by J. V. Jones
One more job to do and she was done. Hieronymus Buck, a tied miner, had once told her what they did to open seams in the mine. “Light fires we do. Heat up the rock face so it nearly glows. Then we pumps the water from the Bluey. Water hits the rock and it’s the mother of all explosions. I’ve seen thirty feet shatter in a single go.”
Raina Blackhail wiped the blood from her hands as she made her way through the roundhouse. She’d be lighting a fire under the Scarpestone this night.
FORTY-TWO
The Dark of the Moon
“Khal Gora,” Lan Fallstar said as they crossed the last stretch of causeway leading over the sunken fields of brown and black sedge, dwarf pine, and hackled ice. “Fort Defeat. Its ruins stand here. There is good water. We will spend the night.”
Ash looked ahead to where the headland rose from the saturated tundra. Charcoal gray limestone bluffs, deeply fissured by running water and pulverized by tree roots, led up to a table-land that on first glance seemed overrun by cedar and silver pine. As her gaze followed the ridgeline she spied a blank rampart of stone partially concealed by the crowns of the trees. The fort wall appeared to be slightly domed, and it was smooth, without windows, arrow slits or battlements of any kind on its southwestern face. Three towers, all broken and fallen in, rose to heights not much higher than the fort itself. The tallest was open-walled and Ash could see the square-shaped shadows of its inner chambers. Frozen blue snow glowed in the corners.
She shivered. The air was raw here in the lowlands. “Why is it named Fort Defeat?”
They were riding in single file on a narrow path of piled stone and Lan did not look around as he replied. “In the Time of Maygi it was called Khal Hark’rial, the Fortress of the Hard Gate. A battle was fought and we were defeated at great cost. A thousand years later we remanned the fortress, believing our ancestors’ previous defense to be at fault. It was a mistake. We were overrun and tens of thousands of lives were lost. The fortress is flawed. No one who holds it is safe. After the defeat He Who Leads decreed that its name should be changed so that future generations would never forget.”
Ash gathered her loose hair in her fist and tucked it beneath the collar of her cloak. Winds cutting through the open fields had been making it blow in her face. She would have liked to ask Lan more questions about the fortress, but knew better than to push her luck. Ask something else and she risked him turning cold; this way they could ride in amiable silence and she wouldn’t have to endure being belittled or ignored.
Stupidly she had thought that after the night Lan heart-killed the unmade creature in the woods, things would change between them, become easier. That night he had seemed almost tender when he held and entered her, and later when he ran his fine golden fingers through her hair. Yet since then he had been colder than ever. She supposed it was just his character, and decided she did not like it very much.
The attack had taken place seven days ago and they’d been traveling hard ever since. East and then south, through ancient forests overgrown with moss and ghostvines, along worn stone roads that ran alongside icy green rivers and blackwater lakes, through hills milky with pale winter grasses, and past the valley of blasted trees. That had been the only day when they had seen other people, when they had ridden along the valley’s rim and looked down upon square leagues of flattened and blackened pines. The valley was a perfectly shaped bowl and the trees had fallen in a radial pattern as if blasted from a central point. Their trunks were black and greasy and some had crumbled into sections like fallen pillars. An open mine was being worked in the valley’s center, and Ash saw the distant figures of men and women digging with picks and working machines. The chink and rumble of their labors was amplified by the valley’s steep walls.
She could smell the stale char of the trees. “What’s happening down there?” she had asked Lan.
Lan had been maintaining a brisk pace along the ridgeline and did not slow to answer her. “It is Scara’il Ixa. A Hole Made By God.” He would say no more.
Ash had the sense that he wanted to be gone as quickly as possible. He did not acknowledge the faces that turned upward to look at them, or the two horsemen armed with longbows who patrolled the head of the valley. She wondered if he had been nervous. He held the reins more closely than normal and his gaze continually scanned the spaces between the trees.
“Where are we going?” she had asked him later that day as he crouched by a stream of snowmelt to fill his waterskin. “The Heart Fires are to the south.” She didn’t know this for a fact but she stated it like one anyway. “And we are heading east.”
