Dragon's Winter (20 page)

Grinning at the man’s fear, Gorthas ducked into the spiral maze of tunnels. The wargs trotted at his heels. Wer-light glowed from the icy walls. Doors off the corridor led to sleeping rooms, places for humans to eat, and to the room with the cages. But at the heart of the castle lay a hole, a great open chamber. It was empty, except for a huge chair made of blocks and shards and streamers of ice.

Here the wer-light was stronger. An arching ceiling rose into darkness. The chamber was cold, which troubled Gorthas not at all, but the child on his back began to shiver. Plucking the boy from the pouch, Gorthas wrapped him more securely in a second fold of cloak. He approached the occupied chair, and put a knee on the frozen ground.

“My lord Koriuji,” he said. “I have the child.”

The great white worm that coiled on and around the chair lifted its head. A human face, pale as a leper’s skin, gazed coldly at man and boy. Its black eyes were shot through with blue lights. It hissed, and licked its human lips with a flickering, forked snake’s tongue. “Well done. Did you kill the mother and father?”

“We did, my lord.”

The worm rose higher in the chair. The coils of its body were thick as a grown man’s trunk. “Let me see it.” Gorthas unwrapped his captive. The worm slid from the chair. Hollow-eyed, Shem watched the monster come closer to him. As it loomed nearer, he shrieked, a thin hoarse cry, and struggled in Gorthas’s hard cold hands.

“A restive little wolfling,” said the worm. “We will bring it to heel soon. Send for Takumik.”

Gorthas spoke to one of the wargs in the language it understood. It sped away. The worm crawled silkily back to its throne. The warg returned, a human being at its heels. He entered the chamber, limping heavily on his left leg, and fell full-length to the ground.

“Get up,” the worm said.

Takumik stood. He was from Hornlund. The wargs had killed his wife and his three sons. With the beasts slavering over him, the sinews of his leg in strips, Gorthas had given him a choice: to die hideously beside his family, or to live, and serve Koriuji for a period of five years. He had chosen to live.

“Give him the child.”

Automatically, Takumik put his arms out.

“You will care for this child,” Koriuji said. “Keep it alive and reasonably healthy. If it dies, I will give you to Gorthas. Tell the hunters what food you need for it. Go.”

Takumik bowed and backed from the chamber. Taking the boy to the cavelike, ice-walled room that he shared with two more of Koriuji’s human servants, he built up the small fire, and laid the boy near it. What he had seen and, indeed, done, in the worm’s service had drained him of the softer emotions, but the child’s silent misery woke the little pity that was left to him, and with gentle fingers he washed the boy clean of grime and filth and laid him on a blanket. This was not a child of his people: this one was straight-nosed, and his skin pale, and his eyes the wrong color. He was, Takumik judged, something over a year old, sturdy, well-muscled, and beloved.

“What is thy name?” he asked, in his own language.

The wide light eyes stared at him without understanding. He repeated it in the tongue of the men who lived in the southern villages, in wooden houses. The child stared dumbly. Perhaps it had understood, perhaps not. Takumik wondered what was planned for it, and shut that thought off quickly: it did not matter. He could not allow it to matter. He stirred the stew in a pot near the fire, and spooned some into a bowl, and sat to coax it into the mute child. It took some time. But that he had, and patience, and eventually the boy ate, and lay still by the fire, not weeping, its strange light eyes fixed on nowhere.

Later, the men who shared this sleeping space came in, worn from hunting—game was sparse—and apprehensive, since Gorthas had returned, and his particular inventive cruelty was much feared. Takumik told them that if the child were injured, they would all die. It was not true, but these men served Koriuji willingly, for gold, and he had no trust in them. One made a coarse joke, and they lost interest, and left him and the boy alone.

Takumik did not rest well that night. He dreamed of his children: not of their deaths—that would have been unbearable—but of them alive. Once he rose, and stumbling along the corridor to the pit where the men relieved themselves, he pissed into the fetid hole.

Coming back, he peered at the child, who lay knees to chest, silent and unmoving. He thought its eyes were open. “Go to sleep,” he said gently, in his own tongue.

