A Cavern of Black Ice (111 page)

"Name what else you would have."

"Your title when you're dead and
gone."

If the branch of candles lighting the
Blackvault had been nearer to the two men, the Knife would have seen
Iss' pupils shrink to specks. Always there was someone who wanted his
place. It wasn't enough to be surlord, not when any man with land and
power could arm himself and unman you. Here, in this very chamber,
Connad Hews had been held captive for thirty days of his hundred-day
rule. His brother Rannock had stormed the fortress to free him, but
he'd come seven hours too late. Trant Gryphon had already put a
broadblade through his heart. Hews of the Hundred Days they called
him now. And Penthero Iss could name a dozen other surlords who had
ruled less than a year.

It was a thought that brought him no
peace. Quietly he said, "No surlord can name his own successor;
you know that as well as any man. I had to seize power from Borhis
Horgo. If you want power, you must seize it yourself."

"Don't think I haven't thought
about it, Surlord." Marafice Eye was suddenly close, his dead
socket inches from Iss' face. "I have lost three septs to your
daughter. Three septs. One eye. And the skin off my ankle and foot.
There's witchery here, and there's more to come—I can smell it
like a dog on a bitch. I know you, Penthero Iss, and I know you're
clever enough to take the clanholds with or without me, but I also
know your interest doesn't end with the clans. You have those pale,
drowned-man's hands of yours in meals bloodier than clanmeat. And I
don't want to find myself in a position where me and my men are sent
forth to battle only to be abandoned when a brighter prize catches
your eye."

He was so close to the truth, Iss
wondered if losing an eye hadn't endowed him with second sight.
Clanholds first, Sull second: That had always been the plan. Strike
hard while their attention was diverted. Strike hard, claim land for
Spire Vanis… and a crown for himself. Surlord wasn't enough.
He hadn't come this far, pulled himself up from farmer's son to
ruler, spent ten years as a grangelord's fosterling, put to work as a
retainer rather than the kin that he was, then another twelve years
in the Watch, working his way up, always up, until Borhis Horgo named
him Protector General and made him his right hand, to have it all
taken away from him by some usurper with a blade. He had worked too
hard and planned too long for that.

Keeping his face still, he said, "You
are crucial to me in all things, Knife. As I rise so do you."

"Name me as your successor."

"If I did it would mean nothing. A
surlord must have the support of the Rive Watch
and
the
grangelords. If I named you as my successor, the grangelords would
laugh at both of us. 'Who do Iss and the Knife think they are,' they
would say,'the Spire King and his son?'"

"They say the Lord of Trance Vor
has taken to calling himself the VorKing."

"Yes, and they also say his brain
is addled with
ivysh
and he takes pleasure in little boys."

Marafice Eye sneered. "I want to
be named, Surlord. It's my business if the grangelords laugh or plot
death behind my back. Today they think of me only as your creature,
your
Knife
. Name me as your successor, and before this war
is over I'll make them think again."

Iss stepped back from Marafice Eye. He
reeked of meat and horses, and he suddenly seemed dangerous in the
way that wounded animals were. The journey home had taken eleven
days. Eleven days alone with a blind and stinking eye and the memory
of eight men's deaths. Iss shivered. He did not like this new and
subtle Knife. What he proposed was unheard of—a surlord naming
his
own
successor—but Iss could understand the Knife's
motives and even recognize the sense behind them.

Marafice Eye was nothing to the
grangelords, a cutthroat with a red-tainted sword. He was not born to
land as they were; he was a hog butcher's son who spoke with the
words and accent of Hoargate. While grangelords' sons were learning
swordplay in their wind-sheltered courtyards, Marafice Eye was
learning to cut the hands off anyone who stole sausages or pork belly
from the front of his father's shop. He had joined the Rive Watch
when he was fourteen, after his father began to suspect that not all
the thieves his son maimed had actually thieved. Marafice Eye would
have their hands for just a
look
.

