A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (11 page)

“Effie’s your girl,” Bitty Shank had said to his older brother Grim last night, as they stood in the dry and dusty shadows of the stable block. “She’s clever with her hands, knows how to keep a secret, and she’s sister to a hammerman herself.” Bullhammer and Grim had nodded gravely, the dim glow from the safe lamp sparking strangely off their tarnished plate. A hammerman’s sister was good enough for them.

Iron juice, Bullhammer had explained, was as black as the Stone Gods’ tears and only a little less likely to kill you. It had to be strong enough to stain a hammerman’s teeth, and keep them good and black for a season. “It’s no good using lampblack or ashes—the stain barely takes for a week. And as soon as a man sets to frothing at the mouth his spittle’s likely to run black.” Effie had nodded in understanding. If you were going to stain your teeth so you looked fierce in battle then it would be better if the stain didn’t wash off halfway through. Else you might end up looking foolish instead.

The problem was that Blackhail hammermen hadn’t stained their teeth since Mad Gregor had led three hundred men to their death in the fast-rising waters of the Flow. All but a dozen of their number had been hammermen. Their bodies had been dragged downstream by the spring rush, across the rocky shallows known as Dead Man’s Ribs and over the towering, misty drop of Moon Falls. Effie had heard it said that the river rock had peeled the flesh from their bones, and the only things left for the widows to wrap were white skulls with grinning black teeth.

Effie frowned. It seemed to her that there were far too many clan stories involving skulls and violent deaths. Still, it
was
interesting how afterward no Blackhail hammerman would stain his teeth for fear of riling the gods, and the recipe for iron juice had been lost.

“Sour as piss,” Gat Murdock pronounced to the now-empty sampling cup. “Good enough for a tied clansman—or his wife.” Satisfied, he upended the cup onto a basswood rack and spat to clean his mouth. Like many older clansmen he was missing fingers, yet he moved no slower for it, and sealed the taps and dimmed the lamp as quick as if he had ten fingers, not eight. Effie watched as he moved to leave then stopped himself before reaching the stair. Turning to face the very corner that concealed her, he sent his gaze darting this way and that, checking if he was being watched. Effie held her breath, imagining herself still as the very stone the well was built from.

Long seconds passed before the clansman’s pale-eyed stare passed her by. Satisfied that no one was looking, Gat Murdock reached for the high shelf where Anwyn Bird kept her twenty-year malt and slipped one of the precious wax-sealed flasks under his coat. Effie forgot she was being still as a stone and let her mouth fall open in amazement. Anwyn’s twenty-year malt! Wasn’t there a curse upon it? Anwyn swore that any clansman who drank her malt without her blessing would find himself short of his man parts within a week. Effie closed her mouth. She had learned all about man parts from Letty Shank. Any man who lost them was bound to be sorely displeased.

Uttering a small grunt of satisfaction, Gat Murdock put his foot to the stair and began the short climb from the well. Effie forced herself to listen for the sound of his feet treading the floor above before emerging from her place behind the vat.

Her arm was stiff and she rubbed it softly as she squeezed past copper pipes. Other parts hurt too; places where Cutty Moss’s knife had sunk deep, opening ragged hard-to-heal wounds that still wept water at night. She wouldn’t think about those now, though. She was a clanswoman of nearly nine winters, and men returning from the Clanwars had worse hurts to bear.

She just wished Cutty’s knife had spared her face.

Effie stopped her treacherous hand from rising to touch her cheek.
Wouldn’t have been a beauty even without the scars, Mace Blackhail said so.

Quickly, she turned her thoughts to iron juice. She needed good strong liquor to proof the potion. Anwyn’s twenty-year malt was too mellow—and too cursed. She needed something that could burn a man’s gums, and possibly his tooth enamel as well. Thoughtful, she scanned the flasks on the highest shelf. Will Hawk’s Dhooneshine in its odd sparkly flask stood beside Dagro Blackhail’s Chief ’s Malt, and Shor Gormalin’s Gutbreaker with its crossed swords burned into the wood. So many dead men’s brews. Then she saw it, in the darkest corner, its leather flask hairy with cobwebs, its wood stopper near forced-out with age: Tem Sevrance’s Special Brew. Da must have distilled it himself.

