A Sword From Red Ice (83 page)

Finally the cragsman turned and looked at him. "A
gold bar. It was my cut for the raid on Black Hole."

Of course. Any meaningful kind of betrayal was
always paid for in gold.

Raif slid the stormglass from the sleeve and
watched as it sucked in the light. The tent actually grew darker.
Holding it out toward Addie, he said, "Take it."

Addie's head was already shaking. "Nay, lad.
What's done is done. It's a pretty bauble. Keep it."

You knew when there was no arguing with Addie
Gunn. Raif closed his fist around the icy piece of glass. A gold bar
was enough for a man to buy himself a piece of land with a building
upon it and a half-dozen sheep. The cragsman had given that up. Raif
swallowed; there was a soreness in his throat. "I will pay you
back, Addie. I swear it."

"I do not accept your oath," he said
softly. "Save your word. Do not waste it on a cragsman like me."

His gray eyes met Raif's, and Raif knew something
had forever changed between him and Addie Gunn.

Watcher of the Dead. He had nearly forgotten all
the things that meant. If the stormglass had been given to Raif
Sevrance, son of Tern, Raif knew he would have given it up three days
ago when Addie brought out his sock. But the stormglass had been
given to Mor Drakka, Watcher of the Dead. And it was not a gift. It
was a marker.

Raif slid the piece of glass back into its sleeve
and dressed himself in new skins. In one of the sacks he found his
daypack, arrows, gear belt, weapon pouch and Traggis Mole's
longknife. In the other he found the simple items Addie had first
traded for: the medicine herbs, food and tea. He could barely look at
them. Locating the scrap of fabric and length of twine that formed
the lid of the leech jar, Raif sealed in the black worms. Leaving the
jar on the floor for Addie to pick up, he headed outside.

Flawless was sitting on an upturned log by the
fire, rubbing some kind of clear fluid into the Sull bow. Raif
immediately saw the bow was brighter, bluer. The silver markings
beneath the surface rippled like liquid mercury. "Nice work,"
Flawless said when he saw Raif. "Shoot arrows long way."

Raif wanted to snatch it away from him. Instead he
said, "The Red Ice. How far?"

The Trenchlander shrugged. "Couple days.
Trade for bow?"

He did take the bow then, yanking it from the old
man's clawlike hands. Inches above Raif's heart, the coven of leeches
stirred.

Flawless whistled as Raif walked away from the
camp.

As he waited for Addie by the first stand of big
trees, he tried to work out what time of day it was. The sun was
hidden from view by banks of slow-moving clouds, but the light still
had some force to it. Not long after noon then. Good. It was above
freezing, and the ground snow was full of holes. The air smelled of
cedar and damp earth. Raif itched to be gone.

The second bear trapper, the one whom Addie had
called Gordo, emerged from the woods not far from where Raif was
pacing. He was walking a thick-legged stallion that was carrying
something dead on its back. When the trapper saw Raif he raised a
hand in greeting, and Raif remembered that the man had been friendly
in his own way, eager to talk to Addie about herbs. Raif looked at
him but did not wave back.

The carcass slung over the horse's rump was a
fine, white-throated doe. Fresh blood oozed from an arrow wound high
on her back, just below her neck. One of her rear legs was crushed
and older, blacker blood stained the dun-colored fur. The tale told
by the two wounds disgusted Raif. The man hadn't even allowed the
trapped animal the dignity of a swift death with a well-placed blade.
He had shot her from a distance with his bow.

Quite suddenly Raif could not bear it and headed
off into the woods. Addie Gunn would have to catch up with him.

Watcher of the Dead was on the move.

And he wanted to kill something before he reached
the Red Ice.

Spire Vanis

Marafice Eye squinted at the horseman riding at
full gallop from his slowly advancing army and thought, If I had any
sense I would kill him. Order a mercenary or one in seven to loose a
nice thick quarrel at the back of his leather-capped head. Whoever
had said "Don't kill the messenger" was a fool of the
highest order. Kill all messengers and stop all messages: that was
wisdom to live by.