As far as Iss knew, the Knife had spent
his first three years in the Watch being bullied in the usual brutal
way. Perhaps it had done him some good: Iss did not know. What he
did
know was that by the time the Knife turned seventeen he had won
himself the right to wear the red-tainted sword. Marafice Eye, a hog
butcher's son from Hoargate, wearing the red alongside grangelords'
bastards and third sons.

Iss had always assumed that the Knife
had joined the Rive Watch thinking he would become one of the Lower
Watch: those men who were bound without oaths and could not wear the
red and patrolled only those parts of the city where no one but the
poor and starving lived. Now Iss found himself wondering if ambition
hadn't been within the Knife from the start.

As Protector General he had risen as
high as any baseborn man could. Now, by publicly declaring his intent
to become surlord, he sought to take the final step. Oh, he knew the
grangelords would be incensed—they'd shake their well-manicured
fists and swear they'd
never
accept a commoner as a
surlord—but that wasn't really the point. Slowly he was going
to get them accustomed to the idea. In five years' time what had once
seemed so outrageous would have mellowed to plain fact: So
Marafice
Eye wants to become surlord… well, even Iss himself thinks him
fit for it
.

Iss breathed thinly. There was gain
here, but danger also.
Your title when you're dead and gone
,
the Knife had said. Yet would he be content to wait that long? It was
easy to imagine him seizing control of Mask Fortress, sealing the
Cask, and taking his surlord's life. The Rive Watch was his and his
alone; if he commanded them to march through the Want in midwinter,
they would do it. And yet… The Knife was no fool. He needed
legitimacy, and he would not get that by murdering his surlord. He
needed time to remake himself as grangelord and warlord, and leading
Spire Vanis to victory against the clans would be half of it. Iss'
resolve stiffened. Far better to have Marafice Eye close, let him
have a vested interest in this war—he would fight better and
longer for it—and later, when it was over and done…
well, who could say what might become of a general on his long march
home? The Northern Territories were about to become an extremely
dangerous place.

Comforted by that thought, Iss said,
"You do know you will have to acquire yourself a grangedom by
fair means or foul?"

The Knife shrugged. "There's a lot
of ugly grangelords' daughters out there." His mouth was too
narrow for grinning, but he managed a fair semblance of a leer. "Or
mayhap I'll find some old fart willing to foster me, just as you did
when you first came to the Vanis. I heard tell that the land you were
born to was some sodden piece of farmland on the poor side of the
Vor, not some fine castle-held estate."

Iss ignored the gibe. Land was land,
and his father may have been a farmer, but his great-grandfather had
been born Lord of the Sundered Granges. There was a world of
difference between Marafice Eye and himself, and if the Knife didn't
know that, then he was a fool. No commonborn man had ever ruled Spire
Vanis. Never had. Never would.

Stepping toward the candle branch, Iss
turned so the light lined his shoulders and shone through his
fingertips and hair. "Tomorrow I will begin spreading the word
that I see you as my natural successor. My word alone cannot make a
surlord of you, but I will do what I can to change minds. In return
you will form an army for me and lead the Rive Watch and the
grangelords north."

Marafice Eye nodded. " Tis
agreed."

Iss looked at the Knife's ruined face
and trembled at what he had done.

*** The Crouching Maiden crouched in
the shadows at the rear of the house. It was a pleasant building, its
faded yellow stonework glowing warmly in the noonday sun. The
wind-damaged chimney stack leaked smoke near the base, and all the
surrounding roof snow had turned black with soot and ash.

The door and windows were especially
interesting to the maiden, for while first glance showed the usual
oak and basswood frames and rusted iron latches, second and third
glances revealed other details to the eye. The windows were
equipped with two sets of shutters, and although the inner ones had
been painted in the same dark color as pitch-soaked wood and
certainly
looked
like wood from a distance, they had the
smooth texture of cast iron. Similarly, the door itself was a great
hunk of weathered and peeling oak that apparently hung on two
horse-head hinges that were crusted with black rot. Magdalena had
been studying the door for quite a while and had come to admire the
subtle
untruth
of the thing. It would take more than two
rusted pot-iron hinges to support a block of oak a foot thick.

