A Cavern of Black Ice (115 page)

Beth was first to reach the kitchen.
There was less smoke here than on the stairs and in the hallways, and
the hardwood embers glowing in the hearth provided a second source of
light. As Darra and Little Moo entered the room, a mighty crack shook
the house. Hot air beat against Cassy's back. The stench of burning
wood sharpened, and when she sucked in breath, crispy little cinders
caught in the back of her throat.

"Cassy. Beth. Get the door."
Darra rocked Little Moo on her hip. "Hurry now."

Cassy and Beth ran to the door. By
unspoken agreement, Cassy pulled the top bolts while Beth took care
of those at the bottom. Cassy's hands felt like clumps of clay.
Stupidly she found herself thinking about the blue dress. Father
would never take her dancing in it now.

The heavy door needed a good shove to
start it swinging, and when the final bolt was drawn both sisters put
their shoulders to the wood. It gave a little, then jerked back
suddenly as if something were blocking its way. They tried again, but
the door would open only so far. Cassy glanced at her mother. "It's
jammed."

"There's enough room to squeeze
through, though," cried Beth.

"One by one," Cassy added in
small voice.

Darra Lok looked from the door to the
encroaching tide of smoke at her back. Little Moo began to cry.
"Beth. Squeeze through and see if you can find what's blocking
it."

Beth sucked in her chest much farther
than it needed to be sucked. Cassy could see the outline of her ribs
beneath her nightgown as she forced her way through the foot-wide
opening. Her eyes were sparkling; this was now an adventure to her.
"It's so dark I can't see anything," were the last words
she said.

Darra called to her, but the roar and
crackle of the fire drowned out any reply. They waited, but Beth did
not return. Cassy went to follow her out.

"No," Darra said sharply.
"Here. You take Moo. I'll go after her."

Little Moo did not want to leave her
mother's arms. Her pudgy fingers clutched at the fabric of Darra's
dress, raising little nubs of wool as Cassy pulled her away. It was
very hot now, and a great quantity of thick black smoke was pouring
into the kitchen. Cassy moved so her back was to it, shielding Little
Moo.

Darra took the three steps toward the
door, hooked the lamp on a nail hammered into the frame, then turned
to look at her daughters.

The lines around her mouth were the
deepest Cassy had ever known them to be. Her eyes had stopped being
blue and were as gray as steel. She looked strong and utterly
beautiful to her eldest daughter. "I'll be back in just a
moment," she said.

Cassy almost called her back. She
would remember that afterward, and it would tear her apart. She
almost said,
Mother, please don't
go. But she didn't, and
Darra Lok forced her way through the opening, and Cassy never saw her
again.

There was an intake of breath, sharp,
as if Darra meant to scream, then silence. "Mother!" Cassy
called, rocking Little Moo against her chest. "
Mother
!"

Somewhere inside the house hot air
exploded, punching out shutters and glass. A low ripping noise
sounded, as hot plaster peeled off the corridor walls. Suddenly Cassy
could no longer see the glow of orange light that marked the hearth.
She jigged Little Moo against her chest, saying nonsense things to
her in a voice that was ragged with fear.

Quickly she glanced at the door. The
foot-wide opening was dark with shadows, and strings of smoke poured
into it like water into a ditch.

One by one
. Cassy shivered as
her own words came back to her. Hardly aware of what she was doing or
why, she moved from the door to the nearest window. Both sets of
shutters were barred and bolted, and she had to set Little Moo down
on the floor while she dealt with them.
Why were there so many
bolts
? Frustration made her careless with her fingers, and she
gouged her knuckles on a raised nailhead as she pulled back the first
set of shutters. The pain was surprisingly easy to ignore. The second
set of shutters proved easier, and she had them done in less than an
instant. Cool, clean air wafted against her face. Outside in the
farmyard all was dark and still. Shaking with relief, she bent to
pick up Little Moo.

Only Little Moo wasn't there. Cassy
turned her head. A wave of sickness and fear rose in her throat.
No
!

Little Moo had crawled to the door. Her
fat little fist was in the opening, and she was calling softly,
"
Mama? Mama
?"

