A Cavern Of Black Ice (Book 1)

by J. V. Jones

  Levering his body around, Heritas Cant adjusted the curve of his neck and fixed Raif with a hard stare. Uncomfortable, Raif looked away. His gaze rested on Heritas Cant’s pale, bone-filled hand. The knuckles were out of alignment. Two had twisted around completely and now faced downward along with his palm.

  As he straightened up, Raif caught the end of a look passed between Angus and Heritas Cant, a message-filled look, where the crippled man looked grim and Angus appealed to him like a puppy who had dug up some piece of nastiness from the garden and brought it into the house.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting supper?” Cant said, each word a little stab with a knife. “And this late, too. You won’t get anything hot, mind. I won’t have the oven fired for a ranger, a clansman, and a sick bit of a girl. You’ll have to make do with cold mutton, thinly sliced, and such crusts as I could not eat myself. Woman!”

  The cloistress appeared in the doorway.

  “Supper for these people. Light no extra tallow and serve them only with the third best bowls.”

  The cloistress said nothing, merely inclined her head.

  “And watch your own trips as you go, woman. Come here but once to bring the food, then not again. I will not have the carpet worn by undue steppings.” Heritas Cant turned to Raif. “Nor will I have the heat from the fire hogged by just one man.”

  Raif pressed his lips to a line and moved a few paces from the fire. He didn’t like this petty little man.

  Cant clicked his sticks on the plank floor as soon as the cloistress was gone. “So you’ve brought me something sick to look at, Angus Lok. I trust she is not fevered, for I’ll have no catching sickness in my house.” As he spoke, he labored across the room, making his way toward Ash. His movements reminded Raif of an aging black bear that Drey had shot at distance one summer in the Oldwood. Drey’s arrow had found the bear’s lower spine, and the creature had lurched into the undergrowth before either he or Drey had chance to kill it.

  To cover up the awkwardness of Heritas bending to tend to Ash, Angus spoke. “Heritas is treasurer of all monies levered from the Old Sull Gate.”

  Heritas blasted air through his nostrils. “And they give me nothing but a copper on the crow-weight for my troubles. More gold rubs off in the gatekeepers’ pockets in a single afternoon than I see in a whole month of counting coin.” Heritas Cant’s good hand traveled along Ash’s body as he spoke, pressing the base of her throat, the hollows beneath her eyes, her stomach, and the muscles in her shoulders and sides.

  Raif feigned interest in the topic of conversation, though in truth all he was concerned with was watching Heritas Cant’s hands on Ash. “Why is it called the Old Sull Gate?”

  “Because that’s what it’s always been known as.” Heritas Cant slipped something between Ash’s lips, something dark and brittle like a dried leaf. “Master Threavish Cutler would have it otherwise; he’s tried calling it King’s Gate, Lake Gate, and even Heron Gate, after his damn fool of a brother who died in waist-deep snow battling a dozen Crosermen on disputed ground. Cutler’s aim, besides appeasing his own undeniable grief, was to make everyone forget that this city once belonged to the Sull.”

  “But I thought—”

  “You thought what?” Heritas Cant sent Raif a withering look and then answered his own question. “That Ille Glaive has always counted itself one of the Mountain Cities? That the Sull have always lived in their forests in the east and never built anything more ambitious than a stone redoubt and a ring of cairns? No. The Sull were the first to cross the Ranges and settle the Northern Territories. Before the clans and the driven ranks marched north, the Sull came here, to the shores of the Black Spill, and built a fine city around the springs. That city still stands today if one cares to look. It exists at the base of old buildings, beneath thickly worked plaster and hastily laid tiles. Aboveground there is nothing—the towers, statues, and earthwork have all gone, systematically wrecked by a long line of Threavish Cutler’s ilk—but belowground, at the heart of Ille Glaive, lie Sull foundations, Sull tunnels, and Sull stone.”

  Raif didn’t care for Heritas Cant’s tone of voice. If the man hadn’t been a cripple, he would have dearly liked to hit him. For Ash’s sake, he made an effort. “So the lords of Ille Glaive forced the Sull from the city?”

