A Cavern of Black Ice (94 page)

And that was the real reason why one
had to withdraw it whole. Nothing, not one drop of digestive fluid,
one double-jointed leg, or one hollow and serrated tooth, could be
lost during the extraction. Blood sorcery could be drawn using an
incomplete specimen, but it was never as potent as when the parasite
was whole. It was the Bound One's creature in every way, his
sorcerous child. During an eight-week incubation the caul fly had fed
upon the Bound One's flesh, concentrating his power and distilling
his blood. Iss had read that some men who bound sorcerers to them
gained access to the sorcerer's power by using other parasites such
as leeches, lice, or loa worms, but Iss found the caul flies much to
his liking. They stayed close to the skin and could be easily tracked
and extracted, and they lived two of their three life cycles within
the host.

The caul fly was now in view, pushed to
the surface by the action of Iss' fingers, its dark, segmented eye
staring at Iss through the airhole. Good. It was close to death, but
the tiny cilia on its body moved against the current of clear fluid
that leaked from the boil. Iss flexed the tweezers, testing
their bend. As he reached through the airhole, probing for the
thorax, a soft gasp parted the Bound One's lips.

Iss was not disturbed. The Bound One
made noises sometimes. He had no words. All speech, memories, and
learning had been taken from him sixteen years earlier, during the
thirty-one days of his breaking. At the end of the thirty-one days he
was left with nothing but an animal's needs, and like an animal he
grunted when he was afraid or in pain. A word softly spoken was all
it took to calm him.

The caul fly came free with a wet
pop
.
Already it had begun to darken and enlarge in preparation for
attracting a mate. The carapace covering its wings was a thing of
beauty: red toned, transparent, divided into angular shapes by a
network of crossing sutures. Iss held it to the light.

This one is for you,
almost-daughter. That I might see how far you reached yesterday at
dawn.

The Bound One groaned as Iss withdrew
his touch. Again the arm moved, and for an instant Iss thought he saw
a flicker of pure hatred darken the Bound One's eye. Iss was not a
man given to shivering, yet he felt his chest muscles contract all
the same. Surely he was mistaken? The Bound One saw but did not
perceive
, existed but did not
feel
.

It was the way it had to be for a bound
sorcerer. They had to be broken completely, both their body and their
mind at the exact same instant. Iss had learned the danger of
breaking the body first. Thigh bones wrenched from the pelvis, spines
forced backward around a wheel, and needles inserted into the inner
ear to misalign the tiny hammer-and-tong bones there, were not enough
to destroy a mind. Iss knew that. He had lost two men learning
that
lesson, had the enamel burned from his teeth as a drawing leaving his
mouth was forced back.

Iss snapped his head, sending the
memory away. His pale hare's eyes focused upon the Bound One's face,
searching for signs of sentience. The Bound One's good pupil was dull
and unfocused, a black hole with nothing spilling out.

"Do you know who I am, Bound One?"
Iss asked. "Do you know all that I have done?"

The Bound One's hand moved again, this
time toward the package of beans sealed in waxed linen that hung from
Iss' belt. Feeling a strange mixture of affection and relief, Iss
nodded his head. "Hungry, eh? Of course, of course. That's the
beast I've come to know."

Turning his back on the Bound One and
his iron pen, Iss took a moment to still himself before he began the
drawing. The close, curving walls of the iron chamber reminded him of
a dry well. Even this deep the stone cutters had worked to maintain
the gradual tapering of the spire's walls. Iss only had to close his
eyes to imagine the spire's form: a stake into the heart of the
mountain. A perfectly rounded stake.

Robb Claw, Lord of the Fourth Spire,
builder of Mask Fortress, and great-grandson to Glamis Claw, was
rumored to have begun excavation on the Inverted Spire five years
after the Splinter was built. The city of Spire Vanis was new then,
one-tenth the size it came to be. The four Bastard Lords had crossed
the Ranges a hundred years earlier and wrested Mount Slain from the
Sull. Robb Claw had taken the timber-and-stone stronghold the
Quarterlords had erected and built a city around it. Spire Vanis was
Claw's creation. The plans were his, the vision was his, and it was
rumored that the curtain wall that contained the city would have been
raised to twice its height if Robb Claw had lived to see an end to
his work.

