A Cavern of Black Ice (49 page)

Walking a little bit to test the
strength of her legs, she felt her gaze returning to Vaingate. The
gate tower looked so quiet—only one brother-in-the-watch that
she could see—and the portcullis itself was up. It would be so
easy to walk over there and slip through. No one would recognize her;
that
much was certain. And she knew from watching the gate
for the past few days that no special arrangements were in place:
just one sworn brother, occasionally two at changing watches. Even
the beggars and street vendors never changed. Surely it would be
safe?

Ash's stomach growled as she reached
the roof wall. Soft cramps had begun to sound in her lower abdomen,
and she wondered if her second menses were due. She had to take the
gate now. The voices might come back at any time, and she didn't know
how much longer she could fight them, didn't know if she could
survive blacking out another time. Two hours yesterday. Four today.

Ash shook her head. It was now or
never.

Decision made, she felt herself filling
up with a splintery, last-stand kind of strength. Once she had been
through the gate and seen the place where she had been found,
everything would change. She would be free to leave the city and go
where she pleased. She could read and write; those skills had their
uses. Perhaps she could find a position as a ladies' maid or
traveling companion or even a maiden scribe. Maybe she could travel
east to the Cloistress Tower at Owl's Reach and ask the green-robed
sisters for asylum. If only it wasn't winter… and so cold that
the wind blew your breath back as ice.

Ash drew her cloak close as she made
her way down through the treacherous landscape of the tannery. She
was Ash March, Foundling, left outside Vaingate to die.

*** "Er… nay, lad. I think
we'll be taking the back door in." Angus grinned at Raif in the
way he always did when he was about to do something that made no
sense. "A wee hike around the back of the city will do the
horses a power of good. Work the colic from their bellies."

Raif knew better than to argue. He and
Angus had been traveling together for two weeks now, and Raif could
spot one of his uncle's diversions a league away. Angus Lok seldom
took the most straightforward route anywhere. As
the blind crow
flies, as the wounded crow crawls
, and
as the dead crow rots
were favorite sayings of his, used to excuse his eccentric methods of
getting from one place to another. If there was a road, Angus would
not take it. If there was a bridge, Angus would not cross it. If
there was a city gate, Angus would examine it from a distance and
then shake his head.

"Come on, young Sevrance. Stare up
at Hoargate any longer and the guards'll have us pegged as a dimwit
and his fool."

Raif continued to stare at the black
and icy arch of Spire Vanis' western gate. It was massive, cut from a
single bloodwood as big as a church. The bark had been stripped away,
and the remaining heartwood had the smooth gleam of obsidian. The
carvings that chased around the arch were thick with hoarfrost, yet
all things the west represented—the setting sun, the bloodwood
forests, the Storm Margin, the Wrecking Sea and the whales that swam
within it—could clearly be seen etched beneath the ice. In all
his life Raif had never seen such a thing. Nothing in the clanholds
matched it.

Ever since they had caught sight of the
city walls two days back, Raif had felt a cold chill of excitement
quickening in his gut. The creamy white stone of Spire Vanis glowed
in every kind of light that shone upon it. Sunrise, sunset,
moonlight, and starlight: The city took something different from them
all. Here, in the bright sunlight of late morning, the towering walls
shone like forged steel. The entire city seemed to throb and breathe
like a living thing. Smoke rose from the stone mass like exhaled
breath, and beneath his feet Raif felt the earth shudder and rumble
as if a dragon were sleeping in a chamber far below.

"That's Mount Slain," Angus
said, grabbing Raif's arm, not gently, and guiding him away from the
gate. "It moves year-round. You'll get used to it after a
while."

Raif nodded absently. Spire Vanis. He
could hardly believe he was here.

The journey around the Black Spill had
taken a week. The Bitter Hills north of the lake marked the
clanholds' southern border, and it seemed to Raif that as every new
day passed the clanholds receded deeper into the mist. He had not
seen a clansman or clanswoman in days. The stovehouses they had
stayed at were large and gloomy, not really stovehouses at all,
rather places that sold ale. If you had no coin to buy food and
drink, the stovemaster threw you out—in the
cold—
and when fighting erupted, there was no talk of stove laws or due
respect, only the cost of broken tables and chairs. Raif had sat in
these new nonclan stovehouses and watched these things happen and let
the truth of them settle against his skin. Stoves were not sacred
here. Old laws did not bind. The One True God of blind faith and
fresh air had no love for the men who worshiped stone.

