A Sword From Red Ice (52 page)

Smoothing down her hair, Raina headed over to the
small crowd that had gathered around Anwyn Bird and Jebb Onnacre. The
clan matron was handing out the booze: a half-dram of her five-year
malt to anyone who fancied it. She was dressed rather curiously in
many layers—a dress, a bodice, an overtunic and an elbow-length
cape—all sparkly and richly embroidered and bearing no
resemblance to each other. Two peacock feathers were stuck like pins
in her hair. Acknowledging Raina with a flat nod, she said, "I
believe you shut down my kitchen."

Raina's instinct was to apologize but she stopped
herself and there was an awkward silence as the two women faced each
other over the upturned barrel containing the half-drams.

"You look like a queen," Jebb Onnacre
said shyly to Raina, breaking the silence.

"She does," Anwyn agreed, her light blue
eyes still intent upon Raina. "So we must forgive her for acting
like one."

Poor Jebb. His two favorite women in the world
were regarding each other coolly and he didn't know what to do about
it. He made a hmm-ming noise, opened his mouth to speak, thought
better of it, and then reached for a half-dram and downed it.

Raina and Anwyn laughed at exactly the same time.
"Thank you for the bath and the pretty stuff," Raina said
to her.

"Good luck," Anwyn replied.

It would do. Raina left them and mingled with the
growing crowd. People seemed to know not to greet her and offered
instead brief bows of respect. It was getting cold now, the air dry
and crisp. The green lights in the northern sky tantalized: Now you
see us, now you don't.

Suddenly there was a soft popping sound and a ball
of white light shot straight up into the air.

"Blackhail!" screamed Stannig Beade.
"Attend the stone!"

Everyone fell silent, and began moving like a
cinched thread toward the center of the greatcourt. Raina hurried
around them, anxious to take up her position.

Stannig Beade's helpers kept the area twenty feet
around the stone clear of people. They were Scarpes, Raina noticed,
but wisely wore no tokens of their clan. When they spotted her, they
let her pass.

Stannig Beade had made Brog Widdie silver-plate a
second, smaller platform that had been dragged into position before
the Scarpestone. Stannig Beade stood upon this metal dais, flanked by
iron torches that hissed as they burned gas. The clan guide noted
Raina's presence but did not greet her. He glared at the crowd, a big
man once trained to the hammer, with bloody eyes and twitching neck
muscles.

"Blackhail!" he cried out when all were
still. "Tonight we are gathered to present our new guidestone
to the gods. It is not enough that it be delivered into the clanhold.
The gods must be called to judge it."

His voice was grinding and terrible, filled with
accusation as he prowled back and forth between the torches. "Look
to yourselves, Blackhail, look into the center of your hearts and ask
if you have cause for shame. The gods will come this night and they
will know you. They will know this clan and every man, woman and
child within it, and if they judge the sum of Blackhail unworthy they
will reject its stone.

"Do not expect to fool them." He shot a
brief, unreadable glance at Raina. "The gods come from stone and
are stone-hard. They will crush you down if you are false, smash the
foundations of this clan." At the word clan, Stannig Beade's arm
shot backward. Air rushed in toward the Scarpestone and the trench
ringing its platform ignited in a sheet of flames.

Raina's ears roared. Heat beat against her cheeks.
The crowd stepped back, fearful. One clan maid, Lansa Tanner by the
look of her golden hair, fainted and had to be carried away.

The fire burned more fiercely than any fire Raina
had ever seen. It dragged air from her lungs to feed itself and its
flames shivered and leapt upward, alive. Stannig Beade's raised dais
was only a few feet in front of the trench. Raina wondered how he
stood the searing heat. He had become a dark profile against the
light. A bear against the sun.

Screaming, he named the gods. "Ganolith,
Hammada, Ione, Loss, Uthred, Oban, Larannyde, Malweg, Behathmus. Hear
me! See me! Come to this clan."

The words were Raina's cue and she took the simple
torch of green wood from the Scarpeman Wilder Styke, but she was
confused, for she was supposed to approach the Scarpestone and light
the Menhir stack that lay primed and ready by the foot of the stone.
Beade had said nothing about a wall of flames. Unsettled, she took a
step forward. From his position upon the second platform, Stannig
Beade glared down at her.