Cassy moved faster than she had
ever moved in her life. Her hands reached out for Little Moo's
blue-socked feet, but other hands beyond the door found her first.
Little Moo was
pulled
through the opening.

Cassy clutched… and
clutched… touched the soft wool of Little Moo's socks…
and then nothing but cold air.

Cassy stared at the space her
sister had left behind. Stupidly, ridiculously, she couldn't stop
clutching at thin air. Her heart was dead inside her chest.

Mother gave the baby to me.

She breathed in that thought, took it
deep inside herself, deep into the place where her heart had ceased
to be. And then she stood and stepped away from the door. Someone on
the other side wished her dead. Someone had lit a fire at the front
of the house and then dragged something heavy like a stone or a piece
of timber in front of the back door, so the Lok family would escape
one by one.

Like a ghost Cassy moved through the
smoke. Sweat was pouring down her face, turning the neck of her dress
black and making it steam. The silver chain she wore at her throat
burned like hot wire. Touching the lamp was like touching a hot coal.
The little copper disk that covered the opening to the oil chamber
swung back with a single flick. As she pulled a nearby chair under
the window and stepped onto it, droplets of pine oil sprinkled the
floor. She made no effort to disguise her movements as she hefted her
body onto the windowsill: Let those hands that pulled Little Moo come
for
her
. Let them burn in hell.

She saw the shadow moving toward her as
she pushed her body clear of the frame. Dark and fluid it came,
moving like spilled ink. The hands were gloved in shiny leather, and
they held the plainest sort of knife. The blade was immaculate, but
Cassy wasn't fooled. She had skinned rabbits and spring lambs before
now. She knew how easily blood wiped clean. Time slowed as the blade
slid through air. A second stretched to an impossibly thin line as
Cassy swung the lamp. The knife touched her, and she was glad of it,
glad because the lamp and its free-spilling oil crashed into those
gloved hands.

Fire
whooshed
into existence,
creating a wall of blazing light. Suddenly there was no air to
breathe, only hot, stinking gas. Cassy heard her hair crackle like
dry twigs as smolder fell upon it, yet she hardly cared. The gloved
hands were burning in a cauldron of bloodred flames.

***

Finally they came to a place where the
walls were planed smooth. The corridor of rock widened and
heightened, and they could pick themselves off the ground they had
crawled over and stand erect on two feet. Raif pulled Ash up. The
lynx coat she was wearing had shed fur at the elbows and knees, and
it was matted with a greasy spume of mineral oil and ice. The palm
sides of both her mitts were bald. One was torn, and there was blood
around the frayed edges. There was blood on her cheek, too; sometime
earlier she had stumbled into a spur of rock that had sliced a
thumbnail's worth of skin from her face.

Raif had lost all sense of time's
passage. He no longer knew if it was day or night. How many hours had
passed since they had left the Hollow River was something he would
never know. If someone had told him he had spent thirty hours on his
hands and knees, crawling through openings no bigger than a doghouse
door and along passages so jagged that they had torn his dead man's
cloak to shreds, he would have nodded and taken it as truth. His
hands burned. Once during the journey he had made the mistake of
biting off his gloves and probing the bandaged flesh. It was like
prodding a waterskin; fluid oozed around his fingers, lukewarm and
yellow as beaten eggs. He had pulled the mitts back on and not looked
since. Pain alone was easier to live with.

As he worked the soreness out of his
legs, he looked at the smoothly planed corridor ahead. A vision of
the night sky had been tattooed into the rock. Stars and
constellations glittered overhead, and night herons and great horned
owls soared the cold currents beneath a moon of pure ice. Shadow
creatures with fingers of charred bone and eyes as black as hell rode
wraith horses from a rift cut deep into the stone. Raif switched his
gaze to another section of rock, only to see a second rift with
things that had no place in the world of men spilling out like
maggots from an old kill.

Kill an army for me, Raif Sevrance.

Softly Raif said to Ash, "Dim the
light."

