A Cavern of Black Ice (112 page)

Magdalena stripped off her thin leather
gloves and massaged the deepening chill from her hands. As the Lok
girl had said, it was bitterly cold, yet the sun shone with all the
absurdity of a king at a beggar's feast. The maiden was sensitive to
the cold. She worried about her hands yet could not bring herself to
wear thick woolen mitts. Touch was everything to an assassin.

With a small animal sound, Magdalena
turned her attention back to the house. Iss had left all decisions
concerning the Lok women's deaths to her, as was proper in such
cases, and had asked only for "discretion." This suited the
maiden well enough. Whenever she took the trouble of placing herself
in a tightly knit community like that of the Three Villages, she
preferred to leave blameless once the commission was over and done.
Thurlo Pike's death would actually help her in this regard, as it was
quite possible that blame would fall upon him. If indeed there was
blame to portion out.

Magdalena still hadn't made a decision
about that yet. She might make the deaths look like an accident.

Slowly she began to work her way around
the side of the house, moving in a wide-turning circle around farm
buildings, stone pens, rusted plow bits, a covered well, a grove of
wintered-withered apple trees, and a retaining ward built in the
crease where the slope of a neighboring hillside met level ground.

The front entrance was not well used;
the maiden saw that straightaway. Not one pair of footsteps were
stamped upon the path, and a wedge of drifted snow lay undisturbed
against the door. No one ever came or went this way, and Magdalena
suspected that the door was sealed permanently closed. She saw no
evidence to suggest this, but she had seen enough of the farmhouse
defenses for her mind to work in the same way as the person who had
constructed them. A second door was an unnecessary risk; far better
to board it up and perhaps the front windows as well and so leave
only the back of the house vulnerable to invasion.

Magdalena suppressed the cold wave of
curiosity that rose with her. Why Angus Lok chose to keep his family
in protected seclusion was not her affair. He feared
something
,
that she knew, and the fact that she was here now, an assassin
crouching in the shadows at the side his house, was proof that he
feared correctly… but nowhere near deeply enough.

She studied the door, its frame, jamb,
and pitch weatherproof for only a minute longer before heading back
to the woods. It was her last night working at Drover Jack's, and she
saw no reason to be late. She had worked under many taskmasters in
her time, and Gull Moler was kinder than most. The fact that he had
fallen a little in love with her was reason enough to be moving on.

Tomorrow. She would leave the Three
Villages tomorrow, under cover of darkness, once her commission here
was done. She had made her decision about the deaths: By the time she
had finished with the bodies it would look as if a terrible tragedy
had taken place.

Fire was always good for that.

The Hollow River

The wind howled as the Sull warriors
took their axes to the ice. Great bear-shaped Mai Naysayer put the
full force of his body behind each blow, sending a battery of sharp
white splinters into the air. Ark Veinsplitter worked on the dimple
holes he had created, chipping away at weak points, thaw edges, and
cracks. The river ice smelled of belowground places, of pine roots
and iron ore and cooled magma. It rang like a great and ancient bell
as the Naysayer's pick found its heart.

Raif was standing on a raised bank that
was heavily forested with stick-thin black spruce. Above him towered
the massive, glaciated west face of Mount Flood. Boulders as big as
barns rose above the snow cover at the mountain's base, towering over
fields of rubble and dead, frost-riven trees. All surrounding land
sloped down toward the river in a great misshapen bowl. Rock walls
plunged beneath the surface, sheer as cliffs. A frozen waterfall hung
like a monstrous white chandelier above a bend in the river's course,
and countless dry streambeds funneled wind along the ice.

The Hollow River itself ran through a
granite canyon and into the maze of knife-edge ridges that formed the
mountain's skirt. Raif raised his bandaged fingers to his face and
blew on them. From where he stood by the horses, the river looked
like a sea of blue glass.

It had taken them three days of hard
travel to reach here, as the Naysayer had promised it would. The two
Sull warriors chose paths Raif would never have dared to take: across
fields of loose shale, past seepage meadows bogged with melt holes,
and over lakes fast with ice.

