A Cavern of Black Ice (99 page)

The terrain changed gradually over the
course of the day. The great dark body of the taiga extended all the
way to the Coastal Ranges, but the trees living within it altered as
they neared the divide. They were smaller now, stunted by late spring
frosts, midwinter thaws, and the black blight of snow mold. Hemlocks
and spruce gave way to the twisted bones of whitebark and limber
pines. The ground underfoot grew harder, and giant boulders riven
with frost cracks studded the valley floor. Scraggy beards of
bladdergrass and yellow moss occupied niches in the rocks, and
prostrate willow hugged the ground like something spilled, not grown.
The snow underfoot was as hard and dry as white sand.

The area reminded Raif of the badlands.
He felt the same sense of cold drought.

By the time the sun reached its highest
point he was no longer sure which clan's territory he was in. He
guessed they might be traveling through the Orrlhold, which was the
most westerly of the border clans, but he also knew that a small
creek named the Red Run lay somewhere out here, beyond whose banks
Blackhail claimed all land west to the Ranges.

The Wolf River flowed to the south
here, and Raif glimpsed its black oily surface at intervals
throughout the day. Most of its tributaries were dry or frozen, and
its mass remained unchanged as it flowed toward the sea. The Wolf
River and its valley cut straight through the Ranges, and Raif knew
it would provide the quickest, safest route to the Storm Margin.

They stopped briefly at midday and ate
the last of the roasted bird. Raif watched Ash closely. Her skin was
markedly yellow now, and there was something wrong with her face. The
change was subtle, yet Raif recognized it for what it was
straightaway. The tiny crinkles around her eyes and mouth were gone.
Fluid beneath her skin was filling out wrinkles and depressions and
making her cheeks swell. He had seen symptoms like these before, on
Braida Tanna, elder sister to Lansa and Hailly, whose body had been
laid in a hollowed-out bass-wood the month Drey took his yearman's
oath. It was poison, Inigar Stoop had said. The girl's body had
poisoned itself.

Raif made Ash ride the gelding at a
gallop for long periods during the afternoon. He ran behind her, his
feet pounding over frozen earth, his ears burning in the rushing air.
At sunset she surprised him by calling a halt. He was some distance
behind her, catching his breath against a massive snout of limestone,
when he heard her call his name. By the time he reached the horse she
had dismounted and was approaching a crop of rocks that lay on a
ridge north of the path.

A small movement of Ash's body turned
him cold. She continued walking forward, yet she drew her arms to her
sides and closed her mouth. Raif took a second look at the rocks.
They were colored a delicate shade of blue gray, coated with
hoarfrost and granules of snow, and they were not rocks at all. They
were corpses. Six of them. Orris-men, judging from the strips of
white willow plaited into their braids, and the pale, shimmering
fabric of their cloaks. From the depth and condition of the
surrounding snow, Raif guessed they had been here for less than two
weeks, yet already the cold dry air had begun to mummify their
remains.

Raif took Ash's hand. His gaze was
drawn to the dark shadows beneath the hoarfrost crust: a blue eye,
perfectly preserved, a mouth open wide enough to show the pink hump
of a frozen tongue, a fist clenched around a column of air.

"What should we do?" Ash's
voice was a whisper.

As she spoke, Raif noticed a cap of
beaten silver discarded a short distance from the bodies. "Nothing."

"But shouldn't they be blessed,
buried,
something
?"

He could tell she was upset, yet he
still shook his head. "My clan brought this death. It's not for
me to deal with the corpses they left behind."

"'How do you know it was Blackhail
who did this?"

"That piece of silver over there
belongs to Blackhail and no other. They killed these men, and when
they were done, one of their number flicked the cap off his tine and
drew a circle in the frost."

"To honor the dead men's
memories?"

"No. You do not honor the memory
of a man you've just killed. The circle was made to draw the eyes of
the Stone Gods, so they may know there are souls to be claimed."

Ash pulled free of Raif's grip. "Why
kill these men
here
, where no one lives?"

"Because we are on Blackhail land,
and a state of war exists in the clanholds, and something has
happened to make the Hail Wolf angry or nervous, or both."

