A Cavern of Black Ice (7 page)

'Father!"

Angus Lok turned toward the voice of
his eldest daughter. Cassy Lok had dirt smeared on her face, her hair
was plastered to the sides of her head in two wet sheets, and she was
wearing an ancient oilskin cape that had come with the farm together
with a milk churn and two rotting plows. Yet to Angus she looked
perfectly beautiful. High spots of color glowed in her cheeks, and
her hazel eyes were as bright as raindrops glistening on amber.
Sixteen, she was. Old enough to be wed and have children of her own.
Angus frowned. How was she ever going to meet
a
young man,
hidden out here in the farm and woodlands two days' northeast of Ille
Glaive? She wasn't. And that was one reason Angus Lok didn't sleep
well at night.

'Have you come to take a look at the
raven?" Cassy said, excitement spilling into her voice as she
ran to join her father. "It's a messenger, like the rooks that
sometimes come. Only bigger. There's something tied to its leg."

Darra and Angus Lok exchanged a glance.
"Cassy, go inside and warm yourself. Your father and I will see
to the bird."

'But-"

'Inside, Casilyn."

Cassy brought her lips together,
made a small huffing sound, then turned and made her way inside the
house. Darra seldom used her full name.

Angus ran a hand over his face,
brushing the rain from his eyebrows and beard. He watched as Cassy
closed the kitchen door behind her. She was a good girl. He'd talk to
her later, explain what he could.

'This way. The bird has no liking for
the rookery like the rest. It's perched itself in the old elm around
the back." Without waiting for her husband to acknowledge what
she said, Darra cut across the yard and down along the side of the
house. Angus had lived with his wife too long not to know that her
briskness was a cover. Darra was nervous and trying not to show it.

To the rear of the Lok farmhouse lay
open woodland. Great old oaks, elms, and basswoods grew tall and
spread wide over a rich damp underwood of lichen, dead leaves, loam,
and ferns. In spring Cassy and Beth would search for blue duck eggs,
wood frogs, and wild mint, and in summer they'd spend entire days in
the woods, picking cloudberries, blackberries, gooseberries, and
black plums, coming home after sundown with sticky faces and baskets
crammed with dark mushy fruits that would have to be soaked in water
to drown the maggots out. In autumn they would hunt for field
mushrooms and milk caps, and in winter, during those times when
Angus' work took him away, Darra would set traps to catch small game.

Kaaw! Kaaw!

The raven announced its presence with
two short, angry notes, drawing Angus Lok's gaze skyward, up through
the branches of the great white elm that provided summer shade for
the entire house. Even surrounded by branches as thick as arms, the
raven's form was unmistakable. It perched in the tree with all the
arrogance of a panther resting after an easy kill. Black and still,
it watched Angus Lok with eyes of liquid gold.

Angus' gaze shifted from the creature's
eyes to its legs. A marked thickening directly above its left claw
was clearly visible: pikeskin, sinew bound, then painted with a resin
seal.

Kaaw! Kaaw!

Look, I dare you.

Angus heard the raven's call as a
challenge. Only two people in the Northern Territories used ravens to
carry their messages, and Angus knew in the soft marrow of his bones
that he didn't want to hear from either of them. The past lay within
that pikeskin pouch, and he and the raven knew it.

'Call it down." Darra's voice was
low, her hands twisted at the fabric of her apron.

Nodding softly, Angus whistled as he
had once been taught nearly twenty years earlier: two short chirrs
followed by a single long note.

The raven bobbed its head and shook out
its wings. Gold eyes appraised Angus Lok. Seconds passed, and then,
making a noise that sounded just like human laughter, the raven flew
down from the branch.

Darra stepped back as the huge bird
landed. Angus had to fight the urge to step back himself. The raven's
bill was as big as a spearhead, sharp and hooked like the shredder on
a plow. Apparently delighted by Darra's fear, the bird danced toward
her, bobbing its head and calling softly.

'Nay, yer little beastie." Angus
grabbed at the raven, one hand circling its belly, the other clamping
down on its bill. Pulling the bird from the ground, he hefted it fast
against his chest. The raven jerked its wings and clawed its feet,
but Angus held it firm, increasing his pressure on its bill. "Darra.
Take the knife from my belt and cut the message."