  Heritas Cant took his left hand from Ash’s stomach and massaged the misshapen hump of bones that was his right wrist. “Yes and no. A siege took place, many battles were fought, but in the end the thanelords of Ille Glaive earned their tears’ worth of Sull blood cheaply. The Sull have demons that are not of man’s making. They fought for this city and would have held it if they hadn’t had older, more pressing battles to win. They as good as gave this city to the thanelords and their leader, Dunness Fey . . . and it wasn’t the first time such a gain has been made at the Sull’s expense. Yet we should all pray that it be the last.”

  Raif felt his face burn as Heritas spoke. He was angry, but there something more here. Almost against his will, Raif’s hand moved to touch his raven lore. Heritas Cant’s sharp green eyes caught the action even as Raif stopped himself short.

  “What is your lore?”

  It was a rude question, and Heritas Cant knew it. When a clansman met someone from another clan, he would never ask him outright about his lore. That sort of knowledge always came secondhand. Raif considered not answering. Heritas Cant was something unknown; just because Angus trusted him didn’t mean that he should. Yet something else struck him about the small, broken man: He had known Raif was a clansman. Angus had not introduced him as such, and Raif knew his clothes and ornaments no longer proclaimed him as clan—the Dhoonesmen’s indifference on the Glaive Road had told him that. So, did Heritas Cant know him as clan because he’d seized upon something subtle like his accent or his manner, or had Angus discussed his sister’s family in this house once before? Either way Raif found little reassurance. He glanced at Cant. The man’s shrewd, pain-sculpted face glowed like polished wood in the firelight.

  “I am raven born,” Raif said.

  “Watcher of the Dead.” Cant clicked his sticks. “’Tis a hard lore. It will drive you fierce and use your flesh and leave you little but loss in payment.”

  Raif did not move; he neither blinked nor breathed nor trembled. The words felt like a sentence, and it seemed all he could do was stand and accept them. The same nameless fear he’d felt moments earlier when Cant spoke about the Sull filled his chest.

  Angus shifted his weight, causing a board to creak beneath him. “Come now, Heritas. You need not be so bleak. Ravens are clever beasties. They’re the only birds who can live out a full winter in the Want. Strong, they are, with wings like knives and voices to match. True, they’re not the prettiest creatures, but if the clan guide gave out lores on looks alone, we’d all be kittens and doe-eyed . . . does.”

  Heritas Cant had stretched his dead hand upon Ash’s forehead as Angus spoke. Now he arranged the twisted fingers with his good hand, spreading them wide, into her hair, over the bridge of her nose, and across her eyebrows. “True enough,” he said as he worked. “The raven is a clever bird. It favors shadows and waits upon death.”

  With those words Cant changed, becoming for a moment something else, as if a heavy substance, like molten rock, had been poured into his body and then flash-hardened in an instant. The dead hand that could only be moved with another’s help gripped Ash’s flesh. Cant’s mouth opened, and he uttered something that was not speech.

  Ash’s entire body moved toward him. Her head rose from the floor. Her mouth gasped open, revealing the dead leaf on her tongue. Raif saw the tendons on her neck and wrists working, straining . The stench of smelted metal was suddenly there in the room, so strong it could be tasted as well as smelled. Pinpoints of spittle frothed from Heritas Cant’s lips. His sticks clattered to the floor. All was still for the briefest moment, then Cant swayed and nearly fell and Ash slumped back onto the rug.

  Angus rushed to Cant’s side, supporting him, helping
him rise, leading him to a chair.

  Raif paid them no heed. He crossed to where Ash lay and knelt in the warm space Cant had just vacated. Even as he reached out to touch her, her eyes opened.

  Relief flooded over him, leaving him feeling drunk and breathless and so stupidly pleased, he could have laid down Tem’s sword and danced above the blade. All talk of ravens and death was forgotten. Swiftly he gave thanks to the Stone Gods; they were jealous and demanding and might take something back if not appeased. Ash was awake. Her large gray eyes, first shown to him weeks ago by the guidestone, looked and saw and recognized.

