A Sword From Red Ice (68 page)

It was like losing a sense. And a tooth. The hole
was there, new and strange, and she kept poking it in disbelief.

Realizing that she'd been paddling for too long on
one side, Effie switched her oar to the right. It was getting colder
and her breath began to make clouds. She thought she detected the
pitchy green sharpness of burning pine and searched for woodsmoke
above the tree line. She couldn't see any, but Waker Stone's father
wasn't taking any chances and steered the boat closer to shore.

The curved prow of the boat glided over the still
water, and for a while the only sound to be heard was the muted
splash of paddles as they broke the surface. Oddly enough the silence
seemed to waken Chedd and he jerked forward in his seat and had to
scramble to steady himself.

"Looks like we're going ashore," he said
to Effie, glancing around.

"Silence," Waker warned, muscling the
paddle. The walls of the gorge were closing in on them, and Effie
could see rocks beneath the water. Red spruce and birches extended
out over the river, their limbs fingering the surface. Effie could
not see how it would be possible to go ashore. The cliffs were too
high and there was no place to beach the boat. She thought perhaps
that Waker was using the cliffs for cover, that by pulling close to
them he was making the boat less visible from above. It was no use
asking questions, that was for sure. Spiced peas and information were
two separate things.

Using his paddle as a tiller, Waker's father
steered around the rocks with ease. As they rounded the river bend,
Effie saw that the gorge wall was lowering and wedges of forest had
forced their way to the shore. Undercut cliffs had toppled forward
and sheets of sandstone lay half-submerged in the water, bleeding
sand the color of rust. Waker was paddling with long, deep strokes
and the boat moved quickly around the ledges. Both he and his father
appeared to know this stretch of the river well and anticipated
problems before they reached them. Just as they were moving out from
the shore to avoid some willow-choked shallows something dropped into
the river about thirty feet ahead of them. Effie had been minding her
paddle strokes, and didn't catch what it was, but she saw the splash.
A big crater in the water. Waker turned around and nodded at his
father. The Grayman's eyes were bulging with force, but he looked
more displeased than afraid. Effie noticed that just before he dug
his paddle into the water for his next stroke his right hand slipped
away to check on his twin knives.

Once they'd passed the shallows they headed to the
nearest landing. As Waker and his father maneuvered the boat parallel
to one of the collapsed sandstone ledges, Chedd glanced back at
Effie, his eyebrows high. Effie shrugged weakly. It would have been a
pretty good time to have her lore.

Waker tied the mooring rope around a fist of
rootwood that no longer had a tree attached, and then draped the air
bladder over the side of the gunwale to act as a buffer against the
rocks.

"You two," he said, looking from Effie
to Chedd. "Stay here. Keep your mouths shut and don't try
anything." Waker's eyes jiggled like gut fat as he waited for
them to nod. Satisfied, he sent a hand signal to his father, plucked
his daypack from beneath the bow seat, and alighted onto the ledge.

As Effie braced herself against the roll of the
boat she checked upshore. The cliff wall that had been exposed when
the ledge collapsed was deeply, damply red. Trees had not yet found
their way into its crevices, but ropy vines were creeping down from
the woods above. Two ravines split the cliff. The largest was running
with meltwater that frothed over big sandstone boulders. The second
appeared to be a path leading up. Waker headed toward it, jumping
across a break in the ledge along the way. Within seconds he had
passed out of sight.

Chedd, Effie and Waker's father sat in the boat
and waited. Effie put her booted feet against the back of Chedd's
seat to give them a rest from the standing water. Just as Chedd
turned around to complain about them, men's voices sounded overhead.
Someone shouted, "Weapons on the rock." In the silence that
followed, Effie imagined Waker pulling out his twin knives, the frog
and the salamander, and placing them carefully on the appointed
ledge. Her gaze tracked the path Waker had taken into the narrow,
winding ravine.

