A Cavern of Black Ice (102 page)

The effort of drawing air through the
ice pack proved too great for the failing horse, and it died within
the quarter. Raif watched its huge dark eye turn dull and gelid, then
rose to fetch his knife from his pack.

As his hand closed around the limewood
hilt, he heard Ash's boots crunching snow at his back. "No,
Raif. Don't butcher him. Not with that dull knife. Not like that."

Raif turned to face her. "Look
away. I have not made a kill in three days. We have no food save for
a few berries and a scrap of smoked meat."

"
Please
." The light
in Ash's eyes wavered as she spoke, and for a moment he was reminded
sharply of the dying horse.

Relaxing muscles in his hand, he let
the knife drop. He had not intended to butcher the horse—his
blade was not keen enough for that—but he had wanted to bleed
the animal while it was still warm and collect its blood in a skin.
Horse blood was rich in goodness and fat.

"Let's just leave him here. He was
a good horse." Ash made a small motion with her hand. "It
wouldn't be right to open him."

No, he thought.
We'll leave the
wolves to do that
. Aloud he said, "We should be moving on.
It'll be dark soon. I want to camp by the river tonight."

She looked at him for a moment, trying
to decide if there was anger in his voice, then nodded slowly. "I'll
fetch the blankets from the horse."

Raif spared no time wondering if she
considered his actions cruel. It was too cold for thought. Any
clansman would butcher a fallen animal in the same conditions. There
was tragedy in eating one's own horse, but no shame.

Pulling his mitts over the hard
chilblained flesh of his hands, he watched as Ash moved around the
gelding. The voices might take her at any time. Twice in the night
he'd had to shake her until bones in her neck cracked. It was
becoming harder to wake her, and he lived in fear of the day when no
amount of shaking would bring her back.

Stooping as he walked into the wind, he
went to reclaim his belt from the horse. Ash was sitting in the snow.
She had begun the work of unleashing the blankets but had stopped
short of pulling them free. When he approached her she smiled like a
sleepy child. Gently he helped her to stand. In a soft voice he bade
her stamp her feet until he was done with the horse. His face
betrayed no worry to her, yet he recognized the first symptoms of
cold sickness. The smile she had given him was one of contentment.
Left on her own, she would have curled up by the horse's corpse and
slept.

Keeping an ear to the sound of her
stamping feet, he rethreaded his belt and hung his antler tine in
place.

Cold sickness could kill a man as
surely as a fall through broken ice yet keep a smile on his face as
it did so.
Sleep, it said. Rest for a bit, just here in this soft
bank of snow, and I promise all your hurts will pass
. With the
sickness upon him a man could swear to the Stone Gods that he was
warm, believe it so completely that he loosened his collar and tugged
down his hood. And all the while his heart was slowing like a failing
clock and his feet were turning yellow with ice. "Cold sickness
is like a whore with a knife," Gat Murdock was fond of saying.
"Drugs you with sweet words and sweet feelings and then stabs
you with her knife."

Raif stayed at Ash's side during the
descent from the high meadow. He asked her questions about her life
in Mask Fortress, the city itself, Penthero Iss. She was too tired to
speak for long on any subject, yet he pressed her for details, forced
her to remember, think. He considered laying one of the horse
blankets over her back for extra warmth, but he wasn't sure she could
bear the weight. Many times she slowed and asked to rest, yet he
shook his head and told her, "Just a little more."

Whenever they came upon a wide expanse
of snow, Raif tested its depth with his willow staff. One fall and
they would both be done.

The ascent to the pass had been easy up
to a point. The Wolf River retained walkable gravel banks for a fair
portion of the way, until a hundred-foot wall of granite rose from
its waters, sheer as the tallest cliff. They had been forced to climb
for half a day to reach the top of the wind-carved bluff and take the
pass. The west side of the pass was a breaking ground of split rock,
frozen waterfalls, gravel beds, and drifted snow. Most surfaces were
stippled with hoarfrost. All edges had been scoured by the wind.

