by J. V. Jones
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
ONE - The Badlands
TWO - Days Darker Than Night
THREE - A Circle of Dust
FOUR - A Raven Has Come
FIVE - Homecoming
SIX - The Inverted Spire
SEVEN - The Great Hearth
EIGHT - Trapping in the Oldwood
NINE - The Dhooneseat
TEN - Return
ELEVEN - Oaths and Dreams
TWELVE - A Fistful of Ice
THIRTEEN - The Bluddroad
FOURTEEN - Escape
FIFTEEN - Within Mask Fortress
SIXTEEN - A Visitor
SEVENTEEN - And Now We Must Bring Them War
EIGHTEEN - Leaving Home
NINETEEN - Swinging from a Gibbet
TWENTY - Duff’s
TWENTY-ONE - Sarga Veys
TWENTY-TWO - Matters of Clan
TWENTY-THREE - Vaingate
TWENTY-FOUR - The Gods Lights
TWENTY-FIVE - Tunnels of the Sull
TWENTY-SIX - Secrets in the Kaleyard
TWENTY-SEVEN - Dancing Ice
TWENTY-EIGHT - Strike upon Bannen
TWENTY-NINE - By the Lake
THIRTY - Frostbite
THIRTY-ONE - Ille Glaive
THIRTY-TWO - Named Beasts
THIRTY-THREE - Shankshounds
THIRTY-FOUR - Men Buying Clothes for a Girl
THIRTY-FIVE - Finding Lost Things
THIRTY-SIX - A Moon Made of Blood
THIRTY-SEVEN - In the Tower
THIRTY-EIGHT - Lords and Maidens
THIRTY-NINE - Watcher of the Dead
FORTY - In the Crab Chief’s Chamber
FORTY-ONE - An Object Returned
FORTY-TWO - Ganmiddich Pass
FORTY-THREE - Meetings
FORTY-FOUR - Something Lost
FORTY-FIVE - The Iron Chamber
FORTY-SIX - A Journey Begins
FORTY-SEVEN - Clothes off a Dead Man’s Back
FORTY-EIGHT - A Night at Drover Jack’s
FORTY-NINE - Ice Wolves
FIFTY - Far Riders and Old Men
FIFTY-ONE - Snow Ghosts
FIFTY-TWO - The Sull
FIFTY-THREE - Marafice One Eye
FIFTY-FOUR - The Hollow River
FIFTY-FIVE - A Cavern of Black Ice
HEART OF DARKNESS
Also by J. V. Jones
The Book of Words
The Baker’s Boy
A Man Betrayed
Master and Fool
The Barbed Coil
A Cavern of Black Ice
J V JONES
Hachette Digital
www.littlebrown.co.uk
Published by Hachette Digital 2010
Copyright © 1999 by J. V. Jones
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 0 7481 2096 3
This ebook produced by JOUVE, France
Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY
An Hachette Livre UK company
To Paul,
who, on the far side of the Atlantic,
keeps hours every bit
as strange as mine
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s easy to get lost in a book the size of this one. Luckily, I had the help of many good people with flashlights. My thanks and gratitude are owed to Betsy Mitchell, Tim Holman, Sona Vogel, Mari Okuda and the staff at Warner Books; Russ Galen; and Richard, who reads everything first.
PROLOGUE
A Birth, a Death, and a Binding
Tarissa whispered a hope out loud before looking up at the sky. “Please make it lighter than before. Please.” As T her lips came together she looked up past the wind-twisted pines and the ridge of frost-riven granite, up toward the position of the sun. Only the sun wasn’t there. Stormheads rolled across the sky, cutting out the sunlight, massing, churning, driven by winds that snapped and circled like pack wolves around sheep. Tarissa made a small gesture with her hand. The storm wasn’t passing overhead. It had come to the mountain to stay.
Dropping her gaze, she took a steadying breath. She couldn’t afford to panic. The city lay a thousand feet below her, rising from the shadow of the mountain like a second, lesser peak. She could see the ring towers clearly now, four of them, two built hard against the wall, the tallest piercing the storm with its iron stake. It was a long way down. Hours of walk, even. And she had to be careful.
Resting her hand on her swollen stomach, she forced herself to smile. Storms? They were nothing.
She moved quickly. Loose scree, bird skeletons, and snags of wind-blasted wood tripped her feet. It was hard to walk, even harder to keep her balance on the ever sharpening slope. Steep draws and creases forced her sideways instead of down. The temperature was falling, and for the first time all day Tarissa noticed her breath came out white. Her left glove had been gone for days—lost somewhere on the far side of the mountain—and she stripped off her right glove, turned it inside out, and pulled it onto her left hand. The fingers there had started to grow numb.
Dead trees blocked her path. Some of their trunks were so smooth they looked polished. As she reached out to steady herself against one of the hard black limbs, she felt a sharp pain in her lower abdomen. Something shifted. Wetness spilled down her thighs. A soft sting sounded in her lower back, and a wave of sickness washed up her gullet, depositing the taste of sour milk in her mouth. Tarissa closed her eyes. This time she kept her hopes to herself.
