A Cavern of Black Ice (79 page)

Veys' face darkened at the memory. He
hated being holed up with Marafice Eye and his thick-necked crony.
Where was the sept Penthero Iss had promised? Veys wouldn't have put
it past the Surlord to slow their sending just to torture him
further. Everyone was intent on causing him harm. Letting his anger
seep into his voice, Veys said to the Knife, "The top layer of
skin must shed before you can strap on a boot."

"And how long might that be?"

"A week," Veys replied,
deliberately adding a few extra days to the tally.

The Knife cursed. Swiping a hand across
the table, he sent dishes and flagons crashing to the floor. Beer
hissed where it landed on the hearthstone. "A week! A week! You
said it was cured. Now look at it." He thrust the blistered and
weeping foot toward Veys. "Your foul magics have made a leper of
me."

"I
said
that I had warmed
the flesh as best I could. You will not lose your foot. You will be
able to walk and ride as normal. What is happening now is just the
natural course of events. I cannot make your skin heal any faster."

"Aye, but you'd make it heal
slower if you could." Hood turned over a cracked dish with the
toe of his boot. "If the limb festers, you die, Halfman. My own
eight fingers will see to that."

Veys pinched his lips tight. He didn't
understand Hood's loyalty to the Knife, yet he knew it was something
real. Hood
would
kill him, and it
would
be out of
some strange and twisted brother love for Marafice Eye.

Pale eyes glinting in anger, Veys
watched as the innkeeper—a fat man with womanish breasts—shoved
one of his girls toward their table to clear up the mess. The girl
was blond, fleshy, and brazen, exactly the kind of woman Veys
despised and Hood and the Knife well liked. Deciding it was time to
leave, Veys stood. He had no wish to witness Hood and the Knife
exchanging the kinds of obscenities they took for flirting with some
cheap, overfed whore.

Looking to the Knife's foot, he said,
"As long as it's cleaned and packed with dog mercury each night,
the skin will not fester."

Marafice Eye grunted.

Hood smiled slowly, revealing a good
portion of unswallowed elk between his teeth. Grabbing the blond girl
by the waist, he forced her into his lap. "Running off to your
bed, Halfman? The thought of our little Moll here scares you that
much!"

The sound of Hood's laughter
accompanied Veys from the tap room.

Holding his white robe above the stair
level so it didn't catch dust from the floor, Veys mounted the inn's
main staircase and headed for his private chamber. The third best inn
in Ille Glaive was named the Dropped Calf, and calf hides, calf pelt
rugs, and paintings of calves formed the main decorations. Even the
wax candles that lit the stairwell shone from scrubbed calf craniums,
giving Sarga Veys the feeling he was being watched by the spirits of
long-dead grasseaters as he made his escape.

The quiet grandeur of his room soothed
him. No dirty rushes, no cheap boxed pallet, no tallow, unwashed
linen, or pests. Instead there was a proper pitch pine floor, a bed
carved from fruitwood, a dozen beeswax candles whiter than his own
teeth, bed linens as crisp as autumn leaves, and nothing but stray
filaments of dust buzzing around the light. Gratifyingly enough, upon
their arrival at the Dropped Calf the innkeeper had mistaken
him
for the head of the party and had housed Marafice Eye and Hood on the
far side of the inn, in a chamber that looked out across the vinegar
brewery next door. Veys had at first been surprised when Marafice Eye
discovered the error and chose to do nothing about it, then
contemptuous. The Knife could think no further than the Rive Watch
and his men.

Of course, the passing days had shown
the innkeeper who the real leader was, yet it pleased Sarga Veys'
vanity to remind himself that on first look
he
had seemed
the superior man.

The greasy smoke in the taproom had
agitated Veys' eyes, and he crossed to the nearest of the two
north-facing windows and flung back the shutters to let in the night.
Icy darkness soothed him like a dip into a still pool.

The Dropped Calf was situated close to
the north wall of the city, and its height and elevation allowed Veys
a view across the battlements to the cityhold beyond.

