A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (2 page)

A day later, Raif met up with Ash on the banks of the Wolf, and they headed west toward the Storm Margin and the Cavern of Black Ice.

Blackhail’s storming of Ganmiddich had plunged the clanholds into deeper conflict. The three northern giants - Blackhail, Dhoone and Bludd - were now engaged in a messy and unclear war. Bludd vowed vengeance on Blackhail for the slaughter on the Bluddroad; Blackhail blamed Bludd for the murder of its chief; and dispossessed Dhoone desperately needed to retake their roundhouse. The architect of all this unrest was the surlord, Penthero Iss, who had been working to destabilize the clanholds for many months. Iss planned to invade the clanholds, and to this end had offered Marafice Eye a mutually beneficial deal. In return for Marafice Eye raising an army and leading it north to crush the clans, Iss would name Eye as his successor.

Meanwhile, Mace Blackhail was working to consolidate his position as Blackhail’s chief. To strengthen his hold on the chiefship, Mace had coerced his father’s widow into marrying him by raping her and then claiming the union had been consensual. Raina Blackhail was a proud woman, and rather than admit she had been raped by Mace, she preferred to keep her silence and retain her standing in the clan. Only one other person besides Raina and Mace knew the truth of what had happened that day in the Oldwood. Effie Sevrance, Raif’s and Drey’s younger sister, had witnessed the rape, and for that reason Mace Blackhail determined he must be rid of her.

Effie Sevrance was bearer of the stone lore: the little chunk of rock she wore around her neck warned her of dangers by moving against her skin. When it went missing one day, she knew to be afraid: without it she felt naked and exposed. A few days later Effie was attacked outside the roundhouse by the luntwoman Nellie Moss and her son. It was the shankshounds - the dogs belonging to the wealthy clan overlord Orwin Shank - that saved Effie, by breaking free from their kennel and ripping her attackers to shreds. The rescue only served to isolate Effie Sevrance, for now people began whispering that she had enchanted the shankshounds and was a witch. Mace Blackhail, sensing an advantage, let the rumors go unchecked. The next time he moved to rid himself of Effie Sevrance, fewer people would speak up in her defence.

On the journey along the Storm Margin, Ash’s condition had grown worse. The bone-chilling cold pierced her and the wards set by Heritas Cant had been blasted away, leaving her vulnerable to the creatures of the Blind. When she lapsed into a coma at the end of a long, freezing day, Raif picked her up in his arms and carried her. Raif had forsaken his clan, his yearman’s oath, and his family: Ash March was all he had. When wolves attacked he was forced to set Ash down to defend himself. Although he heart-killed the pack leader and scattered the other wolves, Raif could not save Ash. She had begun to hemorrhage during the attack, and he did not possess the power to help her. Drawing a guide circle in the snow, he had called upon the clan gods.

Raif’s cry was heard leagues away by two Sull Far Riders, Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer. The Far Riders had been called north to a parley with Sadaluk, the Listener of the Ice Trapper Tribe. The Listener could hear things that other men could not, and he knew that a Reach had been born and that the Blindwall was in danger of collapsing. The Far Riders saved Ash’s life, and later escorted Ash and Raif onto the ice of the Hollow River, beneath which lay the Cavern of Black Ice.

Ash March discharged her Reach-power in the cavern lined with black, ensorcelled ice. But it was too late. The hairpin crack she’d caused earlier could not be mended, and even as she and Raif left the cavern, someone, somewhere, was working upon the flaw.

Penthero Iss’s bound sorcerer, the Nameless One, had made a deal with the Endlords.
Push against the crack
, they had said,
and in return we will give you your name
. And so the Nameless One had pushed and the Blindwall was breached, and the first Unmade rode through.

PROLOGUE

Diamonds and Ice

T
he diamond pipe was hot and stinking, and when the water hit the walls the rock exploded, spraying the diggers with a cloud of dust and steam. Scurvy Pine swore with venom. Fierce blisters of sweat rose on his forehead and he wiped them away with a greasy rag. “Fires have only been out an hour. What do those bastards think we are? Crabs to be steamed for the pot?”

Crope made no reply. He and Scurvy had been working the pipes together for eight years, and they’d been scalded worse in their times. A lot worse. Besides, speaking took up space for remembering, and Crope had important things to remember today. “
Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. You be ready when I give the word
.”