"Should I?" Tat Mackelroy asked, tapping
the small and wicked-looking crossbow that he had taken to wearing in
a sling at his waist.

Marafice grunted the word "No." At this
point they were so damn close to the city that if they set out to
kill everyone who intended to dash ahead of them with news and
details of their arrival it would take a considerable toll on the
population. Not to mention be a waste of good crossbolts.

News had to have arrived by now. An army with foot
soldiers, carts and walking wounded moved at a snail's pace. Any
codger with a cane could outrun it. Word had probably arrived days
back, passing from village to village, tavern to tavern, relayed by
teams of professional messengers who'd likely have fresh horses ready
at each post. Information like this could earn good money in the
Spire. Off the top of his head Marafice could think of at least six
people who would pay gold for it. Exact position, number, makeup,
condition: every detail was worth to own [missing] separate purse.

Marafice had ordered the killing of dozens of
suspicious-looking [missing] everyone, looked and the more futile the
whole endeavor became. Even doing it for sport had become boring.
Runners were another thing entirely. Anyone who slunk away from his
army meaning to trade inside information for personal gain was a dead
man. Marafice killed them himself. It was a phenomenon which had
genuinely surprised him. No one from Rive Company had attempted it
yet, but these past few nights they'd had their hands full with
deserting mercenaries. Steffan Grimes, who led the mercenary
contingent, had told Marafice that such derelictions were not
uncommon when an army was this close to home and that a good portion
of these men wanted nothing more than to get back to wives and
children. Marafice had listened politely—he was getting good at
that—and then killed the deserters anyway. In his experience
reasons just clouded things. What you did, not why you did it, was
what counted.

It had caused some dissension, but no one,
including Steffan Grimes, had said anything to his face. Andrew
Perish, the former master-at-arms of the Rive Watch, had backed him
up like a rock. "We've been abandoned on the field, won a
roundhouse then lost it to a fresh army, been stranded on the wrong
side of the Wolf, and sat through one of the worst storms God in his
Garden ever created. If a mercenary can't wait a few more days to get
home then I don't see why we should wait to discover his motives."
Disloyalty of any kind was intolerable to Perish. He was a man of
God, but also a man of fighting men.

Marafice didn't know what he himself was anymore.
Protector General of the Rive Watch? Surlord-in-waiting? Commander of
a ragtag army of mercenaries, old-timers, religious fanatics,
machinists without machines and walking—and lying—wounded?
One thing was certain though. He was a man finished with the
clanholds. It was a dog-eat-dog world full of wild-eyed warriors and
cunning chiefs, and the day he'd crossed the Wolf and left it was the
day he vowed to himself he'd never go back. "Will you call a
halt?" Tat asked, breaking through his thoughts. It was a good
question and one Marafice had minded all day. Did he stop north of
the city and approach Spire Vanis in the morning, refreshed, or march
on and arrive by night? They were approaching the town of Oxbow in
the Vale of Spires and it was growing late. Men who had been on their
feet since dawn were weary. Marafice was weary, but it was not the
kind of weariness that would let him sleep. The nearer they drew to
the city the more tense he became. He did not know what he would meet
at the gate, couldn't even be sure if they would let him in.

The journey south from the Wolf had been hard and
slow. Ille Glaive had to be avoided, which had meant a detour through
the Bitter Hills. Hill country was cold and barren, policed by sharp
winds and thick snowfalls. Food had been hard to come by and they'd
had to mount raids. Sheep were not afield, and farms had to be
struck. It had not been pretty. There might have been rapings;
Marafice did not get involved in what went on. He had three thousand
men, a thousand horses, and two hundred pack mules to feed: pretty
was seldom possible.

The hardest thing to bear had been the weather.
Storms had hit in succession; great whiteouts where they had been
forced to overtake barns and farm buildings and bed down in the
manure and hay. The worst storm had hit after they'd left hill
country and entered the great floodplains of the Black Spill. It had
acted strangely, that storm, everyone had agreed so later; the way
it had seemed to pass overhead and then thought better of it, and
turned right back for a second swipe. Its length and ferocity had
caught them off-guard, and when the whiteout came it was so sudden
and complete that it had left them stranded. These were grasslands
and there were no woods to look to for protection. No farms either,
at least none that could be found in a hurry. The winds were so high
they couldn't erect the tents, and they'd had to dig themselves into
snowbanks, an experience so miserable and back-breaking that men had
died with shovels in their hands.

