A Sword From Red Ice (86 page)

"Pull 'em up a week later and eat what the
fish didn't want."

A water rat launching itself into the river nearby
made a soft sloshing noise as it carved a trough in the water.
Overhead the quarter-moon seemed to keep pace with the boat. Directly
ahead of her Chedd Limehouse had faked his way into sleep. It had
started out with a bout of pretend head-nodding and some truly
stupendous wet-sounding snores—he had definitely taken notes
from Eggtooth's pig. The next thing you knew the snoring had gotten
softer, the head had tipped forward and he was really, properly
asleep. That boy had some undeniable talents, Effie reckoned. Until
she'd met him she'd never realized that a space existed between fake
and real, let alone that it could be exploited.

Thinking about Chedd helped Effie feel better. Not
that she was afraid, of course. Just . . . anxious.

Chedd was interesting to Effie. He knew things in
the way she knew things. Different knowledge, but got the same way.
Take that water rat. All she'd need to do was poke Chedd's chubby
shoulder and ask "Girl or boy?" and Chedd would tell her
its sex. Might tell her a few other things too. Like whether or not
the rat was hunting or fleeing or simply out to have a cooling swim.
He was good at finding hibernating turtles and salamanders under
rocks, though for some reason he had less luck with fish. Always he
saw things on the shore before she did; the beaver amidst the sticks,
the fawn in the trees, the heron standing still in the rushes.
"There's a bear cub over there," he would say casually,
flicking his hand toward one of the banks. Effie had given up trying
to prove him wrong, for even when the animal never emerged from
hiding they both knew it was there. "How do you know?"
Effie had asked him more than once.

Chedd had a way of shrugging that made his neck
disappear into his chest. "Dunno," he'd told her just this
morning as they stood ankle-deep in the snowmelt pool searching for
fairy shrimp. "Until I was your age I thought everyone knew when
animals were around."

Your age. She'd feigned some disgust over that
particular comment but in a way Chedd's answer was oddly reassuring.
You knew what you knew. That's how Effie had always felt about her
lore: when it was there, hanging around her neck, she just knew
things. Nothing fancy about it. No hocus-pocus or song-and-dance.
Knowledge was there and if she chose to she could draw it in. It was
like sporting something blurry in the distance: you could stop and
look and concentrate upon the object, or pass it right by.

Effie extended her arm over the gunwale and let
her hand touch the greasy black water. She hoped it wasn't bog.
Eggtooth had been most particular about that: it was bog she and
Chedd would be fed to, not river water.

Annoyed with herself for still shivering, she set
her mind on something else. She tried to sort out who and what she
was without her lore. Effie Sevrance, daughter to Tern and Megg,
sister to Drey and Raif, bearer of the stone lore, Hailsman: those
were her names and titles, Tern and Megg were dead. Drey might be
too. She doubted if she'd see Blackhail in a very long time—Clan
Gray was the direct diagonal opposite of Blackhail, and maybe a
thousand leagues away—and to top it all off a fish had eaten
her lore. Now she was simply Effie, sister to Raif, bearer of no
lore, not even the twine that had held it. Did that mean her
knowledge had gone? She didn't know. Some days it felt as if it had.

And then there were days like today when something
tingled in the center of her breastbone, right in the place where her
lore used to lie. It had happened while she and Chedd were eating the
fairy shrimp. They were tiny things, floating upside-down in the icy
water. Chedd said you ate them whole and raw, so that's what they
did. They'd tasted like fish fins, which, as far as Effie knew, were
the one part of the fish you weren't supposed to eat. Chedd had
disagreed and said quite seriously they tasted like fish eyes. Bony
fish eyes. That had them both laughing. And that was when she'd felt
the queerness in her chest. It was like a thumb jabbing against her
chest. No laughing matter. Not today.

After that she didn't eat any more shrimp and went
to sit alone by the boat. Some of the shrimp shell had stuck in her
throat. Now Eggtooth's words were stuck back there too. Tie stones to
their chests and sink 'em.

The ghost of her lore, that's what she decided to
name the sensation in her chest. The ghost of her lore had spoken and
given her a warning about today.