Toward dawn, the boy stirred. Takumik was asleep, or he would have seen Shem uncurl and sit up. Crying, he had learned, brought no attention, and so he did not cry. The fur he was still wrapped in smelled of himself, and Gorthas, and faintly, still, of his mother. He did not know she was dead; he knew only that he had been hurt, and that he was cold, and in a strange place. He was frightened. The fire had gone out and it was dark. Near him, twitching in the grip of an evil dream, lay the man who had fed him and had spoken kindly to him.

“Go home,” he whispered, to the chill, uncaring darkness. “Shem go home?”

But there was no answer.

12

Inexorable as night, a fast-paced storm blew over the northern mountains.

Snow fell for four days. The fifth day, the storm broke: the sun rose, to sit blazing in a cloudless March sky like a lamp hung on a pole. In Chingura, Castria, and Sleeth, men weary with winter once more cleared the drifts from roads. In Dragon Keep, stable boys released the impatient horses from the stables and set about raking out the stalls. Lorimir went to bed at dawn, having led half the men in the garrison on a three-day march over the pass and back, through the storm. Despite bone-deep exhaustion, he was pleased with their endurance. He said as much to Dragon. They could march all night, sleep where they stood, and kill anything he pointed them at. They were almost ready for a war.

In the workroom of her shop in Lantern Street, in Ujo, Terrill Chernico, called Hawk, sat cross-legged on a cushion, planing a stave.

The room was bright. Even though it was the middle of the morning, candles burned in the wall sconces. Bows of all sizes and weights, some in cases, others not, were horizontally mounted on the east and west walls. Shelves stacked with book rolls and bound books and folios lined the long north wall.

In the front room, Tiko, her apprentice, was singing the latest love song.

“I cannot number all the ways I love you; They are numberless as the fishes in the sea,

“In the sunlight, in the moonlight, in the starlight, I lie contented when you come to me.”

“Tiko,” Hawk called.

“Mistress?” Tiko pushed the curtain aside. “Sing something else. Every fishmonger in Ujo is singing that song.”

He grinned, rubbed his mustache—he had only been growing it a week, and it was still sparse—and vanished, whistling ‘The Riddle Song.’ He had a tuneful whistle. Smiling, Hawk bent over her work.

The stave in her hand was hazelwood. The bow would be a child’s bow, ceremonial rather than useful; a gift, she thought, from the scion of one noble house—the Lemininkai, once her employers, now her patron—to another. It was not the kind of commission she preferred, but she never turned down a commission from the Lemininkai. The little bow would have rosewood insets and a deer-horn plate; in its own way, it would be lovely. She ran a thumb along the smooth amber wood. The grain was clear and straight. If you looked closely, you could see strands of silver threaded through the amber.

Then the candles in the chamber went out, one after another. Hawk froze, senses alert, eyes huge in the precipitate darkness. The curtain had not moved. There had been no breath of air. Tiko’s song faded, as if the darkness were absorbing it. The workroom grew bitterly cold. A pale blue-white light, like moonlight on snow, glimmered over the polished floorboards. Caught within the light stood the figure of a man. His head was bowed, but she did not need to see his face: she knew the lean poised body, the black hair tipped with silver, the strong, skilled, familiar hands... The pale light strengthened, and she saw the appalling wounds, open, bleeding, fatal, that marked his body. He lifted his bowed head. His left eye was gone; his right eye and his mouth were racked with fathomless sorrow.

“Wolf!” she cried; but there was no knowledge or recognition in the ghostly face. “Wolf, wait!” But the apparition faded. Sound returned: Tiko’s whistling, a hawker crying in the street. One by one, the candles relit.

Hawk rose. “Tiko,” she said. Her voice was not quite steady.

“Mistress?” Her apprentice’s head poked through the curtain. “Did you call me?”

“Did you notice anything odd just now?” “Odd?”

“Out of the ordinary. A chill in the air, perhaps.”

“No, mistress. Was there—did something happen?”

“Never mind,” Hawk said. “Thank you. Go back to your work.”