Placing the empty bucket down on the blue mud of the pipe floor, Crope watched the rock wall as it continued to crack and pop. The fire set by the free miners heated the rock, making it split and break. Water hauled up from the Drowned Lake cooled the walls so quickly, boulders the size of war carts shattered to dust. “Softening”, the free miners called it, making the pipe ready for the diggers’ picks. Crope could see nothing soft about it. Mannie Dun had broken his back pickaxing a seam last spring. Crope remembered carrying the old digger away, Mannie’s legs jerking against his belly as the free miners called Red Watch and sealed the area off. The sealing wasn’t for safety’s sake—Crope didn’t know much but he knew that. The sealing was to keep the diggers away. Before Mannie’s spine had twisted and popped, the tip of his ax had lodged in a rock wall speckled with flecks of red stone. Red Eyes, the miners called them. Red Eyes meant diamonds . . . and diamonds were the business of free men, not slaves.

“Pick to the wall, giant man. Don’t go giving me good reason to spread my whip.”

Crope knew better than to look at the man who spoke. The guards in the pipe were known as Bull Hands, on account of their oiled and flame-hardened whips. Scurvy said they could take the hands off a man before he even heard the sound of bullhide moving through air. Crope dreamed of that sometimes; of hands not attached to any living man, clutching his neck and face.

Diamond rock split and crumbled to nothing as Crope took his pick to the wall. Water still warm from contact with the heated stone ran through the cracks at his feet. Above, the pipe twisted up and up, its walls gashed by stairs and pathways hewn from the live rock. Tunnels and caves pitted the sides, marking seams long run dry or walls overmined to the point of collapse. The entrances to the older tunnels had been plugged with a makeshift mortar of horsehair and clay, for there were some in the pipe who feared shadow things rising from the depths.

Rope bridges spanned the pipe’s breadth, their wooden treads warped by steam, their fibers ticking as the wind moved a thousand feet above. The sky seemed far away, and the sun farther still, and even on a clear day in midwinter, little light found its way into the pipe.

Down below, in the lowest tier of the pipe, where a ring of pitch lamps burned with white-hot flames, the hags were at work with their baskets and claws.
Scratch, scratch, scratch
, as they raked the new-broke ground for the hard clear stone that was valued above gold. The hags were slaves too, but they were old and weak, bent-backed and stiff-fingered, and the Bull Hands did not fear to let them near the lode.

Crope thought he spied Hadda the Crone, in line with the other hags, her black wool cap bobbing up and down as she raked and clawed and sorted. Hadda scared Crope. She had long, sunken breasts shaped like spades that she bared to any digger who looked her way. Scurvy, Bitterbean and the rest looked her way often, but Crope did not like Hadda, and he would not look at her breasts.

When the lash came he was half expecting it. The sting was cold,
cold
, and it took the breath from him like a punch to the gut. The tip of the whip curled around his ear, licking flesh hard with scars. Tears of blood welled in a line around his neck, and he felt their hotness trickle down his shoulders to his back. The salt burn would come later, when the gray crystals of sea-salt that the Bull Hands soaked into their whips worked their way into the wound.

“It’s not enough that they whip us,” Scurvy always said. “They have to make us burn.”

“I can smell you, giant man.” The Bull Hand pulled back the whip with practiced slowness, drawing the leather through his half-closed fist. He was a big man, hard-mouthed and fair-skinned, with broken veins in the whites of his eyes and the shineless teeth of a diamond miner. Although Crope had seen him many times, he couldn’t remember his name. That was Scurvy’s job, the remembering. Scurvy knew the names of every man in Pipe Town; knew what they were called and what they
were
.

The Bull Hand thrust the whip into his belt. “You stink like the slop pots when your mind’s not on the wall.”

Crope kept his head down and continued to break rock. He was aware of many eyes upon him, of Bitterbean and Iron Toe and Soft Aggie down the line. And of Scurvy Pine beyond them, watching the Bull Hand, yet not seeming to, his eyes so cold and hard they might have been mined in the pipe.

Scurvy’s gaze flicked to the chains at Crope’s feet. Iron they were, black with tar and dead skin, and they ran from ankle to ankle, from digger to digger, joining every man in the line. “
Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. You be ready when I give the word
.”

