A Cavern of Black Ice (2 page)

Fingers smoothing down the backing of
his horn-and-sinew bow, Raif looked over the windblown flats of the
badlands. Panes of ice already lay thick over melt ponds. In the
flattened colt grass beneath Raif's feet hoarfrost grew as silently
and insidiously as mold on second-day bread. The few trees that
managed to survive in the gravelly flood-plain were wind-crippled
blackstone pines and prostrate hemlock. Directly ahead lay a shallow
draw filled with loose rocks and scrubby bushes that looked as tough
and bony as moose antlers. Raif dipped his gaze a fraction lower to
the brown lichen mat surrounding a pile of wet rocks. Even on a
morning as cold as this, the lick was still running.

As Raif watched, another ice hare
popped up its head. Cheeks puffing, ears trembling, it held its
position, listening for danger. It wanted the salt in the lick. Game
animals came from leagues around to drink at the trickle of salt
water that bled across the rocks in the draw. Tem said the lick
welled up from an underground stream.

Raif raised his bow, slid an arrow from
the quiver at his waist. In one smooth motion he nocked the iron
arrowhead against the plate and drew the bowstring back to his chest.
The hare swiveled its head. Its dark eyes looked straight at Raif.
Too late. Raif already had the creature's heart in his sights.
Kissing the string, Raif let the arrow fly. Fingers of ice mist
parted, a faint hiss sounded, and the arrowhead shot straight into
the hare's rib cage. If the creature made a sound, Raif didn't hear
it. Carried back by the force of the blow, it collapsed into the
lick.

'That's three to you. None to me."
Drey's voice sounded flat, resigned.

Raif pretended to check his bow for
hairpin cracks. "Come on. Let's shoot at targets. No more hares
are going to show now you've sent a live one into the lick."
Drey reached out and touched Raif's bow. "You could have used a
smaller head on that arrow, you know. You're supposed to
kill
the hare, not disembowel it."

Raif looked up. Drey was grinning, just
a bit. Relieved, Raif grinned back at him. Drey was two years older
than he, better at everything an older brother should be better at.
Up until this winter he had been better at shooting, too. A lot
better.

Abruptly Raif tucked his bow into his
belt and ran for the draw. Tem never let them shoot anything purely
for sport, and the hares had to be taken back to camp, skinned, and
roasted. The pelts were Raif's. Another couple more and he'd have
enough for a winter coat for Effie. Not that Effie had much use for a
coat. She was the only eight-year-old in Clan Blackhail who didn't
enjoy running around in the snow. Frowning, Raif twisted the arrows
free from the twig-thin bones of the hare's rib cage, careful not to
break the shafts. Timber straight enough for arrows was rare in the
badlands.

As he sealed the carcass in his game
pouch, Raif checked the position of the sun. Nearly noon now. A storm
heading elsewhere blew eastward in the far north. Dark gray clouds
rolled across the horizon like smoke from a distant fire. Raif
shivered. The Great Want lay to the north. Tem said that if a storm
didn't begin in the Want, then it sure as stone would end there.

'Hey! Rough Jaw! Get your bow over here
and let's shred some wood." Drey sent an expertly pitched stone
skittering off rocks and hummocks, to land with a devilish skip
precisely at Raif's feet. "Or are you scared your lucky streak
just ended?"

Almost against his will, Raif's hand
rose to his chin. His skin felt as bristly as a frozen pinecone. He
was Rough Jaw all right. No argument there. "Paint the target,
Sevrance Cur. Then I'll let you take a hand's worth of practice shots
while I restring my bow for wood."

Even a hundred paces in the distance,
Raif saw Drey's jaw drop.
Restring my bow for wood
was
exactly the sort of high-blown thing a master bowman would say. Raif
could hardly keep from laughing out loud. Ignoring the insult and the
boasting, Drey snorted loudly and began plucking fistfuls of grass
from the tundra. By the time Raif caught up with him, Drey had
smeared the grass over the trunk of a frost-killed pine, forming a
roughly circular target, wet with snowmelt and grass sap.

Drey shot first. Stepping back one
hundred and fifty paces, he held his bow at arm's length. Drey's bow
was a recurve made of winter-cut yew, dried over two full years, and
hand-tillered to reduce shock. Raif envied him for it. His own bow
was a clan hand-down, used by anyone who had the string to brace it.

