A Cavern of Black Ice (13 page)

Distressed, Ash drew her feet off the
floor and hugged her knees to her chest. No one had mentioned a move
to her. Nothing had been planned; no workmen or carpenters called.
Surely someone should have told her something? She rubbed her bare
shins. The sheets beneath her feet were damp with sweat. Icy.

No. Ash shook her head. She wouldn't
think about the dream. It was nothing. Nothing.

Katia popped the remaining two rose
cakes into her amber pouch. "Will you be wanting anything else,
miss, 'fore I go?"

"No." Something about the
sight of Katia walking toward the door made Ash change her mind. "I
mean yes. One more thing."

"What?" Katia's full lips
were made more so by an exaggerated pout.

"I know you're going to see my
foster father now—" Seeing Katia ready to protest, Ash
held out her hand. "No, don't deny it. I don't blame you. It's
what you have to do to keep out of the kitchen. I'd do the same if I
were you." Katia remained sullen, yet Ash carried on. "I
don't mind you telling him that I don't feel well and don't look
well, and even that the bed is messed. But please don't tell him that
I know he's planning to move me.
Please
."

Katia looked at her mistress. Ash knew
that the servant girl was envious of her and coveted all the clothes
and pretty things in her chamber like silver brushes and
tortoiseshell combs. Yet she also knew that Katia could be kind when
it suited her. She had once walked all the way to Almsgate and back
to purchase a bolt and plate for the door.

Sighing with exaggerated force, Katia
sent her curls dancing. "All right. I'll do my best—but
only for my own sake, mind. If old Vealskin finds I've been blabbing
about things I overheard and wasn't supposed to, he'll have me
downstairs in no time. And it won't be in the kitchens scrubbing
pots."

"Thank you, Katia."

Katia harrumphed as she stepped toward
the door. "I still have to tell him how you are, though. There's
no getting round that. You know how he is."

Ash nodded as she snuffed out the lamp.
She knew exactly how Iss was.

*** The caul flies hummed within their
netting, black translucent wings beating faster than the eye could
see. Four winged, lean bodied, and with the long, double-jointed legs
of flesh settlers, the creatures flew slowly despite their efforts,
swinging clumsily from side to side. These were females, of course.
The shiny green black sacs around their abdomens were bloated with
hundreds of eggs. Penthero Iss, Surlord of Spire Vanis, Lord
Commander of the Rive Watch, Keeper of Mask Fortress, and Master of
the Four Gates, preferred not to hold the netting too close. The caul
flies were past due and were desperate to lay, and their serrated
chitinous mouthparts were quite capable of breaking through gauze.
Especially if the females smelled blood.

Iss watched with fascination as one
female flew to where his pale hand gripped the netting. The skin was
clean and unbroken, not what the creature wanted at all, but Iss had
seen some caul flies capable of causing the wounds they needed. This
one, however, would not get that chance. With his free hand, Iss
pulled a cloth of blue felt from around his waist and laid it over
the top portion of the netting. He would arrive at his destination
within the quarter, and a short period of darkness would not make the
females drowsy. Iss had made a study of their weaknesses. It was the
cold, not the dark, that slowed them.

As he walked through the deserted east
gallery toward the Splinter, Iss counted days. Six. He kept records,
of course, but he trusted the thoroughness of his own mind more than
any scribbles on a page. He didn't want to risk weakening the Bound
One too soon after the previous drawing. Thoroughness in all things,
most especially the use of power.

Six was enough, though. Six was well
and good.

Winter came early to the mountains and
the city of Spire Vanis, and the temperature in the east gallery was
currently just below freezing. Iss fought the desire to shiver. He
had grown up hating the cold. Cold meant too little wood on the fire
and not enough blankets for the bed, and Iss knew all about that. As
a child he had dreamed of glowing hearths and crackling flames and
layer upon layer of goosedown piled high upon his chest. Forty years
later he had all that, yet he could not say it was enough.

