A Cavern Of Black Ice (Book 1)

by J. V. Jones

  “Drey?” Effie asked time and time again. “Drey?” No one heard, or if they did hear, they soon forgot when a loved one of their own came into sight.

  Effie walked farther away from the roundhouse. Ahead she spied a lone clansmen tending a horse. He was tall enough for Drey . . . it was so very difficult to tell in the dark. Shivering, she made her way toward him. By the time she got close enough to see his face, she knew it wasn’t Drey. He was dressed in the gray leathers and moose felt of Bannen, and his braids were tied close to his head. Shivering, Effie changed course. He wasn’t even a Hailsman. He wouldn’t even know who Drey was.

  Cold stole slowly over Effie’s body, rising up from her feet like tidewater. Crossing her hands over her rib cage, she looked out over the graze. Her heart moved in her chest. There. On the slope, a shadow within the shadows, a man-size shape standing watch. Drey.

  She ran. Icy air roared against her cheeks as she scrambled over ground frozen to the hardness of stone. Her breath came in shallow bursts, her chest too tight to breathe deeply. The figure waited. It waited. It had to be Drey.

  When she reached the bottom of the slope, the figure shuddered. Suddenly she saw he was dressed in white. She stopped. “Drey?” Even to her own ears her voice sounded weak and uncertain. In response, the wind carried the smell of resin to her nostrils, and with a cold shock she realized her mistake. The figure wasn’t a man at all. It was a snow ghost, a pine sapling completely encased within fallen snow.

  Should have known, she told herself harshly. Any fool knows the difference between a snow ghost and a grown man.

  The snow ghost swayed and creaked with the wind, its middle branches beckoning obscenely. Effie felt tiny pinches of fear tighten the skin around her face. Quickly she turned away . . . and saw how far she had come.

  The roundhouse was a monstrous black dome against a charcoal sky. The square of orange light that marked the door was no bigger than a speck in Effie’s sights. As she stood and watched, it slimmed to a hairline, then disappeared completely. Shut. Effie’s heartbeat increased. Purposely she kept her gaze on the roundhouse, her eyes searching for the stable block and more light. Only the stable doors faced toward the roundhouse, not away from it, and all she saw was a pale corona of light glowing around the stable door.

  Effie started toward it. She tried not to look at the dark curves of the roundhouse or the land that spread out in all directions around it. But it was hard. There were no walls to block the view. Shadows surrounded her, not small shadows, not people shadows, but shadows of slopes and hills and great black bodies of trees. And it was cold, so cold.

  “Ah!” Effie sucked in breath as something whipped across her cheek. She jumped out of its way, her eyes searching the darkness for monsters. In her mind she conjured up gray worms as big as men, with teeth like glass spikes and limbs made of the same wet substance as eyes. What she saw was a thin birch branch extending from the snow, a flag of red felt flying from its tip. It was one of Longhead’s graze posts; once the snow reached a certain depth it was his only way of knowing where the graze ended and the court began.

  Shaken, Effie quickened her pace.

  She barely heard the first footsteps. The thin film of light that marked the stable was growing dimmer, and all of Effie’s attention was upon it. They couldn’t close the stable doors, too. Not yet. Panic swirled like thick fog in her head. Could she make it before they locked the doors if she ran? What if she fell in the snow? What if there were things lying beneath the snow, tree root things that curled around her ankles and trapped her? Her heart was beating so fast that it was many seconds before she realized that the soft crunching noise she kept hearing in between her footsteps wasn’t the sound of her own rushing blood.

  Slowly the realization dawned on her. Someone was walking behind her. All the exposed skin on Effie’s face cooled. It wasn’t Drey. He wouldn’t do anything to scare her. No. It was a monster, or a cowlman, or Mace Blackhail come to . . .

  Crunch, crunch, crunch. The footsteps quickened. Effie looked ahead at the roundhouse, but now the stable light had gone out and she had nowhere to head for. With a little cry, she broke into a run.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch. The footsteps were right at her back. Effie imagined a monster dressed in cowlman’s robes, with tree roots for fingers and Mace Blackhail’s yellow eyes. Faster, she ran. Faster.

