A Cavern of Black Ice (55 page)

"Tracking someone with sorcery is
a risk unto itself. Sometimes a sorcerer must take drugs and forsake
his body while he searches. Such skills never come cheap. They use a
man up completely, leaving him as weak as a horse ridden clean
through the night. Sometimes those who forsake their bodies never
come back. The firmament glitters for them, tempting them out toward
its cold, hard edge. Secrets lie there, they say. All things become
known at the moment of death. Men who cannot resist simply leave
their bodies behind. Their minds die the instant their spirit touches
the roof of the world, but their bodies waste slowly over weeks."

Cold. Raif felt so cold his lungs
ached. He found himself looking up at the black arc of the sky.
Yes,
I can see how a man might be tempted
.

Angus saw where his gaze had rested. "I
can't say as we'll be tracked that way tonight, not with us being so
close to the city. The cost is too high for it to be lightly done.
Any time a man or woman draws upon the old skills it takes something
from them. The body pays a price. Different people weaken in
different ways. I've seen some men bleed from the mouth, and others
shiver as if a fever is upon them. A few lose part of their memories
or their minds. I knew a man once, one of the Storm Dogs who live on
the high slopes of the Join, whose body wasted in small portions
every time he broke a storm. The first time I met him I thought he'd
been burned. His arms and legs were black and withered. Dead."

Raif turned away. He hated sorcery.
Clansmen would have no part of it. Strength of mind, will, and body
was what counted in the clanholds. Sorcery was the weapon of the weak
and the damned. Raif remembered watching as Dagro Blackhail and Gat
Murdock clubbed a dark-haired girl senseless one cold winter's
morning on the court. Raif couldn't recall who the girl was, perhaps
a sister to Craw Bannering or a daughter to Meth Ganlow, but he knew
the girl had been discovered calling animals to her without speaking
words. She had died a week later. No one, not even her family,
mourned her. And then there was Mad Binny, living in her ancient
crannog over Cold Lake, exiled from the roundhouse for thirty years.
She could make ewes drop their lambs, people said, tell which winters
would drive the hardest and cull the most deaths.

"Most magic users need rest after
a drawing," Angus said, pulling Raif back. "Many need to
sleep. Some take drugs to lend them strength."

"Like the ghostmeal?"

"Yes, like the ghostmeal."

Raif looked round to find Angus
watching him, and he suddenly realized the purpose of everything his
uncle had said.
Accept what you are
, he seemed to say. You
possess the old skills, I have shown you that. I have spoken of
their dangers and forewarned you of their limits. Now you must learn
to accept it and stomach your distaste
.

Mist washed in and out of Angus' mouth
as he breathed. "Not all people condemn the old skills. There
are places that would fail to exist without them, where they are
woven so tightly into the threads of history that you cannot separate
the people from their sorcery. Perhaps you and I will travel to those
lands one day."

Raif made no reply. He didn't want to
hear any more. He longed for clan, imagined riding across the thick
white snow on the graze, shooting targets with Drey on the court, and
sitting so close to the Great Hearth that its hot yellow flames
burned his cheeks. "The girl is waking," he said after a
time.

Angus' eyes narrowed. A fraction of a
second later Ash moved against his back. Before he turned his
attention to her, Angus searched Raif's face, and Raif guessed he had
given something away. He had known Ash was waking before his uncle
had felt a thing. Abruptly he pulled on Moose's reins, dropping back.

Angus and Ash spoke softly for some
time, Ash turning once to retrieve a parcel of trail meat and a
waterskin from Angus' pack. Raif thought she looked little better for
sleep. Following her lead, he drank some water himself. The liquid
was thick and icy, and it numbed something within him for a while.

The landscape changed as they threaded
through the upper reaches of the tree line, becoming rougher and more
inhospitable to plants. Bare rocks rose to either side of the path,
swept clean of snow by persistent winds. Pines twisted close to the
ground, their trunks smooth as bones, their needles shriveled and
gray. The air smelled of resin, and the mist was sticky, as if it had
slipped into the heartwood and stolen the sap from the pines.