He was surlord, not king, and although
he might rule for twenty years or more, a violent death would be his
in the end. It was the way of things in Spire Vanis. Historians might
speak the names of Uron the Pure and Rhees Gryphon and a handful of
other men who had ruled the city and died in their sleep. Yet Iss had
stood in the shadows and watched as five sworn brothers cut Borhis
Horgo to strips. Old he was, dry and shriveled; Iss could hardly
believe how much he bled. Sometimes he saw the blood in his dreams.
Sometimes the blood was his.

So many surlords. Borhis Horgo, Rannock
Hews, Theric Hews, Connad Hews, Lewick Crieff, who was called the
Halfking, Garath Lors, Stornoway the Bold… and so the list
went on, back and back, to

Theron Pengaron, who was slain by his
nephew's hideclads on ground where the Splinter lay today. All had
died a surlord's death: knifed in the back, shot at distance,
poisoned, bludgeoned, betrayed. The only law of succession in Spire
Vanis was the law of superior might. Once a rival smelled weakness,
he drew his conspirators about him and plotted his surlord's death.
Iss knew his likely fate. He knew and refused to accept it.

It wasn't enough to be surlord. He must
make himself something else.

Cold air settled in Iss' lungs as he
neared the Splinter. Limestone as pale and smooth as lake ice stole
the warmth from the soles of his feet. Heavy things swung from his
belt, nestling against the double-woven silk of his robes. The little
stone lamp so ingeniously crafted by the barbarians who lived in the
north along the coast, with its baleen guards and shaved horn
covering, gave off heat and light more safely than any other lamp. It
could be knocked over, and still the flame would stay inside the
central chamber. Even now, bumping lightly against his thigh, it was
a benign and pleasing warmth to enjoy. As for the other two packages
that hung from the belt, Mistress Wence had better hope she'd wrapped
them securely. Pan-heated honey and mashed then strained yellowbeans
could both leak juices that a man wearing silk had no use for.

Iss had found the caul flies liked to
feed after they had laid their eggs. It was a common misconception
that mature females fed off blood. Iss had observed them and knew
they did not. Honey was what they liked best, preferably warm. The
flies had been fortress bred in the cold climes of the Northern
Territories, yet they still retained memories of the Far South where
they belonged.

As for the yellowbeans, they were to
feed the Bound One. Iss had asked Mistress Wence to enrich them with
butter and egg yolks and salt them as mildly as she would food for a
child.

Holding the partially covered netting
out before him, Iss approached the Splinter. As always, the
temperature dropped the nearer one drew to the door. In just the past
few days water weeping from the stonework had quickened to form a
skin of blue ice above the arch. Iss took out the key. Impaled beasts
with many heads and the thick muscular tails of serpents watched the
lock turn from their position at the spire's base. The oil lamp
flickered, making the relief carvings dance upon their poles. Iss
adjusted the lamp, the light dimmed, and the creatures stilled to
stone.

The door opened with a small hiss.
Frost smoke writhed through the opening, like the tissue of a newly
risen ghost. Within the netting, the caul flies drew in their wings
and dropped to the bottom of the makeshift bag.

First frost was always the worst in the
Splinter. The outer stonework ran with moisture year-round, and every
arch, ledge, and cornerstone let in rain. The interior walls bled.
Rivulets ran in thin lines, following the curves of bias-cut stone
and the edges of steps. Drips gained mass on overhangs, pools
collected in ruts and trenches, and entire walls glistened with damp.
First frost turned it all to freezing mist. As the weeks passed and
the days shortened and rime ice formed on the exterior walls, the
water would cool, then freeze. Expanding as it quickened, the ice
split rock as surely as a mason with a mallet. Each mild spell and
subsequent thawing pushed the Splinter one step closer to collapse.
The entire structure was flawed, crumbling, broken. The only thing
that kept it standing was the precision cut and placement of each
stone.

And the foundations, of course, Iss
thought with a quick humorless smile. No building in the Northern
Territories had foundations to compare with the Splinter.

