A Cavern of Black Ice (37 page)

Raif Sevrance ran from battle
,
he would say.
The yearman broke his oath
.

Raif raised a fist and ground his raven
lore into his chest. He had done Mace Blackhail's work for him! And,
if time could be turned and he could go back to the Bluddroad and the
ambush, he couldn't say if he would do it again. The horror of
killing women and children had seemed so clear then. Riding alone for
the past five days had dulled it.

Pulling the filly from her path to one
of his own choosing, Raif steeled himself against doubts. The past
was the past, and wishing it different never brought anyone relief.

As he cut across the graze, a line of
blue smoke rising from the near side of the roundhouse caught his
attention. He rubbed his sore eyes, making them worse. When the
stinging subsided, he concentrated upon the smoke, tracing its source
to the blue stone roof of the guide-house. Uneasy, he kicked a better
pace from the filly. The guidehouse had no hearth or chimney, only a
smoke hole for letting out lamp fumes, yet from the volume of smoke
escaping from the roof, it looked as if someone had built and lit a
fire.

Everything else about the roundhouse
seemed normal. Longhead and his crew had cleared the snow from the
court, and a handful of young boys were out taking advantage of the
cart-size snow piles that had been shoveled aside. The boys stopped
playing and turned to watch as Raif approached. Berry Lye, a great
turnip-headed youth with red ears who was younger brother to Banron,
brushed the snow from his buckskins and ran forward to greet Raif. He
wanted to know what had happened at the ambush. How many Bluddsmen
had Banron unseated with his hammer? How had his new armor stood up
to the fight? Raif silenced him with a single look. He was in no mood
to talk to children. Berry's face reddened to match his ears, and for
a moment he looked just like his brother. Raif turned away, suddenly
ashamed. He didn't even know if Banron was alive or dead.

Berry ran for the roundhouse, eager to
be first with the news that at least one of the ambush party had made
it back alive.

Raif slid from his horse and led it to
the stables. He felt sick to his stomach. What was he going to say?
How could he tell the clansmen and women with due respect what he had
done?

Pretty, copper-haired Hailly Tanner
emerged from the stables to take his horse. She actually blushed as
their hands touched over the reins. Raif, like many young men in the
clan, had wasted hours dreaming about Hailly's pale, lightly freckled
skin and perfect strawberry mouth. Until today she had never deigned
to notice him, let alone gone out of her way to tend his horse. Now
she stood before him, asking quite coyly if the filly needed hay or
oats. Raif showed a grim smile. He was a yearman now; that was the
difference. Before he had been nothing, a lad with a borrowed bow and
no oath, unworthy in every way of her attentions. He gave her his
instructions and left.

Ignoring the small crowd of women and
children who had begun to gather at the main entrance, Raif headed
for the side door instead. Before he did or said anything, he needed
to visit the guidehouse. Alone.

Anwyn Bird stood in the entryway, arms
folded, watching him. Raif thought he might be in for a grilling, but
something must have been showing on his face, for the gray-haired
matron let him pass unchallenged. As he headed along the stone
passage to the guidehouse, he heard her calling for a keg of warm
beer and a platter of fried bread. Despite everything, Raif felt his
mouth watering. He had trail meat in his pack, but if he had eaten
any on the way home, he had no memory of it.

The door to the guidehouse was open.
Tattered scraps of smoke and burned matter sailed from the doorway as
he passed inside. He thought for a moment, then shut the door behind
him, taking time to ensure it was firmly closed.

The interior was as dark and
suffocating as a smokehouse. Raif's eyes stung fiercely. He couldn't
see anything at first except the massive blocky outline of the
guidestone. Gradually he became accustomed to the darkness and began
to pick out details in the room. He was standing at the foot of the
guidestone. The granite was slick with graphite oil. Pockmarks in the
age-old stone were crusted with hard, milky mineral deposits that
glinted like exposed sections of bone. The stone itself seemed darker
than he remembered. Perhaps it was the smoke.

A small fire was burning in the west
corner, its densely packed timbers wetted with hog's blood to stop
the wood from burning with a hot, fast flame. Directly above, the
smoke hole had been newly enlarged, and fresh tar had been painted
around its edges. No tallow or oil lamps were lit. The guidehouse
floor was littered with debris, and bits of rock crunched beneath
Raif's boots as he stepped toward the stone. Despite the fire, it was
deathly cold, and a harsh acrid stench rose above the gamy aroma of
cooked blood.

