A Cavern of Black Ice (48 page)

Raif shook his head. He hated what he
had become when he'd walked through the stovehouse door. There was no
pride in slaying men so; he had been little more than a wolf tearing
out throats. It sickened him to think of it. He had a memory of the
snow outside of Duff's saturated with blood. "Blackhail will
sing no songs in remembrance of me."

"Maybe not. But thirty pairs of
eyes saw what you did, and songs don't always need to be sung to be
heard." Angus stared hard at Raif a moment, then kicked the bay
forward onto ground that had once been marshy and wet and was now
fast with ice.

Raif followed after. Soon they came
upon a frozen stream and took the cleared and frozen path it offered
them through the hills and ravines of the taiga's edge. By the time
they left the ice to make camp for the night, the trees surrounding
them had stopped being a forest and become a loose collection of
woodland instead. A quarter moon rode low on the horizon, making the
stream ice glow like blue fire.

"What will happen now between
Blackhail and Bludd?" Raif asked, banking snow against the base
of the tent to weigh it against the wind. His hands ached as he
worked, yet the pain was a small thing. This was the first night
there had been no stovehouse to stop at… the clanholds were
coming to an end.

Angus had peeled off his gloves and was
busy stripping wood. His knife never stopped dancing as he spoke.
"You know what will happen, Raif. War. It's in the clanholds'
nature to make battle. Look at your clan boast:
We do not hide
and we do not cower. And we will have our revenge
. And Dhoone's:
We are Dhoone, Clan Kings and dan warriors alike. War is our
mother. Steel is our father. And peace is but a thorn in our side
.
Bludd claims that death is their companion, Castlemilk swears they'll
be fighting the day the Stone Gods shatter the world, and even cursed
Clan Gray holds that loss is something they know and do not fear."
Angus sniffed. "Quite brings a tear to a man's eye."

Raif frowned at him, yet he seemed not
to notice. Resting his blade, he said, "The point is, the
clanholds have been at each other's throats for three thousand
years—probably more if you count the time before Irgar drove
them north across the Ranges. Clan Withy and Clan Haddo keep the
histories, and believe me, those histories are grim. Grim. You've
fought yourselves, the Sull, the city men, the Forsworn,
Trenchlanders—anything you could see and shake a stick at and a
few things you could not. The past forty years have been different,
and you have the old Dhoone chief Airy Dhoone and Dagro Blackhail's
father, Ewan, to thank for that. Both grew up during the River Wars,
both lost kin on the banks of the Wolf and the Easterly Flow. Airy
lost his sister Anne, whom he loved above all others, and Ewan lost
two of his three sons. Such losses shape men. Airy rode the thirty
leagues from the Flow to the Dhoonehouse with Anne's body laid over
the back of his mare. Her death fell hard upon him. Some even say it
turned him mad, and that he kept Anne's dried-up corpse on a chair
made of willow wood next to his bed."

Angus smiled softly, reached for
another log to strip. "With chiefs, who will ever know the
truth? But both Airy Dhoone and Ewan Blackhail
did
withdraw
to their roundhouses, ordered their clansmen to retreat, turned their
backs on their gains, and left their war-sworn clans to battle
amongst themselves. Gullit Bludd did well by them, as did Roy
Ganmrddich and Adalyn Croser. All got the land and water they wanted.

"Five seasons went by where Ewan
Blackhail and Airy Dhoone watched as their war-sworn clans pushed
north against their borders. By this time Dagro had grown to manhood
and taken his first year-man's oath, and Vaylo Bludd had put a dagger
to his father's heart and taken over the lording of that clan. That
was when Ewan and Airy began to see a future where the clanholds were
ruled by Clan Bludd. They knew what sort of man Vaylo Bludd was, that
early, even before he started calling himself the Dog Lord and
braiding his hair in the manner of the Dhoone Kings.

"Vaylo Bludd shook Airy Dhoone and
Ewan Blackhail from their mourning. Both chiefs took command of their
war-sworn clans. They met at the House on the Flow, with the river
brown as mud beneath them, and brought an end to the war by speaking
a treaty there. They met only the once, yet both men spent the rest
of their chiefships building bonds of fosterage between their clans
that have stayed in place to this day."

Raif nodded. He knew this well enough.
Only two winters earlier Drey had been set to leave for a year's
fosterage at Dhoone. Mannie Dhoone, nephew to the Dhoone chief,
Maggis Dhoone, had been set to come to Blackhail in Drey's stead. But
Mannie was thrown by his horse while out hunting in the blue
thorngrass south of the Dhoone-hold, and both his legs were broken,
and the fosterage had never gone through.