Iss let out a long breath. Robb Claw
feared something. A man does not spend thirty-five years of a
fifty-year life building a fortress unlike anything the world has
ever seen if he does not believe he is in danger. Theron and Rangor
Pengaron, Torny Fyfe, and Glamis Claw had no such fears. They had
simply ridden north and conquered. And despite the glorious tales of
impaled beasts, fields steaming with blood, and battles that lasted
ninety days and ninety nights, Iss suspected they had taken Mount
Slain and the Vale of Spires with ease. The Quarterlords erected
their first strongwall a mere seventy days after they crossed the
mountains with their warhost.
Seventy days
.

It was a tantalizing fact. The Sull,
who were known throughout the settled world for yielding land to no
one and defending their borders with cold fury, had barely wetted
their blades in defense of Mount Slain. Oh, the historians would tell
you otherwise, and Iss could name a dozen terrible and bloody battles
that had supposedly taken place during the Founding Wars: battles
where the sky turned as dark as night with the weight of Sull arrows,
where the moon disappeared from the midnight sky, snuffed by foul
Sull magic, and where dread halfbeasts walked the battlefield, their
exhaled breath cold as death, their touch enough to burn the light of
sanity from a fighting man's eyes. Iss had read the tales along with
the rest… yet he wasn't sure he believed them.

Two thousand years ago the Sull had
yielded Mount Slain to the Quarterlords. And a thousand years before
that they had yielded the land that became known as the clanholds to
the fierce, animal-skinned clansmen who were driven out of the Soft
Lands by Irgar the Unchained. Historians claimed that the Sull had
sanctioned the Great Settling of the clanholds because the clans were
not a threat; they kept themselves to themselves, had no interest in
converting or persecuting the Sull, and they took the hard,
inhospitable land in the center of the continent that the Sull had no
love or use for.

The reasons blew like false notes
through Iss' ears. He had been reared in Trance Vor. He knew all
about the Sull. He had stood by and watched as Sull warriors shot his
father a dozen times in the back. Four warriors. Three arrows apiece.
It was over in less than an instant.

Breath shot from Iss' throat like a
pellet of white ice. His father had been a fool! Slowly encroaching
on borders, stealing hair-thin slices of farmland each season, was no
way to take land from the Sull. They had a sixth sense about these
things, always knew the exact moment foreigners crossed into the
Racklands. And they possessed deep ancestral memories of each stream,
glade, heath, and wooded grove that formed their sacred borders.

Ediah Iss had acted in the same way a
thousand Trance Vor farmers had before him: He saw his own marshy,
ill-drained soil, then he looked in the distance and saw the soft,
fertile loam of territory belonging to the Sull. "They don't
work it," he had complained, using words well worn before him.
"Good land laying fallow like that, while I'm out in these shit
fields breaking my balls each day."

They had warned him, of course. The
Sull always warned. The same four warriors who had eventually slain
him rode to the Iss farm one morning at the break of dawn. Iss
remembered being wakened by the sound of a metal arrowhead smashing
against the claystone grate. He was eight at the time, sleeping at
the foot of his parents' pallet on a dog mattress stuffed with straw.
The arrow had come through a slit in the shutters no bigger than a
child's mouth. Ediah Iss had been meaning to fix it since spring.

Iss stood at his mother's side as his
father opened the door. Four mounted warriors dressed in lynx furs,
wolverine pelts, and midnight blue suede formed an arc around the
farmhouse. Seeing their black lacquered bows stamped with
quarter-moons and ravens, their silver letting knives that hung on
silver chains from their saddle pommels and tinkled in the wind like
bells, and their arrows fletched with the snow white feathers of
winter osprey, Iss learned what it was to be afraid as a man. He had
known only child's fear till then.

The Sull did not speak—it was not
their way—simply stood in warning for a period of time and then
turned east and rode away. Iss' mother was the first to move and
speak. Iss remembered her pushing her husband so hard, his forehead
hit the door frame.