The glacier-ground peaks of the Bitter
Hills were a distant break on the horizon, topped by a crown of
silver storm clouds. Each winter on a hundred storms traveled south
from the clanholds and the Want, some so close behind each other that
three had been known to hit in the course of a single day. The Bitter
Hills took punishment from them all. Perhaps once they
had
been mountains, yet between the grinding of ancient glaciers and the
lashing of a million storms, they had been reduced to that awkward
height that man had no right name for. Clansmen called them hills,
yet that was just clannish bravado. And Veys knew all about that.

Making a small grimace of distaste that
exposed his fine, inward-slanting teeth to the light, Veys sat at the
oak desk that was positioned in front of the window. An excellent,
large-scale map of the Ille Glaive cityhold lay unraveled and pinned
to the wood. The map had cost Veys a small fortune, purchased earlier
that day from a young ambitious chartmaker named Siddius Horn, and it
merited every coin paid and more.

"All villages within thirty
leagues of the city are marked and plotted," boasted Siddius
Horn from behind the shabby, acid-burned counter of his shop. "All
hamlets, all
proper
farms, all roads, shared cattle trails,
and elevations."

It was a
very
good map.

Veys trailed a finger over the bleached
silk-rag paper, tracing the course of Ille Glaive's northern road.
The road, painstakingly traced in iron ink with a hair-fine sable
brush, led directly from the Old Sull Gate to the Ganmiddich Pass.
Angus Lok and his two companions had taken that road from the city.
Veys knew that. He also knew that instead of continuing north to the
pass or turning west toward Clan Blackhail, they had turned
east
instead.

The first piece of information had come
cheaply enough. Gatekeepers were as willingly bribed as small
children. It had taken Hood but quarter of a day to find the right
gate and the right gatekeeper and purchase what intelligence was
needed. The second piece of information was all Veys.

Yesterday morning, after Hood had
returned to the Dropped Calf, Veys had paid a visit to the Old Sull
Gate himself. More coins had changed hands. All bore the fine
undetectable film of grease that formed on objects much handled and
much used, yet one bore a little strung extra as well: a compulsion.
Compulsions were high sorcery, and Veys was good at them. More often
than not a compulsion was spoken, not passed from hand to hand,
but Veys didn't have the voice for it. A warm, rich,
compelling
voice was best. The sort of voice that encouraged a man to take part
in one's schemes, that flattered his ego, and played tricks with his
reason, and made the most irregular requests sound sane. A good voice
and a commanding presence were half the work of a compulsion. Without
them, such sorcery was hard work.

It had taken Veys most of the night to
fix the compulsion on the coin. It was a simple one, of course.
Compulsions only worked when the request was modest and of a nature
that did not antagonize the victim in any way. Mostly they were good
for information. With a compulsion upon him, a jailer might let slip
the time of day when his prisoner was fed and the cell door was open,
a pretty chambermaid might disclose her mistress's bedtime
indiscretions, and a respectable innkeeper might point the way to the
room of a guest who had just paid him good money for silence. The
trick was in making the person
want
to fulfill one's
request.

With the five silver coins that Veys
had passed to the lean-bodied, smoke-eyed guardsman, he had also
passed along the suggestion that the man ask all who passed into the
city that morning a simple question. Had they seen two men and a
woman riding together, the men mounted on good horses and the woman
atop a gray hill-bred pony?

The guardsman's eyes had turned from
smoky to blank as Veys spoke his request. No power was present in
Veys' voice, yet the coin pressing against the red flesh of the
guard's palm had burned cold with sorcery. The guard had nodded his
assent even before Veys had reached the words gray
hill-bred
pony
.

Half a day had been enough. After a
small but excellent noonday meal of pheasant prepared in a crust of
its own blood, Veys had returned to the guard and the gate. The guard
related his intelligence in a voice that was fast and
furtive—somewhere deep inside he knew that what he did was
wrong. Several people had sighted the three companions heading north
toward the pass, and Veys was about to conclude that Angus Lok and
his party had indeed crossed into the clanholds when the guard
offered his last piece of information,

"A drover and his son said they
saw such a party heading east three nights back. Said they were about
ten leagues off the north road, traveling along a cattle path known
only to locals and drovers."