The light from the stone lamp did
little but reflect back in Iss' face as he stepped through the smoke
into the tower's lower rotunda. Cracked tiles rocked beneath his feet
as he moved. Whole sections of the original flooring were missing,
either torn up by greedy workmen or destroyed by frosts and falling
stones. Iss didn't care. The Splinter's staircase spiraled through
the tower's heart, stopping off at thirty-nine successive stories
before reaching its apex in the spire that pierced storms, yet Iss
had little but a passing interest in any of it. Aboveground the
Splinter's stone was as dead and worthless as a foot black with
frostbite. It was belowground, in the Inverted Spire, that the stone
became a vital, living thing.

Iss crossed to the base of the spiral
stair, to the dark shadows and awkwardly shaped space that lay
beneath the first flight of steps. Bending his back as needed, he
followed the crook of the stairs until his body was tucked against
the endwall.

Tensing his jaw and his fists, he spoke
a word. It weakened him more severely than he anticipated, and
drops of urine splashed against his thigh. The pain was sharp but
fleeting, and a powerful contraction of his stomach wall flooded his
mouth with the taste of salt.

Even before he could spit it away, the
stairwell rumbled and began to swing inward like a gate. The grinding
of iron wheels and chains was muffled by walls three feet thick.
Above Iss' head, the great stone staircase shuddered, its blocks
shifting minutely in their beds of rotten mortar. Limestone dust
sifted onto his shoulders as the wall completed its movement,
revealing a cavity not much larger than the size of a crouching man.

This was the part Iss hated. Still
shaken from the drawing, his knee joints as weak as green timber, and
urine still wet upon his thigh, he forced himself through the breach.
No frost smoke rose from the void to greet him. The coldness here had
a different, more permanent quality, and all mist had long since
settled and froze. Deep down at the apex of the Inverted Spire the
air was different, warmer, but ice seams remained year-round at the
rim.

Like the cold, the darkness was also
more concentrated, and Iss was forced to unhook the stone lamp from
his belt and adjust the baleen fibers to let in greater amounts of
air. He didn't care much for darkness, though he was willing to allow
it had its uses. Things kept within it usually broke down given time.

Spitting to clean the last traces of
metal from his mouth, he edged forward in small, toe-size movements
until his feet found the lip of the first stair. Unlike the tower
above, the Inverted Spire did not boast a central staircase; rather
the steps ran along the outer wall, gradually spiraling downward in a
great winding arc. A gaping many-storied trough lay in its center.
Black as night, colder than pack ice, fed by self-generating winds,
and subject to each shift and roll of the mountain it bored down
through, the Inverted Spire was a force unto itself. As deep as the
Splinter was tall, narrowing to a nail-hard point, it pierced the
bedrock of Mount Slain like a stake in its heart.

Its frost-riven walls glittered in the
light of Iss' lamp. The farther the Surlord descended, the clearer
and harder the ice became. Ground to lenses by the weight and
compression of Mount Slain, the ice found colors in the lamplight
that no eye could see. Not for the first time, Iss resisted the urge
to reach out and touch it. Once, nearly eight years ago now, he had
lost the skin on his middle finger that way.

The mountain fought the Inverted Spire,
chewing through whole sections of granite facing like oak roots
through earth. Even breached as they were by the white knuckles and
bones of Mount Slain, the walls remained intact. The facing had been
mined from the Tower-lode at Linn, and there were said to be blood
spells and sorcerers' curses set deep into the stone. Robb Claw,
great-grandson of Glamis Claw and builder of Mask Fortress, had once
claimed that it would take an act of God to break the Spire.

Shivering, Iss drew the netting to his
chest. The cold had made the caul flies torpid, and not one of the
dozen females now moved. A few would die; he was prepared for that.
Once, several years earlier, in the middle of one of the coldest
winters Spire Vanis had ever known, all of the laying females had
died. It had been messy, but he
had
managed to extricate
their eggs. Though regrettably a much smaller portion than normal had
gone on to hatch and survive.

With one hand holding the lamp and the
other clutching the netting, he found the descent slow and difficult.
Iss had long since mastered the art of
not
looking down, yet
the knowledge of the deep chasm below lay like clothing next to his
skin. Each stair was three feet wide—a goodly length—yet
the steps began in pressure-formed granite as slick as glass and
ended in fresh air, and a man couldn't be too careful where he
stepped. Iss kept to dead center and turned his mind to matters he
found pleasing.