A Cavern Of Black Ice (Book 1)

by J. V. Jones

  Angry at his own weakness, Raif forced the cold meat of his hands to buttress the staff. The second wolf retreated, and this time Raif made a show of chasing after it, sending every wolf except Pack Leader scampering back.

  Kill an army for me, Raif Sevrance. Raif’s jaw tightened. What was one wolf compared to that?

  He made his stand twenty paces from the rocks. Stripping off his gloves, he bared hands mottled blue and yellow to the night. Swiftly he closed his fingers in a new arrangement around the butt of the staff. All around him wolves’ eyes burned with sliver blue light that looked borrowed from the moon. Raif had mind for only one pair. Pack Leader stood at the head of the formation, its snout bunched, its lips pulled back revealing the hard purple substance of its gums.

  Raif dropped his gaze from its eyes to the muscled bow of its chest . . . and within an instant sighted its heart. Big as a man’s, but beating twice as quickly, it rested against the wolf’s ribs: a fist of gristle and meat. Blood heat and blood stench mingled in Raif’s mouth, and he had no way of knowing if they were his own or the wolf’s. Pack Leader’s heart was his, and it was all dancing after that.

  Snarling, the wolf hunkered for an attack. Raif raised the butt of the staff high above his head. As the animal pounced he waited . . . waited . . . until the darkness at the center of its open maw was all that he could see. And then thrust the staff down its throat. Bone crunched. Breath hissed like steam. Blood shot from the cavity in a fine mist that wetted the upside of Raif’s face. Down the staff went, down the gullet to the heart.

  The wolf hung there, its paws no longer touching earth, spitted upon a branch of willow like a suckling pig ready for the hearth. Raif watched as the blue ice in its eyes melted and the curled bull-whip of its tail fell flat. Watcher of the Dead. Abruptly he threw the staff from him.

  The wolf’s body slumped into the snow, raising a cloud of white ice. Blood seeping from its mouth and the break in its chest fed the frost a meal of scarlet. The other dogs padded forward nervously, haunches low to the ground, nostrils twitching as they pulled knowledge from thin air. Raif ran at them, roaring.

  It was enough to scatter the pack. One by one they turned and ran, leaving their leader to the cold embrace of death. None looked back.

  Shivering, Raif turned. His strength was gone. He could not lift his feet free of the snow and had to force his way through it to return to Ash. Wolf blood drying on his face tightened like a mask as he approached her.

  She was still, perfectly still. Her hood was twisted back behind her neck. Dark liquid rolled from her nose, ears, and mouth. Streams of it. And her head now rested in a pool of red ice.

  Madness came swiftly to Raif. Thought shedded from him like old skin. Sense and understanding drained away as quickly as water down a slope, and all that was left was Ash, the darkness, and the faces of nine gods.

  She could not die.

  He would not let her.

  With hands long past feeling, he plucked Drey’s tine from his belt. The elk horn was as smooth as teeth, cold as the night itself. The silver cap popped softly as he flicked it free with his thumb. A thin stream of powder blew free with the wind, the color of ashes and stone. Turning the tine on its side, Raif walked a circle in the snow.

  Ganolith, Hammada, Ione, Loss, Uthred, Oban, Larannyde, Malweg, Behathmus, Raif so named the Stone Gods. Powdered guidestone trailed behind him like a plume of dark smoke, scattering a line of charcoal upon the ice. The night deepened and hollowed like a pit, and Raif felt himself falling, falling, falling . . .

  Circle completed, he stepped inside it. And howled like the wolf he had just slain.

  FIFTY

  Far Riders and Old Men

  Mal Naysayer and Ark Veinsplitter were riding in silence through a valley of smooth snow when they heard the call of the gods. The two warriors had known each other for so long that they had little need for talk. Ark could tell what the Naysayer was thinking from the slightest shrinking of his pale ice eyes. A moment before the cry, Ark had considered calling a halt, but Mal’s eyes had warned him off. They were overlate as it was.

  A dead raven had called them north. Meeda Longwalker, heartborn daughter of the Sull and mother of He Who Leads, had excavated the frozen carcass from the snow. By her reckoning it had been there eleven days . . . which made Mal Naysayer and Ark Veinsplitter eleven days out of time. Normally such considerations were nothing to Far Riders—they were Sull, and all men waited upon them—but a summons from the Listener was different. It carried the compulsion of blood and gods shared. Ice Trappers were Old Blood, like the Sull.

