A Cavern of Black Ice (36 page)

"She is not to be harmed, Knife."

"She killed one of my men."

Iss felt the anger come to him but did
not show it. His voice was quiet as he said, "You will not hurt
her."

"But-"

"Enough!" Iss kept his eyes
upon Marafice Eye until he was satisfied that Asarhia would be
returned to him whole. Turning his back on the Knife, he contemplated
the stone reliefwork above the hearth. Impaled beasts, two-headed
wolves, goats with women's heads and breasts, and serpents with the
angled, segmented eyes of insects looked down at him from their
limestone poles. Iss shivered.
Asarhia! The stupid girl
. He
would not have hurt her if she had stayed. Caydis would have seen to
it that she had every comfort. Her life would have barely changed.

Knuckles rapped against wood. "Girl's
here, sir."

Marafice Eye opened the door, and a
brother-in-the-watch pushed the little dark-haired maid into the
room. With one quick movement the Knife caught the girl's arm and
twisted it hard behind her back. The girl let out a small cry but was
sensible enough not to fight him.

"Leave us," Iss said to the
watch brother. When the door was closed, he turned to the servant
girl and shook his head. "Katia. Little Katia. I trusted you and
you let me down. Now look at the terrible mess you are in."

Katia's lips trembled. Her fine dark
eyes glanced sideways toward the Knife. He looked away.

Iss took pity on the girl. She was so
very frightened, and she had already been beaten once this night.
"Let her go."

The Knife released her immediately. The
girl let out a sob and stumbled forward, hardly knowing what to do.
She looked around the room for a moment, then flung herself at the
Surlord's feet. "Please, sir.
Please
. I didn't know
what she was planning. I swear it. She told me nothing. Nothing. If
I'd known I would have come to you… like I always do. I would
have told you, sir. I swear." Finished, she broke down into
soft, shuddering tears, her head shaking, her little hands grasping
at the watered silk of Iss' robe.

Iss patted her shiny curls. "Hush,
child. Hush. I know you would have come to me." His fingers slid
under her chin, forcing her to look up. "You're a good girl,
aren't you?" Katia nodded, tears pooling in her eyes, mucus
running from her nose to her mouth. "There. Wipe your face…
That's better, isn't it? No need to cry. You know me and you know the
Knife, and neither of us has ever hurt you, have we? So there's
nothing to be afraid of. All we need from you is the truth."

Katia was quiet now but still shaking.
"Sir, I told you all I know. Ash—I mean Miss Asarhia—said
nothing to me about wanting to leave the fortress. She kept to
herself this past week. Ever since the day she went riding in the
quad and came back and found Caydis in her chamber, she—"

"She saw him there?"

Katia nodded. "Yes, sir. Made him
feel bad. Promised that she wouldn't tell on him being slack about
his business if he didn't tell on her."

"I see. And did she say anything
to you?" Katia hesitated. "Tell me the truth, child."

"Well… she hurt my arm, and
said she'd hurt me more if I didn't tell her what you asked about
whenever you summoned me to your chamber." Katia twisted silk in
her hands. "So I told her how you're most particular in wanting
to know when her menses start… but that's all I said. I swear
it. She was right queer that day. All cold and angry. Told me to
leave straight after."

Iss patted the girl's head. "Good
girl. You're doing very well. Now. This past week, have you seen any
sign of her menses? Think hard, girl."

"No, sir. All her underthings were
as clean as if she'd never even worn 'em."

A soft breath puffed from Iss' lips.
"As if she'd never worn them." He exchanged a glance with
Marafice Eye. It took him a moment to settle his mind. "Now,
Katia. One last thing and you may go. Have you taken inventory of all
the items in Asarhia's chamber?" Katia nodded. So, discounting
the jeweled cloak pin we found in the snow and the silver brush we
found in her cloak, do you know of any other items she may have
taken?"

"No, sir. The brush and the pin
are the only things that have gone."

Iss continued to stroke Katia's hair.
"So she has nothing to sell for coinage, and no cloak to keep
her warm. What a poor affair her first excursion into the city is
likely to be."

