A Cavern of Black Ice (61 page)

"Not so tight, Thrago. I'm not a
chicken to be trussed for the spit." Thrago Bludd looked at his
father with eyes that were the exact same shape and color as those of
old Gullit Bludd. It gave Vaylo a chill to see them. Gullit Bludd was
dead thirty-five years now, yet his likeness was borne by all seven
of his grandsons. Sometimes Vaylo thought the Stone Gods had arranged
such a thing just to spite him.

He scowled as Thrago tightened the
cinches around his waist. Five winters ago this armor had fitted him
perfectly; now it rode over his belly like a loose collection of
bowls. Damn the thing to hell! Who'd have thought iron plate could
shrink?

"You should have Croda forge you
some new plate," Thrago said, putting his back into the task of
making the runnels meet. "Else use the Bludd armor Gullit had
made for his—"

"No." Vaylo's voice was hard.
He would not wear that man's armor.
Put the knife here, boy, so
that it will enter the upmost chamber of my heart
. Vaylo
breathed hard at the memory. He could still see his father lying on
his bench of old black wood, his face shrunk with disease, his eyes
bulging with swollen veins. Do
it! For gods' sakes, do it! We
both know you've dreamt of little else for the past seventeen years
.
Now,
when I finally hand you the knife, you stand there with your
balls shriveled to hailstones and a bastard's fear upon you. What's
the matter with you, boy? I thought you had more jaw.

That was when the knife went in. To
this day Vaylo truly didn't know if he thrust the blade or his father
moved forward to take it. It hardly mattered.
His
hands had
been on the hilt.
His
fingers were covered with the red
wetness that gushed from the hole. So much blood… pouring over
the bench and onto the floor, running between the cracks in the
stone. And his father's eyes…
triumphant
. He had
thought himself rid of his bastard son.

Vaylo rubbed a hand over his face. It
had all gone as smoothly as any epic sung by a hearthsinger. Right on
cue Arno and Gormalic had burst into the room. He was still standing
there, knife in hand, his father choking on his last breath below
him. Vaylo hoped very much that he hadn't seen his father smile then,
that the stretching of Gullit Bludd's lips was nothing more than a
death rictus or a trick of that bloody light. Of all the things that
happened that day in the chiefs chamber at Bludd, that was the one
thing that haunted him the most. That smile.

Arno and Gormalic had come at him with
steel bared. Two longswords against a knife made for slicing fruit.
Yet Vaylo could honestly say that there was not one instant when he'd
thought he might die. He knew his half-brothers well. Arno and
Gormalic practiced for two hours every day on the court. Vaylo
practiced for four. Arno and Gormalic were filled with the rage of
legitimate sons who had just seen their father murdered by a bastard.
Vaylo was filled with a bastard's rage.
His father had tricked
him
! Gullit Bludd had been dying for months, his teeth rotting
from the bone, his gut shrinking to a loose flap of skin, and his
fingers shriveling to bird claws. When he called his bastard son to
his chamber, he was as good as dead. He would not have lived out the
month. Yet this was Gullit Bludd, son of Thrago HalfBludd, and his
pride would not allow him to die alone. He had sought to take his
bastard with him.

Put
me out of my pain, boy. I
cannot bear it. It eats me, how it eats me. Would you see it turn me
into a shitting, drooling babe
?

Gullit had readied the knife himself,
Vaylo remembered. He had it waiting beside him on the bench. Blue
steel with a hilt of sacred ash.

With fingers so pale and wasted they
seemed already dead, Gullit Bludd had raised the point to his heart.

Vaylo closed his eyes for a moment. It
might have happened yesterday, so clear were the memories. By the
time that day was over three Bluddsmen lay dead in the chiefs
chamber, and Vaylo could recount every blow it had taken to send his
brothers to the floor.

They called him the Death Lord later.
Legends grew, as legends always did, and suddenly he was no longer a
bastard yearman celebrated for stealing the Dhoonestone from Dhoone,
he was a killer of men. A usurper. A kinslayer. A chief.

He had offered no explanations or
denials. Even then, thirty-five years ago, he knew it was better to
say nothing and let men think what they would think. Who would have
believed him, anyway? It was well known he hated his father and his
half-brothers. Who would have believed he had killed his father as a
mercy, that Gullit Bludd had directed the knife himself and begged
his bastard son to thrust it deep to cut the great blue vein?

