by J. V. Jones
The thickness of the door was not in question. An hour earlier a young girl with fair hair had stepped from it, revealing the true width of the wood. The girl, whom Magdalena thought to be about seven winters old, had moved no farther than the front step. “It’s freezing,” she had called to someone inside, “but the sun’s shining as if it were spring.” A woman’s voice had replied, telling her to shut and bar the door before all the heat fell out.
Magdalena pursed lips few living had ever kissed. Shut and bar the door. The Lok farmhouse was built like a fort. Oh, it didn’t look it, and the maiden was full of admiration for the person who had modified the original structure in such a way as to fool the casual eye, but the simple fact was that all the entrances and exits could be sealed. It was that fact more than anything said by the roofer Thurlo Pike that made the maiden certain she had found the right place.
“The Lok family will be living in seclusion,” Iss had said. “Angus Lok trusts no one with their whereabouts, not even his close-lipped brothers in the Phage.”
Magdalena knew several assassins who refused to take commissions against any man or woman who was believed to be associated with a Steep House, as the Phage named their secret lodges. But she had looked deep within herself and found little fear of sorcery or those who wielded it. She had been born in the Cloistered Tower, raised by the green-robed sisters there, and she had known a man once who had sworn she wielded a brand of sorcery all her own. Magdalena bared dry teeth. She had killed the man, of course, but his accusations still tugged at her from the grave. She was the Crouching Maiden; all the power she needed lay within her own two hands.
Suddenly uncomfortable with her position in the dogwood that grew beneath the stripped canopy of oldgrowth at the back of the house, Magdalena stood and stretched her legs. Shadows followed her like small children, and although she had little fear of being spotted by anything more troublesome than rabbits and birds, she still moved no closer to the house.
Gaining access was going to be a problem. Obviously the women took due care with their own safety, and at night the door and the windows would be barred. Breaking locks and hinges was noisy and troublesome and not the maiden’s way. Also, if there were defenses in place on the outside of the house, it was fair to assume that there would be arms close at hand within. Iss had offered no insight into the characters of the Lok womenfolk, but Magdalena suspected that the mother and oldest daughter would likely know their way around a knife. By all accounts Angus Lok was a swordsman of high order, and it would take a foolish man not to see the sense of passing along some small portion of those skills to his daughters and his wife.
No. Magdalena shook her head. It would be too dangerous to break into the house and chance being caught in darkness by people who might be armed. It was a risk the Crouching Maiden would not take.
Assassination was all about reducing risk. Those who didn’t know about such things assumed all an assassin did was stalk their mark down a dark alley, slit the mark’s throat, then flee by some secret route. Truth was, Magdalena had killed only one man in an alleyway, and it had been one of the most dangerous commissions she had ever taken. She had been young then, her fee a mere sparrow’s weight in gold, and she hadn’t realized how difficult it was to approach an unknown man and simply kill him. This particular man had lived through four other assassination attempts, and even though the maiden had approached him quietly and from behind, he had caught wind of her intent even before moonlight found her blade. He was large and brutal and had broken two of her fingers before she finally located his windpipe with her knife. His blood was all over her arms and face, and his cries had alerted people in nearby streets. It had taken all her maiden’s skills to return to her safe house undetected.
She had since learned to arrange situations more carefully, to use lures and props as means to insinuate herself into others’ lives and create little “death plays” where she was playwright, player, and stagehand in one. Take Thurlo Pike: The man had been so taken with the thought of a drug that knocked women senseless, he had walked right into his grave.
And that was another thing few gave proper thought to: the arrangement of the bodies later. Not all assassinations called for a corpse spread-eagled on a bed. Most called for greater subtlety than that; patrons asked that the means of death be disguised as natural illness, a rogue attack by thieves, an accidental fall into cold water, suicide, or murder by a third party’s hand. And quite a number of patrons requested that the corpse be permanently lost, so that no record of death remained.
Magdalena stripped off her thin leather gloves and massaged the deepening chill from her hands. As the Lok girl had said, it was bitterly cold, yet the sun shone with all the absurdity of a king at a beggar’s feast. The maiden was sensitive to the cold. She worried about her hands yet could not bring herself to wear thick woolen mitts. Touch was everything to an assassin.