Darra did as she was asked, though her
knifehand shook so much as she broke the seal that she nearly bled
the bird. With the sinew and resin bindings broken, the small
package, no bigger than a child's little finger, fell into Darra's
left palm.

Angus turned away from his wife and
threw the raven from him. The bird spread its wings and soared into
the air, laughing, laughing, as it disappeared into the blade-metal
sky.

'Here. Take it." Darra Lok held
out the package. The pikeskin wrapping was badly stained by rain,
resin, and bird lime, but small silvery green patches of skin were
still visible along its length. Pikeskin was light, strong, and
waterproof and could be molded in place when wet. A useful material,
yet Angus couldn't recall the last time he'd received a message so
wrapped. The moment Angus' fingers closed around the soft, damp
package, Darra took a step back. Angus sent his wife a glance.
Stay
.

Darra shook her head. "No, my
husband. I've been married to you for eighteen years, and I have
never once looked upon any message they have sent. I do not think it
would be a good time to break my tally now." With that Darra Lok
ran a hand over her husband's right cheek and turned and walked away.

Angus cupped his hand to his face where
his wife had touched him, holding on to her warmth as he watched her
disappear behind the corner of the house. He didn't deserve her. She
was a Ross of Clad Hill, and her father was a grangelord, and
nineteen years ago when they'd first met, she could have had any man
she chose. Angus Lok never forgot that. It ran through his mind
now as he unraveled the roll of pikeskin and pulled out the length of
saliva-softened whitespruce bark.

Sliced so thinly that Angus could see
his thumb through the fibers, the soft strip of inner bark carried a
border of seals chasing quarter moons burned into the wood. The
message was also burned in, painstakingly pricked out with the tip of
a red-hot needle:

The One with Reaching Arms Beckons
Days Darker Than Night Lie Ahead Sadaluk
Angus stepped toward
the great old elm and leaned heavily against its trunk. Rain dripped
around him, forming a curtain of beaded light. Many things he had
been prepared for, many terrible, terrible things. But this… A
bitter smile flashed across Angus' face. This was something he had
thought well behind him. They all had.

It's your choice, Angus Lok. Make
of it what you will
. The past pulled like a much used muscle
within Angus' chest. It shortened his breath, making it difficult to
breathe. He would have to leave. Tonight. Head for Ille Glaive, meet
with those who needed to be told. It never occurred to him to doubt
the message. Sadaluk of the Ice Trapper tribe was not the sort of man
given to rash communication. Twenty years, and this was the first
time Angus had ever heard from him.

Beneath Angus' feet, the bald earth
around the elm turned to mud. The raven's laughter echoed in the last
of the tree's attached leaves. Angus glanced at his house. Inside
Cassy would be helping Darra stack the fire before supper, Beth would
be rolling dough for the sweet, sticky unnameable pastries that she
and Little Moo loved to eat. As for Little Moo… well, she had
probably keeled over on the rug and was currently fast asleep. That
child could sleep anywhere.

Pain, which had never quite left Angus'
chest, reasserted itself with a single, soft stab. How safe were all
his children tonight?

Tucking the message in a slip inside
his waistcoat, Angus pushed himself off from the elm and headed for
the warmth of his house. No. He wouldn't leave his home, not in
darkness. Those who sent messages could go to the deepest spiraling
hell. He had promised Beth and Little Moo ribbons, and by all the
gods, they were going to get them. Yet even as Angus Lok found some
satisfaction in defiance, fear settled like dust within his bones. A
raven had come, and a message had been received, and the past was now
a tightly held fist knocking at his door.

*** As quiet as settling dust, Ash
March told herself as she slipped through her chamber door. Cool air
from the corridor brushed against her nightdress, and Ash had to bite
the inside of her mouth to stop herself from shivering. Why did it
have to be so cold? She glanced back at the door. Should she have
brought an outer robe after all? Suddenly the idea of wandering
around Mask Fortress wearing little but a nightdress and a wool tunic
didn't seem nearly as clever as it had earlier. Still, this way, if
she were caught, she could at least claim sleepwalking and have a
chance of being believed. Wearing a cloak would make things harder.
Did sleepwalkers dress before they went outside? Ash didn't know.

