A Sword From Red Ice (27 page)

Crope did Quill's bidding, hoping Quill wouldn't
study the room too carefully while his back was turned. The rough
plank walls had sponged up years of damp, and holes of varying sizes
told of longstanding infestations: woodworm, termites, mice. A rug
woven from bulrushes had partially unraveled on the floor, and
overhead in the roof beams fiddlehead spiders had crocheted a killing
field for flies.

Crope tried to keep the room clean, but no matter
how much he swept and scrubbed the shabbiness remained.

"Watch'll be coming door-to-door tonight,"
Quill said, flicking his gaze away from the figure on the bed as
Crope turned to face him. "A carter hauling tallow up Lime Hill
swears he saw a giant as tall as two men heading east towards Rat's
Nest at dawn."

Crope felt his face grow hot. He had been out last
night, walking in the chill air and watching the stars fade as the
sun rose from behind the big mountain. He knew it was a risk, being
out at dawn, but seventeen years interred in the darkness of tin
mines and diamond pipes changed a man, and there was no one alive who
could keep him away from the light.

Quill studied the color in Crope's face before
nodding shrewdly with understanding. Perhaps he'd been locked up too.
"Here's what we know. The watch has had their drawers in a
dither ever since the night the tower fell. They don't look good. The
Splinter comes crashing down, destroys half the fortress, wakes up
every doomed and deluded soul in the city, and covers every rooftop,
walltop and tabletop with a layer of dust as thick as me thumb.
Eighteen days later and they're still pulling bodies from the
wreckage. And to make matters worse they haven't found the Surlord."
Quill paused to give Crope a speculative look. "All things
considered it's a fuckup of historic proportions. Half the city's
scared arseless and the other half's busy as bees trying to fleece
them. We've got grangelords running wild with their hideclads,
Rullion's whitenecks igniting one unholy fire under the faithful, and
Mask Fortress under siege.

"Blunders left and right. Bollickings for
all. The watch needs to be seen doing something. And that something,
my friend, is finding you." Crope looked at his feet "Not
as tall as two men," he said. Except for blinking a few times,
Quill ignored this. "Rumors are running like cheap ale. The
mountain moved, ancient evils awoken, the Surlord's in hiding, the
Surlord's dead. Only one man alive knows the truth of what
happened—and I'm looking straight at him and it ain't a
reassuring sight."

Crope stared at his feet. Chicken-brained fool.
Brought down the whole henhouse now. "Go away," he offered,
"take lord and never come back."

Tutting impatiently, Quill peeled back the curtain
and glanced down at the street. "As I said, hardly reassuring."
He seemed to be speaking to himself. Letting the curtain drop he spun
around to face Crope. "Look. Leave the city and you might as
well light a signal fire and holler at the top of your lungs. Come
get me. Last time I counted, giants hauling cripples on their backs
were few and far between. Dozens saw you that night. Now granted some
may have exaggerated your considerable charms, but there's two things
they all agree on. One, that the man seen escaping from the
collapsing tower was an unnaturally big bastard. And two, he's as
guilty as sin.

"Every watch brother, bounty hunter and
bailiff in the city hold is looking for you. You're as easy to spot
as a pig in a snake basket, and neither you nor his lordship there
should be going anywhere anytime soon."

Once again Quill's gaze rested upon Baralis. The
thief was deeply interested in him, Crope had noticed, but pretended
otherwise. Baralis lay silent and unmoving, his eyes closed, breath
hissing faintly from his lips.

Listening.

Quill continued. "Matters may have died a
death if the carter hadn't sang his song with you as chord and
chorus. Now the watch is at our heels and they're knocking
door-to-door. They're going to be on that stoop this very night and
unless we do something sharpish we're all gonna hang."

Crope knew some kind of response was called for,
but he was having difficulty keeping up. Quill spoke fast and fancy,
and the word bailiff had been spoken and it was getting hard to
think. "No hang."