Veys made no reply—one did not
thank an ensorcelled man—simply turned his back and walked
away. A few discreet inquiries produced the name of the best
chartmaker in the city, and not many hours later Veys was back in the
comfort of his well-appointed chamber, plotting Angus Lok's journey
with a pot of lampblack ink and a twig.

The guard's information was sound. It
was just like Angus Lok to know the back ways: the low roads, cattle
paths, game tracks, and dogtrots. If a drover had claimed to see him
in such a place, then the drover was likely right.

Satisfied in that regard, at least,
Veys sat back and contemplated Siddius Horn's map. Until an hour ago
he had assumed that Lok's final destination lay east. Now he wasn't
so sure.

Asarhia March's trail was dead. Either
the sorcery that had clung to her had worn off or she had been warded
by someone very clever indeed. Warding was a difficult business. One
could not set wardings in place without giving something of oneself
to the person who was being protected. Only few magic users could
manage them, and almost all were likely members of the Phage.

Veys' lip twisted with the force of
unwanted memories. Yes, there were one or two people in this city
capable of warding Asarhia March… but that was not what
concerned him now. Other sorceries did.

An hour earlier, while he had sat with
Marafice Eye and Hood in the taproom, wetting his lips with beer he
found too coarse to swallow and cutting slivers of meat from the
inner
loin of elk, he had felt a different source of power
in the North. Three fast jabs, one after another. Barely sorcery at
all, so instinctively was it used by he who drew it.

The Clansman.

Veys had perceived him twice before.
Once, in Spire Vanis as he heart-killed four sworn brothers in the
shadow of Vaingate, and again on the shore of the Black Spill when he
took down a pair of hounds. His aftermath reeked of Old Blood. It
made Veys' skin crawl. As soon as he perceived it, it was gone.

North was all Veys knew. North, not
east.
North
.

A clean and perfectly filed fingernail
scratched a furrow in Siddius Horn's map. After a three-day
detour east, Angus Lok and his party were back at the Ganmiddich
Pass.

To Sarga Veys that meant only one
thing: Angus Lok had taken his new friends home. Smiling softly to
himself as he worked, Veys began to work out how far three people
mounted on good horses travel east in a day in thick snow.

In the Tower

They separated him from Angus and
Ash—that he was grateful for. That was one thing to hold on to
in the darkness that was to come: Ash would not see or
know
.

The skiff traveled smoothly over water
as slick and black as volcanic glass. The storm had long passed, and
the Wolf River was sleeping after a night spent howling at the moon.
Raif could smell the thick animal odor of the water, water that in
spring moved so swiftly and with such force that it killed more elk,
horned sheep, snagcats, bear cubs, and small game than the largest
pack of wolves in the North. It smelled of those kills now, of
carrion suspended, half-frozen, in water so thick and cold that
nothing would rot until spring.

The Ganmiddich Inch lay ahead. The Inch
was a shoulder of granite that broke water in the river's middle,
rising above the surface like the dome of an ancient temple, long
sunk. The Ganmiddich Tower was built upon its bedrock. The red fire
burning in the tower's uppermost chamber provided the only light for
the skiff's skipper to steer by. It was close to dawn. Raif could
tell that much from the lay of the stars and the restless switching
of air currents as night made way for day. He lay bound in the belly
of the skiff, the booted feet of six Bludd oarsmen keeping him in
place. A rope lashed across the bridge of his nose made it difficult
to breathe, and another binding the soft tissue of his throat made
any but the slightest movements impossible. He had not been beaten,
but rough handling had broken open the hard, inflexible scar tissue
on his chest. Bluddsmen's spit was still wet on his face and neck,
and scratches on his temples and forehead leaked blood into the hull
of the boat.

Cluff Drybannock stood at the prow, one
foot up upon gunwales, his entire body leaning forward toward the
Inch. Earlier, as they'd ridden north toward Ganmiddich, he had let
down his braids, and now his waist-long black hair streamed behind
him in the predawn chill.