"She'll end up in Almstown, most
like." Marafice Eye had sat himself on one of the dainty
satin-upholstered chairs near the door, and judging from the way
he was pressing his forearm against the armrest, he seemed intent on
breaking it. "I'll double the Watch numbers there as well."

Iss nodded, well content to abide by
the Knife's judgment. He'd never had occasion to doubt its worth
before. Turning his attention to Katia, he said, "Look at me,
girl." Katia raised her chin. Such a pretty, plump little thing.
A perfect mix of servant girl cunning and little girl fear. Asarhia
had cared for her very much.

"Please, sir. I won't have to go
back to the kitchens, will I?
Please
." Large brown eyes
pleaded as small, slightly grubby hands clawed at the silk of his
robes.

Iss was not unmoved. His hand slid
across her hot cheek. "No. You won't have to return to the
kitchens. I promise."

The girl was so relieved and delighted,
her face was a genuine pleasure to watch. As she kissed his silk
robe, teared, and murmured a hundred little words of thanks, Iss
nodded to Marafice Eye across the room.

Katia was so caught up in relief, she
didn't hear the Knife approach. For an instant, as his hands clamped
around her head, she thought it was a caress. One of her hands even
fluttered up to touch him. Then the Knife's grip tightened and she
knew to be afraid, and the look she sent Iss tore at his heart.

One quick wrench was all it took to
break her neck.

People will die for this.

Fire and ice burned his flesh and his
soul. The pain was as deep and many layered as rock formed and then
compressed over millions of years beneath the sea. The Nameless One
knew pain. He knew its weights and measures, its aftertaste and its
cost. His joints ached with the soft calciferous pain of old age, and
even to rest them curled and at ease brought no relief. His broken
and mismended bones burned within his flesh like heated rods, and his
organs shrank and hardened, losing function bit by bit. He no longer
knew what it was to straighten his back or urinate without pain. He
could not recall when last he had taken a breath that satisfied him
wholly or chewed a piece of meat until it was flat.

Pain he knew.

The past he did not.

He strained for it every day, strained
until blood vessels broke in his belly and spine, until his jaw
locked, his wounds wept, and the shaking of his body opened sores
upon his skin. His fear of harming himself—once so strong that
it was the only thought he could retain in his mind from one year to
the next—had now faded to a mild concern. The Light Bearer
always fixed him. The Light Bearer with his salves and bandages and
gauze bags and tongs. The Light Bearer would not let him die. It had
taken many years for the Nameless One to learn this, and more after
to accept it, but now it was set firmly in his mind.

Knowing this had freed him, not from
pain—nothing and no one could free him from that—but from
fear of death. The Nameless One no longer had complete control over
his face muscles, but bitterness still leaked across his face. Even
pain so terrible it tore whole years from his life could not make him
welcome death.

He did not want to die; that was
another thing he knew. In time he would know more.

Waiting. That was his life. Waiting,
pain, and hate. He waited for the Light Bearer to come, waited for
the scraps of light and warmth he brought, ate them up like a dog
after bones. A hand on his shoulder, a warm hand, could burn him now.
He yearned for the warmth and the touch and the contact, but when he
received it, it was too much. When the touch was withdrawn he felt
nothing but relief, yet even before the memory faded and the imprint
of the Light Bearer's hand left his skin, he yearned for it all over
again.

Loneliness wasn't like pain. It had no
degrees and niceties; it did not shift and deepen and lighten, or
change from day to day. It fed consistently moment after moment, hour
after hour, year after year, gnawing away at the back of his throat,
consuming him piece by piece. What it left behind scared him. The
confinement he could stand, the torture and usage he could stand,
even the red-and-blue flames of fire and ice that burned in place of
his past. But the loneliness, the utter loneliness, ached with a pain
he could not bear.

It turned him into something he hated.

The Nameless One shifted in the iron
chamber that was his home, his chamber pot, and his bed. Chains,
their metal mottled and corroded by years of sweat, urine, and feces,
did not rattle so much as crack like the knuckles of a young and
soft-boned child.