  Snow was everywhere: in her hair, in her dress, in her boots. The monster’s breath was hot on her scalp, his footsteps close enough to be her own. Effie was dizzy with fear, no longer paying any attention to where she ran. She heard the footsteps change rhythm, and then a hand jerked viciously at her hair. White pain exploded in Effie’s scalp. Night turned to day and then back again as she felt herself being dragged down into the snow. Suddenly she didn’t know which way was up or down. Her head hurt so.

  “ . . . teach you, little bitch. Run crying to the roundhouse . . .”

  It took Effie a moment to realize that the monster was talking . . . in a normal clansman’s voice. She twisted around and came face-to-face with Cutty Moss. No monster, just a clansman with one blue and one hazel eye.

  “Bitch.”

  Effie tried pulling away from him, but he had wound a thick coil of her hair once around his wrist and held the length tightly in his hand. Feeling her resistance, he jerked her back. The pain made white dots of daytime dance before her eyes.

  “Not got your little witch’s stone this time, eh?” Cutty Moss tapped his throat. Effie’s vision was fuzzy, but she saw enough to realize that the twine suspended there was the exact same reverse-twist cord she had spun to hold her lore. Cutty laughed softly, his mouth splitting into two red strips. “Didn’t see that one coming, did yer?”

  Effie didn’t move. Cutty’s lips were wet with spittle, his eyes two greasy stones that glittered on his face. The ties that held his braids had come undone, and his hair blew unchecked around his face in filthy kinks. Calmly he took out a knife. “Reckon a cowlman’s going to get you. Right here in the snow.” He jabbed the snow with its tip.

  Quick as a flash the blade was at Effie’s throat. Effie saw the trail of blue light it carved in the air, felt air puff against her skin, then something warm bit muscle in her neck. No pain, just a pinprick, then warmness. She jerked back, snapping her head away from the knife. Cutty swore. Pulling on her hair, he yanked her back down into the snow. Effie smelled the sour sweetness of his breath and the urine and man-stench on his clothes. Warm liquid trickled down her throat. Frightened more by the liquid and what it meant than by Cutty Moss, she bucked and struggled against the clansman, kicking up clouds of snow.

  “Sevrance witch.” Cutty Moss kept sticking her with his knife, and Effie felt the tip enter her cheek, her arm, her chest. Hot blood was everywhere, sliding across her teeth and the whites of her eyes. Still she struggled. She didn’t want to think about what would happen if she stopped.

  Cutty Moss shifted the grip on his knife so that he was holding it only with a finger and thumb, and then he slapped her face with what was left of his hand. “Bitch!”

  At that moment Effie’s feet found hard ground beneath the snow. Hands slamming down on the packed white surface, she vaulted into the air. For one breathtaking moment she thought her hair was coming with her. Cutty had been so focused on slapping her that he had slackened his hold on her locks. Effie felt her hair unraveling from his wrist like wool from a reel. Then he yanked her back. This time Effie snapped against him, throwing the entire weight of her body in the opposite direction. The pain was like a thousand white-hot razors slicing her scalp. Her skin ripped, making a wet sucking sound like chicken skin pulled from a bird. She lost vision, but not balance. She lost all sense of direction, but no sense of purpose.

  Blood running in a river down her scalp, she ran. And ran. And ran.

  Cutty was only seconds behind her, but she was lighter in the snow than he and she was burning with animal fear. She heard him curse and grab at her, but now she had an instinct for
keeping to deep snow where she could run and he would sink. It did not occur to her to scream; screaming was not something Effie Sevrance did. She needed all her breath to run and think.

  Twice she felt Cutty’s hands clutching at her hair and dress, but both times she was merciless with hair and fabric and helped him tear both from her by pulling violently away. Her scalp was on fire, raw flesh stinging in air cold enough to freeze breath. The hurts on other parts of her body hardly mattered; the blood seeping from the cuts warmed her skin.

  When she rounded the far corner of the stable block, she saw a figure step out of the shadows. Even before her eyes could focus properly, a deeper part of her brain responded to the figure’s shape—the sunken chest, the bony shoulders, the man-set jaw: Nellie Moss. The luntwoman ran toward her, calling words in some foul mother’s tongue to her son. Effie understood few words, but she felt the luntwoman’s sense of rage against a son who had failed to carry out his appointed task swiftly and with little fuss.