Drey took his time sighting his bow. He
had a sure, unshakable grip and the strength to hold the string for
as long as his ungloved fingers could bear. Just when Raif was set to
call "Shot due," his brother released the string. The arrow
landed with a dull
thunk
, dead center of the smeared-on
target. Turning, Drey inclined his head at his younger brother. He
did not smile.

Raif's bow was already in hand, his
arrow already chosen. With Drey's arrow shaft still quivering in the
target, Raif sighted his bow. The pine was long dead. Cold. When Raif
tried to
call
it to him as he had with the ice hare, it
wouldn't come. The wood stood its distance. Raif felt nothing: no
quickening of his pulse, no dull pain behind his eyes, no metal tang
in his mouth. Nothing. The target was just a target. Unsettled, Raif
centered his bow and searched for the still line that would lead his
arrow home. Seeing nothing but a faraway tree, Raif released his
string. Straightaway he knew the shot was bad. He'd been gripping the
handle too tightly, and his fingertips had grazed the string on
release. The bow shot back with a
thwack
, and Raifs shoulder
took a bad recoil. The arrow landed a good two hands lower than the
target. "Shoot again." Drey's voice was cold.

Raif massaged his shoulder, then
selected a second arrow. For luck, he brushed the fletchings against
the raven lore he wore on a cord around his neck. The second shot was
better, but it still hit a thumb's length short of dead center. Raif
turned to look at his brother. It was his shot.

Drey made a small motion with his bow.
"Again." Raif shook his head. "No. It's your turn."

Drey shook his own head right back.
"You sent those two wide on purpose. Now shoot."

'No, I didn't. It was a true shot. I—

• "No one heart-kills three
hares on the run, then misses a target as big as a man's chest. No
one." Drey pushed back his fox hood. His eyes were dark. He spat
out the wad of black curd he'd been chewing. "I don't need mercy
shots. Either shoot with me fair, or not at all."

Looking at his brother, seeing his big
hands pressing hard into the wood of his bow and the whiteness of his
thumbs as he worked on an imagined imperfection, Raif knew words
would get him nowhere. Drey Sevrance was eighteen years old, a
yearman in the clan. This past summer he'd taken to braiding his hair
with black leather strips and wearing a silver earring in his ear.
Last night around the firepit, when Dagro Blackhail had burned the
scum off an old malt and dropped his earring into the clear liquor
remaining, Drey had done the same. All the sworn clansmen had. Metal
next to the skin attracted frostbite. And everyone in the clan had
seen the black nubs of unidentifiable flesh that the 'bite left
behind. You could find many willing to tell the story of how Jon
Marrow's member had frozen solid when he was jumped by Dhoonesmen
while he was relieving himself in the brack. By the time he had seen
the Dhoonesmen off and pulled himself up from the nail-hard tundra,
his manhood was frozen like a cache of winter meat. By all accounts
he hadn't felt a thing until he was brought into the warmth of the
roundhouse and the stretched and shiny flesh began to thaw. His
screams had kept the clan awake all night.

I Raif ran his hand along his
bowstring, warming the wax. If Drey needed to see him take a third
shot to prove he wasn't shamming, then take another shot he would.
He'd lost the desire to fight.

Again Raif tried to call the dead tree
to him, searching for the still line that would guide his arrow to
the heart. Although the blackstone pine had perished ten hunting
seasons earlier, it had hardly withered at all. Only the needles were
missing. The pitch in the trunk preserved the crown, and the cold
dryness of the badlands hindered the growth of fungus beneath the
bark. Tem said that in the Great Want trees took hundreds, sometimes
thousands, of years to decay.

Seconds passed as Raif concentrated on
the target. The longer he held his sights, the deader the tree
seemed. Something was missing. Ice hares were real living things.
Raif felt their warmth in the space between his eyes. He imagined the
lode of hot pulsing blood in'their hearts and saw the still line that
linked those hearts to his arrowhead as clearly as a dog sees his
leash. Slowly Raif was coming to realize that still line meant death.

Frustration finally got the better of
him, and he stopped searching for the inner heart of the target and
centered his sights on the
visual
heart instead. With the
fletchings of Drey's arrow in his eyeline, Raif released the shot.