Raif dragged his hands over his face.
Orrl was sworn to Blackhail. The two clans had shared borders for two
thousand years, and for as far back as he could remember all disputes
between them had been settled at the hearth. Now this. What was Mace
Blackhail doing? What had happened to make him order such a killing?
Orrl's chief, Spynie Orrl, was no fool. He was the oldest living
chief in the clanholds, outliving four wives, two sons, and a
daughter. Dagro Blackhail had liked him well enough to invite him to
hear vows at both his weddings, and when Spynie's first
great-granddaughter had been born five years back, Spynie had sent
Dagro ten head of blackneck sheep in celebration. Raif could not
imagine Spynie Orrl attacking Blackhail. No man lived as long as he
did by taking chances.

Clan Scarpe. The memory of smoke rising
above the Scarpe tree line cooled Raif's face as quickly as if it had
been stroked with ice. If something had happened to bring the two
clans into dispute, and Clan Orrl had crossed swords with Clan
Scarpe, then Mace Blackhail would make sure that it was Orrl that
paid the highest price. He might call himself the Hail Wolf, but he
was a Scarpeman through and through.

Raif closed his eyes. He felt tired
enough to lie on the frozen ground and sleep with the dead.

He knew there was no way of knowing for
certain if the torching of the Scarpehouse was connected to the
mummified bodies on the ridge—Scarpe collected enemies like
flat roofs collected rain. Yet even if the two events were unrelated,
there was still a hard truth to be learned here. The Clan Wars were
spiraling out of control. Mace Blackhail had ordered the killing of
Orrlsmen. The Scarpe roundhouse had been torched. Ganmiddich had been
taken first by Bludd, then by Blackhail. Dhoone survivors were still
unhoused and scattered, yet it was only a matter of time before they
massed for a strike against Bludd. When would it end? When every
guidestone was smashed to rubble and every clansman dead?

Raif looked northeast toward Blackhail.
After a few minutes the lines around his mouth hardened, and he went
to strip clothes from the corpses.

He found no game to kill that night.
The thought of Ash sitting alone while he hunted kept him close to
the camp. The night was dark, and there was no moon showing, and the
sky seemed close enough to touch. Wind moving down from the mountains
froze the saliva on his teeth and made his eyes stream with stinging
tears. His breath glaciated upon his fisher hood within minutes.

He returned to the camp dragging numb
feet in the snow. They had not traveled far from the Orrlsmen, just
enough to put the sight of death behind them. Camp was a dry storm
channel thatched with willow switches and laid with willow leaves and
moss. The clothes Raif had stripped from the Orrlsmen had been beaten
free of ice and were now laid over the gelding's back so they would
be warm and dry by morning. Ash had offered to help, but he had set
her the task of building the fire and preparing the dried fox supper
instead. Skin had peeled off with the dead men's clothes, and
although it bore little resemblance to living flesh, Raif had not
wanted her to see it.

Ash was awake when he entered the
shelter, sitting with her knees tucked close to her chest. Smoke
choked the air—too much to escape easily from the smoke
hole—and Raif could tell by the length and fierceness of the
flames that Ash had been feeding the fire.

He stripped off his gloves and came to
kneel beside her. She was shaking as violently as if she'd been
pulled from freezing water. "Here," he said, tucking the
blankets around her shoulders. "You need to cover yourself
properly."

She smiled weakly. "No kill
tonight?"

"No." His gaze took in the
pile of willow branches he'd collected for firewood; there was no
longer enough to last the night. Ash had burned more than half their
stock. "Did the voices come again?"

She lowered her head as she nodded.
"They never leave me now. Sometimes they're not strong, and I
can push them back. Other times it's as if they're standing right
beside me… and I can smell them… and they're cold and
their eyes are black and dead.
It's so easy
, they say. So
easy. All you have to do is reach
."

"Do you know what they are?"

"Men. At least they once were men…
it's as if the shadows on the outside have found a way in." Ash
swallowed hard. "They hate us, Raif. They've been shut away for
so long, and all they can do is imagine what it's like to be free.
It's cold there, and no light ever touches them… and they're
in chains, and the chains are made of blood. They call me
mistress
and say they love me, but their words are all lies. There's thousands
of them, thousands upon thousands, and each and every one of them is
waiting for me to reach."