  Ark Veinsplitter barely had time to thrust his hands into the ashes of the Heart Fire before the summons had come. Blood from his horse was still wet upon his letting knife, as He Who Leads had pointed his opal-tipped arrow north. “The Listener calls us north to speak of war and darkness. Staunch the wounds of your horses and ride forth. You speak in my voice and act in my image, and the sons and daughters of the Sull will fast from dawn to moonrise to mark the sacrifices you must make. May you find a bright moon to guide you.”

  Mal Naysayer and Ark Veinsplitter had drunk their horses’ blood and left. Neither had kin to see them off, yet even so when they halted that first night on high ground above the Heart Fires, they found freshly fletched arrows in their cases of wolverine and bone, and new-roasted caribou tongues in the packs that rode their horses’ rumps. Hungry as they were, they honored the fast and did not eat until the blind eye of the moon rose high above the trees.

  They were Sull. The blood of their horses was enough.

  Winter was too deeply set to head north and ride through the Want. The Want was a wasteland of frozen ground. Its pocked and broken earth bore the scars of ancient magic and ancient battles. And even the Sull’s ancestral tellings of its terrain were sparsely worded in parts. The Want was Sull land. They had won and claimed it at the cost of a whole generation of warrior sons and daughters, yet still it remained an unknowable place. Things older than the Sull had lived there in the Time Before.

  Instead the Far Riders had headed west through the clanholds, weaving a path through the territories of twelve separate clans, seen by few save old cragsmen, drovers, and clanswomen tending their traps. The Far Riders skirted the margins, traveling in the mists created by open waters, in the troughs left by dry streams, in the shadows raised by tree lines, and over ice, frozen marshes, and wet-lands that no clan horse could dance. The clanholds had once been Sullholds, and the memories of the land still burned with cold fire in their blood.

  The pass they had taken west through the Ranges was known to none save the Sull. The path slipped beneath the rock in places, and both Ark and Mal had to unmount. The tunnel walls had been chiseled smooth by Sull hands, and ravens and the moon in all its phases were drawn there in silver and midnight blue so dark it looked almost black. The Far Riders gave thanks to the stonecutters who had formed the tunnel and paid a toll of hair and blood.

  That was in the final hour of daylight last night. This morning they had awakened from their cold camp on the west face of the mountain and made good pace to the Storm Margin below. The thick snows that were born in the Wrecking Sea and held within the margin by mountains that would allow none but the highest clouds to pass did little to slow them down. The blue and the gray were bred for white weather and their dams had birthed them upon ice. Even with a day of hard travel behind them, the two stallions and the packhorse showed no sign of tiring, and their heads were erect and alert.

  Both stallions responded to the cold howl that seemed to crack the very substance of time. Ark’s gray shook its head and fought the bit. Mal’s blue lowered its ears so they touched the back of its skull and snorted a great cloud of air. Ark spoke a word to calm his stallion. All about, snow swirled in whirlwind forms, rising and flickering like white flames. The wind murmured softly through the lynx fur at Ark’s ears and throat, and for the first time since journey’s start the Far Rider felt fear.

  He turned
to face Mal. The Naysayer was a large man, made huge by the bulk of his furs. His face was hardened by white-weather travel and white-weather fights. He could use more weapons than any other living man, and his eyes were the color of ice. He had needed no word to calm his horse.

  You speak in my voice and act in my image . . . Ark Veinsplitter counted those words through his head like prayer beads as he decided what to say to his hass. The howl of a creature who was not a wolf had broken their journey, and every scar on his body where blood had been let ached with the knowledge of God.

  The Naysayer waited, his pale eyes blinking only when snowflakes touched them. He could be patient, this man whose anger when stirred was enough to stampede caribou herds and send entire villages inside to lock their doors.

  Ark breathed deeply, then spoke. “What think you, Mal Naysayer? Should we continue our journey as if we have not heard the cry that halted us, and ride north sure in the knowledge that what we do is right in the eyes of moon and God?”

  Mal Naysayer made a move that caused his lynx furs to ripple, a move that anyone else but Ark Veinsplitter might easily have mistaken for a shrug. He said just one word: “Nay.”