Angus was as at home here as he was in
the clanholds. He knew many people and had many different ways of
associating with them. Some men he would laugh and talk with openly
in full sight of all; others he would simply nod to or happen to meet
outside near the jacks or the smokehouse and exchange a few words
with as he pulled on his gloves and hood. Some men he pretended not
to know at all, yet Raif had little to do but watch his uncle these
past weeks and he had seen things a casual observer would not. Angus
had a way of acknowledging men without even looking their way. He
could communicate a thought with the smallest shrug of his shoulders
or arrange a meeting with the slightest narrowing of eyes.

Four nights back, when they were
settling down by the fire in a dingy stovehouse on the western shore
of the Spill, Raif had discovered he'd left his handknife in his
saddlebag. When he'd run over to the stables to retrieve it, he'd
come upon a man slipping a square of folded parchment under the bay's
blanket. Raif had pretended not to notice. If a stranger wanted to
pass a note to Angus, it was nothing to him. The man, a toothless
birch eater in a moose coat, was one of a group of five drovers who
were driving their cattle upland in search of graze. Angus had not
once looked his way all night.

Although Angus liked to visit
stovehouses, he seldom chose to spend the night there, and more often
than not he and Raif camped out under the stars. The warmer
temperatures in the cityholds made it bearable, yet the open
farmlands and clear-cut hillsides made cover increasingly hard to
find. Angus liked cover, Raif had noticed, and often traveled several
hours past sunset in search of a dense stand of bass-woods, a bank
cut low into the hillside, or a favorable cluster of rocks.

Angus set a hard pace, and Raif was
glad of it. There was a lot to be said for falling into an exhausted
sleep each night. Long days in the saddle, battling the wind, the ice
storms, and the aches and pains of a mending body left Raif too tired
for thought. He rode, ate, stripped logs for the morning cookfire,
melted ice, skinned hares, plucked birds, and took care of Moose. He
did not hunt. The blister on his right hand was purple and bloated
with blood.

Pain was something he lived with. The
stitches on his chest itched and burned as the skin knitted itself
together. The urge to tear off his clothes and claw the healing flesh
was overpowering, and he would have scratched his chest raw if it
hadn't been for the sheer number of layers between his fingers and
his skin. It drove him mad. He cursed his mitts, his oilskins, his
softskins, his elk coat, and his wool shirt. To make matters worse,
Angus had insisted that the wounds be covered in Purified butter and
he now stank like something kept a day too long in the sun. By
comparison, the cuts and bruises on his face were bearable. A scab
the size of a leech clung to the cheekbone directly below his left
eye, and a hairline split on his lip made smiling more trouble than
it was worth.

"This way. We'll make better time
the farther we travel from the wall."

Raif followed Angus' direction, leading
Moose through the bald and rutted ground that surrounded the west
wall. A sharp wind blew down from the mountain, hissing in his ears
and driving ice crystals into his face. Ahead, the north face of
Mount Slain rose above the city like a frozen god, its cliffs and
high plains blue with compacted snow, its skirt black with pines. The
air smelled of something Raif couldn't put a name to, some faintly
sulfurous mineral that belonged deep beneath the earth. Underfoot,
the ground snow was hard and unforgiving, harboring no shadows to
reveal its depth. The city itself tantalized Raif with brief glimpses
of iron spires, blazing watch towers, and stone archways as smooth
and pale as the bones of a long dead child.

Angus was quiet as they made their way
south along the wall. He had not applied any protective waxes or oils
this morning, yet his face looked as pale as if he had. Leading the
bay at a brisk pace, he grew impatient whenever snowdrifts slowed
them.

Raif glanced at the sky. Midday. "Do
you come often to this city?"

Angus sent Raif a sharp glance. "I
have no love for this place."

It was the end of the subject as far as
Angus was concerned, for he turned his attention to trotting the bay
through the tangle of weeds and mud ice that lay in the storm channel
ahead. Raif knew his uncle expected him to say no more, but his chest
was itching and the devil was in him, and he was getting tired of
Angus and his evasions. "Why come here, then?"