  “You’re safe,” Raif said. “We’re in a friend’s house.” He hesitated, knowing their peculiar relationship demanded that he always tell her how long she had been asleep. He didn’t want to upset her with the truth, yet he would not lie to her, either. “You’ve been asleep for four days.”

  Ash’s eyes looked into his. Her lips trembled.

  What had she been through? He found he did not like the thought of her suffering. Slowly, deliberately, he bent down and gathered her up, pulling her fast against his chest. She was so cold it frightened him.

  “Easy, Raif.” Angus put a hand on his shoulder. “Let her be.”

  Raif shook his head. “I will not let them take her again.”

  Crouching, Angus brought his face close to Raif’s. He studied whatever was showing there for a long moment and then said in a weary voice, “And so it begins.”

  A quarter passed before Raif could finally be persuaded to let her go.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Named Beasts

  I have put what wardings I can between Ash and that which calls her. Later, I shall do more. Yet know this: The Bound Men and

  Beasts of the Blind will not be held off indefinitely. They know what Ash is, and they will not let her rest until she gives them what they crave.”

  Heritas Cant’s wheel-broken body rested in a chair of hard black wood. An hour had passed since Ash had awakened. A light supper of watered beer, bread, and roasted mutton had been eaten by all, during which Cant had complained heatedly about the number of guests, the amount of food eaten, the crumbs wasted, the gristle spat, the strain on the dying fire, and the wear on his rugs, chairs, wooden bowls, and spoons. After supper he had called the cloistress to him and informed her that he was taking his guests “to the warren” to show them his collection of foreign coins. The cloistress had bobbed her head sharply, like a sparrow plucking insects from air, yet even as her face and chin pointed downward her milky gaze had followed them from the room.

  The warren was located at the far edge of the plot of land that lay at the rear of Heritas Cant’s house. Constructed entirely underground, it reminded Raif of the rendering pits in the badlands, dug so that thirty head of elk could be sweated at one time. Its mud walls were braced with crossing timbers as big as a full-grown man, and its ceiling was formed from whole basswood logs mounted on brackets. Things grew in the spaces between the logs: silvery weeds that moved with every breath Raif took. The floor was good firm stone, blue slate, and much worn. The air above it smelled of wet soil and old age.

  Heritas said it had been built half a century earlier by the last owner of the house, an eccentric man who had been convinced that one day headless demons would walk the earth and only those living beneath it would be saved. Raif had laughed. Angus had suggested that the man’s real motive may well have been to get some peace from his wife. Heritas Cant had greeted both reactions with ill humor.

  He was ill humored now, sitting awkwardly in his chair at the head of a broad oak table laid with chained books, rolled hides, and copper tablets as thin as blades. Mud glistened on the walls behind his back, oozing softly as the goose-fat lantern warmed the chamber.

  “I don’t understand,” Ash said. “What is the Blind?”

  Heritas Cant and Angus exchanged a glance. Raif watched his uncle’s face carefully, trying to see beyond Angus’ guard of good humor. Angus and Ash were sitting close, sharing a bench across the table from Cant. Raif sat with his back against the far wall, glad of his place in the background in the dim low-ceilinged space.

  “The Blind is a place of darkness,” Heritas said. “Some would call it the underworld, others would say it is the boundary where hell and earth meet. More learned men will tell you that it is a place of holding, a prison if you like, where beings that should never have been brought into existence are walled in by the bricks and mortar of ancient spells.” A pause followed, where Heritas settled his crippled legs into a more comfortable position against the chair. When he resumed speaking his voice was sharp with pain, but as he continued, everything—the chamber, the mud walls, the light from the lantern, and even his own pain—fell away.

  “The Blind is home to those who should be dead. Things live there who crave the light and the warmth of the world we inhabit. Hunger is all they know. Need is all they feel. For a thousand years none amongst them have reached the light, but still they do not forget or stop craving. Desire only deepens with time. The Blind is as cold and empty as eternity; it is fed by the dark rivers of hell, held in place by spells so terrible and lasting that closeness to its boundaries can kill.