Standing and brushing ice from his
oilskin, Raif said, "Dhoone
will
join with Blackhail to
defeat Clan Bludd, won't they?"

Angus let the last of the logs fall to
the snow, then reached inside his coat for his rabbit flask. In no
hurry to drink, he simply turned the flask in his hand. "I canna
say, Raif. Dhoone is scattered and broken. Maggis and his sons are
dead, and no one knows when a new chief will be named. They lost
three hundred clansmen and yearmen in that raid. They lost their
forge, their stockpile of pig iron, their livestock." Angus
shook his head. "Dhoone is as close to being lost as Clan Morrow
was on the eve of Burnie Dhoone's wedding."

Raif touched his measure of powdered
guidestone, as all clansmen did when the name of the Lost Clan was
spoken. Clan Morrow had once stood east of the Dhoonehold, rivaling
Bludd and Blackhail in size. The Dark King, Burnie Dhoone, spent
thirty years destroying the clan when his young wife, Maida, left him
for Shann Morrow, eldest son of the Morrow chief. Only outsiders such
as Angus ever called Clan Morrow by its name. To clansmen it was
always the Lost Clan. Raif remembered Tem telling him once how he and
Dagro Blackhail had come upon the ground where the Morrowhouse had
once stood.
Nothing remains, Raif, not even a caimstone, and no
plants but white heather will root there.

Angus took a swig from his flask,
swallowed, then took one more. "Blackhail will fight alone.
Dhoone has battles and demons of its own. The war-sworn clans may
help, yet I have a feeling that they'll be too busy saving their own
necks to worry about Blackhail and Dhoone."

Raif looked hard at Angus. The wind had
dropped, and the hard frost turned each of his uncle's breaths into a
spell of ice and light.

"What do you mean?"

"Naught except that in all wars
it's every man for himself." Slipping the flask beneath his
coat, Angus stooped to pick up the stripped logs. "I'd better
get a fire started or we'll be eating cold kidneys tonight. And I
don't know about you, but I've a fancy that once a kidney's been left
to cool overnight, it makes a better weapon than it does a meal."
He grinned. "Put one of them in a slingshot and I'm sure we
could bring down a bird. A big one, mind. Maybe even a goose."

Raif watched as Angus built the fire
close to the tent's entrance. It wasn't worth restating the question.
Angus Lok said nothing he had no mind to. He knew more about the
coming war, that was certain, but he would speak it only in his own
good time. Bringing his hands to his face, Raif blew on his cold,
aching fingers. It had been full dark for several hours, yet he was
still careful not to turn his gaze north. Clan was behind him, and
that was the way it had to be.

After a time, he made his way to the
tent. As he crawled through the flap, he felt the stitches on his
chest pull at his skin. It took him a moment to deal with the pain.
He stripped off his oilskin and eased himself down amid the blankets
and elkhides. He had no desire for food, neither hot nor cold, and
settled his body into the position that caused the least hurt and
waited for sleep to come.
Blackhail will fight alone
. He did
not rest easy, but he slept.

The next morning when he woke and
crawled from the tent to relieve himself, he caught a glimpse of a
new landscape far below the southern rise. A massive, partially
frozen lake stretched as far as he could see into the distance. Its
shore was gray with grease ice, yet its center was black, oily, and
steaming with frost smoke.

"The Black Spill," murmured
Angus, coming to stand at Raif's side. "The deepest lake in the
Territories. Ille Glaive claims its shore to the east. We'll be
heading around its western shore, toward the Ranges."

Raif nodded, suddenly acutely aware of
how far he was from home. He had never been this far south, never
before stepped upon soil that did not belong to a clan.
Effie,
Drey
…

Abruptly he turned and went to feed and
water Moose. They broke camp soon after, heading southwest and then
south toward the towering peaks of Spire Vanis. The weather warmed
and the winds quickened and storm clouds began to gather in the
north.

Vaingate

Ash scratched her scalp. Mites, she
thought as she watched the distant arch of Vaingate, got everywhere.
And no amount of wind and frost could kill them. She supposed she
should be horrified at the idea of things living on her body, but she
hadn't eaten in over three days and she was seriously beginning to
consider them as a meal.