Suddenly harsh laugher exploded from a point lower
and closer to the shore. Metal was rapped against rock. Something
squealed. A command was issued in a low, guttural voice and the
sound of footsteps tramping brush and crunching stone soon followed.
Behind her, Waker's father drummed his fingers lightly against the
flat of his paddle. As the footsteps grew louder and closer, Effie
realized that Waker was being marched back down the ravine. Someone
was holding a spear or a stick that scraped against the sands stone
with every step. What she saw next was hard to fathom. A
black-and-pink pig came into view. It was haltered like a horse with
a bit between its teeth and someone was leading it on a leash. The
pig's eyes were small and mean and its hairy chewed-up ears flopped
around the sides of them like blinkers. Snuffing wetly, it snouted
through the sedge and berry canes at the bottom of the ravine. The
man holding the leash came into view next. He was nearly as ugly as
his pig. His nose had been broken so many times it looked as if it
had knuckles. Hefty but turning to lard, he was dressed in a stripy
red-and-gold cloak and donkey-hair pants that were too tight. His
weapon was a two-pronged spear that he held upright like a pitchfork.
A slack iron chain, not unlike a hammer chain, connected the spear
head to a leather band at his wrist.

Waker followed next, and two other men brought up
the rear. Both men were armed with evil-looking four-bladed spears.
The smaller man wore a cloak that had been embellished with
iridescent disks that flashed like fishskin. Effie could not tell if
any of them were clan.

"What 'ave we here, my little piggy?"
the man with the broken nose said, spying the boat. "Livestock,
by the looks of it. Good and healthy."

Waker came forward. He was unrestrained and Effie
saw that his knives were riding high in their sheaths. Tar oozed over
their hilts. The strangers must have poured it on the blades to
disable them. "They're mine, Eggtooth. I've paid the toll on
them."

The pig trotted over the sandstone to investigate
the boat. The man named Eggtooth followed. "That was before I
had me a proper look at 'em." His eyes were pale, almost
colorless, and they were now focused on Effie. He licked his lips.
The pig began to squeal. Reaching the boat, it pushed its wet,
pine-needle-encrusted snout against Chedd's arm. Chedd jerked away
and the boat rolled. Waker's father made a quick adjustment.
Steadying.

Eggtooth glanced at him. "Good day to you,"
Effie leant forward, thinking, Here it is: Waker's father's name,
"old man."

Waker's father made no reply. The pig would not go
near him, Effie observed.

"And what 'ave we here?" Eggtooth jabbed
her chin with the butt of his spear, forcing her to raise her head.
"A little scar I see. The stitcher did good work."

Effie resisted the urge to touch her cheek. She
had forgotten the scar existed. No one had mentioned it to her since
the day Laida Moon had winkled out the stitches. Cutty Moss's knife
had cut deep, but Laida had told her she was lucky because the
luntman had picked the one spot on her cheek where there was no
muscle underlying the skin. When Laida had held up the glass and
shown Effie her handiwork, Effie remembered thinking, Is that all?
She had expected something . . . grander.

Unsure what to do she looked at Eggtooth evenly.
His nose was covered in broken veins and there was some kind of
insect bite on the left nostril.

"Cool as milk," he commented, throwing
the remark backward to his men. "Pretty hair. A man could make
good coin just in the scalping."

Effie frowned. Why was he trying to goad her? The
pig, finished with examining Chedd, turned its flat pink face toward
her. She wasn't about to have any of it and clapped her hands right
in front of its snout. With a loud grunt, the pig closed its tiny
black eyes and launched itself at her throat. Eggtooth snapped on the
leash, lassoing the pig in midair. Ungodly squealing followed. Chedd
plugged his fingers in his ears.

Under cover of the noise, Waker's father leaned
forward a fraction in the boat and whispered in Effie's ear, "To
get rid of scum, best play dumb."

Eggtooth twisted the leash so that the metal bit
dug into the corners' of the pig's mouth. The creature's eye bulged
and it began to wheeze pathetically. After a few seconds, Eggtooth
released the slack.

"On your way to the Cursed Clan, eh?" he
said, still addressing Effie. "Know what they do to young uns
there?"

Effie nearly, but did not, say No.

"Feed 'em to the bog," Eggtooth said
with a nasty laugh.

A strangled, airless sound came from Chedd's
throat.

"Tie stones to their chests and sink 'em,"
Eggtooth said, switching fire from Effie to Chedd. "Pull 'em up
a week later and eat what the fish didn't want."

Chedd fainted. One moment he was sitting upright,
if a little forward on his seat, and the next he keeled right over,
felling straight into the prow of the boat. Something cracked. The
boat rocked wildly. Effie dug her heels into the deck to stop herself
from sliding forward.