Always they trusted their horses. Even
when neither Ark nor the Naysayer was riding, they let the blue and
the gray lead the way. Ash had ridden a Sull horse before, and it was
easy for her to hand her stallion the reins and allow it the freedom
to choose its own path. Raif found himself constantly pulling his
stallion back the first day, the reins held so tightly around his
wrists that for once his fingers went numb from lack of blood, not
cold. The state of his hands did not help, as it was difficult to
fine-guide a horse without fingers on the reins.

The pain was excruciating. Raif had
dreams that his hands had been skinned, and turned and sweated in his
blankets as his dream-self watched Death and her creatures pick the
last scraps of meat from his bones. Raif woke shivering and filled
with fear. Once he had torn off the bandages, just to see for himself
that there was living flesh beneath. Straightaway he wished he
hadn't. There
was
living flesh, pink flesh lying beneath a
black-and-red jelly of blisters and cast skin, but the sight was
almost as bad as the pared fingers in his dreams, and he couldn't get
the Naysayer to rebandage them quickly enough.

Mai Naysayer saw nothing in the
blistered, shedding skin to be alarmed about. In one of the few long
speeches Raif had ever heard him speak in Common, he said, "They
will work again, I promise you that. I've seen worse in my time and
doubtless caused worse, too. This hand here will be capable of
holding a drawn bow, and this finger here able to hold and release a
string at tension. They will not look pretty, and they'll be frost
shy from now on and must be tended like newborns in the cold, but
that is the price you pay for killing wolves."

It did not occur to Raif until much
later that Mai Naysayer had no way of knowing that the bow was Raif's
first-chosen weapon and had simply assumed it was so.

Both warriors carried fine recurve
longbows made of horn and sinew, with lacquered risers and wet-spun
string. The Naysayer hunted on foot as he traveled alongside the
packhorse and managed to flush a few ptarmigan and marten from their
lairs. Whenever he made a kill, he plucked the lacquered arrow shaft
from the carcass, slipped it back into his case, and then drained the
blood into a lacquered bowl and served it, still steaming, to Ash.

Ash remained weak, but she insisted on
walking for increasingly longer periods each day. The Naysayer had
given her a coat that was so long it dragged behind her as she
tramped through the snow. It was a thing of alien beauty,
combining lynx fur and woven fabric in a way that Raif had never seen
before. Ash refused to have it cut to fit her and cinched a leather
belt around her waist to raise the hem by less destructive means. She
looked, Raif had to admit, just as he imagined a Sull princess would
look: tall, pale, and covered from head to toe in the silvery pelts
of predatory beasts.

Ark Veinsplitter had offered gifts to
Raif: mitts made from flying squirrel pelts that had the softest,
richest fur Raif had ever touched, a hood of wolverine fur that shed
even breath ice with just a shrug, and a padded inner coat that was
woven from lamb's wool and stuffed with shredded silk. Raif had
refused them. He had no wish to be further beholden to the Sull.

Ark Veinsplitter had nodded his head at
the refusal and said something that Raif did not understand. "To
Sull, a gift is given in the offering, not the accepting, and I will
hold them for you until such a time comes when you need them, or the
Sender of Storms claims my soul."

Raif had thought a lot about that over
the past three days. At first he had assumed it was just a way for
the Sull to claim a debt even when a proffered gift had been refused,
yet now he thought differently. Ark Veinsplitter had separated the
mitts, hood, and inner coat from his other possessions and made a
parcel of them, which he placed in the bottom of his least-used pack.
And Raif believed with growing certainty that the parcel would be
opened again only on
his
say.

The Sull were a different race. They
thought in different ways. Raif found himself thinking back to what
Angus had said about them, how it had taken Mors Stormyielder
fourteen years to breed a horse to repay a debt. He understood that
now. It was quite possible that Ark Veinsplitter would carry that
package with him, unopened, until the day he died.

"We're through!" The cry came
from Ark Veinsplitter, and it broke through Raif's thoughts like
a
whip cracked against his cheek. Both he and Ash looked down to the
riverbank where the two Sull warriors continued to chip at the ice.
Ark Veinsplitter's bent back was turned toward them. They waited, but
he said no more.