"Walk forward and light the Menhir Fire so
the gods will know where to enter the stone."

Raina felt the pressure of thousands of gazes upon
her back. Her face and neck were slick with sweat. A spark from the
torch fell upon her hand, sizzling as it scorched a tiny black hole
in her skin. She took another step forward.

Stannig Beade called out to the gods. "Behold
Raina Blackhail, the chosen emissary of this clan. Judge her and
allow her to step through the flames."

Raina could feel the silver thread in the front
panel of her dress growing hot. She was almost abreast with Beade now
and had a choice between walking over the dais he stood upon, or
around it, to get to the Scarpestone.

"The Menhir Fire illuminates the hole I will
drill deep into the rock," he had told her two days back. "If
all goes well I will tap into a vein, and the gods will be able to
make their journey to the heart of the guidestone. When they are
present I will seal up the hole."

She did not know what to do. Instinct warned her
not to take another step, that once she passed Beade's dais the heat
would be too great to bear. Yet her clan was watching, needing her to
step forward. Stannig Beade had manipulated her once again. Had he
actually told everyone that if the gods judged her worthy they would
kill the flames? The guide scowled ahead, giving nothing away. He was
a man who knew how to intimidate a crowd.

And she was his enemy, and he had placed her in a
position where he could not lose . . . and she could not win. Flee
and she would let down her clan on this most sacred of nights. Stay
and she would be burned.

Raina took the step required to raise herself onto
his dais. She turned her head and looked at him, but he would not
acknowledge her.

He was a coward then, in the end.

The silver plating on the dais had been so highly
polished that standing upon it was like standing on a mirror. Raina
glanced down and saw her face staring back. She looked like a puzzled
child.

Taking another step, she moved behind Stannig
Beade. One more would bring her down on the other side of the dais.
She was perhaps two feet off the ground, yet the flames in the trench
towered over her. They burned ruthlessly, lashing and curling like
blazing whips. Their heat dried Raina's eyeballs, and blew back the
hair from her scalp.

Not one sound came from the crowd. She knew what
they would see: the rigid black silhouette of a woman bearing a
torch. What did they know of such a ceremony? Blackhail hadn't had a
new guidestone in seven hundred years. For all anyone knew Stannig
Beade could be making it up as he went along.

Raina began the forward motion that would take her
off the dais. Of all the thoughts that were swirling in her head, one
came to rest.

Do and be damned.

Rotating her hips, she shifted her momentum and
stepped sideways instead of down. Suddenly she was right there,
beside Stannig Beade in the center of the dais. Before he had chance
to react, Raina held her torch aloft and addressed the crowd.

"Blackhail," she cried. "Our old
guide, Inigar Stoop, had hoped this day would never come. Yet he
swore to me that if it did he would walk through the fire with his
chief. The gods must judge the guide as well as the clan. So I call
upon our new guide to accompany me through the flames."

A moment of quiet followed, where the only noise
Raina could hear was the pounding of her heart. Stannig Beade made a
jerking movement, and filled his lungs to speak.

Someone in the crowd murmured something. There was
a gentle push of people forward. And then quite crisply, Anwyn Bird's
rang out from the back.

"Yes, guide as well as chief. Inigar always
did say that."

"Raina and Stannig," came a second
voice, very possibly belonging to Corbie Meese. "Raina and
Stannig. Raina and Stannig."

Others took up the chant and it spread like its
own kind of fire, rolling out across the crowd. Even one of the
Scarpemen near the front began to mouth the words.

"Raina and Stannig. Raina and Stannig."

Stannig Beade's neck muscles were twitching like
scorpions as he turned to look at her.

Raina did him the courtesy of looking back. "Shall
we?"

This was her clan and he had misjudged her
influence here, but after this moment he would never underestimate
her again. She saw this in him and perhaps later it would make her
afraid, but for now she felt triumphant.

She just hoped she wouldn't burn.