Uneasy, Raif stripped off his soft
inner gloves and dropped to his knees by the guidestone. He wasn't
good at prayers. Tem had taught both his sons that it wasn't right to
ask the Stone Gods for anything for oneself. They were hard gods, not
easily moved by suffering. A man's life and his problems were nothing
to them. They watched over the clanholds and the clans, demanding
their proper place in each roundhouse and around each clansman's and
clanswoman's waist. Yet they gave little back… and they
answered no small prayers.

Raif's fingers hooked around the
tine that hung from his belt. Weighing the antler tip in his fist, he
suddenly realized there was no need to pray: The Stone Gods had been
at his side through the ambush and long journey home. They were here
in the powdered guide-stone at his waist. They knew all he had come
to say.

Not knowing if that thought gave him
comfort or made him afraid, Raif reached forward and laid his palms
on the guidestone.

The stone was as hard and cold as a
frozen carcass. Raif had to fight the desire to withdraw his touch,
knowing that to do so would be a kind of defeat. Forcing his jaw
together, he pressed his flesh harder against the stone. Numbness
took his fingertips, then knuckles, as blood vessels carried the
stone coldness toward his heart. A dull pain sounded in his upper
left arm. The light entering his pupils wavered, and his vision
flickered and dimmed.

The numbness crept across his palms,
tingling like alcohol evaporating from his skin as it spread. After a
few minutes he could feel nothing of the guidestone's surface. The
pain in his arm throbbed like a pump drawing up water. For the
briefest of instances, Raif was taken with the idea that he was
siphoning something from the guidestone, pulling it inward toward
himself. He felt a moment of utter stillness, heavy as the deepest
sleep, where he understood that if he could just reach
beyond
the stone's surface, everything would become known to him.

"What makes you think you can heal
the stone?"

The voice snapped the thread. The pain
and the pulling stopped. The stillness collapsed inward, creating a
rush of light and darkness that formed images as it slid back into
the stone. Raif saw a forest of high trees, their foliage rippling
from blue to silver like the sea; a lake of frozen blood, its surface
hard as hammered metal, its depths dark with distorted shapes trapped
within the ice. Other things came and went, moving too quickly for
him to capture or understand: a city with no name or people, a pair
of gray eyes, frightened, and a raven flying north in winter when all
other birds flew south.

Before he could commit it all to
memory, someone tugged at his wrists, pulling his hands from the
stone. Raif's hands peeled away slowly, making sucking noises as his
skin fought to keep hold. He felt no pain, only a vague sensation of
loss. Turning, he found himself looking into the black eyes of Inigar
Stoop.

"You should not have touched the
stone, Raif Sevrance," he said quietly. "Did you not see
that it is broken?"

Raif's heart was still racing from all
the guidestone had showed him, and it took him a few seconds to
decipher what Inigar had said. He shook his head. "Broken? I…
I don't understand what you mean."

The guide held out a hand dark and
twisted with age. "Then I shall show you."

When Raif gave Inigar his hand he did
not expect to need the guide's help standing, but his legs buckled as
they took his weight and he stumbled against the stone. Surprisingly,
Inigar pulled him up, steadied and held him until he had regained
enough of his strength to stand alone. Looking at the small,
sunken-chested guide with his white old man's hair and his dark,
membrane-thin skin, Raif wondered how he could manage such a feat.

Inigar smiled, not kindly. "Follow
me." Disappearing into the smoky darkness, he gave Raif little
choice but to do as he said.

Coming to a halt at the opposite side
of the guidestone, Inigar wagged his head and said, "This is why
I burn the smoke fire. This."

Raif followed Inigar's gaze. A deep
fissure ran from the top edge of the stone halfway to the floor,
exposing the wet and glistening interior of the rock and gathering
shadows like a fault line in the earth. Graphite oil oozed from the
cleft like blood.

"It happened five days ago."
Inigar looked at Raif sharply. "At dawn."

Knowing there was a question in the
guide's words, yet unwilling to answer it, Raif said, "The
ambush went well. The others will be back within a day or two."