"You fool!" she cried. "You
late-weaned fool! I told you they would know about the onion field
the minute you tilled it. Run over there before they top the ridge
and pull the new bulbs out."

She
hadn't
told him, Iss knew
that. She had been the one who encouraged him to plant the onions in
Sull soil ten days earlier, then stood over him as he spent four days
turning a weed-choked meadow into a lot.

Perhaps it was anger toward his wife
that made Ediah Iss leave two rows of onions undisturbed, or perhaps
he believed that those two particular rows, being nearest to his own
border and hidden from the casual eye by the deep shade thrown from a
hundred-year-old milk-wood, might go unnoticed by the Sull. Either
way he left forty-eight onion bulbs in the ground. Iss knew the exact
amount, as he had pulled each one from the grainy black soil an hour
after his father's death.

It had taken the Sull less than two
days to return. Iss could still remember his mother screaming as the
four warriors cut the used strings from their bows, discarded them as
if they were soiled rags. He only had to close his eyes to see his
father lying belly down on the path, a full quiver of arrows,
bristling and golden like ears of wheat, growing from his back.

Iss sucked his lips against his cracked
and discolored teeth. It was a fool's death, foolishly invited, yet
it was not without its compensations. Iss had gained two things of
value from it. First, his mother's family had moved quickly to be rid
of him, and he was sent for fosterage to a distant uncle in Spire
Vanis who held a grangedom there; and second, he had learned a lesson
about the Sull that would stay with him for life.

"Poor Father," Iss said,
turning the caul fly in the light. "One does not take land from
the Sull in small slices. One waits until the time is right and then
moves to take it all."

With a quick snap of his wrist, he drew
air over the caul fly's abdomen, shaking the creature awake. The
creature's rear legs stiffened, and deep within the red-toned
carapace four fully formed wings twitched to life. The caul fly knew
it was no longer in its host and now sought to unfold its wings and
fly in search of a mate. Iss was not displeased. The presence of such
a strong and universal instinct could only add potency to the
drawing.

Iss sat in the sorcerer's seat that had
been cut two thousand years earlier by masons who were later blinded
and untongued before they were killed so even their ghosts could tell
no secrets. The seat was little more than a hip-size depression in
the chamber wall, backed with the same pressure-formed granite that
lined the entire structure of the Inverted Spire and then plated with
a sheath of dull iron. Nothing of meaning had been stamped into the
metal, no runes or symbols or legends. The mere presence of the seat
in the apex chamber was legend enough. Iss liked to imagine that it
was the final refinement Robb Claw had commanded his masons to make.
"Cut me a sorcerer's seat that I might sit as I do the work of
gods."

Jabbing his tongue against the roof of
his mouth, Iss prepared himself for the drawing. Even after all this
time he was nervous. He trusted the Inverted Spire and knew the power
of the Bound One as well as he knew his own, but always before taking
the caul fly in his mouth, his stomach clenched as tight as a trap.

True, there was no danger from
backlash. The Inverted Spire had been constructed as an insulator.
The mountain's worth of rock that lagged it, the facing tiles mined
from the destroyed sorcerers' tower at Linn, and the spiking
iron-tipped structure itself combined to make the Inverted Spire a
haven from the outside world. No outside sorcery could penetrate it.
No backlash could break it. No sorcery unleashed within it could be
traced to its source. Any man who drew forth power here was free to
act like a god.

Iss brought the caul fly to his lips.
Even as his mouth opened to accept the bloodmeal, his stomach and
lungs contracted, ready to push the power out. Relaxing his grip on
the tweezers, he laid the creature upon his tongue. It twitched there
for just a moment until Iss bit it in two.

The Bound One screamed and screamed,
his high wavering cry bashing against the walls of the chamber like a
bird trapped in a well. Bitter fluids filled Iss' mouth. Stick legs
scraped his teeth. Wings cracked with the soft snap of broken wafers,
and then all the power of the caul fly, stolen over eight weeks of
living, feeding, and shedding within its host, filled Iss' being like
floodwater, pushing his insubstance out. Iss felt a moment of pure
divinity as he parted from his flesh and bones.
This
was
what it felt like to run with the gods.