A Cavern of Black Ice (53 page)

He glanced over at her. She sat hunched
on the bay, her shape obscured by blankets, her head upright, her
chin nodding with the movement of the horse. They had not spoken
since earlier. The shadow of Spire Vanis was too great a presence
between them. It was unthinkable to Raif to speak of small things to
pass the time while Angus was trapped inside the city. The girl had
her miseries and he had his, and there was companionship to be found
in shared silence.

Raif watched her as they wound through
the pines. It was impossible not to. She had bewitched Angus with a
single look, and with just one touch she had…
What
?
Raif turned his hand so that his blister showed, fat and purple like
a tick gorging on his blood. What had happened between them as she'd
knelt in the snow?

He would never forget the voices. They
were inside his mind for life.

Drey. Longing for his brother suddenly
overwhelmed him, making him feel weary beyond knowing. If Drey were
here now, he would know what to do and say. He wouldn't have let
Angus go off alone. Raif's lips formed a faint smile. And even if he
had, Drey would have stood outside the gate and
waited
until
Angus returned. Drey always waited. Of all the traits a brother could
have, that suddenly seemed the best one of all.

"Wrathgate."

The girl's voice drew Raif back. He
looked at her, and she nodded toward the shimmering mass of darkness
that was Spire Vanis at night. A ring of blue fire framed a portal
three hundred feet below the deer path.

"They keep the oil lamps burning
day and night. It's the most heavily used gate."

"Does the east road lead directly
from it?"

"I'm not sure."

Raif looked at the girl's face, Ash's
face, he reminded himself. She lived in this city yet didn't know its
roads? Who was she? What sort of trouble was she in? Shrugging, he
told himself it meant nothing to him. "We'll head east a while,
then start making our way down."

The girl, as if embarrassed by her lack
of knowledge, made no reply.

Raif turned his attention to breaking a
path through the shifting snow and loose scree of Mount Slain's
northeastern skirt. In his anxiousness to find the east road and meet
with Angus, he pushed on ahead of Ash.

The farther they traveled from the city
walls, the darker the night became. Spire Vanis felt like an enemy at
his back. He had not once stepped inside it, yet he had killed men
there. Another four to add to his tally. Bitterness trickled through
his mouth, stinging like pure alcohol, and he switched his mind away
from what he had done and who he was. Getting to Angus was all that
counted.

Lights appeared in the landscape below,
scattered over the rolling darkness like grain waiting to take seed.
Some moved. Carts, Raif realized with a small thrill. The lights were
torches burning on the guardrails of carts. East road. After glancing
over his shoulder to check that Ash was still keeping pace, he began
weaving his way down to the moving lights.

Everything that grew on Mount Slain was
crippled and hard formed. Moose picked his path with care, hesitating
whenever the mountain shivered or twisted bits of dead wood poked
rotten limbs through the snow. Raif was so tired his eyes ached.
Angus has to be here. He has to be all right
.

By the time they reached the road, the
lighted carts were long gone, and the crowds of towns and villages
had thinned, giving way to plowed fields, fenced grazes, farmhouses,
and unlit strongwalls built from rough-hewn stone. A lone man rode a
horse in the distance, but Raif knew it wasn't Angus: too thin, too
dark, too
upright
to be a wounded man. The road itself was
wide and gently graded, the snow upon its surface packed to the
hardness of ice. To the north lay the Vale of Spires, prime farmland
and grazeland that sloped gently for thirty leagues. Angus said that
in its center lay a strange formation of granite spires that most
people believed had been formed by nature, carved by a hundred
thousand years of wind and hail. A few claimed the spires were the
work of man, erected in the Time of Shadows by sorcerer-masons who
spent their lives working with stone. Fewer still whispered about
dark horselords and dark beasts and things impaled upon granite
spikes. Raif didn't know what to think of
that
. Sometimes he
swore Angus told him such things just to see how he'd react.

According to Angus, it was the granite
spires that gave the city and the vale their name: Spire Vanis. Vale
of Spires.