  It was enough to turn the two men west, and change the course of fate.

  Spynie Orrl, the ancient chief of Clan Orrl, faced the Dog Lord over the chief’s table at Dhoone. A storm pushed clouds and snow against the Dhoonehouse’s blue sandstone walls, but inside the chief’s chamber all was still. The dogs were chained to their rat hooks by the hearth, but harsh words from Vaylo Bludd moments earlier had forestalled the normal hostilities they showed to uninvited guests.

  The Dog Lord poured malt in silence, giving the amber-colored liquid the respect it was due. Two wood cups, plainly turned with neither handles nor embellishment, were filled to the exact same mark. Pushing the first in the Orrl chief’s direction, Vaylo said, “What brings a Blackhail-sworn chief to Dhoone this night?”

  Spynie Orrl made no response, save to retrieve his cup and drink. He was an old man, the oldest chief in the clanholds, and his body was all knots and bone. A few white hairs clung to his scalp, but apart from that he was bald in the way newborns were bald: eyebrowless, pink, and shiny. His eyes were dark and shrunken, but they were still as sharp as picks. Placing his wooden cup on the table, he nodded toward it. “Good malt. I’ve tasted Bludd liquor before now, and no offense to your malters and distillers, but this stuff must belong to the Dhoone.”

  “So you think ill of our Bludd’s own brew?”

  “Ill’s not the word. Let’s just say I wouldn’t feed it to my sheep.”

  Vaylo Bludd snorted with laughter, slapping his hand on the table and stamping his booted feet. At the hearth, his dogs tugged nervously on their leashes. They had not heard their master laugh in months, and the sound disturbed them deeply. Vaylo reached for Spynie’s cup. “Well, coming from an Orrlsman, I’ll consider both myself and my clan reprimanded. Here. Let’s drink to brewers with nimble fingers and distillers with surgeon’s hands.”

  Spynie Orrl was more than happy to drink to that.

  When the second cup had been drunk and an agreeable silence had settled between the two chiefs, Vaylo decided to try his hand again. He had been too arrogant the first time; he saw that now. This man before him might be a chief from a lesser clan, but he had lorded that clan for fifty years, and for that alone he demanded respect. “I hear there’s trouble between you and Scarpe.”

  The Orrl chief nodded absently, the gooseflesh on his neck continuing to wobble after the movement stopped. “Aye. And trouble with Blackhail as well.”

  The Dog Lord knew this, but he also knew it was better to let a man tell his own story in his own words. So he nodded and said nothing and let the Orrl chief speak.

  “It’s Mace Blackhail. The Hail Wolf, they call him now. Any other man or woman in that clan would have been a better choice to lead it. His foster father was a good man. I say that because I knew and respected him, and named a grandson in his honor. But Mace Blackhail shares neither blood nor mettle with the man who fostered him from Scarpe. Mace is a Scarpeman. Yelma Scarpe is his mother’s cousin. He can’t help but favor her claims. When she came to him asking for his help against us, he should have done what Dagro always did. Told the sharp-toothed bitch he never so much as pissed between his war-sworn clans.” Spynie Orrl wagged his ancient head. “Of course, Dagro would have used words sweeter than those. But then sweet words didn’t save him in the end.”

  He looked at the Dog Lord sharply, and Vaylo got the distinct feeling that the old chief had long since guessed that Clan Bludd wasn’t responsible for Dagro Blackhail’s death. Vaylo was too much of an old dog himself to allow his face to betray him, but his dogs picked up on the change in his scent and growled accordingly at Spynie Orrl.

  The Orrl chief tipped his head in their direction. “Nice dogs. When you’re done with them send them to me. I’ve got some sheep I’d like to scare hairless. Not to mention a few of my wife’s kin.” Before Vaylo had chance to react, Spynie leaned across the table and said, “Mace Blackhail has as good as declared war on our clan. Twelve Scarpemen were slain on our border, and it suited Yelma Scarpe to point her finger our way. She’s always wanted that border-land. My hunters take down a hundred head of elk there each season. It’s good ranging land, and Yelma Scarpe went running to Mace Blackhail to get it. You know how Scarpes are: She didn’t want to fight. There’s more muscles in their tongues than their guts. We’ll pardon you for the killing of our men if you relinquish the land they died on.” Spynie Orrl’s breath exploded from his mouth. “And Mace Blackhail thought this fair! Take the land, he said, quick as if it were his Stone God-given right to grant it. I’ll send a score of hammermen to keep the peace.”

