A Cavern of Black Ice (39 page)

Raif closed his fist around his lore.
Angus was right: Mace Blackhail would see him staved and skin-hung.
The truth of what happened, the hunt and slaughter of the Bludd women
and children, would be forgotten. It had to be. Raif knew he would
never mention it in his own defense. To do so would dishonor Drey,
Corbie Meese, Ballic the Red, and all the rest.

He would not bring such shame upon his
clan.

Better to let Mace Blackhail smooth
over the incident; let him spin some wolf tale where the Bludd women
were armed and trying to escape, let everyone who took part in the
slaughter return home believing it, and let the truth lie dead on the
Bluddroad.

Raif felt a finger of ice tap his
cheek.
Watcher of the Dead
. For the first time in his life,
he understood what it meant to be raven born. The raven circled
overhead, watched and waited, and then picked at the lifeless
remains. Inigar Stoop had the truth of it in the guidehouse: He was
not good for the clan.

The fifth Blackhail guidestone, which
had been quarried from the stonefields south of Trance Vor and had
stood within the roundhouse for three hundred years, had split
because of his actions. The very stone itself had told him to go.
Raif could not recall all the images the guidestone had shown him,
but one thing was certain: None of the places was home. The Blackhail
clanhold harbored no bloodred lakes or forests of silver blue trees.
The guidestone had told him to go and shown him the way.

Raif shivered, suddenly colder than the
day itself. He looked up and met eyes with Angus Lok. Angus' large
hearty face and bright coppery eyes showed no signs of the temper he
had displayed minutes earlier. He looked worried now and kept
glancing east, perhaps searching for signs of the ambush party or to
track the progress of the storm.

It had been five years since he had
come here last. Effie had been little more than a baby at the time.
Raif tried to recall all he knew about his uncle. He had a wife and
children, yet Raif found he had no memory of where they lived or what
they were called. He didn't even know how Angus made his living. Raif
knew Meg had loved him dearly, and when she had been alive Angus had
visited the roundhouse twice a year. He always brought gifts, good
ones, such as practice swords made from petrified wood, chunks of
green seaglass, thumb rings carved from walrus ivory, bowstrings
woven from human hair, and little fur pouches made from whole
collared lemmings, just the right size for holding flints.

Raif smiled as he remembered how he and
Drey had fought over the gifts. One of them would always end up
bleeding, Tern would clout both of them, and then Angus would
miraculously produce a second identical object from his pack. After
that Meg would scold everyone—Angus and Tern included—and
shoo them all away until they had found some good sense.

Slowly Raif's smile faded. He glanced
back at the roundhouse. Clan was everything: home, memories, kin. To
leave would mean never coming back. A man could not break an oath and
desert his clan and ever expect to return home. A muscle pulled high
in Raif's chest. He loved his clan.

"So. What do you say, lad? Will
you come with me to Spire Vanis? I'm not as young as I once was and
could do with a young buck to watch my back."

Yes, Raif Sevrance. Perhaps you had
better step back, for all our sakes.

Raif closed his eyes and saw the
guidestone's leaking wound. Opened his eyes and saw Drey as he last
glimpsed him: a hammer in his hand, saliva rolling down his chin,
mouth filled with words Mace Blackhail had given him. No. Raif
stopped the memory before it burned itself more deeply into his soul.
Instead he forced himself to remember Drey on the court the morning
they had left for the ambush. Out of twenty-nine men, he had been the
only one willing to come forward and second his oath.
If I had
such a brother
… I
would not shame him with my words
or my deeds
.

Raif pulled himself up to his full
height, hand coming to rest on the hilt of his halfsword. Inigar
Stoop was right. Stay, and no matter what happened he would only
bring shame to Drey.

The day grew darker and the badlands
storm rolled south as Raif spoke his reply to Angus Lok.

And Now We Must Bring Them War

Vaylo Bludd kept his stallion on a
tight rein in the snow. The old horse's eyesight was failing, and
despite its advancing years it was still as mean as a pike. Any man
or horse who drew too close could still find themselves the recipient
of a swift kick to the shins or balls courtesy of the stallion who
answered to the name of Dog Horse. Vaylo Bludd had a soft spot in his
heart for the old nag. Although it had long since willfully
disregarded all its obedience training, it still remembered two basic
things: Dogs and small children were
not
to be kicked.

