A Cavern of Black Ice (43 page)

"But we worship the Stone Gods."

"Aye, and you've got the last of
the great Clan Kings to thank for that."

Raif ran a hand through his hair. He
didn't understand what Angus was getting at. "Why do you keep
mentioning Hoggie Dhoone? He hated the cities and their one jealous
God. His armies slew ten thousand city men at the Battle of Stone
Cairns. He made the Bitter Hills his wall, swearing that no man who
was not a clansman would ever raise a roof beyond them. He
saved
the clanholds. And he had no dealings with the One God."

Angus began packing the stove for the
night, adding only the largest chunks of firewood to the stack. "Aye,
you're right about Hoggie Dhoone: He
did
save the clanholds.
He saw the cities for what they were. He knew that given half a
chance they'd march their armies over the Bitter Hills and shatter
clan guidestones to dust. He knew what they thought of the clanholds
and its nine gods. Hoggie Dhoone was no fool. He fought the cities
with one hand, and met them halfway with the other."

"Hoggie Dhoone never met anyone
halfway."

"Did he not?" Angus shrugged.
"So it's just coincidence that he began outlawing the old skills
at the same time the Mountain Cities did? Not the act of a clever man
who saw the way the world was turning and chose to turn
with
,
not against it."

"I don't understand."

"It's simple. Hoggie Dhoone was
not prepared to give up the Stone Gods. He knew the Mountain Cities
thought them cruel and barbaric, and he also knew that the sort of
fanatic wars that raged in the Soft Lands to the south could easily
break out in the North. So rather than set himself and his gods apart
and risk the self-righteous might of the cities falling upon him, he
chose to run with the pack. Everyone who used the old skills was
exiled or hounded. It was nothing to him. The Stone Gods have always
been hard gods. They're not known for weeping over the dead.

"In one canny move, Hoggie Dhoone
turned the Mountain Cities into his allies. Oh, there were battles
aplenty—you know that better than me—but they were always
over land, not religion. Shared beliefs may be a powerful thing. But
nothing quite binds like shared hatred."

Raif stared at Angus; he didn't know
what to think. Hoggie Dhoone was the last of the great Clan Kings,
and no one in the clan had ever told his story quite like that. It
lessened him. "If the Mountain Cities were as fanatical as you
say, then why didn't they go after the Sull? Their gods are older
than the clans'."

Angus closed the stove door, creating
darkness. "Because it suited them to strip land, not gods, from
the Sull."

Raif closed his eyes. He thought Angus
might say more, but he didn't and began settling himself down by the
opposite wall. Raif almost spoke to break the silence. Suddenly he
didn't want to be alone with his thoughts. Time passed. Angus'
breathing grew shallow and regular, and Raif imagined his uncle
asleep. How
long before I sleep
? he wondered. How long
before the nightmares come?

Swinging from a
Gibbet

Ash held her breath, scrunched her face
as tight as it would go, and began to hack away at her hair. She
couldn't look. Couldn't bear to see it fall to the snow. Stupid, she
told herself. Vain, weak-minded, and stupid. It was only hair. It
would grow back. Still, she couldn't quite bring herself to cut it as
short as she had intended. She tried, but her hands kept defying her,
and the knife kept sliding downward, and she didn't have the heart to
fight it.

She had originally planned to cut it as
short as a boy's, but that decision was taken in the broad light of
day, when decisions were easier to make and keep. Now, at midnight,
sitting on an iron bench cleared of snow in the Street of the Five
Traitors in Almstown, hemmed in by shadows, overhanging eaves, and
mounds of black, shoveled slush, she didn't much feel like doing
anything. And she
was
very much attached to her hair—even
if it wasn't curly and bright like Katia's.

Vain, weak-minded, stupid, Ash scolded
herself again as she sawed the blade through the last strands. There.
Done it now. Running a hand through her ragged, shoulder-length hair,
she tested its new feel and weight. Her head felt uncommonly light,
as if she'd drunk too much red wine at supper. Pale silver strands,
long as snakes, curled in the snow at her feet. Kicking them with the
toe of her boot, she told herself they were nothing really, just a
heap of old straw.

Hearing footsteps and thin jabs of
laughter, Ash bent forward and scooped up the hair, then folded it
into the cloth bag tied at her waist. She could get good money for it
on Shorn Lamb Street, but she was no longer sure if selling it was a
good idea. She had heard the talk in the city. Everyone who was
anyone was looking for a tall, slim girl with long pale hair and no
breasts. Ash glanced down at her chest. Slowly, little by little,
that particular aspect of her description was being rendered
obsolete. It was quite amazing how fast a body could grow when it had
a mind to. Even when the body in question was being fed nothing but
goose grease and oats.

Ash concentrated on staying as still
and silent as she could until the laughter and footsteps had passed.
Her rough wool cloak itched, and things living within it crawled as
slowly as things living in cloaks
did
crawl on cold nights
in early winter. At least they weren't biters. Ash supposed she
should be grateful for that.

She had sold her old clothes the very
same night she had broken free of the fortress, before word of her
escape had had chance to leak through the city and everyone knew to
be on the watch for a girl matching the description of Penthero Iss'
ward. Her dress had been plain but of excellent quality, and her
calf-leather boots were the best to be bought in the city. The old
bidwife who had purchased them had been happy to give Ash a whole
outfit in exchange, complete with a lined and hooded cloak, thick
wool leggings and mitts, a dress dyed a forgettable shade of brown,
and a stout pair of "whore's boots." According to the
bidwife, the boots were named for whores because they boasted soles
so thick that a girl could walk the streets all day and not feel the
pinch.

