A Cavern of Black Ice (108 page)

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 lunt-woman 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.

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
that 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.

Raif breathed deeply. Beneath the
bandages his hands felt like raw meat. Pain had made him twist and
sweat in his blankets for two nights. It was almost as if his flesh
had been burned, not frozen. In his dreams he envisaged tearing off
the bandages and thrusting the scorched flesh in snow. The worst time
had been sunset on the second night, when the Sull warrior called the
Naysayer had stripped off the first set of bandages and cleaned the
black flesh. Bits of tissue had come away in his cloth. Raif had
looked down and not recognized the wet sticks of flesh as his
fingers. When he'd asked the Sull warrior if he would lose any of
them, the man had said simply, "Nay."

He'd used the same word later, in the
middle of the night, when Ash had cried out in her sleep. Raif had
watched as the great bear of a man had laid his hand on her head and
said, "Nay, silver-haired one. No demons will reach you here."