Raif glanced at Ash. "Are you
ready?"

"Yes." Her gray eyes
flickered with snowlight as she spoke. "It's time this was over
and done."

He let her walk ahead of him to the
bank, glad for a few moments to settle his mind in place. He
waited to feel fear,
expected
to feel fear, but there was
nothing but emptiness inside him. Their journey was coming to an end.

Readying himself as he walked, he
pulled on his gloves and packed the spaces between his fingers with
dried moss as the Naysayer had taught him. He had no weapon or
guidestone to weigh his belt, yet he tugged on the buckle to check
its hold as if it were loaded down with gear. The hard edges of his
dead man's cloak curled in the wind as he approached the river's
edge.

The two warriors stepped back, their
faces reddened by exertion, their axes sparkling with ice. No one
spoke. Ash shivered as she looked down upon the hole they had
created. The ice was nearly two feet thick, carpeted by an uneven
layer of dry snow. The hole was roughly circular in shape, its blue
and jagged edges creating a trap for the light. Score lines caused by
ax strokes drew Raif's gaze down through the shadowless rim to the
utter darkness at its center. It was impossible to see the riverbed
or anything else that lay beyond.

"How deep is it?" Ash's voice
was a whisper.

"Let us see." Ark
Veinsplitter unhooked the coil of rope that was attached to his belt
by a white metal dog hook. Swiftly he fed the weighted end of the
rope into the hole and let it run through his half-closed fist until
it halted of its own accord. He pulled up close to fifteen feet of
rope. "It will be deeper near the middle."

Raif looked out across the ice. "I'll
go first."

The two warriors exchanged a glance.
Ark said, "Blood must be spilt before you enter. This is a place
of sacrifice to the Sull." Almost instantly the warrior's
letting knife appeared in his hand, the silver chain that linked the
crosshilt to his belt chiming softly like struck glass. With his free
hand he pulled back his sleeve and bared his fore arm.

Raif's hand shot out to stop him. "No.
If anyone must pay a toll for this journey, it will be me."
Biting the end of his glove, he stripped it off. "Here. Cut the
wrist."

Muscles in Ark Veinsplitter's face
tightened. When he spoke his voice was dangerously low. "Your
blood is not Sull blood. It comes at a cheaper price."

"That may be so, Far Rider, but
Ash and I will be the ones who make this journey, not you." 

"I don't understand," Ash
said. "I thought—"

"Nay, Ash March," the
Naysayer said, his gruff voice almost gentle. "We travel with
you only this far."

"But you will wait for us?"
Ash glanced from Raif to Ark to the Naysayer. The fear in her voice
was barely masked. "You
will
wait for us?"

The Naysayer's ice blue eyes held hers
without blinking. "We cannot stay here, Ash March. We must pay a
toll for the passage we have opened and ride north before moonlight
strikes the ice. We are Far Riders.
Kith Masso
is no place
for us."

Ash looked at him, the plea slowly
slipping from her face. After a long moment she matched his
unblinking gaze. "So be it."

Raif held his face still as he listened
to her speak. The hollow place inside him ached for her, and he
wanted nothing more than to lift her from the ice and crush her
against his chest. Instead he thrust his wrist toward Ark
Veinsplitter. "Cut it."

The Sull warrior's eyes darkened, and
Raif saw himself reflected in the black oil of his irises. Slowly Ark
raised the letting knife to his mouth and breathed upon the
razor-thin edge. His breath condensed upon the metal, then cooled to
form a rime of ice. With a circle of wool dyed midnight blue, he
wiped the edge. That done, he grasped Raif's forearm and jabbed his
fingers hard into the flesh. Raif could feel him searching for, and
finding, veins. With a movement so fast it could not be followed with
the eye, Ark Veinsplitter slashed Raif s wrist.

Raif felt the shock of cold metal, but
no pain. Blood oozed quickly to the surface, rolling in a wide band
along his wrist.

Only when the first red drops landed in
the snow above the river's surface did the Sull warrior release his
grip. "There. Clan blood has been spilt upon Sull ice. Let us
hope for all our sakes that this angers no gods." Ark
Veinsplitter turned and made his way to his horse.