A Cavern Of Black Ice (Book 1)

by J. V. Jones

  “You’re not having it.” The skin over Marafice Eye’s lips stretched white as he spoke. Seeing him standing there, his back to the great Roundroom fire, his boots dripping snowmelt onto the gold-and-turquoise rug, his entire body shaking with fury, Iss decided to say no more. Marafice Eye was protective of his men, fiercely so. The Red Forge would burn long and bright this night in memory of a brother lost.

  Turning his back on the Knife, Iss stared into the yellow flames blazing in the hearth. How could Asarhia have gone? Didn’t she know he would never hurt her? Hadn’t he told her a hundred times that he loved her more than any real father could? Damn her! She had to be found. There was no telling whose hands she might fall into out there. The Phage might find her . . . or even the Sull. Iss took the black iron poker from its stand near the hearth and turned over piece after piece of burning coal. After a few moments he had collected himself enough to finish the matter at hand. “Have Storrin’s body brought before the White Robes for blessing and annunciation—wake them if you must. If they complain, tell them that the Surlord himself commands it. And see to it that the man’s widow, his mother, or whoever else he leaves behind is adequately compensated for the loss.”

  Marafice Eye grunted. Even in a chamber the size and height of the Roundroom, which occupied a full quarter of the ground floor in the Cask, the Protector General of Spire Vanis dominated the space. He was a dangerous animal, not to be toyed with—Iss knew that.

  “You never mentioned what business was so pressing it pulled you away from Asarhia’s door.”

  “No. I didn’t.” Marafice Eye stood his ground, his eyes hardening along with his tight little mouth.

  Iss held his gaze. Information was cheap to come by in Mask Fortress: He’d have answers soon enough. Caydis Zerbina, with his soft linen slippers that never made a sound and his long agile fingers shaped for foiling locks, would see to that. There was little Caydis and his dark-skinned brethren did not know about Marafice Eye. The Knife prefers to court his women in the dark, Sarab, Caydis had once breathed in his soft musical voice. His night mushroom is sadly misshapen. Iss found such information both useful and distasteful. And he always sent Caydis in search of more.

  Returning the charred black poker to its stand, he said, “No matter. Asarhia must be found. The servant girl must be questioned. It seems highly unlikely to me that Asarhia could have orchestrated such a clever escape on her own. My ward is a bright girl, but far too naive and timid to have carried off something so cold-blooded without help. Soot in her hair, crawling under horse stalls, strutting to the stable gate, and declaring herself a prostitute!” Iss paused, his pale hand knotted around the poker shaft. “The servant girl must be involved in some way.”

  He looked at the Knife without seeming to. The man’s face gave nothing away as he murmured, “I’ll take the truth from her.”

  “Call her now.”

  Iss released his grip on the poker as Marafice Eye left the room. The Roundroom was bright and warm, decorated with silk hangings and silk rugs and thirteen black pewter lanterns that burned the fragrant flume of sperm whales, giving off a sweet childlike scent. Iss had taught Asarhia to read and write here, beneath the light of the pewter lanterns. Once when she was nine years old her feet had frozen to blocks in the quad, and he had stripped her down in front of the fire and warmed her pale little toes in his fists.

  “The girl will be here soon.” The Knife strode back into the chamber, shaking tapestries and wall-mounted weaponry as he moved. “Ganron has reported back. Watch has been tripled on Almsgate, Hoargate, and Wrathgate. The east—”

  Iss flicked a wrist, silencing the Knife. “Vaingate must also be watched. I want a triple guard posted there as well.”

  “Vaingate leads nowhere. No one in their right mind would leave the city by way of Mount Slain. I’ll not waste my men setting them to guard a dead gate.”

  “Indulge me,” Iss said. “Waste them.”

  Marafice Eye glowered. His big hands crunched the Killhound broach at his throat, forcing the soft, lead-based alloy into a shape that looked more like a dog than a bird.

  The Surlord explained himself only once his Knife had nodded and said, “Aye.”