Raif leaned over and fed more willow to
the fire. He understood her need for warmth now.

As yellow flames dripped onto the new
wood and the frozen clay walls of the shelter shivered in the
changing light, Ash said, "Why do I exist, Raif? If what I can
do is so terrible, why was I born?"

Her eyes were bright in the firelight.
A patch on her bottom lip was red and tattered where she had chewed
on it. Raif wanted to take her in his arms and crush her until she
was warm and safe and unafraid. He wanted to say,
It doesn't
matter what you are capable of. If you breached the Blindwall this
night and let loose an army from the Blind, I would stay by your side
and protect you
. You
are clan to me now
. Instead he
said, "All of us are born with the ability to bring death and
suffering. Some of us have to fight harder than others to cause no
harm."

It was not the answer Ash wanted, yet
he could see her thinking as she pushed smoke away from her face.
"You fight it too, don't you?"

"Yes."

She edged closer to him, so that their
shoulders and arms were touching, yet kept her gaze on the fire as
she said, "Why do you stay with me, Raif? You don't want
anything from me. There's no reward for taking me to the cavern. We
could both die in the cold and the snow, and by the time someone came
upon our bodies we'd be like those Orrlsmen on the ridge, blue and
white and frozen."

Raif sat still and did not speak. How
could he answer? Staying with Ash was all he had, yet he could not
let her know that. She might pity him… and that was something
he had no need for. After a time he leaned forward and stoked the
fire with his staff. "I think we'd better sleep."

Ash looked at him without blinking, yet
he pretended not to notice as he shouldered down beneath his blanket,
closed his eyes, and waited for sleep to take him.

The screaming of the wind woke him
before dawn. The fire was long dead, and the temperature in the
shelter had dropped below freezing. Ice smoke hung in the air above
Raif's body, like a small piece of his soul. He lay still for a while
and listened to the wind, as Tern had taught him. The high-pitched
whistling told of air forced through mountain passes and needle-thin
fissures in rocks. The undertone of white noise, a sound as soft as a
mother shushing a baby to sleep, spoke of ice. The wind was full of
ice.

Although he didn't much feel like it,
Raif rose. Pain shot through his hands as he contracted muscles
locked by cold. His left eye was frozen shut, and when he rubbed his
beard, dead skin and ice crystals flaked into his hand. He needed to
heat water and render the last drops of fat from the fox, yet the
idea of going outside and collecting more fuel for the fire rested
like an undigested meal in his belly. He rubbed his left eye until it
ached and scarlet colors bloomed against the inside of his eyelid,
and then pried the eye open. Some portion of ice held fast, and as he
forced back the lid a handful of eyelashes were plucked clean.

Raif damned the cold.

Gathering his blanket around him like a
cloak, he crossed to where Ash lay sleeping against the back wall of
the shelter. Breaths so shallow they hardly raised her chest
exited her mouth with little scraping noises. Raif spoke her name,
loudly, afraid she might not wake. Her eyes blinked open.

Raif concealed his relief. "It's
morning. We must be ready to leave within the quarter. Wrap up well.
There's ice on the wind today."

He left her alone then, as he always
did, aware that women needed time for themselves after waking.
Breaking up the roof thatch, he pulled himself free of the shelter
and entered the ice storm beyond. The land was white and shifting,
driven by winds that could be seen and touched. Great webs of ice
hung from bent and crippled pines, and hoarfrost grew on everything
that lived like a plague. The snow underfoot was so hard and dry it
snapped like panes of glass beneath Raif's feet.

Head down, arms crossed over his chest,
he made his way toward the prostrate willow where he had tethered the
horse.

The gelding was in a bad way. It had
not fed during the night. Veins around its mouth and eyes were
chilblained and broken, and despite the many blankets and articles of
clothing spread over its back, it was shivering violently. As soon as
it heard Raif, it whickered softly and came toward him on uncertain
legs. Raif stroked the old horse's nose, oddly touched by its desire
to be near him.