“Tomorrow we turn south,” he had said.
She had decided she would leave him if they did not head south in the morning.
That night she did not sleep in the tent and had bundled in her blankets by the fire. The sky had been diamond clear and crushed with stars. As she watched the constellations turn, the horses wandered over to check on her. The stallion held itself at a companionable distance and began nosing the snow for grass, while the gelding stood right over her and blew on her face. She’d had to push him away in the end, but it had felt good to know that both horses had offered their company.
As she settled down to sleep, she glanced over at the wolfhide tent. The entrance flap was moving back and forth. Ash watched it come to rest, and then waited to see if a stray gust of wind might set it into motion. It did not. Had Lan been watching her? Or had he simply heard the horses stirring and put out his head to check on them? Uneasy, she had fallen asleep.
Her dreams were of the gray, unsettled place, and the armies of creatures that suffered within it. They roiled with the smoke, hissing, arching their spines, jerking back their heads and clawing at each other and themselves. To be there was a torture. And they wanted out. Something dark and infinitely evil moved along the edge of her perception. It was the calm in the rage, the master of the chaos. Mistresssss, it warned. Do not come here in the flesh.
Ash snapped awake. Cold sweat had pooled in the hollow of her throat and it rolled down her dress as she sat upright. Dawn was a silver line on the horizon, and woodcocks were performing their strange slow mating flights above the trees. The horses were asleep; their elbows and stifles locked in place, their eyelids fluttering but not completely closed. Ash knew that if she were to stand she would wake them.
Smoky red coals were all that was left of the fire. Reaching for a stick to poke some air in them, she glanced over at the tent. The hide was still. Footsteps led from the flap into the trees. Was he gone? She tried to remember their movements last night. The stream was behind the tent. They had come in from the north. The footsteps led south.
She stood. The horses’ ears tracked the movement and their heads came up. Cutting toward the trees, she felt for her sickle knife. She was still sweating, and when she blinked she saw images from the dream. Claws uncurling. Limbs writhing. Eye sockets filled with the cold black substance of space. It occurred to her that she should call Lan’s name and look inside the tent, but she did neither. She had some knowledge of path lores and once she saw the footprints close up she decided they were fresh. The surrounding snow was icy, but the little lumps kicked up by the boot heels were soft. They would have hardened if they’d been left overnight.
Camp had been made in a small depression in a sloped woodland of mixed hardwood and pine. Old and swollen oaks lay dormant beside ladders of purple hemlock. Ash headed into the trees, following the path created by the footsteps. It never occurred to her that Lan might be in danger; later she would think about that.
As she waded her way through a tangle of burdock and cloudberries, the Far Rider appeared on the path ahead. His bow was braced and he was carrying a lean and bloody coati by its ringed tail. When he saw her he blinked in surprise. Ash felt heat rush to her face. It looked as if she was spying on him. Silently, he held up the coati for her to see. There was a smear of blood on his forearm, but it was probably from the animal. She backed out of the bushes, feeling ashamed.
Later that morning they’d headed south.
Ash watched Lan Fallstar as he rode ahead of her on the causeway. She suspected she did not know enough about the Sull to accurately judge him. Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer might have appeared more forthcoming, but they had kept their silence on many things. Neither one would tell her what it meant to be Reach. She recalled Ark warning her once that she was in danger unless she became Sull. He had not told her why. Perhaps this was the way it would be with all of them. She was an outsider, not to be trusted with their deepest secrets. The color of her eyes might have darkened from gray to midnight blue that night in the mountain pool, but nothing else on the outside had changed. She did not look Sull, so how could she expect Lan Fallstar to treat her as an equal? She had known all along the Sull believed themselves to be superior to men.
Reaching the end of the raised path, Lan slowed his stallion to a walk. Without any signal from Ash, the gelding followed his lead. Wind moaned in her ears as the horses climbed up a narrow and crumbling stair cut into the bluff. Pale weeds grew in the cracks in the steps, and icy streams trickling along their edges had deposited streaks of green algae and calcium salts. The horses moved slowly, placing their hoofs with care. Ash spotted a footprint stamped half in the snow and half in the algae. Did Sull still come here?
