by J. V. Jones
Vaylo’s thoughts were broken by the soft burr of Cluff Drybannock’s voice. “Say the word and I will assemble a troop of hammermen and escort the bairns back to Dhoone.”
Halting by the chief’s door, the Dog Lord turned and looked into the man’s Sull-blue eyes. “You don’t think I should have brought them here.”
It was not a question, yet Drybone answered it anyway. “No. This roundhouse is no place for them. It’s only a matter of time before the Crab tries to reclaim it.”
“And what if I had left them at Dhoone, with their father? How safe would they be there?”
“Safer than here, on the cityhold border, in a roundhouse only a day’s ride from Bannen and Croser, and not much farther from Gnash.”
Vaylo slammed a fist against the door. The dogs at his heels skittered and shrank to their haunches. “Don’t you think I know the dangers? Don’t you think I lie awake each night, thinking and rethinking them?”
Drybone did not respond in any way to his chief’s anger. Instead he held his fine head level and spoke in a quiet voice. “Every journey you take them on is a danger. They are best kept at the Heart of Clan, at Dhoone.”
He was right, and Vaylo knew it. Entering the green-walled interior of the chief’s chamber, he turned to Drybone and said, “I fear to let them out of my sight, Dry. Two now, only two.”
Cluff Drybannock nodded, once. He offered no comfort, made no attempt to remind him that his sons were still young and would father dozens more, and Vaylo was grateful for that. For the second time that night he touched Drybone on the shoulder. “I’ll let you take them in a few days.”
As Drybone assented with the briefest of his always brief smiles, the two children in question came bounding through the door. Ignoring their grandfather completely, they made straight for the dogs.
After watching them wrestle, tumble, and shriek in delight at the black-and-orange beasts known throughout the North as the Dog Lord’s knuckles, Vaylo turned to Drybone and grinned. “I can’t say they’ll miss me much.”
Cluff Drybannock turned to go.
Halting him with a small turn of the wrist, Vaylo said, “How is the girl?”
“Well. Nan visited her room today. Says she’s not the sort to starve herself or throw tantrums. I think she’s quite taken with her myself.”
Vaylo rubbed his jaw, soothing his aching teeth as he thought. “How old is she?”
Drybone shrugged. “Just a girl. Tall, thin.”
“Have her brought to me, Dry. I would look upon the Surlord’s daughter myself.”
“Here?” Drybone’s gaze flicked to the children, who were giggling wildly as they groomed the wolf dog’s belly with their feet.
“Aye. If Nan thinks well enough of her, then I’ll trust her at my hearth.”
Drybone left, closing the door behind him as quietly as if he were a servant, not the man who only seven days ago had claimed
Ganmiddich for Bludd. Give me two hundred swordsmen, Dry had said the day before he’d left, and your silence until the deed is done. Even now Vaylo did not know how he’d managed it. Two hundred men to take a roundhouse the size of Ganmiddich? And it hadn’t been a bloodbath, either . . . not like Withy.
Easing himself onto the maid’s stool close to the fire, Vaylo slapped his thighs for dogs and children alike. Many feet, both hairy and hairless, scampered over the stone to reach him by the shortest, quickest route. The two children came and sat at his feet while he unhooked the leather cinches from his belt and began lashing the dogs into a team. The dogs hated being bound, but the children’s presence tempered their normal reaction, and Vaylo managed to collar them with only a minor loss of skin and blood. When he was done, he looped the main lead over a spit hook in the hearthwall.
“Granda, why do they have to be tied?” Casha, now his eldest grandchild, sent a long, sympathetic look the wolf dog’s way.
Vaylo brushed the girl’s jet black hair. Her mother had Far South blood in her, and the child was dark skinned and dark eyed and beautiful to behold. “Because I’m expecting a visitor, and the dogs seldom take kindly to those.”
One of the dogs, a lean bitch who was all teeth and snout, growled. Vaylo hissed at her, though in truth he was not displeased. As he returned his gaze to his granddaughter, a red light shining through the slitted window in the opposite wall caught his eye: the Bludd Fire burning in the upper chamber of the tower. Seven days and nights it had blazed, long enough for all in the cityholds to know that the Dog Lord now stood at their door.