That thought made her smile in a grim
way, and
that
made the ice sore on her lip crack open.
Seconds later she tasted her own blood, warm and briny like salt
water. Eating snow wasn't a good idea. She wished someone had told
her that before her mouth had gotten sore. Still, it did have its
advantages. Ash couldn't imagine anyone recognizing her now, not even
Penthero Iss. Her hair was dark and greasy, her clothes were stiff
with mud, and her skin felt like something a carpenter might use to
sand a chair. Heaven only knew what she looked like. She hadn't seen
her reflection in days and had now reached the point where she was
quite sure she didn't want to.

Her stomach rumbled noisily, pulling
her thoughts back to Vaingate. It was early morning and the rising
sun had turned the gate's three-story arch into a bridge of golden
light. Just watching the sunlight flow across the bias-cut limestone
filled Ash with such longing, it stopped her hunger dead.
Reach,
mistressss. So cold here, so dark. Reach
.

The voices jumped her, beating against
her mind like a flock of dark birds. Ash fought, as she always did,
yet more and more these days she had less and less to fight with. A
razor's edge of darkness cut her thoughts, splitting and resplitting
until there was nothing but a thin line left.

She blinked awake. Sunlight streamed
into her eyes, dazzling and making her feel sick. Pain squeezed along
her forehead as she rolled sideways and vomited onto the snow. Wiping
her mouth clean, she forgot about the ice sore and winced as the edge
of her hand knocked the scab. When she was ready, she looked at the
sky again. The sun was now high in the south. It was midday. She had
lost four hours.
Four
.

Frightened, she sat upright.
It's
all right
, she told herself. No
one could have spotted me up
here
.

She was sitting on the flat roof of a
broken-down and abandoned tannery. Ever since she had discovered the
building a week ago, it had become her favorite place in all the
city. The area around Vaingate was crowded with disused buildings,
but all were carefully chained and boarded to prevent anyone in need
of shelter from breaking in. The tannery's windows were nailed shut,
and it had enough chains around its doors to contain a prison full of
thieves, yet at some point the weight of snow on the roof had caused
a portion of the upper floor to collapse. A season of floods, frosts,
and thaws had gone on to break the walls, and it hadn't been
difficult at all to find a way in.

Unlike most other buildings in the city
that were built with sloping roofs to shunt snow, the tannery roof
was mostly flat. Ash supposed the flat sections had been used for
pegging out tanned skins to dry. She could still see some of the
remaining pegs, poking up from the rooftop like stone weeds.

It wasn't a very high building, yet its
position a quarter league north of the city wall afforded it a good
view of Vaingate. It soothed Ash to come here and just look. Yet now,
glancing at the boarded-up buildings across the way and the lifeless
streets below, she knew she couldn't risk coming here again. This
wasn't the first time the voices had made her black out, and it
wouldn't be the last. They were getting stronger… and they had
learned ways to reach her while she was awake.

Ash shivered.
Four hours
. What
if she had not woken? What if she had lain here, unseen and
undiscovered, all day? One night spent outside would kill her. Last
night it had been so cold that she had felt the saliva freeze against
her teeth.

A sound halfway between a grunt and a
sob puffed from her lips. She desperately needed to drink, but the
thought of eating more snow made her mouth curl. Slowly she struggled
to her feet. She tried not to look at her body as she brushed the
snow from her cloak, but bony edges kept catching her eye. Stupidly,
ridiculously, it was her breasts that worried her the most. Just two
weeks ago they had been heavy and round, growing so quickly they
ached
. Now they were small again, barely there. It was as if
her body had reverted to childhood, leaving only her hands and face
to age.

Straightening her back, she turned into
the wind and pulled the odors of the city through her nostrils.
Saliva pooled in her mouth as she tasted the scents of woodsmoke and
charred fat. She was fiercely hungry. Money had run out five days
ago, and unless she sold her cloak and boots she had no chance of
getting more. Stealing scraps of food from the charcoal burners who
stood on street corners day and night, grilling bacon and goose
sausages over their dark-fires, was becoming increasingly tempting to
Ash. Yet she knew from watching children quicker and cleverer than
she that being caught was another horror, every bit as dreadful as
starvation. Whenever a charcoal burner caught a child robbing, he
would hold their hands over his grill and sear their skin like a
piece of meat. At first when Ash had seen this happen, she'd wondered
why the children took the risk. Now she knew. The smell of grilled
fat and onions was enough to drive a starving child insane.