And tonight. Effie swatted a black fly who fancied
a piece of her wrist. The horn-covered lamp clipped to the bow of the
boat created an eerie circle of light. She wished she could paddle.
To do something would be good, to get tired and a bit sore, and have
something else beside her thoughts to think about—if that made
any sense. Waker and Waker's father were poling though, standing in
the boat and using long sticks to punt through the water. The river
was too shallow for paddling, barely a river at all anymore.

The Mouseweed. Only a few days earlier Effie had
thought it an undeserving sort of name. She and Chedd had spotted
beaver dams and big barnacly trout, and the river was at least thirty
feet across. Now the only things to spot were flies. And its width
had grown decidedly uncertain. Black water wept beyond the banks and
into fields of sedge and rushes. The hills had ended and the land had
sunk. The tallest things around were the alders and silky willows,
trees clinging grimly to last summer's crisped leaves.

The river was too shallow for paddling. And too
full of weeds. The water meandered around great islands of bulrushes
and cattails, and then widened into wet fields. Channels were no
longer obvious and Waker and his father needed to be able to turn the
boat on a point.

Four days back they had passed Clan Otler's
roundhouse in the night. Waker had snuffed the prow lamp and his
father had propelled the boat while he himself did something strange.
Waker had sat forward in the prow seat and made sweeping motions
with the pole. Chedd had whispered that Waker was checking for trip
wires above the water. Effie had frowned at this at first, thinking
it a highly unlikely figment of Chedd's overly dramatic imagination.
Trip wires above the water indeed. What was next, attack fish? This
odd behavior had gone on for nearly an hour—Waker pivoting the
butt of the pole against his chest as he swung the tip in a
half-circle—and during that time Effie couldn't come up with a
single explanation that sounded better. And Waker had never repeated
the action any night since then. It certainly made her think.

Otler's roundhouse had been lit with fiery red
torches that doubled their light by reflecting in the water. It was
strange to see a roundhouse built from wood and raised on stilts. The
Otlerhouse was huge and beautifully made. Entire stripped logs had
been carved into curves to form the roundwall. The cedar gleamed in
the firelight, thickly oiled against mist and river damp. Three
turrets rose from its domed roof. Lamps burned in the top galleries
of each tower and the windows were guarded by meshed wire stretched
over X-shaped frames. Both the towers and the roundhouse were roofed
in white lead; probably to reduce the risk of fire, Effie guessed.
Lead had also been added to the chinking between the logs, endowing
the roundhouse with a series of pale horizontal stripes that
reflected in the dark water as glowing rings.

As far as Effie could tell normal kinds of
trees—oaks and cedars and elms—grew at the rear of the
roundhouse, so solid ground must lie back there. At the front of the
roundhouse a series of landings and jetties projected out across the
water and many small boats were tied up there. Guards were watching
from both the turrets and the highest landing, but they never spotted
Waker's boat. Waker's father was poling through the reeds on the
southern shore and you couldn't even hear his paddle enter the water.

Effie had wondered about the passing. Beforehand
both Waker and his father had been nervous, shifting in their seats,
making adjustments to the load, communicating in the terse hand
signals they seemed to prefer over language. Clouds had snuffed the
moon and there was no mist. Good and bad. Just as they spied the
first lights, Effie felt a little creepy sensation crawl along her
skin. She thought it might be a cloud of midges, only how had the
midges managed to fly into the bodice of her dress? Then she thought
about the day Eggtooth had stopped the boat by chucking a big stone
into the water. She remembered the prickly sensation in her mouth
when Waker's father had removed her tongue and teeth; either winking
them out of existence entirely or concealing them behind shadows so
deep that no normal glance could find them. Whatever had gone on,
Effie had been mightily glad to get them back.

The night they'd floated past Otler she suspected
Waker's father had been up to his tricks. Nothing as drastic as with
her teeth but something—a blurring or shadowing or some subtle
misdirection—had taken place. How else could you explain the
fact Otlermen armed with crossbows and looking out across the water
had not seen a shallow boat containing four people moving along the
opposite shore?