She did, and when he took her hand in
his it was warm with the lantern's heat. He knew she had seen the
same things he had, and his heart ached at her strength. Never once
during the journey had she stopped and rested. Never once had she
spoken about fear. He loved her completely and could no longer
imagine a world where she was not at his side. He had to protect her
for always. She was clan.

In this smooth new corridor there was
enough room for them to walk side by side. Briefly Raif let himself
imagine a future where he and Ash lived on a croft in some distant
corner of the clanholds. Effie would be there too, and Ash would love
her like a sister, and he would teach them both how to fight and
hunt, and together they would plant a good bed of oats and another of
onions and keep six head of sheep for wool and milk. And Drey…
Drey would ride there twice a week and be closer than a brother to
them all.

Raif breathed hard. Bit by bit he
shredded the dream in his mind until there was nothing but torn bits
left. It was a childish fantasy, and he was a fool to imagine it, and
the only thing that mattered was the Cavern of Black Ice.

Noooooooo.

Ash flinched as the scream ripped along
the corridor. The voices had been quiet for some time, and Raif had
hoped against hope they had gone. Yet even as the tail end of the
scream faded into freezing air, a second scream came, and then
another. And then the wailing began.

Please, mistressss, no, mistressss…

So
cold, mistressss, share the
light
…

Want it, give it, reach…

Raif's skin crawled. He could hear the
click of fingernails against stone and smell the stench of burned
things. Everything that was within him told him this was no place for
a clansman to be. He had seen the moon and the night sky on the wall:
This was the domain of the Sull.

And yet. There was a raven too, and it
had been guiding the way, and there had to be something in that.

Setting his mouth in a grim line, he
tightened his hold on Ash's hand and led her through the keening of
insane things to the cavern that awaited her at the end.

There wasn't far to go, not really. The
voices had known she was close. Suddenly there were no more
decorations on the walls, only symbols carved in a foreign hand. An
archway cut from mountain rock marked the end of the journey. It was
another Sull-made thing, dark and shaded with moonlight, with
night-blooming flowers at its base and silver-winged moths suspended
in the stone. A roughly carved figure leaped over the cantle of the
arch, his features turned toward the rock so his face was unknowable,
a sword of shadows in his hand.

As they passed beneath the arch Raif
noticed a mated pair of ravens had been carved within the deepest
recesses of the rock. Their bills were open as if frozen in midcall,
and their clawed feet danced a jig upon the stone. Without thought,
he raised his hand to his neck and pulled out his lore. Touching it,
he entered the Cave of Black Ice.

Clan had no words for this place. The
world of the clanholds was one of daylight and hunting and white ice;
it had boundaries and borders—dozens of ways to separate one
clanhold from another and one clansman's holdings from his
neighbor's. This place was thin around the edges, like a sword turned
side on. Its boundaries bled into another world, and Raif doubted
they were true boundaries at all. It hardly seemed to exist before
his eyes, like something conjured up out of moonlight and rain, yet
even as he thought that, he was aware of the weight and the sheer
mass
of the place.

The ice steamed like a great black
dragon emerging from a frozen lake. It glittered with every color
ever seen at night. Once, many summers ago, Effie had gone trapping
with Raina. She was only a baby at the time, barely able to walk on
her own two feet, yet somehow she had returned home with an egg-size
granite pebble in her fist. She was excited about it in her own quiet
way, and to please her, Inigar Stoop had taken it to his mill-saw and
broken it in two. Raif could remember watching the cooling water
spill over the granite as the saw bit sliced into stone. He
remembered frowning at the waste of a good skimmer. Then it had split
in two, and inside was a heart of pure quartz. Dark and smoky and
flashing like the brightest jewel, encased in a rime of hard rock.
Raif thought about that now as he looked upon the cavern. It was like
standing in the center of such a stone.

He could not begin to guess what liquid
had cooled to form the ice. Slabs of it, some so smooth he could see
his own face reflected there, and some as jagged as spinal cords,
lined every portion of the cave. He walked upon it as he entered,
heard it tick and fracture as his weight came down upon it, felt the
entire structure
shudder
as stresses spread around it like
whispers around a room.