"Too right no hang." Quill was beginning
to get animated. "I haven't sneaked these streets for twenty
years to get a necking for mischief I didn't make. Abetting a friend
of a friend, I was. The King of Thieves himself, Scurvy Pine. That's
the way things work in the back alleys: you help someone, I help you,
and when time comes when I require a little assistance meself my dues
are paid in full. Course the system starts to break down when one
good deed turns into an ongoing concern. I have to ask myself
'What's in it for me?' and from where I'm standing now—between
an eight-foot stack-o-hay and death on two sticks—it ain't
looking good."

"No good," Crope echoed in deep
agreement.

This response appeared to exasperate Quill, who
began to pace the room. "So all the time you hauled rocks in the
diamond pipe you never stashed a little cream for yourself?"

Morose now, Crope shook his head. "Had
diamond . . . lost it."

"And what about his lordship there. Lord of
what? Lord of where? Has he holdings, land, goods?"

Crope continued shaking his head. Baralis had been
a powerful man once, in the land south of the mountains. Kings had
waited upon his word. But the old kings were dead now and those who
had taken their place had ill-liked Baralis and his methods. All had
been lost. It hardly seemed real. A castle had burned to the ground
and Baralis had burned along with it, and while everyone else was
fleeing the flames, Crope had run toward them. It was the smoke, he
remembered, thick and hot like boiling wool. The first time he
breathed it in, his gums had shrank away from his teeth. Eighteen
years later and they still hadn't sprung back.

Nothing had sprung back. Crope had pulled Baralis
from the flames but even though his body had been saved the losses
were still being counted. Crope believed he would never know all the
ways in which his lord had shrunk. Land and titles could be counted,
a body seared by flames and then broken could be seen and reckoned,
but the other things—the mind, the will, the power of his
lord—were beyond his ability to comprehend. Some of his lord
was still there, lying behind the slow-tracking gaze, but how much
was impossible to know. Even though Crope knew it was a mistake to
think of the bad man, the one with pale eyes who Quill called the
Surlord, he couldn't seem to stop himself. That man had destroyed his
lord. Ridden them down, he had, coolly keeping his distance while his
armsmen had drawn swords. Wittle-wattle. Wittle-wattle. Chicken jowls
for brains. Crope flushed with shame as he remembered his lord's
capture. It was all his fault. After he'd rescued his lord he could
have gone anywhere in the Known Lands. Flee, that was the important
thing. Escape from the walled city and the men who were enemies of
his lord. North, south, east, west: it hardly mattered which way. So
why had he chosen to head north into the mountains? Because he was
stupid, that was why. Any other direction and they would have been
high and dry. Wet and low was what they got though. Eighteen years of
wet and low.

The pale-eyed man's capture of his lord had just
been the beginning. While Baralis was hauled off to the pointy tower,
Crope had been left for dead in a dry gully. Arrows, four of them,
had punctured his giant man's hide. Crope could not say how long they
rendered him unconscious, but what he did know was that his first and
only thought upon waking was, Now I must rescue my lord. The hijack
had been sprung in foothills northwest of Hound's Mire and Crope knew
with certainty that his lord had been taken west. So west he went,
toward the city with the gray limestone walls he stood within this
very night. Within less than a day he'd run afoul of the slavers.
Years later, Crope learned that slaving companies regularly patrolled
the lawless country known as the Mirelands. According to Scurvy Pine,
anyone crossing the mountains on their own or in small, undefended
companies was judged fair game. Hobbled, blindfolded, and harnessed
to the back of a wagon, Crope had been hauled east to Trance Vor. The
Vor was an outlaw city financed with diamonds, tin, mercury and
gold—anything that could be dug from the earth. Scurvy Pine
said that slaving was illegal there, just like in most other cities
in the North, but the Vor lords turned a blind eye to it. Slaves were
needed to break the stone.

Crope had been sold to the tin mines. Eight years
later when the seam had run dry, he'd been traded along with his
chain brothers to the diamond pipe north of Drowned Lake. Rumor had
it that mining diamonds was easier than mining tin, but Crope soon
learned those rumors were false. Eighteen hours a day you broke rock.
An hour to eat and piss, and five to sleep. After nearly a decade of
living underground, working in the open pit of the diamond pipe had
first seemed a blessing. Then autumn's cool sunshine fled and half a
year of winter began. Ice storms, blizzards, northern winds and
freezing fog: rock had to be broken through it all. Crope had watched
men's hands turn bright pink and then white, and known that within a
week they would rot and have to be amputated with the pipe surgeon's
bone saw. Bitterbean called it the miner's farewell, for even one who
went under that green-toothed saw died.