Smiling, Vaylo revealed his black and
aching teeth. He'd had a terrible time training the stallion. It was
a bad horse, everyone who saw it said so, yet here they were eleven
years later, the Dog Lord and his bad horse, trotting through
territory gained, as comfortable with each other as a man and mount
could be.

"Light the torches, man! Light
them!"

Riding at the head of the party of
twelve, Vaylo heard his sixth son shout for light. Hanro had done
little but shout orders all day. Vaylo wasn't quite sure whom he was
trying to impress but swore to himself that next time his sixth son
called for torches, scout reports, or wet halts he would make a point
of riding Dog Horse close enough to land a swift kick to his vitals.
Just because a man shouted orders, it didn't mean he was leader of
the party. Hanro needed to learn that. All his sons did.

Not liking to dwell on the weaknesses
of his seven sons, Vaylo turned his attention to his surroundings.
Late afternoon light was fading rapidly, turning the snow underfoot
blue and translucent like ice. Ahead lay the Copper Hills, once key
to the Dhoone's greatness and military might. Copper mined there had
made Clan Dhoone rich, allowing them to build the largest roundhouse
in the clanholds, dam rivers, divert streams, and cart a mountain's
worth of topsoil to the northern fellfields, converting barren land
left by the retreating Hell's Tongue glacier into prime livestock
graze
.

This was the first time Vaylo Bludd had
been out riding in the Dhoonehold since he had taken it, yet he had
little mind for the fine grasses, the well-stocked trout lakes now
sealed for the winter beneath a crust of freshwater ice, or the herds
of elk traveling southeast through the blackstone forests, fat and
glossy from two seasons of good grazing on the badlands to the north.
All he had eyes for was the Bluddroad.

His grandchildren were four days late.
The party had been set to leave the Bluddhouse thirteen days back.
They should have arrived at Dhoone by now. Drybone thought it likely
that the party had met with bad weather in the hills and had set the
great war cart down on its trusses and made camp until the worst of
the storm had passed. It sounded likely, and Drybone was a cautious
man—for a Trench-lander—yet Vaylo couldn't shake off a
feeling of unease. His dogs were fussy and quick to bite, and the
scent of Sarga Veys hung around the Dhooneseat like peat smoke.

In a way it had been a relief to leave
the roundhouse. Clan Dhoone was not home. Perhaps in time that would
change, when his sons' wives and their children arrived and claimed
the hold as their own, but for now it was a place of strange echoes
and foreign shadows and large empty rooms that no amount of birch
fires could warm or light. The place made his teeth ache. To add to
his troubles, four of his seven sons were living there with him,
fighting like foxes down a hole, scheming, bickering over land and
borders, and getting drunk as fools each night. And each and every
one of them thought he could take the Dog Lord's place!

Vaylo Bludd spat out a wad of black
curd. The dogs trotting at the stallion's hocks growled and snapped,
shaking their heads and worrying against their leather collars and
hames. They hated being spat at.

"Use your noses, then," he
barked at them. "You weren't brought here to plow snow. Search.
Find." Just to spite them, he made the stallion rear and kick
out its hooves. Damn dogs! They'd been traveling since before dawn,
and the only scents they'd caught were a lone broadback ewe, which
they'd sent cowering up a slate crag, and a raven-killed eider whose
flesh was one-day froze. Still, even though Vaylo was inclined to be
churlish with his dogs, he was secretly quite relieved. No scents
meant no people, and no people meant no foreigners on the road.

Indeed, the snow underfoot was as white
and level as the head on a good stout. They had seen no sign of
riders all day, and now that the light was failing they wouldn't be
able to spot either tracks or camp smoke. Which was why the dogs
needed to earn their keep.

The dogs, instantly recognizing the
change in their master's temperament, ran ahead of the party,
bounding or pushing through the snow, depending on the length of
their legs. Vaylo sat back in the saddle, his ancient leathers
creaking along with his bones. Stone Gods! But it was cold! Made him
want to piss by the minute. He remembered once when he was young,
riding from the Trenchland border to the Bluddhouse in a single day,
not stopping once to empty his bladder or ease the chaff around his
thighs. Damn fool thing to do! Probably damaged something internal
along the way.