Inigar ignored his words completely.
Running a hand along the crack, he said, "The Stone Gods watch
over all clans. Despite the claims of each and every clan chief since
the Great Settling, they have no favorites. Blackhail, Dhoone,
Scarpe, Ganmiddich; They are all one and the same to those who live
within the stone. If Scarpe wins a victory over Gnash, they are not
displeased. If Ganmiddich takes the Croser roundhouse and makes it
their own, they find no reason to be enraged. The Stone Gods created
the clans, they put the craving for land and battle within us, so
they do not grieve when clans make war and lives are shed. It is
their nature as well as our own.

"However, when something happens
that goes against all they have taught and bred within us,
threatening the very existence of the clan-holds themselves, then the
gods get angry." Inigar punched the cracked guidestone with the
heel of his fist. "And this is how they show it!"

Raif stepped back.

"Yes, Raif Sevrance. Perhaps you
had better step back, for all our sakes."

Feeling his face grow hot, Raif began
to shake his head. He couldn't bear to look at the crack in the
stone. "I… I…"

"Silence! I don't want to be told
what happened from your lips. Some news can come too soon, when a man
is not ready or able to chew it." Inigar Stoop looked straight
into Raif's eyes. "Like oaths."

Raif winced. The pain returned to his
arm, soft and sickening like a pulled muscle.

"We three knew, didn't we? Eleven
days ago on the court. Me, you, and the raven." The guide
grabbed Raif's elkskin, tore the ties apart to reveal the raven lore
beneath. He plucked the piece of horn from Raif's neck, snapping the
twine. Closing his fist around the lore, he said, "I was not the
one who gave you this—that shame is not mine—and perhaps
it is as much the old guide's fault as it is yours. Either way, you
are not good for this clan, Raif Sevrance. You are raven born, chosen
to watch the dead. And I fear that if you stay amongst us, you will
watch us all die before your eyes have had their fill.

"Already you have watched the
deaths of your father, ten of our best warriors, and our chief. Yet
that still wasn't enough, was it? You had to watch the death of Shor
Gormalin, too. Shor. The finest man in this clan. An eagle, he was.
Tell me, what right has a raven to watch over an eagle's death?"

Raif looked down. He had no answer.

Still Inigar Stoop wasn't finished.
"And what of your brother, Raif Sevrance? Who seconded your oath
and took possession of your swearstone. What new shame have you
brought him? If I had such a brother, who loved me with all the
fierceness of his bear lore, who spoke up for me when no one else
would, and linked his fate to mine without a moment's hesitation, I
would count myself blessed. I would revere and obey him and spend all
my days repaying his trust. I would not shame him with my words or my
deeds."

Raif covered his face with his hands.
He had spent the last five days pushing all thoughts of Drey from his
mind. Now the guide was pushing them back. And Raif knew he spoke the
truth.

Inigar opened his fist and let the
raven lore drop to the floor. "You came here to seek the Stone
Gods' guidance. So look hard upon the guidestone and see if it does
not offer the answer you need." He glanced once at the fissure
in the stone, just long enough to ensure that Raif understood his
meaning, then turned and walked into the smoke. "When you are
done, go and join those gathered to greet you on the court. A visitor
awaits you there."

Raif closed his eyes. He stood and did
not move, fearing to touch the stone again. It was a long time before
he scooped up his lore and left.

"Leave him alone! All of you!"
Anwyn Bird broke through the crowd of people on the court, laden tray
held out before her like a battering ram. "Can't you see the
yearman needs food and drink before you go bothering him with
questions?" The clan matron favored Raif with a smile so gentle
and proud, it made him ashamed. "Here, lad. It's the best dark
beer I have. Drink it."

Raif took the horn from her, grateful
to have something to focus his attention upon. The sunlight
reflecting off the snow was dazzling after the darkness of the
guidehouse, and the river of faces before him, all chattering and
asking questions at once, made him want to run away. He stood his
ground. These people were his clan, and they had a right to know of
their kin. He held the horn to his lips, inhaled the rich, woodsy
aroma of beer aged in oak barrels and then warmed slowly over the
hearth for three days. Anwyn was right: It
was
the best she
had. And that was why he chose not to drink it.