Perish had made a killing that night. Men scared
that if they fell asleep in the snow they would not wake up, were
ripe for religious conversion. He had them chanting the pieties like
ten-year-old boys. Marafice would have none of it—his balls
might be freezing to hailstones but he wasn't crazy. Yet he could see
that in this instance it had worth. Men were comforted in a place
where there had been no comfort. It was something to be grateful
for, Perish's makeshift church in the snow.

Two days had been lost. The greatest number of
deaths were amongst the horses. Marafice had detected some relation
between the fanciness of a horse—the length and skinniness of
its legs and the shininess of its coat—to its ability to
withstand cold. Fancy died faster. Men and mules fared better, though
pretty much everyone and everything had ended up with chilblains,
frostbite, dead skin, shed hair and snow blindness. Marafice's left
foot, which had been badly frostbitten once before, had been paining
him ever since. He would not put weight on it and spent all his days
in the saddle, atop his decidedly unfancy stallion.

His eye socket had had to be stuffed with balled
horse mane and sword grease. After the first few hours in the
snowbank it had begun to smell. Men would not look at him, he'd
noticed. Marafice One Eye, at the best of times, was rarely an
appealing sight. Strange how you could forget all about how you
looked. Spend months on end imagining that your appearance did not
matter and that you were being judged solely on your actions, only to
be reminded with a shock that it wasn't true. A man with an ugly face
was set apart. A man with only one eye in that ugly face was judged a
monster.

Marafice told himself it was of no consequence,
and mostly it was not, yet there were times, such as in the snowbank,
where he felt filled with layers of hard-to-place resentment. Those
men chanting their crazy pieties with Andrew Perish could all go to
hell.

"We'll call a halt when we reach the rocks,"
Marafice said to Tat Mackelroy, guiding his horse around a pothole
filled with frozen mud. "There's open ground. We'll make camp
there."

Tat nodded slowly, thoughtful. They were riding
eight abreast along a wide, unpaved road that led through closely
spaced goose and pig farms. It was late afternoon, and the air was
cool and clear and reeked of animal foulness. "Some in the
company won't like it."

Marafice grinned unpleasantly. "Anyone with
objections, send 'em to me."

The rocks were the strange circle of free-standing
granite spires that gave both the Vale of Spires and Spire Vanis its
name. Some superstition surrounded their nature, and various
legends, both sacred and profane, claimed to explain their existence.
Marafice didn't give two bird farts about that. The things that
counted to him were the facts that the rocks were set on open ground
well away from the roads, farms, towns and villages that crowded the
region northeast of the city. And that the land they stood upon had
long been claimed by Mask Fortress on behalf of the people of Spire
Vanis. And did not fall within any grange. This was Whitehog
territory they walked through now, land held and protected by House
Hews. The granite spires not only were no-man's-land, but also marked
the southern boundary of the vast Eastern and Long Grass Granges.
Once Marafice and his army were there they'd be off Garric Hews' land
for good. Well, it was Lisereth Hews' land to be exact, but mother
and son were much the same beast. The Lady of the Eastern Granges and
her son the Whitehog were united in a single ambition: to place
Garric Hews as the one hundred and forty-second Surlord of Spire
Vanis.

And that put them in direct opposition to Marafice
Eye.

It was a risk, albeit a small one, to march on the
western border of their lands, using a Hews-patrolled road to head
south into the city. An attack could be mounted, though judging from
the latest intelligence Marafice had received from the darkcloaks
this seemed unlikely.

Apparently the surlordship of Spire Vanis was
still open to contention. Roland Stornoway, his own father-in-law,
held Mask Fortress. This fact so amazed Marafice that when he'd first
heard it six days back he had laughed in Greenslade's face. "Who
have you been talking to? The blind drunk or the insane?"