Vaylo tried to tear his eyes away but couldn’t. There had been a time when taking Ganmiddich would have meant something, when the thought of war and raids was what roused him from his bed every morning and kept him awake past midnight with his warlords every night. He fought because he had the jaw for it, because he loved to win more than he loved life itself. Now, though, he fought from hate.
And fear.
Vaylo rose and closed the iron shutters, engaging each of the seven clasps and drawing the bar.
Blackhail was the reason Cluff Drybannock had moved against Ganmiddich. He had been there the night the women and children were found off the Bluddroad. He had helped excavate the bodies. Any clan who might form an alliance with the Hail Wolf and his clansmen had to be sent a message of death. Drybone knew it. The Dog Lord knew it. And although no word had passed between them, they both knew the war would not end until Blackhail had been destroyed.
Vaylo put a hand on the iron shutters, resting the heavy bulk of his standing weight. The Ganmiddich Tower and its red fire still burned upon his irises. The Hailsman who lay imprisoned within it still burned upon his soul.
He was just a lad. When Vaylo had entered the tower yesterday at noon he had not known what to expect. Watcher of the Dead, people had started calling him after the night he’d slain three Bluddsmen at Duff’s. He’d fought like a Stone God, they said, and freely admitted to being present at the Bluddroad ambush before he’d forced his way through the door.
Vaylo’s hand cooled to the temperature of iron. Now he had this Hailsman here, imprisoned upon the Inch. He had seen him with his own two eyes, minded his wounds, and sniffed his stench. Cluff Drybannock and the others had expected him to finish the Hailsman off. He saw that on their faces, later, when he had emerged from the tower and they stood waiting in a half circle about the skiff. Drybone had even given orders that no beating was to be so great as to threaten the Hailsman’s life or limb: that privilege belonged to the Dog Lord.
Yet Vaylo had not used it. He hardly knew why himself. Seeing the Hailsman lying there on the bench, beaten, his clothes dark with blood and river grime, Vaylo had tortured himself: How had it happened, that massacre on the Bluddroad? Did the Hailsmen go in expecting to kill women and children? Did one man panic and kill one child out of anger or surprise and the others followed suit? Had any of the women fought back? How long had it taken for his grandchildren to die?
Vaylo closed his eyes, let the iron shutter take more of his weight.
No. He had not killed the Hailsman. He would, because he was the Dog Lord and no one could slay his kin and survive, yet there were things he needed to know. Things only someone present that day could tell him.
The dogs stood and growled. Immediately Vaylo looked to the door. A few seconds passed, and then knuckles rapped against the wood. A moment later Drybone entered the room, leading a girl before him. Depositing her in the center of the room, he turned to leave without a moment’s hesitation. Vaylo knew he would wait outside, at a distance where he could be sure not to overhear a word.
Penthero Iss’ foster daughter matched gazes with the Dog Lord. As Drybone had promised, she was tall and thin, yet Vaylo knew enough about young women to realize that the thinness would leave her soon enough. A few weeks of lard and oats would see to that.
“What have you done to Raif Sevrance and Angus Lok?” The girl’s voice was cold, and for the briefest moment Vaylo was reminded of her foster father, Penthero Iss. He
had reared this child from birth.
Vaylo gave no answer. Instead he walked from the window to the hearth and came to sit in the company of his dogs. His two grandchildren scrambled quickly to his feet, the youngest tugging at his dogskin pants, demanding to be picked up and held in his granda’s lap. Vaylo was aware of his grandchildren’s unease: They had sensed the fear of the dogs.
Normally when a stranger entered their master’s territory, the dogs were quick to show their teeth. Growling, they would test their leashes, lower their tails, and watch the intruder with eyes that held memories of pack kills on the frozen tundra of the Want. Yet from the moment Iss’ foster daughter had entered the room all the dogs had been silent. Not one of them growled, not even the wolf dog. They lay on their bellies, rumps pushed up against the hearthwall, ears flat against their skulls. As Vaylo picked up his grandson, one of the bitches whined softly and withdrew farther into the pack.