With a small animal sound, Magdalena turned her attention back to the house. Iss had left all decisions concerning the Lok women’s deaths to her, as was proper in such cases, and had asked only for “discretion.” This suited the maiden well enough. Whenever she took the trouble of placing herself in a tightly knit community like that of the Three Villages, she preferred to leave blameless once the commission was over and done. Thurlo Pike’s death would actually help her in this regard, as it was quite possible that blame would fall upon him. If indeed there was blame to portion out.
Magdalena still hadn’t made a decision about that yet. She might make the deaths look like an accident.
Slowly she began to work her way around the side of the house, moving in a wide-turning circle around farm buildings, stone pens, rusted plow bits, a covered well, a grove of winter-withered apple trees, and a retaining ward built in the crease where the slope of a neighboring hillside met level ground.
The front entrance was not well used; the maiden saw that straightaway. Not one pair of footsteps were stamped upon the path, and a wedge of drifted snow lay undisturbed against the door. No one ever came or went this way, and Magdalena suspected that the door was sealed permanently closed. She saw no evidence to suggest this, but she had seen enough of the farmhouse defenses for her mind to work in the same way as the person who had constructed them. A second door was an unnecessary risk; far better to board it up and perhaps the front windows as well and so leave only the back of the house vulnerable to invasion.
Magdalena suppressed the cold wave of curiosity that rose within her. Why Angus Lok chose to keep his family in protected seclusion was not her affair. He feared something, that she knew, and the fact that she was here now, an assassin crouching in the shadows at the side of his house, was proof that he feared correctly . . . but nowhere near deeply enough.
She studied the door, its frame, jamb, and pitch weatherproofing for only a minute longer before heading back to the woods. It was her last night working at Drover Jack’s, and she saw no reason to be late. She had worked under many taskmasters in her time, and Gull Moler was kinder than most. The fact that he had fallen a little in love with her was reason enough to be moving on.
Tomorrow. She would leave the Three Villages tomorrow, under cover of darkness, once her commission here was done. She had made her decision about the deaths: By the time she had finished with the bodies it would look as if a terrible tragedy had taken place.
Fire was always good for that.
FIFTY-FOUR
The Hollow River
The wind howled as the Sull warriors took their axes to the ice. Great bear-shaped Mal Naysayer put the full force of his body behind each blow, sending a battery of sharp white splinters into the air. Ark Veinsplitter worked on the dimple holes he had created, chipping away at weak points, thaw edges, and cracks. The river ice smelled of belowground places, of pine roots and iron ore and cooled magma. It rang like a great and ancient bell as the Naysayer’s pick found its heart.
Raif was standing on a raised bank that was heavily forested with stick-thin black
spruce. Above him towered the massive, glaciated west face of Mount Flood. Boulders as big as barns rose above the snow cover at the mountain’s base, towering over fields of rubble and dead, frost-riven trees. All surrounding land sloped down toward the river in a great misshapen bowl. Rock walls plunged beneath the surface, sheer as cliffs. A frozen waterfall hung like a monstrous white chandelier above a bend in the river’s course, and countless dry streambeds funneled wind along the ice.
The Hollow River itself ran through a granite canyon and into the maze of knife-edge ridges that formed the mountain’s skirt. Raif raised his bandaged fingers to his face and blew on them. From where he stood by the horses, the river looked like a sea of blue glass.
It had taken them three days of hard travel to reach here, as the Naysayer had promised it would. The two Sull warriors chose paths Raif would never have dared to take: across fields of loose shale, past seepage meadows bogged with melt holes, and over lakes fast with ice. Always they trusted their horses. Even when neither Ark nor the Naysayer was riding, they let the blue and the gray lead the way. Ash had ridden a Sull horse before, and it was easy for her to hand her stallion the reins and allow it the freedom to choose its own path. Raif found himself constantly pulling his stallion back the first day, the reins held so tightly around his wrists that for once his fingers went numb from lack of blood, not cold. The state of his hands did not help, as it was difficult to fine-guide a horse without fingers on the reins.
