
I am an old man, he told himself. A chief in search of a clan. This battle is not mine.
It took an effort to speak. “These are the creatures you believe slew Derek Blunt and his men?” After the words spun with cool beauty by his fostered son, Vaylo’s voice sounded harsh and world-weary to his ears. “What are we dealing with here?”
Cluff Drybannock did not appear to notice. All the while he had been speaking he had not moved from his place by the north window. He did not move now as he replied. “The Endlords are voids that can spin matter around themselves and take on living form. They walk the earth to claim men and other living beasts for their armies. One touch of an Endlord and you are taken. Unmade. Men become other, their flesh sucked dry of life and replaced with an absence of light. The Endlords arm them with Kil Ji, voided steel, which is said to be forged from the strange metals of time itself. If you are killed by voided steel you are also taken.”
Vaylo was beginning to understand things now. “The sword-shaped pit in the earth?”
Dry dropped his gaze from his chief. “This warrior believes it was made by Kil Ji.”
Dragging a hand over the stubble on his chin, Vaylo looked through the hole in the roof at the sky. It was the color of deep mountain lakes. Underwater, that was how he felt, plunged from a world that allowed him to stand upright and see ahead, into one that was murky and had no place to rest his feet. Nine men lost, and if Cluff Drybannock’s fears were true they weren’t even dead. Did that mean they would never rest in the Stone Halls of the gods?
“Yet they died fighting,” Vaylo said quietly, barely aware he was speaking out loud.
You could not be a clansman and fail to comprehend the full horror of those words. Dry nodded softly. “The Stone Gods have long memories. If the men are ever freed from the thrall of the Endlords the manner of their deaths will not go unrewarded.”
The Dog Lord found he had to think about this statement for a moment. Light was leaving the tower quickly now, making way for the chill of night. “How can my men be freed?”
Straightaway he could see this was a question that Cluff Drybannock had hoped not to answer—perhaps not even to himself. He turned to look out the window and fill his lungs with fresh air. “Once a man or woma
n is unmade they join the ranks of the Endlords. They too will wield Kil Ji and unlike those who are imprisoned, they have no need to force their way out. They are here, amongst us, and they walk by night. To reclaim them for the Stone Gods we must slay them through the heart.”
“Mother of Gods,” Vaylo murmured.
They both fell silent after that. Vaylo could see Dry’s profile, see him blinking as he worked the air in and out of his chest. After a while Vaylo asked him, “How do you know so much? A boy eavesdropping in a tavern would not have learned all this.”
Dry turned so he could look directly at his chief. “The ranger Angus Lok told me much of this last winter, when we held him in the pit cell below Dhoone.”
Of course. Vaylo should have guessed. He knew the ranger well. When they’d met all those months ago in the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes, Angus Lok had tried to tell him some of the very same things. He had certainly warned him. “Return to Bludd and marshal your forces and wait for the Long Night to come. Forget about Dhoone and this roundhouse and your fancy of naming yourself Lord of the Clans. Days darker than night lie ahead.” Vaylo had barely marked the words at the time, so intent was he on holding onto the Dhoonehouse. Yet Angus Lok had found someone else nearby who was willing to listen, someone whose blood pulled him toward the Sull and their causes, someone who was hungry to know.
Vaylo searched for how he felt. Almost you could not blame the ranger—bring a snake into your house and you will end up bitten—but he was less certain about Dry’s role. Should he have listened so eagerly? How could you stop a man from wanting to know the history of his people? You could not, and to do so would deprive him of his freedom. That was that, then. There was no disloyalty on Dry’s part, only listening. Yet it still hurt.
Dry stood waiting and Vaylo knew him well enough to know that he was anxious about his chief’s reaction. Vaylo made an effort. “Angus Lok’s information is usually sound, though he is particular in how and where he metes it out.” It was the best he could do for now, and Dry sensed it.
Dry could have pointed out that Angus Lok only told him what he would have eventually discovered for himself, yet he did not. Instead, he said, “A half-moon is rising.”
It was a truce. Cluff Drybannock was part Sull and he could not deny it—did not want to deny it—and Vaylo knew he had little choice but to accept it. Neither man wanted to dwell on what it meant for the future: Sull goals and clan goals would not remain the same. For now they were both united in defending the hillfort: leave it at that.
“Let us walk in the moonlight back to the fort,” Vaylo said. Cluff Drybannock crossed the chamber and took his chief’s arm, and they were both comforted by the touch for a while.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Weasel’s Den
The march was grueling on both men and horses and Marafice was glad they had thought to bring the carts that the grangelords, in their haste to return to Spire Vanis and enter the contest for surlord that was surely taking place there, had left behind in the camp. The grangelords had left behind a lot of things without value—servants included—and it all added to the general motley of Marafice Eye’s crew.
The carts now, they were a good thing. Saved the badly wounded having to be thrown over the backs of horses, or even worse—God forbid—being dragged behind them on sleds. The first thing he’d done after the rout was to set those fancy grangelord servants hitching the carts. It all had to be executed in haste of course for it had not been clear then whether or not the Bludd army would mount a full pursuit. Luckily they had not, preferring instead to chop down most of the remaining Hailsmen, chase the city men off the Crabhold and occupy and secure the gate. It was a miscalculation, Marafice reckoned. For any war chief with experience could have taken one look at the tired and bloody city men army and known it for easy pickings. The Bludd warrior in command was lazy, Marafice concluded. He had the swaggering looks of his father, the Dog Lord, but he was not half the man.