Wet snow began to fall as she pushed herself off from the dead tree. Her glove was sticky with sap, and bits of pine needles were glued to the fingers. Underfoot the granite ledge was unstable; gravel spilled from deep gashes, and husks of failed saplings crumbled to nothing the instant they took her weight. Despite the cold, Tarissa started to sweat. The pain in her back chewed inward, and although she didn’t want to admit it, didn’t even want to acknowledge it, her lower abdomen began contracting in rhythmic waves.
No. No. NO. Her baby wasn’t due yet. Two weeks more—it had to be. She needed to make it to the city, to find shelter. She’d even held back enough coins for a midwife and a room.
Finding a lead through the rocks, she picked up her pace. A lone raven, its plumage dark and oily as a scorched liver, watched her in silence from the distorted upper branch of a blackstone pine. Spying it, Tarissa was conscious of how ridiculous she must look: fat bellied, wild haired, scrambling down a mountainside in a race against a storm. Grimacing, she looked away from the bird. She didn’t like how it made her feel.
Contractions were coming faster now, and Tarissa found that it helped if she kept on the move. Stopping made the suffering linger, gave her seconds to count and think.
Mist rose from crevices. Snow flew in Tarissa’s face, and the wind lifted the cloak from her back. Overhead, the clouds mimicked her desce
nt, following her down the mountain as if she were showing them the way. Tarissa walked with her gloved hand cradling her belly. The fluid between her legs had dried to a sticky film that sucked her thighs together as she moved. Heat pumped up through the arteries in her neck, flushing her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
Faster. She had to move faster.
Spotting a clear run between boulders, Tarissa switched her path farther to her right. Thorns snagged her skirt, and she yanked on the fabric, losing patience. As she turned back to face the path, the raven took flight. Its black wings beat against the storm current, snapping and tearing like teeth.
The instant Tarissa stepped forward, gravel and rocks began running beneath her feet. She felt herself falling, and she flung out her arms to grab at something, anything, to hold her. The mist hid everything at ground level, and Tarissa’s hands found only loose stones and twigs. Pain exploded in her shoulder as she was thrown against a rock. Pinecones and rocks bounced overhead as she tried desperately to break her fall. Her bare hand grasped at a tussock of wolfgrass, but her body kept sliding downward and the roots pulled free in her hand. Her hip bashed against a granite ridge, something sharp shaved skin from the back of her knee, and when she opened her mouth to scream, snow flew between her lips, freezing the cry on her tongue.
She came to. There was no pain, just a fog of ragged light lying between her and the outside world. Above her, as far as her eyes could see, stretched walls of hand-polished limestone, mason cut and smooth as bone. She’d finally made it to the city with the Iron Spire.
Dimly she was aware of something pushing far below her. Minutes passed before she realized that it was her body working to expel the child. She swallowed hard. Suddenly she missed all the people she had run from. Leaving home had been a mistake.
Kaaw!
Tarissa tried to shift her head toward the sound. A hot needle of pain jabbed at the vertebrae in the base of her neck. She blacked out. When she came to again she saw the raven sitting on a rock before her. Black-and-gold eyes pinned her with a look that was devoid of pity. Bobbing its head and raising its scaly yellow claws, it danced a little jig of damnation. When it was done it made a soft clucking noise that sounded just like a mother scolding a child and then flung itself to the mercy of the storm. Cold currents bore it swiftly away.
Pushing. Her body kept pushing.
Tarissa felt herself drifting . . . she was so tired . . . so very, very tired. If only she could find a way through the fog . . . if only her eyes could show her more.
As her eyelids closed for the last time and her ribs pressed an unused breath from her lungs, she saw a pair of booted feet walking toward her. The tar-blackened leather melted snowflakes on contact.
They applied the leeches to him in rings of six. His body was crusted with sweat and rock dust and dirt, and the first man scraped the skin clean with deer tallow and a cedarwood wedge, while the second worked in his shadow with metal pincers, a pitchpine bucket, and heavy buckskin gloves.
The man who no longer knew his name strained against his bindings, testing. Thick coils of rope pressed into his neck, upper arms, wrists, thighs, and ankles. He could shudder and breathe and blink. Nothing more.
He could barely feel the leeches. One settled in the fold between his inner thigh and groin, and he tensed for a moment. Pincer took a pinch of white powder from a pouch around his neck and applied it to the leech. Salt. The leech dropped away. A fresh leech was applied, higher this time so it couldn’t attach itself to skin that wasn’t fit.
That done, Pincer stripped off his gloves and spoke a word that sent Accomplice to the far side of the cell. A moment later Accomplice returned with a tray and a soapstone lamp. A single red flame burned within the lamp, heating the contents of the crucible above. When he saw the flame, the man with no name flinched so hard that the rope binding his wrists split his skin. Flames were all he had now. Memories of flames. He hated the flames and feared them, yet he needed them, too. Familiarity bred contempt, they said. But the man with no name knew that was only half of it. Familiarity bred dependence as well.