  “You know Asarhia’s history as well as I do, Knife. She was abandoned outside of Vaingate. Vaingate. Now, for the first time in her life she’s free to go where she chooses. If you were in her position, wouldn’t you be curious about the place where you were found? Wouldn’t you like to stand upon that frozen ground and spend a moment wondering why your mother left you for dead? Asarhia is a sensitive girl. She hides things even from me, yet I know she feels her abandonment keenly. Some nights she even calls out in her sleep.”

  Marafice Eye took this information and chewed on it, his hands dropping to his waist where his red sword was sheathed and hung. After a minute of silence he spoke. “If you’re so sure she’ll visit Vaingate, then I say we don’t increase the guard at all. Visibly. The girl’s not stupid—we’ve seen the truth of that ourselves tonight—and she won’t show herself by the gate if she judges it unsafe. Let her come. Let her see only beggars and vendors and street filth. Let her come in good faith, unawares. And let me be there to stop her when she does.”

  “She is not to be harmed, Knife.”

  “She killed one of my men.”

  Iss felt the anger come to him but did not show it. His voice was quiet as he said, “You will not hurt her.”

  “But—”

  “Enough!” Iss kept his eyes upon Marafice Eye until he was satisfied that Asarhia would be returned to him whole. Turning his back on the Knife, he contemplated the stone reliefwork above the hearth. Impaled beasts, two-headed wolves, goats with women’s heads and breasts, and serpents with the angled, segmented eyes of insects looked down at him from their limestone poles. Iss shivered. Asarhia! The stupid girl. He would not have hurt her if she had stayed. Caydis would have seen to it that she had every comfort. Her life would have barely changed.

  Knuckles rapped against wood. “Girl’s here, sir.”

  Marafice Eye opened the door, and a brother-in-the-watch pushed the little dark-haired maid into the room. With one quick movement the Knife caught the girl’s arm and twisted it hard behind her back. The girl let out a small cry but was sensible enough not to fight him.

  “Leave us,” Iss said to the watch brother. When the door was closed, he turned to the servant girl and shook his head. “Katia. Little Katia. I trusted you and you let me down. Now look at the terrible mess you are in.”

  Katia’s lips trembled. Her fine dark eyes glanced sideways toward the Knife. He looked away.

  Iss took pity on the girl. She was so very frightened, and she had already been beaten once this night. “Let her go.”

  The Knife released her immediately. The girl let out a sob and stumbled forward, hardly knowing what to do. She looked around the room for a moment, then flung herself at the Surlord’s feet. “Please, sir. Please. I didn’t know what she was planning. I swear it. She told me nothing. Nothing. If I’d known I would have come to you . . . like I always do. I would have told you, sir. I swear.” Finished, she broke down into soft, shuddering tears, her head shaking, her little hands grasping at the watered silk of Iss’ robe.

  Iss patted her shiny curls. “Hush, child. Hush. I know you would have come to me.” His fingers slid under her chin, forcing her to look up. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?” Katia nodded, tears pooling in her eyes, mucus running from her nose to her mouth. “There. Wipe your face . . . That’s better, isn’t it? No need to cry. You know me and you know the Knife, and neither of us has ever hurt you, have we? So there’s nothing to be afraid of. All we need from you is the truth.”

  Katia was quiet now but still shaking. “Sir, I told you all I know. Ash—I mean Miss Asarhia—said nothing to me about wanting to leave the fortress. She kept to herself this past week. Ever since the day she went riding in the quad and came back and found Caydis in her chamber, she—”


  “She saw him there?”

  Katia nodded. “Yes, sir. Made him feel bad. Promised that she wouldn’t tell on him being slack about his business if he didn’t tell on her.”

  “I see. And did she say anything to you?” Katia hesitated. “Tell me the truth, child.”

  “Well . . . she hurt my arm, and said she’d hurt me more if I didn’t tell her what you asked about whenever you summoned me to your chamber.” Katia twisted silk in her hands. “So I told her how you’re most particular in wanting to know when her menses start . . . but that’s all I said. I swear it. She was right queer that day. All cold and angry. Told me to leave straight after.”

  Iss patted the girl’s head. “Good girl. You’re doing very well. Now. This past week, have you seen any sign of her menses? Think hard, girl.”