Light faded as they passed into a tunnel mined deep into the crenellations of the cliff. Water dripped and plonked in the darkness. Ash smelled tree roots and the faint tinge of sulfur. Quite suddenly she realized she had never opened a vein and paid a toll for passage; she did not possess that Sull instinct. Yet as she moved through the tunnel something within her thought, Now would be a good time to let blood. When light from the exit came sliding along the walls, she saw marks tattooed into the rock. Star maps, tailed comets, meteor showers, eclipsed suns and the moon in all its phases had been carved into limestone and filled with a cloudy white substance that was slowly moldering to green. Seeing the markings Ash had a sense that finally she was drawing close to the heart of Sull. They had fought and lost major battles here. Khal Hark’rial. The Fortress of the Hard Gate.
They emerged on a circular stairwell whose ancient stone floor was speckled with calcium deposits and lichen. The patches looked like bird droppings. A spring gurgled over the raw rockwall before passing into an underground channel. Lan headed up more steps and Ash followed him. She could see the sky again now. Clouds were fleeing west with the sun.
Finally they reached the plateau, climbing onto land that was flat and green with trees. Fort Defeat was a massive and featureless curtainwall built from dressed ashlar that was paler than the limestone bluffs. It was larger than she had imagined, its ramparts rising fifty feet. The walls were curved outward like barrels and nothing had been done to add grace or bring relief to its primitive form. Earthworks mounded at its base were overgrown with burdock, nettles and white thorns. A full-grown cedar grew straight out from a crack in the wall, its pale roots grasping the stone like claws.
Lan spoke a word in Sull she did not know and dismounted. A stone path led through the woods and around to the northern face of the fortress. Ash remained in the saddle as they took it. The wind was high here and it blew the fur on her cloak flat, revealing the pin-holed pink skin of the lynx.
As they rounded the northern facade Ash spied the first of the towers and the arched gate. The tower was the tallest of the three, and had no exterior walls on its remaining top floors. The gate was a gaping and undefended hole in the curtainwall. Some of the capstones had gone, and others were smashed and crumbling. A relief carving of a raven in flight that surmounted the gate had been broken into shards. Its wingtips and feet were missing, and its head and bill were a spiderweb of cracks. Ash felt some slight hesitation from the gelding as she guided the horse underneath it.
The fortress was doubled-walled, and as she passed through the gate she could clearly see the dark passageway that led between the exterior wall and the jacket wall. The temperature dropped as they moved into the fort’s collapsed outer ward. All ceilings and interior walls had fallen and giant heaps of debris had been claimed by ivy, burdock, moss and scrub pine. Mature cedars grew in the center of the open space. Ahead a second, smaller gate led to the inner ward, but Lan came to a halt by a waist-high section of standing wall.
“We will set camp here,” he said.
Ash slid from her horse. She felt as if she were standing in a crater. Sounds echoed across the hollowed-out fort. As she lifted the saddle from the gelding, Lan cleared an area of snow. He seemed distracted and did not unpack his saddlebags in his normal sequence. Nor did he set about building a fire. It was early for camp, she realized. Still an hour or so of daylight left. There was little need to rush the preparations. The stallion had found something to its liking growing on one of the stone heaps and was busy munching on yellow stalks. Once it was free of its saddle, the gelding trotted over to investigate.
“Does anyone ever come here?” Ash asked Lan, thinking of the footstep on the stair.
“No,” he replied. “This is Glor Yatanga. The Saturated Lands.”
She waited, listening to his words bounce off the walls and break up into pieces, but he said nothing more. She considered mentioning the footprint, but decided against it. A small hum of wariness was sounding in her gut.
“Come,” Lan said, standing upright. “I will show you the Thirteen Wells.”
She followed him through the second gate to the inner ward. The roof had caved in here but some interior walls were still standing. Lan led her along a narrow corridor and down a short flight of stone steps.