  Effie ran wide of Nellie Moss and her clutching tar-blackened fingers, careful to keep to deep snow. As she glanced ahead into the landscape of shadows and open spaces, a shiver of recognition passed along her spine. She knew the profiles of those stone pines and the mound of packed earth behind them. She knew them, and suddenly the darkness made sense. Kicking her heels through the snow, she altered her course. She had a place to run to now.

  Nellie Moss was lighter on her feet than her son, and Effie heard her gaining. A hand clutched at her collar, but Effie’s hair and dress were slick with blood, and it was easy to pull away from an unclosed grip. Too tired to feel relief, she continued running. Her legs were weakening beneath her, and it was becoming difficult to think. She was so tired . . . her eyelids were as heavy as stones . . . she knew she had to run . . . but it was so very hard to think . . .

  The howl and clamor of the shankshounds cut through the haze of Effie’s thoughts like a light through a storm. Shaking herself, she saw the little dog cote straight ahead. The shankshounds knew she was coming. They knew. And they were guiding her home.

  Tears prickled Effie’s eyes. She heard the deep bass rumble of Darknose, the excited howls of Cally and Teeth, the angry snarl of Cat, the low roar of Old Scratch, and the bloodcurdling growl of Lady Bee—Lady Bee, who thought Effie was one of her pups.

  Behind her, Effie heard Nellie Moss and her son hesitate. Their footstep rhythm wavered. Angry words were exchanged. Nellie Moss called her son foul names. Effie tried not to hear them, but the wind carried them straight to her ears. They stung like the coldest air in the middle of the night. Darknose began howling frantically, and suddenly she couldn’t hear mother and son anymore. Footsteps quickened, and two sets of hands began grabbing at her dress and hair.

  The shankshounds shrieked and wailed like madmen trapped in a burning house. The plank door of the little dog cote rattled and strained as the weight of six dogs came against it. Tears and blood rolled in pink streams down Effie’s face as hands pulled her down into the snow. She tasted ice as Nellie Moss began hauling her back. The door was so close that she could see the grain of the heartwood and the orange rust on the latch. If only she could get her arm to work properly . . . if only it didn’t hurt so. There was a hole at the top of her shoulder, a dark red pit where Cutty Moss had stuck her with his knife.

  She threw the useless arm toward the door. Pain made her teeth come down upon her tongue. Nellie Moss’ hands were around her waist, pulling, pulling. Effie’s hand slid down the planks. Her fingers caught on the latch. Cutty Moss gripped her thighs. Effie stiffened her fingers around the latch, and as the clansman hauled her body through the snow, the metal bar jumped its cradle.

  And the night of dogs began.

  Dark beasts exploded from the cote, sleek nightmare forms, all snout and teeth and neck. Their growls shook the air like thunder, raising hair on Effie’s back and neck. She heard terrible, terrible screams and the word No stretched over seconds until it ceased having meaning and became the sound of pure terror instead. A neck snapped with the wet crunch of a rotten log, fingers scratched at snow, something tore with a twisting-wrenching kind of sound, and then Effie knew no more.

  Later, when it was over, Corbie Meese and others found her lying in the center of a killing ground of blood, bones, viscera, and human hair, protected by a circle of dogs. The dogs had licked her clean of blood and were keeping her broken body warm by pressing their bellies against it. Orwin Shank had to be roused from the Great Hearth, for the dogs would release her to no one but him, and it wasn’t until many hours later that the first whisper of the word witch was heard.

  FIFTY-TWO

  The Sull

  Drink this, Orrlsman. It will thicken your blood.” Raif heard the words, but he had just woken from a deep sleep and it took him a moment to understand them. The dark-haired warrior was cupping a brass bowl decorated with midnight blue enamel in his hands. Raif could not see what the contents were, only that they were hot enough to cause steam to rise above the rim. Pink steam. He shifted his position beneath the wolfskin blanket, then tested moving his right hand. Pain made him bare his teeth. The hand that emerged from the blanket was thickly swaddled in some kind of birdskin and greased with shale oil scented with a sharp, smoky fragrance he could not name. Underneath, his fingers felt swollen and stiff, and he was suddenly glad he could not see them. Frostbite was seldom pretty to look at.