Vaylo watched the girl as she waited for his reply. Her silver gold hair brushed against her shoulders, falling as straight as if each individual strand had been weighted with lead beads. Her eyes were the same gray as the sky before a storm, large and clear, with silver filaments in the irises that reflected light. Everything about her looked conjured up from silver, water, and hard stone. Yet she was little more than a child, and she was afraid; Vaylo wasn’t fooled about that for an instant. He saw how she clutched at the fabric of her skirt to prevent her hands from trembling, how a muscle in her throat bobbed when she swallowed . . . and she swallowed a lot.
It was interesting that the first question she had asked had concerned her companions, not herself.
Vaylo said, “You have been well treated by my clan?”
“Answer my question.”
“Answer mine.”
The girl flinched at the hardness of his voice.
Vaylo pressed his hands against each of his grandchildren’s shoulders in turn, calming. Their granda’s anger frightened them.
“I have been treated well enough. Fed. Clothed. Confined.” The silver in the girl’s eyes turned to something darker, like steel. “Now tell me what has become of my friends.”
Vaylo made her wait upon an answer. He was impressed by her courage—he couldn’t recall the last time anyone had demanded anything from him—yet he had been the Dog Lord for too long now to let a surlord’s daughter force him into speaking before his time.
When he was good and ready he said, “Angus Lok is being held in the pit cell directly below my feet. His only harms have been the dampness of the four walls that surround him and the poorness of his diet. By all accounts he has little taste for raw leeks and sotted oats.”
“And what will you do with him?”
It was on Vaylo’s mind to reply, “Whatever I wish,” yet the girl chose that moment to push back her hair. The curt, guileless flick of her wrist was the action of a child, not a woman. To Asarhia March her hair was still a hindrance, something to be flicked away like a mosquito or a bit of dust, not a veil to be toyed with for the benefit of men. Vaylo almost smiled but didn’t. The ghosts of grand-daughters lost began to gather in the room.
“I shall hold Lok here in Ganmiddich until such a time as I see fit to move him. When I am ready I will either ransom or exchange him. There are some in the North who would pay good money for his head.”
If this was news to the girl, she didn’t show it. She merely blinked and said, “And Raif?”
“He will die by my hand.”
The girl took a breath. The light in her eyes dimmed, actually dimmed, as if something within her had blocked the fuel they needed to burn. A noise such as Vaylo had never heard before sounded deep in the throats of his dogs. The skin along his arms puckered with gooseflesh as he listened to the fearful keening.
Letting his grandson slide to the floor, he stood. “Raif Sevrance and his clan slew our women and children upon the Bluddroad. In cold blood they drew steel, and with cold hearts they rode down my grandchildren as if they were nothing more than sheep.” Vaylo didn’t take his eyes from the Surlord’s daughter as he spoke. Every sense he had told him there was danger here, from this slip of a girl, and he never questioned his instincts. He was the Dog Lord: He lived by them.
The girl stood perfectly still. Light from the fire seemed pulled toward her, as if she were sucking it from the hearth. The air in the room moved, puffing through the dogs’ coats and the children’s fine black hair.
Unnerved, Vaylo continued speaking, his voice becoming louder as he approached the center of the room. “Raif Sevrance is a slayer of children. A murderer. An enemy to this clan. I will kill him because I have no choice. Nine gods demand it.” Barely an arm’s length from the girl now, he reached out and touched her cheek. It was like touching stone.
Muscles in the girl’s throat began to move.
Sorcery.
Recognizing it for what it was, Vaylo snatched back his hand and sent it plunging downward to the gray iron clansword at his waist. As he drew metal from the hound’s-tail scabbard, the girl’s lips fell open. Something dark and liquid, like molten glass, purled on the tip of her tongue. Shadows lived within in it, floating slowly through its liquid eye like specks of dust in oil.
Vaylo’s skin cooled. Deep within him, in the blood vessels that connected his mind to his heart, he felt the nearness of something he could only name as evil. His dogs felt it, too. Behind his back he was aware of them, whimpering and scratching at the floor. He was aware also of the wolf dog moving into place by his grandchildren.
“I shall not kill him yet.” Vaylo spoke because he knew exactly how fast he was with the blade, exactly how long it would take him to cut through the girl’s neck . . . and he knew it wasn’t enough.
The words were softly spoken, whispered darts, each one making the girl blink. The light in her eyes brightened. The dark mass on her tongue hung, half in the Dog Lord’s world, half in the moist cavern of her mouth. Its surface rolled like hot tar. Vaylo saw his own death reflected there before the girl inhaled, sucking the substance she had created back into her lungs.