The creepiness Effie had felt subsided quickly
once they'd passed the roundhouse. Waker's father had rested in the
back while Waker returned to poling. The whole episode struck Effie
as odd. Otler and Gray were neighbors, they shared borders and
vulnerability to Trance Vor. You'd think they'd be friendly out of
necessity if nothing else, seeing as they were both stranded in the
far southeastern reaches of the clanholds. And they both held war
oaths to Bludd. So why then couldn't a Grayman paddle past Otler at
midday? Because Clan Gray is different, stupid. It's cursed. Effie
frowned. Needing some distraction she did the crawly hands on the
back of Chedd's neck. Chedd's head jerked back and his hand came up
to slap away the fly. Effie pressed her lips together to stop
laughing and ended up making a snorting noise instead. The beauty of
the crawly hands was that she could do it easily to Chedd but Chedd
wouldn't do it easily back. It was a masterstroke of gaming and it
very nearly made up for the now-legendary disaster that had become
bear: naked!

"Eff," Chedd said, using the kind of
voice she had not expected, quiet and puzzled. "There's
half-things around."

"Ssh," Waker warned from the bow of the
boat.

Effie looked at the back of Chedd's head. Her feet
and legs suddenly felt cold, and the chains around her ankles chinked
as she shivered.

"The way to Gray is lined with prey,"
Waker's father whispered softly in her ear. "Nothing worse than
being cursed."

She hoped Chedd hadn't heard him.

The moon was setting now, slipping behind the low
alders. Something rustled on the near shore, hopefully a muskrat or
river rat—or weird nocturnal duck. Waker's father thrust his
pole deep into the river mud and held it there for a moment, allowing
Waker to swiftly turn the boat. As the butt of the pole came out of
the water Effie saw it was glistening with tar.

Old peat and tar beds lay here, Chedd had told her
earlier back at the camp, that was why the water was so black. You
could dig up the mud, light it, and watch it burn. He was all for
giving it a try, but then they'd found the pool with the fairy shrimp
and got distracted. The water had been clear in the pool, she
remembered. Snowmelt, not river water. It was difficult to imagine
fairy shrimp—or much else for that matter—living within
this murky, acidic water.

She really, really hoped it wasn't bog.

Things had started to change pretty quickly the
day after the encounter with Eggtooth. The river cliffs north of the
Mouseweed had sunk into the river, forming huge mounds of boulders
and gravel. The hills to the south had begun to fail, and soon there
were no uplands at all, just rolling forested plains. After that the
entire landmass had seemed to sink. They'd passed a flooded forest
and a series of big muddy river pools that smelled bad. East of Otler
the water had begun to darken, and it wasn't always easy to tell when
the river ended and the land began. Waker and his father appeared to
know the area well and the campsites they chose were always firm
ground above the water.

People lived here, for sometimes Effie would spot
lights on the shore. Occasionally they passed other
rivercraft—shallow skiffs and one-seat longboats putted by
gaunt-looking men and women wrapped in boiled skins and beaver's fur.
Waker and his father offered no greeting to their fellow boatmen.
Effie guessed they were in the Graylands by then. She and Chedd
didn't talk much about Clan Gray anymore. Eggtooth's words had thrown
a large damp blanket on the subject. She could no longer argue
against Chedd's crazy notions of human sacrifices and bog baiting.
She'd even started thinking that she and Chedd would have been better
off if they'd been pirated by Eggtooth. You could stab a pig.

She wasn't so sure about half-things. Leaning
forward, she touched Chedd lightly on the cheek. "What's wrong?"
she murmured as quietly as she could.

Chedd shook his head. They were both aware that
Waker's father was behind them, watching their every move. It was so
dark now that you could see only the few feet of water beyond the
boat that were illuminated by the bow lamp. Chedd made a small
motion with his right arm, flexing it as if he was warding off a
cramp. Something plonked into the water nearby and as it did so Chedd
murmured over his shoulder to Effie, "It's like ghosts."

For her own sake just as much as Chedd's Effie
Sevrance decided she was going to stay calm. She decided this very
firmly, nodding her head. Whatever Chedd perceived—and she
believed he perceived something—was probably not unknown to
Waker and his father. They knew these waters. This was their
clanhold. And unless it happened to be one of those special nights
that came around once or twice a year when all sorts of spirits and
dead things were permitted to walk the earth for reasons that were
unclear to Effie—then this was a normal occurrence. It didn't
mean it was good—Waker was paddling like a fiddler playing a
particularly fast and difficult tune—but it didn't mean there
was any reason to panic.