Raif waited for Ash to join him before
turning onto the road and heading west. The relief of riding on
cleared ground almost canceled out the fear of being out in the open.
It was bitterly cold, and he could feel the freezing air hardening
the threads that held his stitches. Ignoring the pain, he began
pulling food and drink from the nearest saddlebag. He wasn't
especially hungry, but eating gave him something to do. The
wind-dried mutton Angus had purchased ten days ago had the taste and
texture of old string. It was easier to
suck
than chew it.
Unwilling to trust his body to alcohol, he washed down the meat with
clear water.

As he wiped his mouth with the back of
his hand, he was aware of a sense of loss, almost as if he were
drifting away to sleep. The muscle lying directly beneath his raven
lore
wrenched
softly, as if something had pulled on it.

Without thought he turned to Ash.

Her eyes were closed, and her head was
slumped forward onto her chest.

Raif pulled on his reins, leaping down
before Moose had chance to halt. He stilled the bay with a word and
then reached up and pulled Ash from the saddle. She weighed almost
nothing. As his left arm slid beneath her to support her legs, he
felt something wet roll over his hand.
Let it not be blood
,
he thought as he hefted her fast against his chest.

Picking a spot fifty paces from the
road's edge, shielded from casual eyes by a grove of sticklike
birches, Raif laid her down on the blankets she had been using as a
cloak. Quickly he ran back for the horses. As he led Moose and the
bay through the brush, he reached inside his skins for his lore. The
horn felt cold, and heavier than it had a right to be.

Ash lay where he had left her,
perfectly still, breathing fast, shallow breaths. A dark stain on her
skirt grew as he looked on, pluming outward like dye poured in water.
The horses smelled blood. Raif pushed up his sleeves and knelt in the
snow. He hesitated before touching her again. He had felt nothing
when he'd pulled her from the bay, but what if the voices had
returned? Swallowing hard, he reached out and brushed the hair from
her face.

Reach for us, reach. We cannot wait
much longer, we are cold, so cold, our chains cut us, how they cut
us, we want, we need. Reach.

Raif's first instinct was to pull away.
Run
, said something within him.
Run and never look back
.
He didn't run, though he could not say why. Instead he took Ash by
the shoulders and shook her. "Wake!" he cried. "
Wake
!"

No muscle in her face or body moved.
She was limp beneath his grip, a doll made of rags. Still he shook
her; he didn't know what else to do.

Gradually, over the course of many
seconds, her shoulders stiffened beneath him. Imagining she was
coming round, he took his hands from her and sat back in the snow. He
wondered why he felt no relief. A long moment passed, where the wind
died and the snow settled, and then Ash's arms began to rise, slowly,
mechanically, like machines worked by ghosts.

Gooseflesh lifted on Raif's arms.
Hardly aware of what he was doing, he slammed his fists into her
shoulders, forcing the muscles flat. She would not reach out to them.
He would not let her. It was madness and he didn't understand it, but
he had heard the voices call to her and knew they loved her not.

Ash's body fought him, but not in a
forceful way, more a slow relentless push. New blood flared over her
skirt, soaking through to the snow beneath. Raif didn't want to risk
letting her go to deal with it. There was too much to be woman's
blood, that he knew.

Then, suddenly, Ash stopped fighting
him. Her body stilled. Raif felt a bead of cold sweat trickle along
his stitches. All was quiet for a moment as the night entered a new
phase of darkness, then Ash's mouth fell open.

The stench of blood metal came out. The
same odor Raif had smelled the day his father died. Sorcery, and she
was drawing it. Raif howled Angus' name into the night.

Tunnels of the Sull

Penthero Iss was standing in the Rive
Hall, in the heart of the Red Forge, watching Marafice Eye snap a
sword over his knee, when the night came alive with sorcery. The
Knife's leathers were stiff with mud and blood, his face smeared with
soot, his fingernails jutting from his fingertips with the pressure
of wedged dirt. Fury was upon him, though he did not shake and he did
not fume; he took things in his hands and broke them.

"Six of mine dead. Another three
wounded in the chase. And they got away—all three of them."
Marafice Eye raised the two separate pieces he had made of the sword.
"And this is all I got from Angus Lok.
This
!"