Touching his fifth son on the shoulder,
Vaylo said, "Enough. I'll see to the helm and gorget myself."
Thrago nodded. "I'll ready the horse."

Vaylo watched as his fifth son climbed
the narrow stair that led up from the chief's chamber at Withy. It
was a strange place, this Clan Withy roundhouse, built to confound
outsiders. It made no sense, what with its maze of tunnels, mine
holes, dead ends, secret chambers, and traps. A man could lose
himself, turn a wrong corner, and find himself falling through a
trapdoor and into a pit floored with spikes. Molo Bean had broken his
ankle when a stone flag had given way beneath him, and Pengo had
taken a fall and ended up with a spike through his cheek for his
trouble. Vaylo thought his second son looked no worse for the spike
hole, yet it had certainly darkened his humor.

They had taken over Clan Withy ten days
ago for no other reason than its roundhouse was southwest of Dhoone.
Pengo had led the assault, backed by three of his seven brothers and
nine hundred hammermen and spearmen. Vaylo almost pitied the
Withymen. The anger was upon Clan Bludd, and the proud Withymen, who
had lived in Dhoone's shadow for two thousand years, must have
thought the Stone Gods had deserted them. Perhaps they had; the Dog
Lord claimed no knowledge of such things. He
did
know that
Withy had received the fury meant for another clan.

Blackhail
. Vaylo's entire body
stiffened at the word. It was Clan Blackhail his four sons had
attacked that day, not Withy. It was Mace Blackhail's face they saw
in their minds as they smashed every bone in the Withy chief's
corpse. It was Raif Sevrance, he who stood at Duff's and proudly
admitted slaughtering Bludd women and children, whom they imagined
gutting with their three-bladed spears.

Pengo, Hanro, Gangaric, and Thrago had
killed two hundred Withymen between them that day, and another eleven
hundred had died by other hands. Proud Withymen, who wore ringmail
over coats stuffed with blue fox fur, and boasted,
We are the
clan who makes kings
.

The boast was true enough. It was a
Withyman who had proclaimed the first Dhoone King and a Withyman who
crowned him.

Vaylo buckled his gorget to his plate.
If Withymen made kings, then it was Blackhail who slew them. Oh,
people forgot that now. Five hundred years had passed since Dhoone
last had a king, and in that time Blackhail and Dhoone had cozied up
like two blind men with sticks. Bludd was the enemy. Godless,
ruthless Bludd. Yet it wasn't a Bluddsman who put an arrow in Roddie
Dhoone's throat, it was the Hailsman Ayan Blackhail. Vaylo's blue
eyes shrank. Roddie Dhoone may have been a mother-spoiled weakling
with a cruel streak as deep as the Black Spill, yet an arrow was no
way to kill a king. A Bluddsman would not have killed Roddie Dhoone
at distance; he would have walked straight up to him and thrust cold
steel through his Dhoonish heart.

No
matter, no matter. What does
anything matter
? Vaylo grabbed his gray braids in his fist and
held them down while he fixed his horned helm in place. Other men
wound their braids beneath their helmets to help buffer blows, but
not the Dog Lord. His braids streamed free in battle. It was a small
thing, but such small things made men who they were. And when the
battle was joined this night, two thousand Bludd-sworn eyes would be
looking toward his braids.

Vaylo touched the red leather pouch
containing his measure of guidestone before he tucked it beneath his
plate.
Stone Gods, see my clan through this night
.

The Clan Withy roundhouse was only a
tenth the size of Dhoone's, yet its builders were artful and had
shown a penchant for building
down
, not up or outward. The
chiefs chamber was sunk far below the earth, perhaps even to a depth
of a hundred feet. Vaylo could only wonder where the Withy chief had
dressed for war, for it hardly seemed likely that he'd willingly
climb the hundred and twenty steps to the surface while loaded with
two stone of plate.

Vaylo climbed and puffed and was
careful where he put his feet. Already all thoughts were falling from
him. He was the Dog Lord, and he must lead his clan to battle as he
had led them a hundred times before. If the Stone Gods showed him
grace, then dawn would find him one step closer to taking the
Hailhold. If they turned their cold cheeks toward him, then he would
strike somewhere else another day.