Hate was not new to him; that was the
last thing he knew. It came too easily and fit too well to have been
something newborn during his confinement. Even as he craved each
visit from the Light Bearer, craved the world of light, warmth, and
people, he hated all he craved with utter coldness. Loneliness fed
off him, and he fed off hate. Hate was how he lived through years of
darkness, how he survived the aching stillness and the separate
weights of physical pain. It was how he faced a world with neither
day or night, seasons, sunlight, nor cool rain. It was how he clung
to the last shred of self.

People will die for this.

Counting was beyond him—he knew
nothing of numbers and their kind—but the words he whispered
into the darkness had the feel of things many times said. They were a
comfort to him. They made tolerable the wriggling and pinching of the
creatures inserted beneath the skin on his forearm, back, and upper
thigh. They turned the sawing of their chitinous mouthparts into a
soft bearable hum.

Skin on the Nameless One's face cracked
and bled as he forced muscles to work upon a smile.

People will die for this.

All he had to do was remember the past,
that was the thing. Remember who he was.

Already he was stronger than he had
been. The Light Bearer did not know this; he thought his charge the
same. But he was wrong. The Nameless One added to himself in
cornea-thin slivers, cumulating in the darkness like rotting meat
growing mold. He could retain thoughts from one day to another now.
It cost him in other ways, forced his body to fight the pain alone as
his mind wet-nursed a thought, and his joints ached to bleeding as he
held himself still while he slept. Still, he
knew
things
now, and he judged it worth it. For uncountable years he had known as
little as the creatures that grew to maturation beneath his flesh,
aware of nothing except hunger and pain and thirst.

He had himself now. And he spent his
days waiting for the chance to reclaim more.

When the Light Bearer took, when he
descended into the chamber with his light and his warm packages
oozing honey and bean juice and stole that thing he needed from the
Nameless One's flesh, he uncovered a river of dark currents as he
worked. These glimpses of darkness, swells, and eddies of liquid
glass whetted the Nameless One's tongue. The current ran for him
alone. And every time the Light Bearer slit open skin with his thin
engraver's knife and extracted what he needed with his little silver
tongs, the river's bank meandered closer. One day it would come close
enough for the Nameless One to enter. One day he would use its waters
to douse the flames that burned in place of his past.

Settling himself in the position that
brought most comfort, with his legs tucked beneath him and the chains
pulled high across his chest, he began straining for the name he'd
lost. Time came and went. Darkness endured. Somehow, despite all his
efforts and his deepest wishes, his mind slipped from his task, and
loneliness came to feed upon him once more. Eventually he slept. His
dreams when they came were all of warm arms, touching him, holding
him, carrying him up toward the light.

A Visitor

Heavy snows had fallen on the clanhold
during the ten days he was away. The filly didn't like the soft,
often chest-high drifts and left to her own devices chose paths that
were indirect, to say the least. Raif let her have her say. The
roundhouse was in sight now, and he could find nothing inside himself
that welcomed the thought of coming home.

Overhead the sky was striped gray and
white by high winds. A storm far to the north, born in the frozen
waste of the Great Want, was working itself out beyond the horizon.
At ground level the wind it generated was biting. The filly got the
worst of it, and her nose and eyes were crusted and weeping, and ice
crystals formed continually around her mouth. Every hour or so Raif
would stop and clean her face and bridle and check the flesh around
her mouth for chilblains. He could muster no such enthusiasm for
himself. His fox hood was stiff with ice; five days' worth of breath
had accumulated in the guard hairs, turning each strand of fur into a
brittle quill of ice. The parts of Raif's cheeks that touched the
hood were numb.

His eyes stung, part snow abrasion and
part snow blindness. Everything he'd looked at for the past two days
had been blurred. The others probably had the sense to sit out the
worst days of the storm, raise camp hard against a leeward slope, and
cover their tents in snow. Raif forced his wind-cracked lips to
stretch to a hard line. He wouldn't think about the others. They
would come back, perhaps two or three days later than he, but they
would
return, and when they did his life in the clan would
be over. Mace Blackhail would see to that.