The pain was excruciating. Raif had dreams that his hands had been skinned, and turned and sweated in his blankets as his dream-self watched Death and her creatures pick the last scraps of meat from his bones. Raif woke shivering and filled with fear. Once he had torn off the bandages, just to see for himself that there was living flesh beneath. Straightaway he wished he hadn’t. There was living flesh, pink flesh lying beneath a black-and-red jelly of blisters and cast skin, but the sight was almost as bad as the pared fingers in his dreams, and he couldn’t get the Naysayer to rebandage them quickly enough.
Mal Naysayer saw nothing in the blistered, shedding skin to be alarmed about. In one of the few long speeches Raif had ever heard him speak in Common, he said, “They will work again, I promise you that. I’ve seen worse in my time and doubtless caused worse, too. This hand here will be capable of holding a drawn bow, and this finger here able to hold and release a string at tension. They will not look pretty, and they’ll be frost shy from now on and must be tended like newborns in the cold, but that is the price you pay for killing wolves.”
It did not occur to Raif until much later that Mal Naysayer had no way of knowing that the bow was Raif’s first-chosen weapon and had simply assumed it was so.
Both warriors carried fine recurve longbows made of horn and sinew, with lacquered risers and wet-spun string. The Naysayer hunted on foot as he traveled alongside the packhorse and managed to flush a few ptarmigan and marten from their lairs. Whenever he made a kill, he plucked the lacquered arrow shaft from the carcass, slipped it back into his case, and then drained the blood into a lacquered bowl and served it, still steaming, to Ash.
Ash remained weak, but she insisted on walking for increasingly longer periods each day. The Naysayer had given her a coat that was so long it dragged behind her as she tramped through the snow. It was a thing of alien beauty, combining lynx fur and woven fabric in a way that Raif had never seen before. Ash refused to have it cut to fit her and cinched a leather belt around her waist to raise the hem by less destructive means. She looked, Raif had to admit, just as he imagined a Sull princess would look: tall, pale, and covered from head to toe in the silvery pelts of predatory beasts.
Ark Veinsplitter had offered gifts to Raif: mitts made from flying squirrel pelts that had the softest, richest fur Raif had ever touched, a hood of wolverine fur that shed even breath ice with just a shrug, and a padded inner coat that was woven from lamb’s wool and stuffed with shredded silk. Raif had refused them. He had no wish to be further beholden to the Sull.
Ark Veinsplitter had nodded his head at the refusal and said something that Raif did not understand. “To Sull, a gift is given in the offering, not the accepting, and I will hold them for you until such a time comes when you need them, or the Sender of Storms claims my soul.”
Raif had thought a lot about that over the past three days. At first he had assumed it was just a way for the Sull to claim a debt even when a proffered gift had been refused, yet now he thought differently. Ark Veinsplitter had separated the mitts, hood, and inner coat from his other possessions and made a parcel of them, which he placed in the bottom of his least-used pack. And Raif believed with growing certainty that the parcel would be opened again only on his say.
The Sull were a different race. They thought in different ways. Raif found himself thinking back to what Angus had said about them, how it had taken Mors Stormyielder fourteen years to breed a horse to repay a debt. He understood that now. It was quite possible that Ark Veinsplitter would carry that package with him, unopened, until the day he died.
“We’re through!” The cry came from Ark Veinsplitter, and it broke through Raif’s thoughts like a whip cracked against his cheek. Both he and Ash looked down to the riverbank where the two Sull warriors continued to chip at the ice. Ark Veinsplitter’s bent back was turned toward them. They waited, but he said no more.
Raif glanced at Ash. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.” Her gray eyes flickered with snowlight as she spoke. “It’s time this was over and done.”
He let her walk ahead of him to the bank, glad for a few moments to settle his mind in place. He waited to feel fear, expected to feel fear, but there was nothing but emptiness inside him. Their journey was coming to an end.