"Vaylo. We can't ride for much
longer. Even with the torches lit." Cluff Drybannock, better
known as Drybone, fell in at Vaylo's side. Even as he adjusted his
horse's pace to match his chief's, Vaylo could hear the slap and
patter of a second horse hurrying to catch up. Vaylo didn't have to
turn his head to know who the second rider would be. Hanro wouldn't
want to miss out on anything Drybone was likely to say.

"We'll ride a while longer,"
Vaylo said, deliberately speaking loudly to relieve the burning in
his sixth son's ears. "Give the dogs chance to spot a league or
two." As he spoke, he glanced over at the man he trusted most in
the clan. Drybone was a great wall of a man, with barricades for
shoulders and skin the color of red clay. He was not clan, not quite.
His mother had been a Trenchlander whore, and his father…
well, whore's bastards seldom knew just
who
their fathers
were. When Drybone turned seven, his mother had sent him from the
Trenchlands to the Bluddhold and told him never to come back. He was
not one of their kind, and he was not wanted anymore.

Vaylo sucked on his old teeth. He hated
Trenchlanders. What sort of woman would do that to her child? He
still remembered Cluff being brought to the Bluddhouse by massive,
bulb-nosed Yagro Wike, who had caught the lad tickling for trout in
the Flow. Thin as a fence post, he was, and nearly wild with hunger
and sunstroke. When asked what he was doing on Bludd territory, he
had replied just the way his mother had taught him: "I'm a
Trenchborn bastard. My father was a Bluddsman, and I'm searching
until I find him and make him pay his due in my rearing."

The lad had such a fierce look in his
bright blue eyes and such a hard sense of purpose within his small
clenched fists that Vaylo had taken to him on the spot. "A
bastard, eh?" he'd said, ruffling the lad's night black hair.
"Well, you should fit in just fine here. If no man speaks up to
claim you, then I'll take you as my own."

That was twenty-five years ago. Drybone
was a full-sworn clansman now and the best swordsman in the clan, yet
the bastard was still in him. It never went away. Vaylo knew that.
They understood each other, the whore's bastard and the clan chief's
bastard. They knew what it was to give up their places at table, to
fight a real or imagined insult until their mouths filled with blood,
and to watch the laughter and scolding of legitimate children with
envy so potent that it took something from you as surely as a long
day's hunt in the woods. Vaylo had seen to it that Drybone had fared
better than he, but you could not shield a child against the cruelty
of other children. And to try to was a mistake of a different,
greater kind.

Drybone had grown up well enough. He
was a good solid fighter, a hard worker, and as vigilant of people's
moods and motives as any bastard ever was. Vaylo knew his sons
resented him, yet he didn't care one jot. Let them fret over who
would take over his chiefdom when he was dead and gone. Worry might
make men of them yet.

"Balhagro would have pulled well
off from the road to make camp," Drybone said, squinting into
the darkness beyond the pale sheets of torchlight. "And would
have thought to cover the wagon's tracks."

The Dog Lord nodded. Drybone had a
better opinion of Balhagro's initiative than he had, but that didn't
mean he wasn't right. Age had brought Vaylo the slow realization that
he would never know everything about men and that even those he knew
best were capable of surprising him. Balhagro was a steady man; that
was why Vaylo had chosen him to lead the moving party. That and the
fact that Balhagro's eldest daughter had just produced his first
grandchild, so the man knew just how fiercely grandchildren must be
guarded.

"Aye," Vaylo said, suddenly
hopeful that Drybone was right and Balhagro
was
the sort of
man to take extreme caution. "We should have brought the hawks.
They'd be better than the dogs in the snow."

'Your best pair were out last time I
looked." Drybone glanced at Vaylo, a question in his sharp blue
eyes.

Vaylo Bludd seldom lied. He either
spoke the truth or said nothing. Looking at Cluff Drybannock, he saw
a man who took care that his appearance was neither lesser nor
greater than those around him. His braids were closely tied, but not
excessively so; his furs and leathers were of good quality, but he
wore no sable, lynx, or stillborn calfskin. The greatsword at his
waist was shorter than most swords given that name, but it was
polished to a high sheen and couched in the best lamb's wool. Vaylo
didn't have to look around to know how his sixth son was dressed in
comparison. Hanro was the dandy of the bunch. Spent more time oiling
his braids than most women did plucking their leg hair. His crown was
always shaved so smoothly that sometimes Vaylo wondered if he wasn't
just plain bald.