The thickness of the door was not in
question. An hour earlier a young girl with fair hair had stepped
from it, revealing the true width of the wood. The girl, whom
Magdalena thought to be about seven winters old, had moved no farther
than the front step. "It's freezing," she had called to
someone inside, "but the sun's shining as if it were spring."
A woman's voice had replied, telling her to shut and bar the door
before all the heat fell out.

Magdalena pursed lips few living had
ever kissed. Shut
and
bar the door. The Lok farmhouse was
built like a fort. Oh, it didn't look it, and the maiden was full of
admiration for the person who had modified the original structure in
such a way as to fool the casual eye, but the simple fact was that
all the entrances and exits could be sealed. It was
that
fact more than anything said by the roofer Thurlo Pike that made the
maiden certain she had found the right place.

"The Lok family will be living in
seclusion," Iss had said. "Angus Lok trusts no one with
their whereabouts, not even his close-lipped brothers in the Phage."

Magdalena knew several assassins who
refused to take commissions against any man or woman who was believed
to be associated with a Steep House, as the Phage named their secret
lodges. But she had looked deep within herself and found little fear
of sorcery or those who wielded it. She had been born in the
Cloistered Tower, raised by the green-robed sisters there, and she
had known a man once who had sworn she wielded a brand of sorcery all
her own. Magdalena bared dry teeth. She had killed the man, of
course, but his accusations still tugged at her from the grave. She
was the Crouching Maiden; all the power she needed lay within her own
two hands.

Suddenly uncomfortable with her
position in the dogwood that grew beneath the stripped canopy of
oldgrowth at the back of the house, Magdalena stood and stretched her
legs. Shadows followed her like small children, and although she had
little fear of being spotted by anything more troublesome than
rabbits and birds, she still moved no closer to the house.

Gaining access was going to be a
problem. Obviously the women took due care with their own safety, and
at night the door and the windows would be barred. Breaking locks and
hinges was noisy and troublesome and not the maiden's way. Also, if
there were defenses in place on the outside of the house, it was fair
to assume that there would be arms close at hand within. Iss had
offered no insight into the characters of the Lok womenfolk, but
Magdalena suspected that the mother and oldest daughter would likely
know their way around a knife. By all accounts Angus Lok was a
swordsman of high order, and it would take a foolish man not to see
the sense of passing along some small portion of those skills to his
daughters and his wife.

No. Magdalena shook her head. It would
be too dangerous to break into the house and chance being caught in
darkness by people who might be armed. It was a risk the Crouching
Maiden would not take.

Assassination was all about reducing
risk. Those who didn't know about such things assumed all an assassin
did was stalk their mark down a dark alley, slit the mark's throat,
then flee by some secret route. Truth was, Magdalena had killed only
one man in an alleyway, and it had been one of the most dangerous
commissions she had ever taken. She had been young then, her fee a
mere sparrow's weight in gold, and she hadn't realized how difficult
it was to approach an unknown man and simply kill him. This
particular man had lived through four other assassination attempts,
and even though the maiden had approached him quietly and from
behind, he had caught wind of her intent even before moonlight found
her blade. He was large and brutal and had broken two of her fingers
before she finally located his windpipe with her knife. His blood was
all over her arms and face, and his cries had alerted people in
nearby streets. It had taken all her maiden's skills to return to her
safe house undetected.

She had since learned to arrange
situations more carefully, to use lures and props as means to
insinuate herself into others' lives and create little "death
plays" where she was playwright, player, and stagehand in one.
Take Thurlo Pike: The man had been so taken with the thought of
a drug that knocked women senseless, he had walked right into his
grave.

And that was another thing few gave
proper thought to: the arrangement of the bodies later. Not all
assassinations called for a corpse spread-eagled on a bed. Most
called for greater subtlety than that; patrons asked that the means
of death be disguised as natural illness, a rogue attack by thieves,
an accidental fall into cold water, suicide, or murder by a third
party's hand. And quite a number of patrons requested that the corpse
be permanently lost, so that no record of death remained.