That was when Iss felt it: strong,
metallic, reverberating with the pure tone of a struck bell. Sorcery,
and it shot through the room like siege fire. Iss' tongue wetted, and
the glaze on his corneas dried in an instant, leaving a scum of salt
and dust that stung his eyes. Fear relaxed muscles in his lower
abdomen, and he had to work quickly to stop urine from dribbling down
his thigh. Yet even as terror took him and his skin soaked up the
aftermath like a rag dipped in oil, he probed the nature of the
drawing with small mental jabs.

Iss breathed through his mouth, letting
minute particles of airborne metal settle upon his tongue.
Straightaway he learned things. The drawing was unfocused, the work
of a beginner. It came from somewhere close and to the east. If he
had been a stronger sorcerer himself, he might have forsaken his body
and tracked it back to the source. Almost he didn't need to. He knew
who had drawn it and where she was likely to be.

Asarhia. The air
tasted
of
her. A small thrill fingered Iss' throat and groin. His
almost-daughter was close by, probably on the east road or traveling
just above it, doing what she had been born for: reaching from this
world to the one that lay beyond.

Abruptly the flow of sorcery stopped,
halted so quickly that Iss was left snapping tongue flesh. He felt
disoriented for a moment, as if he had been passing through a doorway
that was suddenly and unexpectedly shut. Aware of Marafice Eye's hard
blue eyes upon him, he worked to bring his body and mind under
control. Only those who could use sorcery could sense it.

"Trapped wind?" Marafice Eye
said, throwing the broken pieces of sword onto the exquisitely woven
rug that covered the length of the Rive Hall. "Too many quails
eggs at supper. You should try eating real meat instead."

Iss made no reply. Marafice Eye's
crudeness was nothing to him; he'd had more than fifteen years to
grow accustomed to it.

Taking a moment to still himself, Iss
regarded the vast stone-ceilinged chamber of the Rive Hall. Row upon
row of red swords armed the walls, hung from their crossguards and
pointing down toward the earth. Blood steel, forged in the great
black furnace in the adjoining chamber, cooled in oil drawn from the
tar pits of the Join. Only two people in the Watch knew the secret of
its making: the Iron Master and the Rive scribe. The scribe kept a
written record of the brazing. The text was rumored to fill three
leaves of parchment and be written backward in the manner of
sorcerer's spells.

Iss turned to face the Knife. "Asarhia
is no longer in the city. She's east of here, either on the road or
just above it."

Marafice Eye's mouth twisted
unpleasantly. "I'll leave within the quarter." He turned to
go.

"No." Iss found himself
strangely unsettled by Asarhia's drawing. Its aftermath still lived
within him, running like fever through his blood. He forced his mind
to focus above the roar of the forge. "Not yet. I must know more
about who we are dealing with. This stranger… the one with the
arrows—

"That bastard shot four of my men,
dropped them where they stood."

There was that hint of possessiveness
again:
my men, mine
. Iss wasn't sure that he liked this new
protective Knife. "What did he look like?"

"Dark haired. Rough clad, like one
of those demon clansmen. Had a silver piece in his hair."

"A Hailsman, then." Iss felt
better for knowing that one small fact. "And he shot the
brothers
through
the grating?"

Marafice Eye stamped a booted foot on a
section of the broken sword and ground it into the rug. "Space
no bigger than a piss hole."

Iss ran a hand over the cleverly
weighted silk of his robe. He had felt four jolts of power earlier:
rough, hard, and stinking of the Old Blood. He had assumed it was
Angus Lok, an old dog who had learned new tricks. Now it seemed it
was someone else. "When you chased Lok through the city, did you
catch sight of Asarhia or the clansman again?"

No.

So it was likely the two were together.
Now. The thought of Asarhia in the company of some rough-skinned
clansman who could draw upon the Old Blood turned him cold. And then
there was Angus Lok… Iss' fingers tightened around the silk.
Asarhia was his. He had found her. He had raised her. She called no
one else Father but him. Armed men were no longer enough. "You
must take Sarga Veys with you when you leave. Asarhia must be brought
back."