Thoughts lost in the dance of flames, he didn’t see Pincer kneading an oakum wad in his fist. He was aware only of Accomplice’s hands on his jaw, repositioning his head, brushing his hair to one side, and pushing his skull hard against the bench. The man with no name felt the frayed rope and beeswax wad thrust into his left ear. Ship’s caulking. They were shoring him up like a storm-battered hull. A second wad was thrust into his right ear, and then Accomplice held the nameless man’s jaws wide while Pincer thrust a third wad into the back of his throat. The desire to vomit was sudden and overpowering, but Pincer slapped one large hand on the nameless man’s chest and another on his belly and pressed hard against the contracting muscles, forcing them flat. A minute later the urge had passed.
Still Accomplice held on to his jaw. Pincer paid attention to the tray, his hands casting claw shadows against the cell wall as he worked. Seconds later he turned about. A thread of animal sinew was stretched between his thumbs. Seeing it, Accomplice shifted his grip, opening the nameless man’s jaws wider, pulling back lip tissue along with bone. The man with no name felt thick fingers in his mouth. He tasted urine and salt and leech water. His tongue was pressed to the base of his mouth, and then sinew was woven across his bottom teeth, binding his tongue in place.
Fear came alive in the nameless man’s chest. Perhaps flames weren’t the only things that could harm him.
“He’s done,” said Pincer, drawing back.
“What about the wax?” breathed a third voice from the shadows near the door. It was the One Who Issued Orders. “You are supposed to seal his eyes shut.”
“Wax is too hot. It could blind him if we use it now.”
“Use it.”
The flame in the soapstone lamp wavered as Accomplice drew the crucible away. The man with no name smelled smoke given off from the impurities in the wax. When the burning came it shocked him. After everything he had been through, all the suffering he had borne, he imagined he had outlived pain. He was wrong. And as the hours wore on and his bones were broken methodically by Pincer wielding a goosedown padded mallet, Accomplice following after to ensure the splintered ends were pulled apart, and his internal organs were manipulated with needles so long and fine that they could puncture specific chambers in his lungs and heart while leaving the surrounding tissue intact, he began to realize that pain—and the ability to feel it—was the last sense to go.
When the One Who Issued Orders stepped close and began breathing words of binding older than the city he currently stood in, the man with no name no longer cared. His mind had returned to the flames. There, at least, was a pain that he knew.
ONE
The Badlands
Raif Sevrance set his sights on the target and called the ice hare to him. A moment of disorientation followed, where the world dropped out of focus like a great dark stone sinking to the bottom of a lake; then, in the shortest space that a moment could be, he perceived the animal’s heart. The light, sounds, and odors of the badlands slid away, leaving nothing but the weight of blood in the ice hare’s chest and the hummingbird flutter of its heart. Slowly, deliberately, Raif angled his bow away from the target. The arrow cracked the freezing air like a word spoken out loud. As its iron blade shot past the hare, the creature’s head came up and it sprang for cover in a cushion of black sedge.
“Take the shot again,” Drey said. “You sent that wide on purpose.”
Raif lowered his bow and glanced over at his older brother. Drey’s face was partially shaded by his fox hood, but the firm set of his mouth was clear. Raif paused, considered arguing, then shrugged and reset his footing on the tundra. It never felt good deceiving Drey.
Fingers smoothing down the backing of his horn-and-sinew bow, Raif looked over the windblown flats of the badlands. Panes of ice already lay thick over melt ponds. In the flattened colt grass beneath Raif’s feet hoarfrost grew as silently and insidio
usly as mold on second-day bread. The few trees that managed to survive in the gravelly floodplain were wind-crippled blackstone pines and prostrate hemlock. Directly ahead lay a shallow draw filled with loose rocks and scrubby bushes that looked as tough and bony as moose antlers. Raif dipped his gaze a fraction lower to the brown lichen mat surrounding a pile of wet rocks. Even on a morning as cold as this, the lick was still running.
As Raif watched, another ice hare popped up its head. Cheeks puffing, ears trembling, it held its position, listening for danger. It wanted the salt in the lick. Game animals came from leagues around to drink at the trickle of salt water that bled across the rocks in the draw. Tem said the lick welled up from an underground stream.
Raif raised his bow, slid an arrow from the quiver at his waist. In one smooth motion he nocked the iron arrowhead against the plate and drew the bowstring back to his chest. The hare swiveled its head. Its dark eyes looked straight at Raif. Too late. Raif already had the creature’s heart in his sights. Kissing the string, Raif let the arrow fly. Fingers of ice mist parted, a faint hiss sounded, and the arrowhead shot straight into the hare’s rib cage. If the creature made a sound, Raif didn’t hear it. Carried back by the force of the blow, it collapsed into the lick.
“That’s three to you. None to me.” Drey’s voice sounded flat, resigned.
Raif pretended to check his bow for hairpin cracks.
“Come on. Let’s shoot at targets. No more hares are going to show now you’ve sent a live one into the lick.” Drey reached out and touched Raif’s bow. “You could have used a smaller head on that arrow, you know. You’re supposed to kill the hare, not disembowel it.”