Angus trotted the bay through a series
of sharp turns and then surprised Raif by calling a halt and
dismounting. "Wait here," he said, handing Raif the reins.
By the time Raif had dismounted himself, Angus had disappeared into
the mist. Ash stared after him.

Silence followed. Raif had no desire to
speak. He felt a dull resentment toward the girl; it was almost as if
she'd stolen upon him while he slept, slit the skin on his wrist, and
made a blood kin of him. He'd been given no choice in the matter, yet
somehow he felt bound. And she was so young and thin, her face red
with snowburn, her hair matted with many kinds of dirt. Only her eyes
held his interest: huge gray eyes that shone like polished metal,
silver one moment, iron the next. "Good. You've both dismounted.
We're on foot from now on."

I Angus' voice emerged from the mist
ahead of his body. "Raif. Cut a torch from that hemlock. Strip
it until the juices run."

Raif was glad of something to do. He
cut three sticks, hacking at the branches until his dogskin mitts
were soaked with sap. Shaving the sticks with his belt knife, he
created a series of thin wood curls to catch the sparks from his
flint and hold them against the sapwood until it kindled. The
business of making fires in snow and ice was something he knew well,
and it felt good to do something plain and honest with his hands.

The first torch was lit by the time
Angus had brushed down the horses. Ash had taken charge of Moose and
was saying horsey things to him and scratching behind his ears. Moose
seemed stupidly pleased, snuffling and clucking like a hen. Raif
glared at him. Traitor horse.

Angus led them into a deep draw between
the rocks. The pale, ice-riven banks grew higher as they descended,
and the path began to narrow and steepen. Soon the walls curved
overhead, and Raif got the sense that they were traveling
into
the mountain. The same kind of oily stone they had passed earlier
caught and reflected light. When flames from Raif's torch licked
against the wetness, it hissed. Mist rolled around the horses'
fetlocks like seafoam, turning from gray to green with each flick of
the light. The air became noticeably colder.

Then, suddenly, there
was
no
draw. The rocks fused overhead, and what might have been a water
channel during spring melt became a tunnel instead.

Raif felt his stitches itch. The raven
lore was as cold as a fossil against his chest.

"Easy now," Angus said. "Stay
close. There are ways here that are not ours to take. Raif. Step
forward with the torch. Ash. Keep an eye to Moose. Don't forget to
tear a bit of rue leaf now and then and chew on it."

As he positioned himself at the head of
the party, Raif was aware of the ground changing beneath his feet.
What minutes earlier had been rough, uncut rock now had the smooth
shine of stone once tended by a chisel. The walls were more lightly
touched, hewn only to prevent sharp edges. Something—mineral
oil or water—tapped away in the distance like a leaking roof.
All surfaces collected shadows as easily as ditches filling with
rainwater.

Raif's first thought was that
Effie would have loved this. No one knew the caves in the
clanhold like Effie. The only time she ever came out of the
roundhouse in summer was to explore the sandstone caverns around the
Wedge. Raif smiled. He remembered taking her out one summer morning
and having to wait for
hours
while she explored some odd bit
of a pothole not much wider than her own head. He wasn't about to go
in after her, and Tern would have given him a beating if he'd left
her to return home alone.

"What is this place?" asked
Ash.

It was hard for Raif to pull back from
his memories. For no reason other than she
wasn't
Effie, he
felt a tide of ill feelings toward the girl. She wasn't who she
showed herself to be. Her voice was clear and insistent, and she
sounded like no beggar girl in any story Turby Flapp or Gat Murdock
had ever told.

"It's just a wee tunnel, nothing
more." Angus took a slug from his rabbit flask. "It was cut
many thousands of years ago, before Spire Vanis was even built."

Ash reached out a hand and touched the
wall. "Who built it?"

"The Sull."

Raif sucked in air and held it in his
lungs. This was the third time Angus had mentioned the Sull, yet the
word sounded no better for repetition. The Sull were enemies to all.
They hated the Mountain Cities
and
the clans. And even
though they protected the Trenchlanders with their lives, they hated
them, too. Hiding in their vast forests, amid their cities of blue
and silver stone, they refused to trade and treaty. Rumor had it they
emerged from the Racklands only to defend their borders and reclaim
their dead. "What use is a tunnel here, in the west, to the
Sull?"