Raif fought hard to keep his mind in
the now. Ash was weaker than he; the sickness that poisoned her blood
and robbed the color from her skin made her more susceptible to the
altitude and the cold. But that did not mean he was immune. Several
times he caught himself drifting away from the present on the wave of
a collapsing thought. So far he had managed to pull himself back, but
the fear of lethargy was present and real. He could not afford to let
his mind drift.

Ash was what mattered. Keeping Ash
safe.

A path of sorts, a game track used by
horned sheep in high summer, wound down through the cliff to the
river and the Storm Margin below. Through chinks in the clouds, Raif
spotted the dark body of a bloodwood forest far to the south. The
mighty red-barked trees were the tallest living things in the
Territories, and they grew only in the wet, foggy slopes of the
southern margin. Every summer men and women from the clanholds made
the journey west and then south to purchase timber from the Cold Axes
who lived in their high timber halls amid the trees. Croser was the
only clan that had riverboats capable of hauling the raw timber
upstream. All other clans paid freightage to the Master of Ille
Glaive.

When Raif turned his gaze north, he saw
nothing but white snow clouds. Mount Flood and the Hollow River were
out there, yet he could not be sure where either of them lay. Clan
knowledge ended here.

"I miss Angus," Ash said. "I
wish he were here with us."

Raif dragged his hand over his face.
Her words robbed a portion of his strength. "We've come so far
without him. We'll manage the rest of the way."

"He will be all right, won't he?"

Raif forced himself to reassure her.
How could she know that the mention of Angus' name cut him—she
who had no kin?

The last hour of the descent was
undertaken during a long bloody sunset that turned the surrounding
mist pink and made west-facing snowbanks look like killing fields.
The Wolf River ran dark and silent, unaffected by the failing light.
The wind died and the air cooled, and the first wolf cries rose above
the grinding of the ice. Raif wondered how long it would take the
pack to find the horse.

He and Ash did not speak much after the
words about Angus. They were a good two hundred feet below the high
meadow, and the risk of cold and altitude sickness was now less,
despite the drop in the temperature. Besides, the final descent was
tricky, pitted with bog holes and wet ice, and concentrating on
avoiding falls seemed mental exercise enough.

Raif watched Ash every second. Her
cloak was weighted with frost, and the fur around her hood was stiff
and white. Every so often she swayed with the wind, and Raif would
reach over and steady her, disguising the gesture as a casual touch
or a gentle reminder to stay on the path. Toward the end of the
descent her legs began to buckle and she started missing steps, and
it seemed natural to put his arm around her shoulder and take her
weight as his own.

By the time they reached the river, ice
smoke steaming off the surface made it difficult to see more than a
few feet ahead. The air was colder than the black, oily water, and
the river would steam through the night. Raif could not find the will
to search for a proper campsite and settled upon the first bluff that
afforded shelter from the wind. Ash slipped in and out of
consciousness as he hacked at the resin-preserved remains of a
frost-killed willow. The only thing that kept him from stopping what
he was doing and tending her was the cold certainty that she needed
heat from the fire more than any words of comfort from him.

It took forever for the fire to catch.
Raif couldn't stop his hands from shaking as he cupped and blew on
the pine needle kindling. When the fire finally took and bright
little fingers of light shivered around the wood, he set snow to melt
over the hottest part of the flames, then turned his attention to
Ash. She had fallen fast asleep, bundled up in the roughest horse
blanket, her hooded head resting against the smooth belly of a basalt
boulder. He meant to wake her; she needed to drink, to eat, to take
off her boots and beat the ice from her stockings and the inside of
her collar and hood. Yet somehow he didn't. She was resting easy, and
for the first time that day the muscles in her face were fully
relaxed. Quietly he set about securing the camp for the night. The
fire would warm her soon enough.

After a portion of the night had
passed, he wrapped himself in the second blanket and slept.

When he awoke Ash the next morning, she
did not know who he was. Her eyes were as dull as gray clay. Skin
around her mouth was shedding, and the yellowing of her flesh had
spread to her tongue and gums.

Raif felt the fear rise within him. He
shook her. "
Ash
!"