For he would have Blackhail. He was the
Bludd chief, and a hard life long lived was his reward. Gullit Bludd
had died in his sixties, yet Thrago HalfBludd had lived until he was
eighty-two and Wolver Bludd before him had seen out ninety-four years
in the Bluddhouse. Vaylo expected he would live for another thirty
years himself… and by his reckoning that was more than enough
time to send Mace Blackhail to hell.

"Vaylo. The Bludd host waits upon
your word." It was Cluff Drybannock, crossing over from the
boat-size piece of white oak that formed the Withy door. Drybone was
dressed in armor only marginally less battered and worn than his
chiefs. A hand-down from Ockish Bull, who had been dead these past
five years and who had stood second to every oath Drybone had ever
spoken. Oil lamps flickering in the perfect circle of the entrance
hall showed the hard bones in Drybone's cheeks and the brilliant
blueness of his eyes.

A young scrap of a boy came running
over with Vaylo's war hammer, the metal all shiny and near dripping
with oil. Vaylo didn't have the heart to tell him that he had not
wanted it cleaned, that he liked it good and worn to match his armor,
his sword, and his horse. "Strap it on me," he commanded
the boy, who might have been Strom Carvo's son.

It was an honor, and the boy's hands
shook as he laid the great spiked and lead-weighted hammer in its
cradle of soft suede and fastened the steel chains about it. As
always when the hammer was laid against his back, Vaylo felt the
first stirrings of battle fear. So many battles, so many melees, yet
in all this time he still hadn't found a way to calm the turmoil in
his stomach and the hammering of his heart.

Thrago had the Dog Horse standing ready
as promised, and as Vaylo and Cluff Drybannock passed under the oak
door and emerged into the late afternoon light, he trotted the old
black stallion forward. Vaylo stood on the steps a moment and looked
out upon the sea of red that was his men. Pengo was there, on his
great gray warhorse, his hammer as big as his head. Gangaric, Vaylo's
third son, stood at the fore, dressed in new-forged plate, a troop of
Clan HalfBludd axmen surrounding him. Vaylo recognized men from Clan
Otler, with their maroon-colored battle cloaks and clean-shaven
faces, and men from Clan Frees with copper wire braided into their
hair, and the bones of their ancestors forming bosses on their
shields. Even little Clan Broddic had sent sixty men, who sat high
upon their snowy horses, resplendent in oxblood leathers and
hound-skull helms. All the Bludd-sworn clans had sent men, even
cursed Clan Gray who could ill afford them, and that meant something
to the Dog Lord. No matter that of the two thousand horsed upon the
Withy greatcourt, fifteen hundred were Bluddsmen. No matter at all.

Ties of blood and battles bound Bludd
to HalfBludd, Frees, Otler, Broddic, and Gray. Dhoone had more clans
sworn to it than Bludd, but ties didn't run as deep in the middle of
the clanholds as they did in its farthest reaches. All clans here
today knew what it was to defend themselves against the Mountain
Cities, against Trance Vor and Morning Star… and against the
cold quick arrows of the Sull.

Vaylo took a hard breath as he
descended the steps. He would not think about the Sull… not
here, not now.

Using the bottom step as a platform,
Vaylo mounted his horse. The beast was lively today and fought the
reins the moment he pulled them. Vaylo fought back, and the Dog Horse
screamed and reared and other horses shied away to give it space.
Vaylo was not displeased. Drawing his greatsword from the
hound's-tail scabbard at his side, he looked upon the faces of his
men and roared, "
South to Bannen
!"

The howls of two thousand warriors
followed him as he rode to the head of the line.

The Dog Lord set a hard pace. The day
was cold and clear, and the wind was changing, and there'd be a
half-moon rising soon enough. The territory north of Withy was wooded
with elms and white oaks, with many groves cleared to provide forage
for wild boars. The grazing land and wheatfields lay to the north. To
the northeast, the dull brownish waters of the Easterly Flow could be
seen, as they bow-curved north toward Dhoone. Southwest, toward
Bannen, lay a landscape of gentle rolling lowlands seeded with white
heather, thistlegrass, and oats.

Vaylo pulled great quantities of air
through his lungs as he rode, savoring the coldness of the day and
the ice upon the wind. The snow underfoot had a crust to it that
snapped with a pleasing sound as the Dog Horse claimed ground beneath
him. At his back, Vaylo heard the thunder of his men, and the noise
made the bloodlust rise within him.