"Do you think, Raif Sevrance, that
this land has always been held by the Mountain Cities?" Angus'
tone made Raif wish he hadn't asked the question. "Before there
were cities, before even there were clans, there were the Sull. Clan
Blackhail might call itself the first of the clans, yet it's a poor
claim when compared to the Sull's. They call themselves the First
Born, and they do not mean solely in the Northern Territories."

Ash spoke after a moment of silence.
"The Sull were the first men in the Known Lands?"

"So legend says. The same legends
that tell how they were driven first from the Far South, and then the
Soft Lands of the middle, finally making a home of the North. All of
it, not just the Boreal Sway and the Great Snake Coast and the Red
Glaciers they claim today. All of it, from the Breaking Grounds in
the farthest north, to Old Goat's Pass in these Ranges." Angus'
voice was hard, his eyes dark. "So this small tunnel, cut so the
Sull could cross the mountains and descend Mount Slain without being
sniffed out by the Mountain Queen's septs, or scented by Wetcloaks
and their hounds, may not be much use to them now. But it once was,
and there are a score of others like it in the Ranges."

"Who is this Mountain Queen?"
Ash said. "And the Wetcloaks? I've never heard of them."

Angus shook his head. "People and
forces from another age, before the Red Priest and the Founding
Quarterlords were born, before religion took its hold on the Soft
Lands to the south, when the world was ruled by emperors and kings,
and sorcery was their weapon of control."

Raif held the torch away from his body.
The damp air was making it crackle and spit. "You said the Sull
could use sorcery. So why didn't they build an empire of their own?"

"Once they did," Angus said
quietly. "Once they did. Now…" He shook his head.
"Now they seek only to survive."

Frowning, Raif walked deeper into the
tunnel. What Angus said didn't fit with clan beliefs about the Sull.
"But the Sull are the fiercest—"

"Aye," Angus said, cutting
him short. "The Sull
are
the fiercest warriors ever to
raise their banns over the North. They have to be. They are a people
unto themselves, deeply private and self-sustaining, and every king,
emperor, and warlord in the Known Lands for the past thirteen
thousand years has feared them. The Sull have been driven north and
east through three continents, and now all that's left to them is the
Racklands." Angus' voice quieted and turned oddly cold. "And
I pity anyone who tries to take it from them… for they have
nowhere else to go."

Raif and Ash exchanged a glance, both
affected by Angus' words. Ash's eyes looked almost blue in the cave
light.

We must leave something for the
journey," Angus said, working to regain his good humor. "
Tis an old custom and doubtless seems foolish to do so when none but
dark-winged bats will likely collect it. But Darra would have my
earlobes for salt dishes if I failed to pay my due."

"Darra?" asked Ash.

"My lady wife."

Ash made no reply, and silence grew
around them.

Reaching back behind his neck, Raif
felt for the band of silver that bound his hair. With one swift
movement he tugged it free. "Here," he said, offering it to
Angus. "Take this for the journey."

Angus closed his large red hand around
Raif's. "Nay, lad. That's a clan token. Keep it. I'll pay this
passage."

"Take it."

There must have been something in his
voice, for Angus looked at him hard a moment, then nodded. "As
you wish."

No one spoke for a while after that.
Angus took the silver band in his fist and began kneading the metal
as he walked. The tunnel grew narrower and the rock ceiling dipped,
so both Angus and Ash had to be careful where they led the horses.
Moisture wept from cracks in the stone, forming oily pools that
everyone avoided.

Raif lit the second torch, and the
fresher, brighter light illuminated markings on the stone. No, not
on
the stone, he corrected himself,
in
it. Drawings of the moon
and stars, inked in dark blues and liquid silvers, shone through a
layer of rock as thin as the membrane on a fish's eye. Somehow the
artist had inserted the pigment below the surface, like a tattoo.
Raif thought back to Angus' bow; that had an inlay beneath the wood
too. Angus
has a Sull bow
? Raif held on to the question as
they entered a section of tunnel partially collapsed by flood damage,
trying to decide what it meant.