Looking ahead at what she could see of
the gently spiraling corridor of cut and angled stone, Ash listened
for the sound of Marafice Eye. The Knife had moved from his post by
Ash's door some minutes earlier, probably assuming his charge was
fast asleep. Ash didn't know where he had gone, had no idea when and
if he would return. She just knew that he was sick of spending his
nights camped outside her door. She didn't blame him. It was cold
enough to turn breath white, and, discounting watching dust settle
and greenwood torches burn out one by one, there was nothing to do.

Laughter. Ash tensed. The sound came
again, down the corridor and off to the right. Katia's room. Yet that
wasn't Katia laughing. Not unless she'd spent the night swilling hot
tar and chewing on gravel.

'I said blow out the light."

Immediately Ash recognized the cold,
imperative tones of Marafice Eye. He was in Katia's room…
with
Katia
. Ash shuddered; she didn't like the thought of that one
bit. Katia was so small, dark and tiny like a doll. And Marafice Eye
was a huge bull of a man, with arms that took the sleeves of four men
to cover them and wrists like iron bars. Slipping into the shadows
against the opposite wall, Ash walked quickly ahead.

The limestone walls were bitterly cold,
and Ash avoided touching them as she moved. Both her own and Katia's
chambers were situated in the shortest and thickest of the four
towers in Mask Fortress: the Cask. The Cask was the principal
fortified structure in Spire Vanis, and its walls were twenty feet
thick. A series of spiraling corridors and winding staircases led up
from its base like a path weaving around a hill, breaking
occasionally for defensive bastions, archers' roosts, chambers,
walled-in snugs, and recessed alcoves with cut stone benches known as
graymeets.

Ash's chamber formed the heart of the
Cask. Directly below her floor, the tower wall was spiked with a ring
of fortifications so thick that from outside they looked like a
massive limestone bird's nest clustered around a tree. The Cask was
not a pretty sight. Of the three towers that were livable within the
fortress, it was the least graciously set, having none of the wrought
ironwork and lead cladding found in the Horn or the crow-step gables
and black marble eyelets of the Bight.

As for the Splinter, the tallest tower
in Mask Fortress, capped with the Iron Spire, where high traitors
were once impaled at a height of six hundred feet so that everyone
within the city could see them and know fear… Ash shook her
head. No one had been there for years. The Splinter was unstable,
uninhabitable, freezing, damp, broken. It was a wonder the whole
thing didn't collapse. One end was said to be embedded so deeply
within the frozen bedrock of Mount Slain that the tower shuddered
along with the mountain. And the other end soared so high into the
clouds that moisture continually ran in rivulets down its walls
whether it was raining or not. In winter the entire structure was
encased within a layer of rime ice a knuckle thick. Pale, narrow, and
twisting, the ice-bound tower had been called by many names: the
Winter Spire, the White Thorn, Penthero Iss' Bloodless Prick. Ash
frowned. Katia was always passing along such nonsense.

Reaching the first set of steps, Ash
risked looking back. Katia must have blown out the light as Marafice
Eye had bidden, for the space beneath the little maid's door was now
dark. That was good, Ash told herself, moving her mind away from the
subject. She didn't want to think about what might be happening
within.

Solid limestone steps muffled her
footfalls as she descended the stairs. Iron hooks, mottled brown and
orange with rot and rust, jutted from the stairwall like bird claws,
forcing her to walk dead center. Once they had been used to suspend
great fire-blackened chains that linked all the Cask's portcullises
to a single lever in the strongroom below. Now they were just one
more hazard to avoid, like servants, brothers-in-the-watch, and the
raw mountain air.

Ash rubbed her arms. She was so cold.
Freezing. Yet she had thought to wear her thickest nightgown, and her
feet were slippered in moleskin. It wasn't even winter yet, not
properly, so why could she never get warm?

You
are not well, almost-daughter.
I worry
.

Ash shook her foster father's voice
from her head. She wasn't unwell in the way he meant. Katia had told
her all about what happened to girls when they came into their blood,
and nightmares and cold sweats formed no part of it. "You get
stomach cramps," Katia had said, an air of vast superiority
warming her voice. "And your mind starts turning to men."
Ash blew air through her nostrils. Men. No, that definitely wasn't
happening to her.