Beade did not take her offered hand. Instead he
punched a fist into the air, silencing the crowd. "Blackhail!
You dishonor the gods. This is not a horse race. Yes, I will walk
with the representative of our chief, but beware the ire of the
gods." He seared the crowd with his stare, replacing
anticipation with shame. They looked like clansmen thwarting their
[missing].

"Woman," he commanded Raina, "step
in time with me." She was not a fool and knew not to challenge
him any further and they began a solemn walk toward the fire. Flames
jumped at them.

Once they were down from the platform the heat hit
their faces in waves. Raina kept in perfect time with Beade, matching
his stride length and swing. She held the torch high between them,
following his example of making a show for the crowd.

Dagro's dress would be forever ruined with sweat,
she thought sadly, as perspiration poured from her body into the
fabric. Perhaps it was just as well. It made her act like someone
else when she wore it.

Stannig Beade knew something Raina did not, for
when they drew close enough to the flames to smell their hair and
clothes crisping, he made a small gesture with his finger and stepped
ahead of her.

As he moved forward the flames died and he entered
a world of smoke. Confused, Raina followed him. The stench of burned
soil was sickening, and the ground she stepped on was hot. Fire had
dazzled her eyes and she thought she saw a figure slipping away from
the opposite side of the trench.

"Light the Menhir Fire," Beade ordered,
his voice ugly now that they were out of earshot of the crowd.

Raina was glad to get away from him and crossed
the short distance to the platform. Fire had tarnished the silver,
and the platform's walls were almost black. Above them, the lines
covering the Scarpestone were smoking. Bending at the waist, Raina
pushed the torch toward the small stack of sticks laying on the
platform's edge. With a jolt of surprise she realized the hides did
not reach all the way down to the hole. The foot of the Scarpestone
was visible and she could clearly see the pale circle of new stone
that had been exposed by Stannig Beade's drill. The hole in its
center was the blackest thing Raina had ever seen in her life. It was
the color of all things forsaken.

Stannig Beade is right, she realized with a chill.
This is no game we play. That hole was a passage for the gods, and if
they did not like what they saw tonight they would not take it. Yes,
Stannig Beade had his tricks—someone had flash-doused the
flames for him—but this was no trick. And he and she wanted the
same thing: the gods to return to Blackhail.

Sobered by her thoughts, Raina lit the Menhir Fire
and prayed for the Stone Gods to notice.

Hard Truths at the Dhoonewall

The only remaining hillfort in the Dhoonewall that
remained livable was a kidney-shaped mound of dressed stone that had
a second roof built on top of its original slate roof. The second
roof consisted of massive panels of copper soldered together and bent
in place, that were secured, as far as Vaylo Bludd could see, by
man-size needles that had been driven through the copper and between
the slates and into the original wooden beams underneath. Had to be
about a hundred of those iron rods sticking out of the roof, Vaylo
reckoned, and he wouldn't be surprised that if he actually decided to
take the roof stair all the way up to the top, walked across the
scaly green carpet of verdigris and stood by one of those black
needles he would see it was a spear. Fighting men had erected this
roof, using whatever resources they had at hand; copper stockpiled
from the mines to the south and clumsy spears they did not need.
Vaylo could imagine it. Their roof was leaking and they were wet and
miserable. They'd applied to their chief and been ignored. Attacks
were coming from the north, their equipment was rusting, their
clothes black with mold; a supply wagon had failed to arrive. Pissed
off, they'd forged this roof, using a fortune of Dhoone's precious
copper in its making and sending an angry message to their chief.
Behold us, we are sons of Dhoone. The force with which the spears
have been thrust into the roof, punching great dents in the metal,
told all.

Of course the second roof barely worked better
than the first. The soldiers never did seal up the dents, and rain
found its way through them and ran down onto the first roof and along
well worn paths to the mold-barrel fortress below. Vaylo didn't like
to breathe the air. He frowned at the slimy black film on the walls
and found it surprisingly easy to imagine it invading his lungs. He
had bid Nan do what she could, but she was one woman fighting against
a horde of spores and quick as she flung back shutters to let in the
wind the little black devils were invading her mop bucket,
infiltrating the very agent of their own destruction. Nan laughed
about it, and staunchly refused help. Vaylo had a feeling she liked
being the only woman amongst a hundred and eighty men.