  “No, sir. All her underthings were as clean as if she’d never even worn ’em.”

  A soft breath puffed from Iss’ lips. “As if she’d never worn them.” He exchanged a glance with Marafice Eye. It took him a moment to settle his mind. “Now, Katia. One last thing and you may go. Have you taken inventory of all the items in Asarhia’s chamber?” Katia nodded. “So, discounting the jeweled cloak pin we found in the snow and the silver brush we found in her cloak, do you know of any other items she may have taken?”

  “No, sir. The brush and the pin are the only things that have gone.”

  Iss continued to stroke Katia’s hair. “So she has nothing to sell for coinage, and no cloak to keep her warm. What a poor affair her first excursion into the city is likely to be.”

  “She’ll end up in Almstown, most like.” Marafice Eye had sat himself on one of the dainty satin-upholstered chairs near the door, and judging from the way he was pressing his forearm against the armrest, he seemed intent on breaking it. “I’ll double the Watch numbers there as well.”

  Iss nodded, well content to abide by the Knife’s judgment. He’d never had occasion to doubt its worth before. Turning his attention to Katia, he said, “Look at me, girl.” Katia raised her chin. Such a pretty, plump little thing. A perfect mix of servant girl cunning and little girl fear. Asarhia had cared for her very much.

  “Please, sir. I won’t have to go back to the kitchens, will I? Please.” Large brown eyes pleaded as small, slightly grubby hands clawed at the silk of his robes.

  Iss was not unmoved. His hand slid across her hot cheek. “No. You won’t have to return to the kitchens. I promise.”

  The girl was so relieved and delighted, her face was a genuine pleasure to watch. As she kissed his silk robe, teared, and murmured a hundred little words of thanks, Iss nodded to Marafice Eye across the room.

  Katia was so caught up in relief, she didn’t hear the Knife approach. For an instant, as his hands clamped around her head, she thought it was a caress. One of her hands even fluttered up to touch him. Then the Knife’s grip tightened and she knew to be afraid, and the look she sent Iss tore at his heart.

  One quick wrench was all it took to break her neck.

  People will die for this.

  Fire and ice burned his flesh and his soul. The pain was as deep and many layered as rock formed and then compressed over millions of years beneath the sea. The Nameless One knew pain. He knew its weights and measures, its aftertaste and its cost. His joints ached with the soft calciferous pain of old age, and even to rest them curled and at ease brought no relief. His broken and mismended bones burned within his flesh like heated rods, and his organs shrank and hardened, losing function bit by bit. He no longer knew what it was to straighten his back or urinate without pain. He could not recall when last he had taken a breath that satisfied him wholly or chewed a piece of meat until it was flat.

  Pain he knew.

  The past he did not.

  He strained for it every day, strained until blood vessels broke in his belly and spine, until his jaw locked, his wounds wept, and the shaking of his body opened sores upon his skin. His fear of harming himself—once so strong that it was the only thought he could retain in his mind from one year to the next—had now faded to a mild concern. The Light Bearer always fixed him. The Light Bearer with his salves and bandages and gauze bags and tongs. The Light Bearer would not let him die. It had taken many years for the Nameless One to learn this, and more after to accept it, but now it was set firmly in his mind.

  Knowing this had freed him, not from pain—nothing and no one could free him from that—but from fear of death. The Nameless One no longer had complete control over his face muscles, but bitterness still leaked across his face. Even pain so terrible it tore whole years from his life could not make him welcome death.

  He did not want to die; that was another thing he knew. In time he would know more.

  Waiting. That was his life. Waiting, pain, and hate. He waited for the Light Bearer to come, waited for the scraps of light and warmth he brought, ate them up like a dog after bones. A hand on his shoulder, a warm hand, could burn him now. He yearned for the warmth and the touch and the contact, but when he received it, it was too much. When the touch was withdrawn he felt nothing but relief, yet even before the memory faded and the imprint of the Light Bearer’s hand left his skin, he yearned for it all over again.