  Vaylo frowned. No Bludd, Dhoone, or Blackhail chief had any business intervening in conflicts between their war-sworn clans.

  Spynie Orrl continued, his head shaking softly as he spoke. “I had no choice but to defend my borders against Scarpe- and Hailsmen. Orrl against Blackhail, I never thought to see it in my lifetime. Before they rode north, I warned my axmen to slay only those men showing the colors and badges of Scarpe. But even then I knew I was giving an order that could not be obeyed. You cannot order men to cherry-pick their foe.” He sighed heavily. “Two Hailsmen were slain along with a score of Scarpemen. All men of mine who venture outside the Orrlhold now risk death. I’ve lost two border patrols, and a party I sent east to treat with the Crab chief.” There was a pause. “And I’m waiting on the return of my firstborn grandson and the five men who traveled west with him for the hunt.”

  The Dog Lord stood and turned his face toward his dogs. He knew all about grandchildren and their loss. When he spoke he kept his voice hard. “Yet you torched the Scarpehouse.”

  “Aye. And I’d torch it again if I could. We are Orrl, we hunt our enemies and our game alike.”

  The Orrl boast. Vaylo had never thought much of it until now. Bending joints that creaked like old wood, Vaylo reached down to handle the dogs he had left. The wolf dog forced its large streamlined head into his hand, demanding to be scratched and tussled first. The burns on its ear and scalp were dry now, but the healed flesh was hard and raised, and fur would never grow there again. Not for the first time, Vaylo found himself thinking back to that last night in Ganmiddich. If the dogs had not been shackled and housed, they would have provided fair warning of the Blackhail attack. As it was, Vaylo had barely had time to assemble his men and raise an attack on Blackhail lines. Strom Carvo was dead, his skull smashed by a Blackhail hammer. Molo Bean was dead, his arms hacked off at the elbows, his face burned black by the flames that had rained from the sky. Others were gone. Good men, who all took pieces of the Dog Lord’s heart to the Stone Halls beyond. Two of his dogs were burned beyond recognition. One made it as far as Withy before Vaylo broke its neck.

  The sight of his two grandchildren, running toward him across the courtyard at Dhoone, nearly made his hurts go away. Cluff Drybannock h
ad taken them north two days ahead of the raid, and they and Nan were safe. Drybone didn’t say it but both he and the Dog Lord knew that if half the Bludd force hadn’t been sent north from Ganmiddich to escort the children home, Blackhail would have won nothing but death that day.

  “You know the Hail Wolf refused to relinquish control of the Ganmiddich roundhouse until the Crab forswore his oath to Dhoone, and gave word to Blackhail instead?” Spynie Orrl’s dark eyes glinted like pieces of coal. Could he read thoughts? Vaylo wondered.

  “I have heard that. ’Tis a bad business. Ganmiddich has been sworn to Dhoone for as long—”

  “As Orrl’s been sworn to Blackhail,” Spynie finished for him. The old clan chief met and held the Dog Lord’s gaze. Silence in the room deepened and stretched, and Vaylo felt it press against each of his seventeen teeth.

  Why had he come here, this chief from an enemy clan? Why had he risked the lives of eleven of his best men by riding east through territory that encompassed three separate warring clans? And then there was the greatest risk of all: presenting himself at the Dhoone border and demanding an audience with the Dog Lord himself. It took jaw to do that. Vaylo almost smiled to think of it. Spynie Orrl was as tough as a mountain goat.

  “I haven’t come here to offer my clan to Bludd,” the Orrl chief said, once again snatching the thoughts straight from Vaylo’s head. “Only a fool would do that. I’ve got Blackhail-sworn clans on two sides, and playing piggy-in-the-middle suits me about as much as a truss made of ice. No. I’ll keep my oath to Blackhail as best I can. A thousand years of loyalty should not be easily set aside.”

  The look in Spynie’s eyes left no doubt as to what he thought of oath breakers. Suddenly angry, the Dog Lord said, “Say what you came here for, Orrl chief. I will not be preached at. The Stone Gods bred war into us, and I would not be a clansman if I did not see an advantage and take it. Battle is in my blood.”