In the eight years he mined the pipe, Crope had
seen all the ways a man could die. He knew he was lucky to be here,
lucky to have a hide so thick it defied freezing, lucky to have a
back so strong that after eighteen hours of breaking rock, it would
straighten like a bivouacked birch. He'd been lucky to have Scurvy
Pine, the King of Thieves, as his protector, and lucky to know that
one day he would escape and find his lord.

That knowledge had sustained him better than warm
blankets and lamb stew. When Scurvy Pine had come up with the escape
plan, Crope had agreed to everything he'd asked. His job had been to
break the leg irons that bound the slaves into a line, "Don't
you go forgetting, giant man. You be ready when I give the word."
When the word came Crope had been ready. He and Scurvy had escaped,
and while the King of Thieves fled north, Crope had headed west.

Come to me, his lord had commanded. Now Crope was
here and his lord was free, and things were still wet and low.
Stupidly, he had imagined that once he and his lord were reunited
their problems would disappear.

Crope looked at his boots—yet another thing
he owed to Quillan Moxley. The thief had deemed his original diamond
boots "lacking in mediocrity" and had purchased a superior,
more forgettable pair.

"Lord has nothing. Crope has nothing,"
Crope said, feeling deeply wretched. "Can break rocks and fix
things." He struggled for more. "Once acted in a mummers'
show as a bear."

Quill appeared genuinely puzzled at this and
paused for a moment to consider it. With a shake of his head he
continued. "His lordship must have friends in high places.
Stashes? Influences? Favors waiting to be cashed? You don't end up
with a surlord as your personal jailer unless you're valuable, or
dangerous. Or both." A thoughtful look charged Quill's features.
"You're going to have to leave this house tonight, my friend. I
am not your protector. I'm a thief, and I don't want to hang."

Suddenly things had become deadly serious. It was
almost dark in the room now. Oil lanterns burning in the street lit
the ceiling with a flickering orange glow. The north face of Mount
Slain was breathing, moving banks of mist across the city. Crope felt
their chill, and his instinct was to light the little brass stove in
the corner. That had just become an impossibility though. You
couldn't fault Quill for looking out for himself. If it wasn't for
his lord, Crope imagined he would have done the same. Still, it was
hard to know what to do. Why was there never enough thinking room in
his head?

Quill let the silence be, his long thief's fingers
twitching.

Suddenly the sound of horse hoofs rang out in the
street below. The Rive Watch. Few in the Rat's Nest owned horses—nags
to pull barrows, donkeys for hauling soft goods and drunks. It had
to be the red cloaks.

Crope's gaze jumped from the blacked-out window to
Quill. A delicate adjustment of neck muscle was all it took for the
thief to send his face into shadow.

Here it was then. Quill had called in his marker,
and Crope had no means to pay. Nodding softly, Crope said, "Go
now. Take lord out back." Who knew where they would go? Not
north, that was the only thing he was sure of. No good had ever come
to anyone from heading north.

Quill bowed his head gravely. "May your
nights always be long and moonless."

Crope tried to respond with matching dignity, but
the panic was building. His lord was too sick to travel. What would
they do? Leave the city? Stay? Quill said everyone in Spire Vanis was
searching for them. How could they even walk to the nearest gate
without being seen? Crope tried, but he imagined the plea "Help
me!" was writ clear upon his face.

If it was the thief didn't acknowledge it. With a
swift movement Quill crossed to the door. The bolts were pulled with
expert skill. Even the one that needed oiling made no sound. Light
from the hall poured into the room. "I'll send the dog up,"
Quill said in parting. "Best be quick."

Just as the thief's shadow slid across the
threshold a word sounded.

"Wait."

It was a command, issued quietly but filled with
force, and it halted the thief in his tracks. Baralis had spoken.

Quill reacted so quickly, spinning around and
stepping back across the threshold, that for a moment Crope wondered
if he hadn't anticipated such a response all along. Pushing the door
closed behind him, the thief fixed his gaze on the bed. "I'm
listening."