  Loneliness wasn’t like pain. It had no degrees and niceties; it did not shift and deepen and lighten, or change from day to day. It fed consistently moment after moment, hour after hour, year after year, gnawing away at the back of his throat, consuming him piece by piece. What it left behind scared him. The confinement he could stand, the torture and usage he could stand, even the red-and-blue flames of fire and ice that burned in place of his past. But the loneliness, the utter loneliness, ached with a pain he could not bear.

  It turned him into something he hated.

  The Nameless One shifted in the iron chamber that was his home, his chamber pot, and his bed. Chains, their metal mottled and corroded by years of sweat, urine, and feces, did not rattle so much as crack like the knuckles of a young and soft-boned child.

  Hate was not new to him; that was the last thing he knew. It came too easily and fit too well to have been something newborn during his confinement. Even as he craved each visit from the Light Bearer, craved the world of light, warmth, and people, he hated all he craved with utter coldness. Loneliness fed off him, and he fed off hate. Hate was how he lived through years of darkness, how he survived the aching stillness and the separate weights of physical pain. It was how he faced a world with neither day or night, seasons, sunlight, nor cool rain. It was how he clung to the last shred of self.

  People will die for this.

  Counting was beyond him—he knew nothing of numbers and their kind—but the words he whispered into the darkness had the feel of things many times said. They were a comfort to him. They made tolerable the wriggling and pinching of the creatures inserted beneath the skin on his forearm, back, and upper thigh. They turned the sawing of their chitinous mouthparts into a soft bearable hum.

  Skin on the Nameless One’s face cracked and bled as he forced muscles to work upon a smile.

  People will die for this.

  All he had to do was remember the past, that was the thing. Remember who he was.

  Already he was stronger than he had been. The Light Bearer did not know this; he thought his charge the same. But he was wrong. The Nameless One added to himself in cornea-thin slivers, cumulating in the darkness like rotting meat growing mold. He could retain thoughts from one day to another now. It cost him in other ways, forced his body to fight the pain alone as his mind wet-nursed a thought, and his joints ached to bleeding as he held himself still while he slept. Still, he knew things now, and he judged it worth it. For uncountable years he had known as little as the creatures that grew to maturation beneath his flesh, aware of nothing except hunger and pain and thirst.

  He had himself now. And he spent his days waiting for the chance to reclaim more.

  When the Light Bearer took, when he descended into the chamber with his light and his warm
packages oozing honey and bean juice and stole that thing he needed from the Nameless One’s flesh, he uncovered a river of dark currents as he worked. These glimpses of darkness, swells, and eddies of liquid glass whetted the Nameless One’s tongue. The current ran for him alone. And every time the Light Bearer slit open skin with his thin engraver’s knife and extracted what he needed with his little silver tongs, the river’s bank meandered closer. One day it would come close enough for the Nameless One to enter. One day he would use its waters to douse the flames that burned in place of his past.

  Settling himself in the position that brought most comfort, with his legs tucked beneath him and the chains pulled high across his chest, he began straining for the name he’d lost. Time came and went. Darkness endured. Somehow, despite all his efforts and his deepest wishes, his mind slipped from his task, and loneliness came to feed upon him once more. Eventually he slept. His dreams when they came were all of warm arms, touching him, holding him, carrying him up toward the light.

  SIXTEEN

  A Visitor

  Heavy snows had fallen on the clanhold during the ten days he was away. The filly didn’t like the soft, often chest-high drifts and left to her own devices chose paths that were indirect, to say the least. Raif let her have her say. The roundhouse was in sight now, and he could find nothing inside himself that welcomed the thought of coming home.

  Overhead the sky was striped gray and white by high winds. A storm far to the north, born in the frozen waste of the Great Want, was working itself out beyond the horizon. At ground level the wind it generated was biting. The filly got the worst of it, and her nose and eyes were crusted and weeping, and ice crystals formed continually around her mouth. Every hour or so Raif would stop and clean her face and bridle and check the flesh around her mouth for chilblains. He could muster no such enthusiasm for himself. His fox hood was stiff with ice; five days’ worth of breath had accumulated in the guard hairs, turning each strand of fur into a brittle quill of ice. The parts of Raif’s cheeks that touched the hood were numb.