Angus' shoulders stiffened at the
question. He pulled hard on the bay's reins, causing the gelding to
whiffle and shake his head. Raif thought his uncle wasn't going to
answer, yet when they reached the first in a series of giant
buttresses that supported the main wall, Angus turned to face him.

"I come here because I have people
I must see and others I must take heed of. Don't think, Raif
Sevrance, that you are the only one in this world who is troubled and
hard done by. The clanholds are just the start. There are people who
would see more than Clan Bludd and Clan Blackhail at each other's
throats. Some of them are in this city, some of them scheme in bed
each night and call themselves clansmen when they wake in the
morning, and others are hidden in vaults so deep that even the sun
can't find them. There is danger here for me, and that means there is
danger for you also. Soon enough you will attract enemies in your own
right. For now be content that the burdens of danger and protection
fall on me."

Angus took Raif by the shoulders and
held him at arm's length. His face was grim. "I am your kin, and
you must trust me. Save your questions for a place far away from
these walls. There's nothing but ill memories here for me."

Raif looked at his uncle carefully. He
could see him shaking, feel the heat of his body through his sealskin
gloves as he waited for Raif to speak. Raif wanted to know more. How
was it that Angus knew so much about the Clan Wars? Was Mace
Blackhail one of the clansmen he mentioned? Who were the men whom no
sun could reach? Raif frowned. Although he didn't much want to, he
said, "I'll hold my questions for now."

Angus nodded back at him. "That's
favor enough for me."

The sky darkened as they led the horses
around the buttress walls and on toward the mountain. Snow clouds
were rolling south and the sun was soon hidden from view. Two tall
structures rose against the city's west wall, one dark and ringed
with metal outerwork, the other as pale as ice and so tall that Raif
could not see its peak.

"The Horn and the Splinter,"
Angus said, slapping his coat in search of his flask. "That's
Mask Fortress on the other side of the wall. Home of the surlords of
Spire Vanis."

Raif could not take his eyes from the
tower called the Splinter. It wasn't merely the color of ice, it
was
ice. A rime of it covered the stonework like fat around a skinned
carcass, gleaming yellow then blue in the light. Raif shivered. He
was cold and empty, and he needed a drink.

Angus handed him the rabbit flask. The
alcohol had been spiked with birch bark, and it tasted sweet and
earthy like newly turned soil. One mouthful was enough. Thumping the
cork in place, Raif said, "Does anyone
live
in that
thing?"

"The Splinter? Nay, lad. It was
flawed from the day it was built. Too high, you see. Milks the storm
clouds. By all accounts it's little more than a broken shell inside.
None except Robb Claw ever lived there, if
living's
the
right word for it. Holed himself up one winter, he did, and never
came out. They found his corpse ten years later. Took five men to
carry it to the light of day, as it had turned as hard as stone."
Angus sniffed. "That's the story, anyhow."

Raif looked away. He knew little of the
Mountain Cities and their history. Some of the border clans had
dealings with Ille Glaive, but few clansmen had words, good or
otherwise, to spare for the cities and their closely guarded holds.
"Who was Robb Claw?"

Angus slowed his pace as they reached
the southwest cornerstone of the city and the bay was forced to pick
its way through the rocks, dead rootwood, and loose shale that had
rolled down from the mountain. The path steepened and narrowed, and
then there was no path at all. Raif felt sweat trickle along his
stitch lines.

"Robb Claw was the great-grandson
of Glamis Claw, one of the Founding Quarterlords of Spire Vanis."

"Was he a king?"

"Nay, lad. No king's ever ruled in
Spire Vanis, though it's not from want of trying. The Founding
Quarterlords were the bastard sons of kings; their fathers ruled
lands far to the south, and each king had enough true sons to ensure
that neither lands nor titles would ever cede to their bastards. This
pleased the Quarterlords not at all, and there were many battles
fought and many knives slipped into prince-flesh. Two of the four
were the brothers Theron and Rangor Pengaron, and they joined with
Glamis Claw and Torny Fyfe to raise a warhost and march it north
across the Ranges. Theron was their leader, might have even crowned
himself a king if it hadn't been for the other three lords at his
back. As it was, he led the host against the Sull, founded the city,
and built the first strongwall of stone and timber where Mask
Fortress lies today." Angus wagged his head toward the Splinter.
"Though it was Robb Claw who built the four towers."