The chief’s chamber trembled. Ceiling timbers ticked and shuddered, and a thin stream of masonry dust showered the hearth.
The dogs began to howl.
“Granda! The lady looks sick!” Vaylo’s granddaughter spoke in a child’s idea of a whisper that was actually louder than her normal speaking voice. “Shall I bring her the stool?”
Vaylo considered the Surlord’s daughter. The blankness of moments earlier had gone from her face, leaving her looking like a young girl who had played too hard and stayed up too late. She swayed, and Vaylo automatically put out his swordhand to steady her. Glancing over his shoulder, he said to his granddaughter, “Yes, fetch the stool. Quickly, now.” Then, to the dogs, “Silence!”
Vaylo couched his sword. His hands were trembling, but the blade slid into the scabbard on first attempt. What had just happened here? Part of him almost knew, almost recognized what the girl had brought forth, yet when he probed for a memory that might explain it, he drew blank. All sense of evil had left him. The girl was just that: a girl. As his granddaughter dragged the maid’s stool across the floor, Vaylo shouldered more of Ash’s weight.
Blood trickled from her nostrils to her mouth as he lowered her onto the stool. She was trembling, and Vaylo sent his granddaughter and grandson to fetch a good malt from Nan Culldayis. He was glad to have them gone from the room.
“Here.” Vaylo handed the girl the soft red kerchief from around his neck. “Clean yourself.”
He watched her do so, taking deep breaths to calm the worn muscle that was his heart. He needed a drink. Badly. The faint odor of urine in the room testified to the fear of one of the bitches. Vaylo could not find it in himself to discipline her.
“I should slay you now, Surlord’s Daughter. Do the whole of the Northern Territories a favor.”
She looked up at him, her gray eyes as clear as a child’s. “But you won’t.”
She
had the truth of it; he needed her alive and well. Yet he would not let her know that. “What are you?”
“You do not want to know.”
She was right. He was the Dog Lord, and he existed in a world of earth and clay, where roundhouses were seldom built more than three stories above the ground and all gods worshiped lived in stone. What he had seen upon her tongue was something else, something that belonged to another people and another place. And as that thought turned over in his mind, he finally realized what part of him already knew.
This girl did not belong with Penthero Iss in Spire Vanis. This girl belonged to the Sull.
Seventeen teeth ached with raw, needling pain as Vaylo thought upon his old enemies. Bludd shared borders with the Sull, with the Trenchlanders who were part Sull, part clansmen, part anyone else who stayed long enough in their slash-and-burn settlements to give birth or spread their seed. Trenchlanders were one thing. The real Sull, the pure Sull, were something Vaylo feared above all else.
He clearly remembered the day, thirty-four years ago now, when he had led a raid on the Trenchlander settlement of Cedarlode. He had been chief less than a year, and a dry spring had forced the Cedarlode Trenchlanders out of their forests and onto his borders to search for game. Trenchlanders hunted by setting fires. They torched whole corridors of forest to force the creatures living there to flee ahead of the flames. If a fire went well and the winds blew true, they could kill enough game in a single day to feed an entire settlement for a season. While Trenchland hunters stood at the fire’s mouth, waiting to spear fleeing game, cindermen moved across the scorched and smoking charnel, bagging freshly charred carcasses.
Vaylo shuddered. He hated Trenchlanders. He had seen them destroy a thousand-year-old timber line in half a day.
When they started lighting fires on his borders, he had been quick to act. Eight score of his best hammermen and spearmen rode east with him to Cedarlode. A skirmish of sorts had taken place. Trenchlanders were no match for Bluddsmen, and even before the battle was met the Trenchlanders began to withdraw. Vaylo’s lips stretched in something close to a smile. Stone Gods! He had been arrogant that day. Suddenly, in the heat of easy victory, it wasn’t enough to force them back to their own bounds. Why not drive them farther? Claim land along the Choke River that Bludd had always coveted? It was so easy. Vaylo clearly remembered laughing with Jon Grubber and Masgro Faa as they’d bludgeoned a dozen Trenchlander cindermen along the red mud banks of the Choke.