It was late: the roundhouse had grown quiet and Effie knew she’d better hurry, yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself from reaching for Da’s flask. It smelled like him: leathery and horsy. And when she pulled the stopper out she nearly laughed.
This
would do the job. It surely couldn’t kill anyone, not after this long, and Da had been a hammerman himself. He’d help her with blackening his companions’ teeth.

Something behind Effie’s eyes began to hurt, and she recorked the flask with a hard thump and began the short climb from the well.

It was an odd night in the roundhouse, dark and still with only half the torches lit in preparation for the Feast of Breaking. It had seemed like a good idea to gather the ingredients for the iron juice tonight, for few liked to travel the halls on the night the Stone Gods walked the earth. Now, though, as she wound her way through the roundhouse’s crumbling lower reaches, she began to feel little prickles of unease. Her lore felt cool against her skin.

The small granite stone was suspended around her neck once more, heavy as a new-laid egg. Inigar Stoop had found it, clutched in a severed hand. It had been the clan guide’s job to gather the remains of Cutty and Nelly Moss. Back bent double against the wind, wicker basket in hand, he had pried their frozen flesh from the snow. Effie had heard it whispered that nothing whole remained, that the dogs had eaten Nelly’s eyes and tongue and torn out Cutty’s spleen. She supposed she was lucky no dog had swallowed her lore. Inigar would not let her wear it at first. Instead he had taken the lore to the guidehouse where he’d spoken words of power over it, and then laid it atop the guidestone where it could draw strength and be renewed.

It felt different now. Older. Harder. Inigar said lores changed and grew with their wearers; so did that mean she was older and harder too?

Nearing the oil-blackened stair that spiraled up to the clan forge, Effie slowed her pace. Normally she liked this part of the roundhouse, with its low ceilings and narrow ways. It was darker than normal, but she didn’t mind that. No Sevrance had ever been afraid of the dark. Still. There was something else . . . something watchful and waiting. And her lore didn’t move, didn’t push, but something inside it shifted as if a drop of liquid mercury had flash-hardened in its core. She stopped. Listened. Almost she heard something, but it was probably just a fancy. You couldn’t
hear
the sound of a man holding his breath.

Go back, Effie
, said a little voice inside her.
Run to your room and lock the door.

No. She was on a mission for Bullhammer and Grim Shank. And she wouldn’t bolt like a rabbit every time she was afraid. Besides, things were different now she was armed. Bitty Shank had given her a knife. A maiden’s helper, he called it. “As nice a piece of flint as you’ll find strapped to a goodwife’s thigh.” He taught her how to use it, too. It wasn’t like stabbing someone with a sword. A flint knife’s strength was in its blade, not its tip, and unless you fancied the tip breaking off as soon as you hit bone it was wiser to slash than stab. Effie had practiced slashing moldy and worm-holed sheepskins in the tannery, reducing the thick, useless rams’ hides to strips. The knife’s edge had been knapped to a sharpness beyond steel, so thin in parts that light shone through the stone. It was spoils, Bitty said, seized from a group of Ille Glaive trappers caught setting wires on Ganmiddich soil.

Effie touched her waist, feeling for the smooth horn sheath that held her knife. She loved Bitty Shank. He and his brothers would hear no talk of her being a witch.

Careful to let her thoughts go no farther, Effie started up the stair. All was quiet except for the groaning of ancient timbers and stone. Normally the clan forge was kept busy through the night, and although Brog Widdie, master smith and exiled Dhoonesman, would allow no man without an oath to work with hot iron, unsworn smiths and wireworkers would be busy socketing arrowheads and riveting coats of mail.

Tonight was different, though. The Eve of Breaking. All clansmen, sworn and unsworn, were gathered close around the Great Hearth, chanting the old songs. The Breaking was sacred to the Stone Gods. If they were not given their due this night they might send a frost so hard and so long that ice would grow in the heart of all guidestones, and the clanholds would shatter to dust. Castlemilk’s guidestone had taken the frost nearly two thousand years earlier, and that ancient and venerable clan—who had once been great enough to challenge Dhoone for the kingship—had been in decline ever since. Many tales of the clanholds had been lost, even to Withy and Wellhouse who kept the histories, but the story of the Milkstone shattering, of how the Milkwives gathered the broken shards in their skirts and carried them to a place their menfolk would never know, sent chills down every clansman’s spine. All knew that if the women hadn’t hidden the fragments the men would have used them to cut out their own hearts.