  It took him a while to shift his sore and aching body into a sitting position and even longer to align both hands in a position suitable for holding the enamel bowl. The Sull warrior waited in silence, his hard ice-tanned face giving nothing away. Raif kept his own face still when he took the cup, though its weight and heat caused him pain. In silence he drank the red liquid, realizing as he did so that horse blood was the main ingredient. Its taste was not unpleasant, but it was strangely spiced, and some of the blood had congealed in long strings that clung to his tongue and teeth. When he had finished, he placed the bowl into the Sull warrior’s waiting hands and gave his thanks.

  The warrior bowed his head. He had stripped off his outer clothes and was now dressed in fluid furs and soft midnight blue suedes inlaid with horn sliced so thinly it rippled like dragon’s scales. On first glance Raif had thought his hair braided, but now he saw that although it was held in thick strands by a series of opal and white metal rings, the hair itself was not woven in any way. Both men’s features were somehow different from clannish features: their eye color more vivid, their lips and brows more finely shaped, and their cheekbones harder, with more obvious bone mass beneath.

  The tent they had erected was made of hides and caribou felt, and it was lined with a dark fishskinlike substance that cut the wind dead. The floor was laid with an exquisitely woven carpet, showing the moon in all its phases against a field of night blue silk. A firepit formed the center of the tent, and although Raif had memories of seeing timber burned over the course of the past two nights, chunks of dark stone were now alight, burning with smokeless amethyst flames. Ash lay on the opposite side of the tent, her body entirely covered with white fox blankets, her face turned toward the wall. Her hair had been washed, and it now shone the exact same color of the white metal the Sull warriors hung in their hair and at their throats.

  Raif made a small movement toward her. “How is she?”

  The Sull warrior brought a hand to his chin, and as he did so the sleeve of his lynx coat fell back, revealing dozens of bloodletting scars on his forearm and wrist. So they bleed themselves as well as their horses. Raif wasn’t sure if he was fascinated or disturbed.

  “The one who sleeps grows stronger, Orrlsman. Today she woke and drank broth and asked words about you.”

  Raif saw no reason to correct the Sull warrior’s assumption he was an Orrlsman. “When will she be able to get up?”

  “You mean, when will she be able to travel?”

  Raif nodded. The Sull warrior spoke Common with only the faintest hint of an accent to betray the fact t
hat it was not his first-spoken language. The first night when they had ridden out of the darkness, seeming to Raif’s eyes to have stepped straight from a legend of blood and war, they had spoken to each other in foreign tongue. Raif had never encountered Sull before in his life, yet he knew them for what they were the moment his eyes fell upon them. Sull. The warriors who rode the vast forests of the Boreal Sway, lived in cities built from icewood and cold hard milkstone, and carried arrowheads so fine and sharp they could penetrate a man’s brain through the orb of his eye. Their blades were a swordsman’s dream, layered and folded and pale as ghosts, wrought from metals that fell from the stars. Clansmen whispered that their hard shimmering edges could take a man’s soul as well as his life.

  “It would depend upon where she must travel and why.” The Sull warrior did not blink as he spoke. His letting scars glowed like broken veins in the amethyst light.

  Raif had not yet decided how much to tell the Sull. “We travel north on a matter of urgency.”

  The Sull warrior nodded slowly, as if he had heard and understood a lot more than the small thing Raif had said. His sable-colored eyes glanced to the tent slit. “The Naysayer will have answers better than mine. He has tended the girl day and night. Her life is now a weight upon his own.”

  A speck of fear rested in Raif’s chest. “What do you mean?”

  “The Naysayer has spilt his own blood to save her.”

  “Why?”

  “That is not my question to answer, Orrlsman.” The warrior’s voice tightened with something that might have been anger. He stood, the horn scales on his coat snapping like teeth. Although he was neither large nor tall like his companion, his presence filled the space of two men.

  “Why did he let his blood?” Raif persisted, unable to shake off his unease.

  The Sull warrior turned and looked at Raif as if he were some bit of dirt he had scraped from under his boot. “When we make sacrifice or pay toll, we settle in the highest currency we have. And nothing in this world of cold moons and sharp arrows comes dearer than Sull blood.” Thrusting aside the tent slit, he stepped into the darkness beyond.