Readying himself as he walked, he pulled on his gloves and packed the spaces between his fingers with dried moss as the Naysayer had taught him. He had no weapon or guidestone to weigh his belt, yet he tugged on the buckle to check its hold as if it were loaded down with gear. The hard edges of his dead man’s cloak curled in the wind as he approached the river’s edge.
The two warriors stepped back, their faces reddened by exertion, their axes sparkling with ice. No one spoke. Ash shivered as she looked down upon the hole they had created. The ice was nearly two feet thick, carpeted by an uneven layer of dry snow. The hole was roughly circular in shape, its blue and jagged edges creating a trap for the light. Score lines caused by ax strokes drew Raif’s gaze down through the shadowless rim to the utter darkness at its center. It was impossible to see the riverbed or anything else that lay beyond.
“How deep is it?” Ash’s voice was a whisper.
“Let us see.” Ark Veinsplitter unhooked the coil of rope that was attached to his belt by a white metal dog hook. Swiftly he fed the weighted end of the rope into the hole and let it run through his half-closed fist until it halted of its own accord. He pulled up close to fifteen feet of rope. “It will be deeper near the middle.”
Raif looked out across the ice. “I’ll go first.”
The two warriors exchanged a glance. Ark said, “Blood must be spilt before you enter. This is a place of sacrifice to the Sull.” Almost instantly the warrior’s letting knife appeared in his hand, the silver chain that linked the crosshilt to his belt chiming softly like struck glass. With his free hand he pulled back his sleeve and bared his forearm.
Raif’s hand shot out to stop him. “No. If anyone must pay a toll for this journey, it will be me.” Biting the end of his glove, he stripped it off. “Here. Cut the wrist.”
Muscles in Ark Veinsplitter’s face tightened. When he spoke his voice was dangerously low. “Your blood is not Sull blood. It comes at a cheaper price.”
“That may be so, Far Rider, but Ash and I will be the ones who make this journey, not you.”
“I don’t understand,” Ash said. “I thought—”
“Nay, Ash March,” the Naysayer said, his gruff voice almost gentle. “We travel with you only this far.”
“But
you will wait for us?” Ash glanced from Raif to Ark to the Naysayer. The fear in her voice was barely masked. “You will wait for us?”
The Naysayer’s ice blue eyes held hers without blinking. “We cannot stay here, Ash March. We must pay a toll for the passage we have opened and ride north before moonlight strikes the ice. We are Far Riders. Kith Masso is no place for us.”
Ash looked at him, the plea slowly slipping from her face. After a long moment she matched his unblinking gaze. “So be it.”
Raif held his face still as he listened to her speak. The hollow place inside him ached for her, and he wanted nothing more than to lift her from the ice and crush her against his chest. Instead he thrust his wrist toward Ark Veinsplitter. “Cut it.”
The Sull warrior’s eyes darkened, and Raif saw himself reflected in the black oil of his irises. Slowly Ark raised the letting knife to his mouth and breathed upon the razor-thin edge. His breath condensed upon the metal, then cooled to form a rime of ice. With a circle of wool dyed midnight blue, he wiped the edge. That done, he grasped Raif’s forearm and jabbed his fingers hard into the flesh. Raif could feel him searching for, and finding, veins. With a movement so fast it could not be followed with the eye, Ark Veinsplitter slashed Raif’s wrist.
Raif felt the shock of cold metal, but no pain. Blood oozed quickly to the surface, rolling in a wide band along his wrist.
Only when the first red drops landed in the snow above the river’s surface did the Sull warrior release his grip. “There. Clan blood has been spilt upon Sull ice. Let us hope for all our sakes that this angers no gods.” Ark Veinsplitter turned and made his way to his horse.
Raif breathed deeply and then jammed his knuckles into the wound. The pain in both his hands was blinding, and it made him wonder if he’d lost his mind. What had he been thinking, letting Ark Veinsplitter spill his blood? He counted seconds as he continued to press against the cut vein. Truth was, he knew what he had been thinking; it just didn’t make much sense, that was all. He didn’t want the Sull paying for his journey. Not this part, the last part, after he and Ash had come this far.