Crope felt Scurvy’s will working upon him, warning him to keep swinging his ax. Eight years ago they’d met, in the tin pits west of Trance Vor. Crope never wanted to go back there again. He hated the low ceilings of the tin caves, the darkness, the stench of bad eggs, and the
drip, drip, drip
of the walls. Spineless, that was what everyone had called him, before Scurvy had made them stop. Scurvy had picked no fight nor raised a weapon; he had simply told the other tin men how it was going to be. “He carved the eyes out of an ice master who cheated him at dice,” Bitterbean had once told Crope. “But
that’s
not the reason they ’prisoned him.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Crope thought he saw Scurvy nod minutely to Hadda the Crone.

Time passed. The diggers continued breaking the wall and the hags kept sifting through the dust. Crope’s lash wound began to burn with the hot sting of salt. Softly, so softly that he wasn’t even sure when the sound began, Hadda the Crone began to sing. It was like no song Crope had ever heard, high and wavering and strange to the ear. It made the hairs around his wound stand upright. Other diggers felt it too. At Crope’s side, Soft Aggie’s chains rattled as he stamped his feet in the mud. Bitterbean and the others slowed their strikes, and the sound of breaking rock lessened as Hadda’s song began to rise.

If she sang in words Crope did not recognize them, yet fear entered him all the same. High and higher, her song rose, keening and wailing, her voice disappearing for brief moments as she reached pitches that only dogs could hear. Other hags joined in, chanting low where Hadda soared high, rough where she was as clear as glass.

Crope felt a queer coldness steal into the pipe. He watched as the shadow cast by his ax lengthened and darkened, until the shadow seemed more real than the ax. One of the pitch lamps blew out, and then another. And then one of the Bull Hands cracked his whip and shouted, “Stop that fucking wailing, bitch.”

Crope risked a glance at Scurvy.
Wait
, his eyes said.
Be ready when I give the word.

Hadda’s song turned shrill. The diamond drilled into her front tooth was the only thing that glinted in the darkening pipe. Crope felt sweat slide along his fingers as he raised his ax for another strike. A memory of a time long ago possessed him, a night roaring with flames. People burning alive; precious stones popping from their jewelry in the heat, smoke curling from their mouths as they screamed. Bad memories, and Crope did not want to think of them. Driving his ax deep into diamond rock, he sent them smashing against the wall.

Two Bull Hands jumped down into the lower tier, where the hags squatted as they sifted dust. A tongue of black leather came down upon a thigh, opening skin stained blue with mud. A woman screamed. A basket full of rubble dropped to the floor, sending stones the size of rat skulls bouncing into the hole at the center of the pipe. “That’s where the diamonds come from, that hole,” Scurvy had once told Crope. “Leads right down to the center of the earth. And the gods that live there shit them.”

Fear quieted the hags. Hadda’s song rose alone and defiant, beating against the walls like a sparrow trapped in the pipe. As the Bull Hand moved toward her, the Crone set down her basket, straightened her back and looked into the blackness at the bottom of the pipe.

“Rath Maer!”
she murmured, and although Crope had no book learning or knowledge of foreign tongues, he felt the words pull on the fluid in his eyes and groin, and he knew she was calling something forth.
“Rath Maer!”

“RATH MAER!”

One by one the pitch lamps blew out. Crope smelled the dark, wet odor of night, caught a glimpse of something rising from the center of the pipe . . . and then Scurvy Pine gave the word.

“To the wall!”

Men moved in the shadows with a great rattling of chains. Quickly, and with perfect violence, Scurvy sent the tip of his pickax smashing into the nearest Bull Hand’s face. The guard jerked fiercely as he dropped to the floor, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching as he worked on a scream that would never be heard. Bitterbean moved quickly to finish the job off, the pale flesh on his arms and many chins quivering as he stamped the life from the Bull Hand’s lungs.

In the lower tier of the pipe all was chaos. The Bull Hands were lashing the hags, sending up sprays of blood and pipe-water to spatter against the wall. Hadda was still standing, but as Crope looked on, a hard leather edge snapped against her temple, pulling off her cap and revealing her scarred and shaven scalp. A second edge found her robe, and another found her legs, and the Bull Hands stripped her bare, and lashed her sagging flesh.