Marafice shuddered as he forced his great black warhorse down into the rocky stream. That moment after the horn sounded and the front line of the strange new army broke free from the woods behind the roundhouse, the Knife had known fear so concentrated it had stopped his heart. Clan Bludd. He had recognized their colors and their trappings straightaway and he knew instantly that he must call a retreat. He had met the Dog Lord man-to-man, looked into his eyes, and heard the timbre of his voice. Marafice Eye, with twenty years spent in the Rive Watch protecting three successive surlords, had never met anyone who had impressed him like Vaylo Bludd.
He had assumed that the Dog Lord would be leading the Bludd army. He was wrong. That wrongness was why his army of three thousand men was alive today. If he hadn’t felt such fear of the Dog Lord he might have been ambivalent about retreat. Certainly Andrew Perish and his God-fearing nine hundred had wanted to stay and fight. They held the gate. Almost. It may have been possible to secure it. They had the numbers. Even with those bastard grangelords stealing away with half the army, superior manpower was theirs. Two factors were not in their favor though. One, they were unfamiliar with the Crabhouse, and it would have taken time and trial to secure it. And two, they had been fighting from noon to sundown and were flat-out spent. Even Andrew Perish, whose zeal gave new meaning to the phrase ‘second wind’ had been forced to admit that his men were flagging. That last hard fight with Hailsmen for the gate had been devastating. Many of Perish’s faithful had fallen.
At least it had doused their God fires, and made it less of a fight to call a retreat.
It was hard to know how many had died in the rout. Numbers had been fluid, bodies already strewn across the roundhouse steps and its river hill. Marafice could not take such matters lightly, and he had played the retreat over and over again in his head. It was a hard thing for a warlord, a retreat. Did you command the front or bring up the rear?
He had brought up the rear, because that seemed like the way he had lived his life. When you were born a butcher’s son in Spire Vanis you started at the back.
Still, even if the retreat had not gone as well as it might, Marafice believed the men who marched with him this day would live longer lives because of it. Bludd, Blackhail, Dhoone: all three northern giants had their eyes on Ganmiddich. It would have turned into a killing field. Three thousand city men holed up in the most bitterly contested clanhold in the north? How long before the real might of Blackhail turned up? And what about the self-crowned Thorn King, Robbie Dhoone?
Marafice shook his head as he shortened the reins and encouraged his mount to take the shore. They would not have been supported. Who the hell in Spire Vanis cared about this rabble of fanatics, mercenaries, and aging brothers-in-the-watch? No one now that the grangelords had upped stakes and headed south. Indeed it would suit most of the high-and-mighties in Spire Vanis if the Protector General of Spire Vanis simply never returned home.
The Rive Watch was always a tricky proposition for an aspiring surlord. The eager candidate would almost certainly be a grangelord, reared from birth to be hostile to the Rive’s power and the rough-necked men who wielded it. A swallowing of pride was usually called for. Some were smart about it—Iss, a grangelord by fosterage, had planned ahead, and joined the watch as a young man. Marafice had respected him as a leader, but he had always known Iss held him in contempt. Brothers-in-the-watch might be lacking in finery and titles but that did not make them stupid. They controlled Mask Fortress itself: the seat of the Surlord’s power. Some courting was called for if you fancied calling that fortress home. No one could take it without the Rive Watch’s support.
Now that the watch’s leader was a thousand leagues away from home, stuck on the wrong side of the Wolf for fear of making a crossing, that courting had suddenly got easier. Some bright and ambitious brother-in-the-watch had doubtless declared himself in command while Marafice was away. He would be insecure, not wholly supported by men who were loyal to the Eye. That meant the aspiring grangelord could play a hand of divide and conquer; s
et one faction against the other, whisper promises to both and keep none of them. Marafice knew how it would go down. He had seen the same kind of dealings several times before.
That was why he should have been there. If he’d been in the city the day that Iss died no one could have matched him. The watch was his. Thanks to a quick marriage to the Lord of the High Grange’s sluttish daughter, a grange and its titles were as good as his own. Even Iss himself had declared Marafice Eye as his successor. It was a rock-strong foundation that had now been rendered worthless.
First come, first take: that was the law of Spire Vanis. Mask Fortress did not hold open its doors until all contenders had been assembled and accounted for. It wasn’t a tourney, governed by the rules of polite engagement. The doors were closed the instant someone claimed the surlordship for his own. Prising those doors open again was a long, bloody and frequently futile task. It was the difference between rolling a boulder down a hill and carrying it up again. You needed a hundred times the force.
What am I doing even thinking of it? Marafice chastised himself. Here he was, stuck in the godforsaken clanholds, in some wild river territory eight days west of Ganmiddich, with three cartloads of badly injured men on his hands and another two hundred walking wounded, unable to find a safe place to cross the high and swift-moving Wolf, all the while constantly having to check over his shoulder lest crews of heathen clansmen attack his rear.
Marafice frowned at the sky. At least there was some sun about, not like yesterday when the thunderheads blew in from the south and turned the Wolf into a chop field of flying branches and jagged water. Damn the river to hell. They had tried to take the same crossing that they’d used coming over, but the ferryman had upped and gone and taken his ropes with him. Iss had arranged the crossing, and Marafice hadn’t taken much interest in it at the time. The only thing he recalled for certain was that Clan Scarpe was somehow involved.