  “The creatures who wait there are chained in blood. They hate living men with all the substance of their souls. Once they were human. Once they walked our world as men, yet dark times came and some would say the world cracked open and through the breach rode the Endlords. They have many names, these lords: Lords of Shadow and Lords of Night, the Unleashed, the Condemned, the Shadow Warriors, and the Takers of Men. One touch is all it takes for an Endlord to claim a man’s body and soul. Their flesh bleeds darkness. Cut them open and the black substance of evil leaks out. In the Time of Shadows they massed great warhosts that stretched from sea to sea. They were terrible to behold, human yet not human, wearing the faces of men and women they had claimed, stinking of death, their eyes burning black and red, their bodies shifting shadows beneath them. The Endlords rode at the head of their armies, great beastmen on black horses, with weapons forged from voided steel that reflected no light.

  “It is said that they were birthed at the same time as the gods, and if it is the gods’ purpose to make life, then it is the Endlords’ purpose to destroy it. Make no mistake, the world will end, perhaps not for a thousand thousand years, but when it does it will be the Endlords who will dance upon the wreckage.

  “They ride the earth every thousand years to claim more men for their armies. When a man or woman is touched by them, they become Unmade. Not dead, never dead, but something different, cold and craving. The shadows enter them, snuffing the light from their eyes and the warmth from their hearts. Everything is lost. Their memories leave them first, seeping from them like blood from skinned flesh. The ability to think and understand comes next and with it all emotion except need. Blood and skin and bone is lost, changed into something the Sull call maer dan: shadowflesh.

  “These men and women are known as Shadow Wearers, the Bound Men, Wralls, and the Taken. The Endlords have taken others, too, beasts from forgotten ages, things that are half man and half monster, giants, bloodwraiths . . . things that no longer walk this earth.

  “All have but one memory left: the knowledge they were once counted amongst the living. This is the core of their existence. It is what drives them to battle . . . and to hate.

  “There was a time when the Shadow Wearers and their masters rode unchecked in our world. Their numbers massed and their power cumulated and the long night of darkness began. Terrible wars were fought. Wars so ancient and devastating that only scraps of their history remain. Wars of Blood and Shadow, the Ruinwars, Wars of the Blind. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. Generations of sorcerer-warriors were massacred. Losses became so great that those fighting could see no end, only the complete and utter silence of destruction. That’s when the Hearth of Ten came together to bring an end to the wars and banish the Shadow Wearers and the lords who had made them, exile them to a place wh
ere their powers were rendered futile and they could no longer walk the earth.

  “I do not know if the Hearth of Ten created the Blind or found it. Some say the Blind is where the Endlords first came from, that they originated in a place beyond the boundaries of our world and that the Hearth of Ten did nothing but drive them back. Others will tell you that the Blind is wholly the creation of man, that it is as artificial as a glass eye and as monstrous as a cage riven with inward-pointing spikes.

  “One thing is certain, though: The Hearth of Ten sealed the Blind. The ten greatest bloodlines of sorcerer-warriors came together and worked upon the sealing for ten generations. Spells and dark sorceries, heavy with kin-blood, thick with time’s passage, shared sacrifices and loss, were woven over the course of three hundred years. The Hearth of Ten created new sorceries as they worked, inventing new methods of seeing, new ways of combining their powers, and massing them over time.

  “By such methods they built a wall around the Blind, such a wall as had never been seen or imagined, one that could never again be duplicated, whose secrets died with the generations of sorcerer-warriors who had created it, their blood, bones, ashes, and souls ground into the substance of the wall.

  “And so the Blind was sealed and remains sealed, and those beings that feed on men abide there, remembering, waiting, living quarter-lives in an absence of light. The Blind is their prison and may one day be their tomb, and no man, woman, or sorcerer may go there. No one except a Reach.”

  At some point while he spoke, Heritas Cant had stopped being a crippled man with stunted, misshapen legs and a listing spine and become a powerful sorcerer instead. Now, finished, he set his green eyes upon Ash and watched to see what she would do. He shrank as he waited. The distance between his shoulder blades contracted, his chest sagged, and the skin on his hands settled, revealing white ridges of bone.

  He is two people, Raif thought, one broken and twisted like his body, and one powerful and in pain and not often shown.