“The fortress was built around the wells,” he explained to her as they entered a dim cavernous space, lit by sky holes. “Their water has not run dry in five thousand years.”
The chamber was damp and smelled of bats and their droppings. Odd pieces of glazed tile still clung to upper portions of the wall, and the sky holes were glazed with thick lenses of rock crystal. Wisps of mist rising from the wells scudded across the natural rock floor. The wells were laid out in a honeycomb pattern, with only thin strips of rock between them. Some steamed more than others, and their colors varied from milky blue and green, to rusty yellow and pink, to crystal clear sapphire and inky black.
“No two share the same temperature or taste,” Lan said, pulling two horn cups from the pack around his waist. “It is custom to sample twelve of the thirteen.”
He had thought ahead, she realized, for the cups were normally in one of his saddlebags. Realizing he was making an effort to be amiable, she took one of the cups from his hand. “You go first.”
He crossed to one of the wells at the back of the chamber, easily balancing on the narrow stone gangways. “This Sull will try the water that looks the worst.”
Ash laughed, surprised by his humor. Following his path along the lips of the wells, she went to join him. Crouching, Lan scooped up a cup of gray water and drank. She watched him swallow and then did the same. The water smelled of sulfur and bubbled in her mouth. It was lukewarm.
“You must choose the next one,” he told her.
She picked the largest well. Steam peeled off the surface, and its water was hot and clear and salty. Lan chose one of the rust-colored wells next and Ash was impressed by its coldness. They moved between the wells in silence, crouching, sniffing, tasting. Lan kept count, and when they had sampled eleven of the thirteen wells he said, “It is custom to bathe in the twelfth well.”
She looked at him carefully. His sharply angled face was still. Mist had coated his skin in a fine film.
“We have been lucky in our choices. The two wells that remain are both warm.” He shrugged off his buckskin cloak. “Make a choice.”
Ash followed the motion of his hand. One of the wells was clear and black and barely steamed. The other lay at the center of the honeycomb and was milky green with a circle of cloud above it. “That one,” she said. “As long as it is not too hot.”
Lan undressed and le
ft his clothes and gear in a neat pile on the rock floor. Naked, he stepped into the pool. His body was lean and muscular, covered by a fine down of golden hair that darkened around his pubis. Ash looked at him and found she had no desire. Outside the sun was setting and the sky holes let in rings of amber light. The mist and dimness were making her drowsy and she yawned as she pulled off her clothes. Once she’d removed her boots she carried her clothes to Lan’s pile and dumped them on top. The boots knocked against his horn arrowcase, making the arrows slide out. A few of them came out all the way, revealing their steel heads with the holes drilled through them. The heads were socketed into the wooden shafts and bound with wire. One of the three was bound with something else.
“Come,” Lan called. “This Sull does not wish to boil alone.”
Ash turned quickly and went to join him. Tiptoeing around the wells, she thought about the arrow. It did not seem such a bad thing. With a high squeal she jumped into the pool.
Water splashed up, soaking Lan and sloshing into the other pools. It was shockingly hot and Ash’s skin reddened immediately. Dipping her head under, she wetted her hair and face. Lan was leaning against the bowl of the well, his arms stretched wide. The lead clasps that bound his braids had reacted to something in the water and turned silver-black. Ash floated away from him, coming to rest on the opposite side of the bowl. A ledge cut below the surface provided a place to rest and Ash sat and luxuriated in the steaming water.
“Drink,” Lan said after a while.
Of course, this was the twelfth well and she hadn’t sampled its water yet. Leaning forward she opened her mouth and let it fill with sweet-tasting liquid. Lan watched as she swallowed.
Ash closed her eyes. “It’s getting dark,” she said. “We may have to wait for the moon to rise to get back.”
“It is the dark of moon tonight.”
The Far Rider’s voice rippled toward her across the delicious warmth of the water. She tilted her head back and let her arms and legs float to the surface. Heat enveloped her, wrapping around her belly and thighs, and cupping her neck. She drifted free, slowly turning in the water. Sleep came as a gentle relaxing of thought and muscle.