Her eyes flickered at the sound of her
name. Raif fought the desire to shake her harder. Instead he pulled
her up by her shoulders and spoke in a firm voice. "You must
ready yourself to leave now. We have to make our way north, to Mount
Flood."

Lips shrunk by dehydration mouthed the
word, "Flood."

Raif's breath drained out of him. She
was standing, that would have to be enough. Holding on to her with
one hand, he reached back until his fingers found the warmth of the
tin bowl that contained the snowmelt. "Drink this."

She took the bowl from him and drank it
dry. Water spilled down her chin, but she didn't seem to notice and
made no effort to wipe it away when she was done.

"Stay here while I roll the
blankets and store my pack." Raif guided her back to the basalt
boulder where she'd slept. He could feel the heat of her body through
a double layer of wool. "If you need to relieve yourself, do it
here in the warmth…" Heat of a different kind burned his
face. "I won't look."

He did not know if she understood him.
Her eyes were focused somewhere else.

When all was done and the fire was
kicked cold, its remains buried beneath the snow, he came for her
again. She was sitting with her chin slumped against her chest. Her
hands were dropped against her thighs, mitted fingers curled tight.
He took her arm. "Ash. We've got to go now. Remember?"

It was like leading a ghost from the
grave.

The day began like the last one had
ended: with ice mist peeling off the river and the hidden sun turning
everything red. The wind was sharp but not unbearable, breaking up
grease ice on the river's surface and shifting drifts back and forth
between the trees and raised ground. The air stank of snow. Raif kept
an eye to the thick featureless clouds as he traveled: This was no
time for a storm.

Ash walked, in a manner. She shivered
uncontrollably, her body too weak to counter the reflex action, yet
somehow she retained the will to keep moving. Raif wrapped an arm
around her waist and took as much of her weight as he could, but it
was her own determination that placed one foot in front of the other
and made her walk.

Raif wondered how much she was aware
of. He spoke to her, but she made no reply. He looked into her eyes,
but the shadows he saw living there soon made him look away.

Within an hour of breaking camp, they
parted company with the river that had led them this far. The great
channel of black water headed west toward the sea, where choked ice
in its channel formed a delta each spring. Raif was sorry to leave
its banks, but his route took him northward, and there was no time to
spare on sentiment for the river that was known throughout the
clanholds as the Sum of All Streams.

Mist lifted over the course of the
morning to reveal a landscape of black basalt spires, sheared cliffs,
valleys pocked with frost boils and hummocks, floodways blocked with
ice rubble, and dead and calcified pines sunk half into the ground
like beached whales. No bloodwoods grew this far north, or if they
did they were no longer recognizable as the sure and towering trees
that were more highly valued than livestock in the clanholds. The
trees that
did
grow were beaten to their knees by the wind,
their trunks smooth as polished stone, their limbs webbed with
mistletoe, whose pale fruits shone like opals and were poisonous to
man.

Hard granite mountains rode the east
and northern horizons, and Raif's gaze traveled from peak to peak,
looking for the glacier-pressed form of Mount Flood. The wind stung
tears from his eyes, and inside his gloves his hands hurt like all
the hells. According to Angus and Heritas Cant, the Hollow River lay
at the base of Mount Flood, fed each spring by a flow of snow and
glacier melt so great that it broke mountains. Raif wasn't sure what
state the river would be in now. Rivers fed by a single source often
froze or ran dry by midwinter, but nothing was certain this far
north. Sudden changes in the weather, hot springs, or swift currents
could keep a river flowing through to spring.

Raif stripped off his gloves and
massaged his hands. The cold made his eyes slow to change focus from
the distant mountains to the nearness of his fingers. Weariness
tugged him down. If he could just rest for a little while…
sleep
…

He snapped back with a start, suddenly
aware that Ash's weight was no longer upon him. She had slid to the
ground and was now kneeling in the snow. Raif cursed his own
weakness. How could he have been stupid enough to close his eyes for
even a moment? Anger made him rough with himself, and he thrust his
gloves over fingers that were shadowed yellow and gray with early
frostbite.