Effie touched her little pouch of powdered guidestone, giving the Stone Gods their due.

Beneath her feet the stone steps were slippery, greased by graphite and calf’s-brain oil from the smith’s feet. The air grew warm and dry, thick with the stench of sweat and sulfur and smelted ore. Ahead, the great lead-plated doors were drawn closed. Water casks stowed to either side of the threshold told of the clan’s great fear of fire. The forge bulged out from the north face of the roundhouse, shielded from the core stonework by a dark, airless tunnel called the Dry Run. The main entrance to the forge was cut from the exterior north wall, a towering arch as tall as two men, guarded by doors force-hardened with salt water and studded with steel heads to deflect blades. A clan’s forge was its wealth and its strength. Raw metals were stored here, swords and arrowheads were forged here, and war spoils awaiting refiring and refitting were piled in great stacks along the walls.

Effie walked the length of the Dry Run, then put her hand to the lead door. It was neither locked nor bolted—she hadn’t expected it to be—and half a ton of wood swung easily on hinges that Brog Widdie had tooled himself. The orange glow of the furnace lit the cavernous space of the forge. A circle of anvils dominated the room; horned and blocked and mouse-holed, they sent strange shadows to flicker at Effie’s feet. Tempering baths filled with brine and refined tallow stood warming close to the furnace. Beyond them lay the worktables and work-blocks piled with striking hammers and bow tongs and other vicious-looking tools. Beyond those lay the stores: tubs of oil and slack and pig’s blood, sacks of charcoal, sand and raw ore. Iron rods were stacked as carefully as if they were gold, and cords of quartered lumber were piled like a bonfire to the rafters.

Effie took a step forward, hesitated, then called softly, “Message for Brog Widdie.” No one answered. Something in the far corner, next to the redsmith bench where Mungo Kale worked copper and bronze, rustled and then was still.
Rat after tallow
, she thought, feeling braver by the minute. Letty Shank and Florrie Horn might scream at the very thought of rodents, but Effie could find nothing within her that was afraid of things so small. Quietly, she crossed the circle of anvils and headed toward the stores. One of the tallow baths had claimed a rat. As the temperature from the furnace dropped and the tallow congealed, the rodent had been set in fat. Tomorrow morning one of the Scarpemen would likely scoop it up, roast it in the furnace, and eat it. Everyone knew Scarpes feasted on rats.

As she passed one of the nail-punching benches, she paused to empty a supply of nails from a brass bowl. As the little iron spikes tumbled onto the wood she thought she heard something creak in the Dry Run behind her, but when she turned to look all was still. Probably just a beam settling—yet she moved a little quicker because of it.

The sacks of charcoal were easy to identify, as the pallet they were set upon was furry with soot. The charcoal-burner’s mark was a tree above a flame; Effie noticed it as she unsheathed her knife and set flint to the hemp. The sack split easily and a thick stream of charcoal spilled to the floor. She moved quickly to catch the fine powder in the bowl, marveling at the richness of the charcoal . . . surely the darkest, blackest thing that ever was. If this didn’t stain the hammermen’s teeth then she might as well try to bottle the night sky, for nothing else was darker.

When the bowl was half full she drew it back and let the sack spill until it found its level. Her lore shifted uneasily against her skin, but she was too excited to pay heed. What if she tested a potion now? Did iron juice need iron? Or was it just a name? Yes, she probably needed acid to etch the charcoal into the hammermen’s teeth, but it wouldn’t hurt to try without it first ... and it might save somebody’s gums.
And
, she thought, becoming even more excited,
I’ll test it on one of the shankshounds tonight. Old Scratch won’t mind. His teeth are so yellow and chipped that it really might be an improvement.

Grinning at the thought of a dog with black-stained teeth, Effie set down her knife. She pulled out Da’s flask, uncorked it, and then poured half its measure into the bowl. Crouching by the charcoal sacks, she stirred the mixture with a chip of wood she found on the floor. Da’s special brew darkened in an instant, and a fine black dust rose from the bowl like the opposite of steam. As she stirred she had visions of rank upon rank of Blackhail hammermen, armed and mounted, their hammer chains rattling in a quickening wind, their lips pulled back to reveal night-black teeth. Drey would be one of them, too. And perhaps if she made the iron juice dark enough and he looked fierce enough he wouldn’t have to fight. Perhaps the Bluddsmen would turn and flee rather than raise their axes against him.