The moment his thumb lifted from the
string, a raven
kaawed
. High and shrill, the carrion
feeder's cry seemed to split the very substance of time. Raif felt a
finger of ice tap his spine. His vision blurred. Saliva jetted into
his mouth, thick and hot and tasting of metal. Stumbling back, he
lost his grip on the bow and it fell to the ground point first. A
crack sounded as it landed. The arrow hit the tree with a dull thud,
placing a knuckle short of Drey's own shot. Raif didn't care. Black
points raced across his vision, scorching like soot belched from a
fire.

'Raif! Raif!"

Raif felt Drey's huge, muscular arms
clamp around his shoulders, smelled his brother's scent of
neat's-foot oil, tanned leather, horses, and sweat. Glancing up, Raif
saw Drey's brown eyes staring into his. He looked worried. His prized
yewbow lay flat on the ground.

'Here, sit." Not waiting for any
compliance on Raifs part, Drey forced his younger brother onto the
tundra floor. The frozen earth bit into Raifs buckskin pants. Turning
away from his brother, Raif cleared his mouth of the metal-tasting
saliva. His eyes stung. A sickening pain in his forehead made him
retch. He clenched his jaw until bone clicked.

Seconds passed. Drey said nothing, just
held his brother as tightly as he could. Part of Raif wanted to
smile; the last time Drey had crushed him like this was after he fell
twenty feet from a foxtail pine three springs back. The fall only
broke an ankle. Drey's subsequent bear hug had succeeded in breaking
two ribs.

Strangely, the memory had a calming
effect on Raif, and the pain slowly subsided. Raif's vision blurred
sharply and then reset itself. A feeling of badness grew in him.
Swiveling around in his brother's grip, Raif looked in the direction
of the camp. The stench of metal washed over him, as thick as grease
smoke from the rendering pits.

Drey followed his gaze. "What's
the matter?" His voice was tight, strained.

'Don't you feel it?"

Drey shook his head.

The camp was five leagues to the south,
hidden in the shelter of the flood basin. All Raif could see was the
rapidly darkening sky and the low ridges and rocky flats of the
badlands. Yet he felt something. Something unspeakable, as when
nightmares jolted him awake in pitch darkness or when he thought back
to the day Tem had shut him in the guidehouse with his mother's
corpse. He had been eight at the time, old enough to pay due respect
to the dead. The guidehouse was dark and filled with smoke. The
hollowed-out basswood where his mother lay smelled of wet earth and
rotten things. Sulfur had been rubbed into the carved inner trunk to
keep insects and carrion feeders away from the body when it was laid
upon the ground.

Raif smelled badness now. He smelled
stinking metal and sulfur and death. Fighting against Drey's grip, he
cried, "We have to go back."

Drey released his grip on Raif and
pulled himself to his feet. He plucked his dogskin gloves from his
belt and pulled them on with two violent movements. "Why?"

Raif shook his head. The pain and
nausea had gone, but something else had come in its place. A tight
shivering fear. "The camp."

Drey nodded. He took a deep breath and
looked set to speak, then abruptly stopped himself. Offering Raif his
hand, he heaved his brother off the ground with a single tug. By
the time Raif had brushed the frost from his buckskins, Drey had
collected both bows and was pulling the arrow shafts from the dead
tree. As he turned away from the blackstone pine, Raif noticed the
Retchings in Drey's grip were shaking. This one small sign of his
brother's fear worried Raif more than anything else. Drey was his
older brother by two years. Drey was afraid of nothing.

They had left the camp before dawn,
before even the embers on the firepit had burned cold. No one except
Tern knew they had gone. It was their last chance to shoot game
before they broke camp and returned to the roundhouse for winter. The
previous night Tern had warned them about going off on their own in
the badlands, though he knew well enough that nothing he said would
stop them.

'Sons!" he had said, shaking his
large, grizzled head. "I might as well spend my days picking
ticks from the dogs as tell you two what you should and shouldn't do.
At least come sundown I'd have a deloused pup to show for my
trouble." Tern would glower as he spoke, and the skin above his
eyebrows would bunch into knots, yet his eyes always gave him away.

Just this morning as Raif pulled back
the hide fastening on the tent he shared with his father and brother,
he noticed a small bundle set upon the warming stone. It was food.
Hunters' food. Tern had packed two whole smoke-cured ptarmigan, a
brace of hard-boiled eggs, and enough strips of hung mutton to mend
an elk-size hole in a tent. All this for his sons to eat on a hunting
trip he had expressly forbidden them to take.