Eggtooth and his men roared with laughter. The one
with the fish-scale cloak slapped his side. The pig sneered at Effie.
Waker's father stretched his arm to work out a cramp. On the
sandstone ledge fifteen feet away, Waker watched his father's arm.
Effie felt her mouth begin to tingle.

"I told you these two were no good,"
Waker said, speaking over the laughter. "A fattie and a mute.
You've had a gold piece for them—they're not worth any more."

Eggtooth tapped his forked spear against the rock.
He seemed to be thinking. The pig had found a lump of duck crap and
was licking it.

"She's no mute," Eggtooth declared
finally, staring straight at Effie.

A long pause followed, and then Waker Stone said
quietly, "Go ahead, look for yourself."

All the while Eggtooth had been tapping his spear,
the strange tingly numbness had been growing in Effie's mouth. It
felt like she was being pricked with dozens of needles, only there
was no pain, just weird pricking. By the time that Chedd had pulled
himself up from the prow and lumped himself down on the seat, the
numbness had turned into thickness and now she no longer recognized
the landscape of tumorous ridges that had become the insides of her
mouth.

Suspecting a trap, Eggtooth made a signal to his
men. Lowering the points of their spears, they sheared fur from
Waker's otter-skin coat. Eggtooth took a step forward and carefully
brought the twin points of his spear to the roof of Effie's jaw.
"Open up," he told her.

Effie opened her mouth. Something darker and
thicker than air smoked out.

Eggtooth leant toward her. Peered inside. Frowned.
Everyone was quiet, even the pig. Eggtooth's own mouth fell open.
"Sweet gods. She doesn't even have teeth, let alone a tongue."
Shuddering with feeling, he withdrew the spear.

Effie closed her mouth. The thickness was wearing
thin. Behind her, Waker's father's seat creaked.

"Get going, the lot of you!" ordered
Eggtooth with a mighty stamp of his spear. "Sodding freaks."

Waker wasted no time in jumping into the boat and
pushing off. Not bothering to recoil mooring rope, he left it
trailing behind in the water. Instinctively Effie knew that she had
to steer more than paddle, and she plunged the oar deep into the
starboard side, guiding the boat away from shore. Directly ahead of
her, Chedd paddled with real force. Directly behind her, Waker
Stone's father hung on grimly to the gunwales, exhausted.

Chedd and Waker quickly fell into a strong rhythm,
and the three men and the pig were soon left behind on the northern
shore. When the boat finally rounded the riverbend and they passed
beyond sight, Chedd turned to Effie. A square welt on his forehead
marked the place where he'd hit the deck.

"Pirates without boats," he said with
satisfaction and relief.

Effie decided that now wasn't a good time to
remind him what Eggtooth had said about Clan Gray.

Floating east on the Mouseweed, she tried very
hard to feel saved.

A Journey Begins

"Give me one more day," Thomas Argola,
the outlander, had said. "Do not leave in the morning."

They had been standing in his cave, the only one
with a hinged door in the entire city, and Raif kept his hand on the
bolt to keep the door from closing. "No," he had replied.
"I go tomorrow. Tell me what you've learned."

Raif thought about that conversation now as he and
Addie Gunn headed due east along the rim of the Rift. They had been
traveling for the better part of the day and the going was hard and
rocky. Stony bluffs, mounds of boulders and steep and sudden drops
had to be navigated with care. Ground snow was a problem, concealing
cracks and loose stones, but at least it wasn't hard with ice. Weeds
poked through the white. Mounds of black sedge concentrated the
warmth of the sun, turning the surrounding snow into mush. The air
was clear and smelled of stone, but Addie warned that come nightfall
there'd be mist "Air's dry. Land's wet. Fog'll rise with the
dark." There was not much the small, fair-haired cragsman did
not know about the land, and Raif accepted his words without
question. It did not mean they would stop though. When you've given a
dead man your word you only stop to sleep.

Topping a cracked shelf of granite, Raif turned to
see if Addie needed a hand up the slope. The cragsman was wearing his
brown wool cloak and carrying his oak staff, and he waved Raif away
as if he were a bothersome fly. "Been scuffing the crags since
afore you were born, laddie. And most days I was toting sheep. Only
time I'll need a hand from you is to stir the beans while I make the
tea."