Ash wondered about that. Sometimes she
caught men looking at her feet. The toes were capped with a
particularly bright strain of copper that could be seen across a
fair-size street. Just this afternoon she had worked charcoal and
horse dung over the metal, hoping to ward off speculative glances
from men and ill-humored appraisals from other girls.

The leather belt with a silver buckle
that she had worn during the escape had also been sold, and the three
silver pieces she had haggled from the bidwife had been enough to buy
a loaf of oats and a sausage skin full of goose drippings every
morning for the past five days. She had one silver left.

At night she slept alongside beggars
and street whores. It was easy, really, watching people, seeing where
they went and what they did. Early in the evening, even the poorest
and sickest slid away to known dens to sleep. Wedge-shaped spaces
under stairs, sewers blocked with ice, collapsed watch towers with
makeshift roofs of elkhide, disused roast pits, abandoned outhouses
and dry wells, burrows dug into the great mounds of snow that built
up along the city's south wall, and cracks in the very city itself,
leading downward to vaults of precision-cut stone and warrens of
crawl spaces, underspaces, and sinkholes: Ash had seen people slip
into them all.

The first night had been the worst,
after she had left the bidwife's stall with money in her hand and
nowhere to go. She didn't trust places that were dark and deserted
and had chosen to stay on noisy, crowd-filled streets. Through the
course of the night she had walked the length of the city, across the
great stone court known as the Square of Sorrows, where Garath Lors
had declared himself king before being cut down by his brother's
darkcloaks; along the Spireway with its crumbling stonework and
rotted spikes; and down into the dim and slushy streets of Almstown,
where the soot from a thousand charcoal fires turned every wall,
roof, and walkway black. Even the falling snow was black, catching
minute flecks of burned matter as it sailed toward the earth.

Ash thought Almstown was a kind of
hell. Katia had always spoken about it with a sort of wistful
affection, telling how you could buy whole sides of bacon, steaming
and ready to eat, warm your hands with mugs of beer so hot that you
could set them on the ground and melt snow, and walk down any street
and see dark-skinned women dressed in cloth-of-gold hoods and
thin-lipped assassins glittering with knives. Ash tried, but she saw
only the filth and the smoke and the open sores on people's faces.
She had no money to buy bacon or beer, and the only people she saw
were prostitutes fighting with their pimps, pot boys shoveling slush,
charcoal burners tending their smoke fires, and tired old men getting
drunk.

No one trusted anyone. Ash had learned
quickly to keep her hands and eyes to herself. It didn't do to look
too long at anyone or stand too close to a man selling hot food or
cold beer.

Still, Ash thought, rising from the
bench and stepping into the street, Almstown was a good place to get
lost in. No one cared about finding the Surlord's ward. There was
money in it—Iss had offered a crow's weight in gold for
information leading to her capture—but the I inhabitants of
Almstown didn't think for one moment that any fine lady from Mask
Fortress would ever find her way
here
.

Ash had heard people talking about it.
Women joked that they'd dye their hair with lye, bandage their
breasts, and go and claim the reward for themselves. Men spoke in
hushed voices, murmuring about the Rive Watch, forced searches,
torchings, and how Marafice Eye had blinded a carcass gutter for
claiming, wrongly, that he had seen Asarhia March enter the Bone
Temple and ask the tall and silent priests for asylum.

Ash shivered. Sometimes she wondered if
Marafice Eye hadn't done such a thing just so news of it would reach
her and make her afraid.

Determined
not
to be afraid,
she headed south through the butcher's market and onto the paved
streets beyond. When the pale, straight-as-arrow forms of the Horn
and the Splinter drew her eyes, she did not look away. At this
distance they were the only structures within Mask Fortress that were
visible. Ash knew that all she had to do was head north for a few
streets to lose sight of the Horn, but she had yet to find one street
corner, alleyway, or ditch within the entire city of Spire Vanis from
which the Splinter couldn't be seen. In a way it was a good thing.
All she had to do was look up into the southern sky to see the reason
why she had fled.

Before she pulled her gaze downward,
she couldn't help but linger on the sloping roofs, flickering watch
towers, and hammered iron domes of the southern skyline. At the
farthest point south lay Vaingate. Vaingate. The last built and least
used of the four city gates. Ash didn't know how many hours she had
spent imagining what it would feel like to walk through the limestone
arch and onto the mountainside beyond. Vaingate was her one
connection with her mother, the only thing they shared. Both of them
had passed through that gate.

Ash took a breath and held it. All her
childhood dreams had begun with her standing outside Vaingate. She
imagined finding the place where she'd been abandoned, running her
hands through the loose scree and dry brush, and finding something
that no one else had found before. Some bit of parchment, a rusted
locket, a scrap of fabric, anything that she could hold and say,
This
once belonged to my mother
. In her more elaborate dreams, she'd
find something that told her who her mother really was, and she'd
search the city and find her, and her mother would turn out to be
warm and glowing and utterly good…yet she never had a face.
Ash smiled bitterly. She saw the dreams for what they were today.

There was no hidden marker waiting for
her on Mount Slain. Her mother had set her down to
die;
she
would have left nothing that could give her away. It was a sin
against the Maker to abandon a healthy child. And even if she
had
dropped something—a hairpin or a ribbon or a bit of lace from
her dress—sixteen years of snow and floods would have washed it
clean away.

Ash continued to look south. Even if
she went there and found something, there was no telling
whom
it had once belonged to. Besides, it wasn't safe. Vaingate was too
close to Mask Fortress. No one but sheep drovers, hunt parties, holy
men traveling to the Cloud Shrine, and healers in search of mountain
plants passed through. She would be spotted the moment she drew near
the gate.