In the Golden Cup Inn in Sogda, two hours north of Mako, Bear sprawled on a mound of tangled blankets in a warm, dry room, snoring softly.

A pine log burned in the hearth. Curled into the crook of his arm, a large naked woman slept, her dark hair fanning gracefully over the pillow. A stack of gold coins lay on the table, payment for five days travel through rain-soaked hills, guiding a nervous man who had not wanted to hire a conspicuous troop of men to guard him, but did not want to walk unescorted on lonely roads. Bear had no idea what the man had carried from Yarrow to Mako, except that it was small. Three men had followed them at one point, tough, hard-faced men, ex-soldiers turned outlaw from the look of them, but one or more of them had recognized the red- bearded giant who strode so lightly beside the merchant’s brown mule.

Fifteen, even ten years ago, he would have turned, swinging his iron-tipped cudgel, and taunted them into battle for the sheer joy of it. But these days he was older, wiser, and usually lazier, content simply to earn the gold which paid for food, drink, sex.

A sharp wind raked its claws across the window shutter. Ariana shivered, touched by chill, or nightmare. Wakeful as a cat, Bear’s eyes opened, glittering amber in the darkness. He turned his head from side to side. The wind huffed again, moaning like a man in pain. Untroubled, Bear drew his companion close, and closed his eyes.

Bear was finishing the last of his breakfast when Ariana came in. She wore red, and the pearl earrings he had brought her from Skyeggo. “There’s a woman here to see you.” She pouted at him. “She says it’s business.”

“Is she alone?”

“As far as I can tell.”

Bear frowned into the remnants of his steak. “Bring her in.”

Ariana glared at him, hands on her waist. “You’ve barely arrived. Is this all I am to have of you—three nights?” She sashayed from the room, swinging her wide hips in a way that stirred his blood. In a very short while she was back. “She says, Do you come out.”

It was Bear’s turn to glare. “Out where? Into the road?”

“Round the back of the house, under the red oak, beside the stable.” She cocked her hip at him. Irritated, but curious, Bear seized his great iron-tipped cudgel and followed her. He strode through the common room, ignoring stares, and marched to the great-branched oak.

A shadow moved, became a plain-faced warrior woman wearing silver-grey, who bore an Isojai hunting bow. She thrust the hood from her face, and he saw the crevices of weariness and grief around her eyes and mouth. “What is it?” he said.

“Wolf is dead.”

His breath stopped.

“I saw him. He was wounded, torn open, broken.” Her hand circled unconsciously across her abdomen. “I suppose it was his ghost. He—it—didn’t see me. I said his name—”

“Who killed him?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. The ghost appeared two days ago.”

“Two
days
? The trail will be ice-cold! What in the gods’ names kept you? In four days you could fly to Gate-of-Winds and back!”

Her voice stayed level. “A snowstorm held me back. And it took me a little time to find you. Nelli at the Street of Painted Fans insisted you were somewhere in Kameni, but then Joab the Purse told me that he’d met you in a bar in Yarrow, and that you said you were coming here.”

“I’ll get my pack.”

Ariana was in the common room. “I have to go,” he said to her. “I’ll come back when I’m finished.” He went up the stairs at a dead run. He left half the gold on the table. When he left the room, Ariana was standing in the hallway, holding a wineskin. He took it, and felt her hands slide across his chest, and tangle in his hair.

As he returned to Hawk’s side, disbelief and sorrow and a scalding anger rose through his body like fever. He stopped, shaking with it. Hawk watched him silently. At last his locked muscles loosened. He shrugged his pack onto his shoulders, and flexed his hands on his stick.

“Let’s go,” he said.

They went west, into the scrublands, away from the river. Below them, smoke from the inn’s chimney streamed like incense into the still blue day. Despite the late snow, the land was thawing from the winter freeze. Mud sucked at their boots, and beneath the hard brown grass, the soft green of the new growth shone like starlight on water. At the top of a small rise, they halted. Bear looked back toward the inn. Ariana stood outside. Her gown gleamed like blood in the bright morning light.