A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (15 page)

Only a dead man cannot surprise you.
Raif made a sound in his throat. It seemed the Listener made a habit of such surprises.

The girl had brought him food for the past two nights, and had visited many times to tend the lamp. The long wick needed to be carefully managed so it didn’t die out or smoke, and Raif noticed there were many opportunities for Sila to show off her plumpness, bending and crouching as she fed the little wick-seeds to the oil. She was as unlike Ash as it was possible to be: warm-skinned and warm-eyed, and ready with shy laughter.
Ash is gone. Gone.
So why couldn’t he smile at this girl and enjoy her simple attentions without feeling as if every act of companionship were a betrayal?

Sila took the tray of meat from him, observant of the fact that he had little appetite for it. “Bad?” she asked, making a question of her newly learned word. Dimples appeared like small blessings in her cheeks.

Raif tried to resent her, but could not. What was the Listener thinking, to send her to him? Did the old man seek to make amends over his part in stealing Ash? Or did he think that one girl could make Raif forget another?

Still waiting for an answer, Sila plucked at the golden fur around her collar, all the while frowning doubtfully at the meat. This small sign of her nervousness affected Raif and suddenly he wanted to be kind. Patting his stomach, he said, “Full.”

The girl was quick to mimic him, rubbing the swell of her belly with one hand whilst covering her teeth with the other. “Full,” she said proudly. “Full.”

They sat and looked at each other, shyly at first and then more boldly. Sila was dressed in a close-fitting coat decorated with fish-bone stitching and musk-ox fur, its neck-opening tied back to reveal a necklace of tattooed skin. Raif saw her gaze alight on his frost-scarred hands, and then rise to the lore at his throat. She surprised him by reaching out to touch it.

“Warm.”

He smelled her, and he could not speak. She smelled of seal oil and sea salt and sweet heather, and it made the blood rise in him. Suddenly it was hard to think. She leaned closer to inspect the lore, her breath condensing on the down-facing planes of his face. He could see the back of her neck, where soft baby-hairs had worked free from her braids. And then she was kissing him, gently, tentatively, her lips moist with seal oil. Raif thought he would lose himself. He wanted to crush her to him, to feel her forehead grind against his. Something desperate came alive within him, and with it the real fear that he would hurt her. Not gently, he pushed her away.

She was breathing hard, and there was hurt in her eyes. She touched her lips. “Good.”

Shame and need sent hot blood to Raif’s face. Seconds passed where he fought to regain self-control. He didn’t know what he was doing anymore.
Ash, why did you have to leave me?

Sila waited, watching him. When he made no move to pull her back she unfastened the ties of her coat. Her gaze met his as she bared small brown breasts and laid her hand upon her heart. “Full.”

Ridiculously, Raif felt himself close to tears. He had struggled for so long for so little that he had forgotten what it was to receive a gift. He did not deserve her . . . but that knowledge did not stop him from wanting her. With swift movements he pulled off his own borrowed coat, rough bearded-seal hide that shed many hairs. Pushing the thing away he let her look at him; at the great white scars the Bludd swordsmen had raised outside Duff’s, and the weals and marks of torture he had received at the Dog Lord’s hand. Time and healing had done little to prettify his flesh. Angus Lok’s thick black stitches, that had been made with boiled horse-mane, had long since gone—winkled out by Angus’s diabolically sharp knife—yet their uneven tracks remained puckered in his flesh.

Sila studied him. If he had thought to repulse her he was mistaken, for she looked with curiosity and some knowledge of scarred flesh. When she reached out to touch him he moved back.

“Bad,” he said, laying her hand on the center of his chest.
Watcher of the Dead
. Close to losing himself, he stood. His head was light with confusion and he knew he couldn’t stay here any longer and not seize her. Stumbling, he snatched his coat off the floor and made his way into the night.

The blinding cold could not cool him. He was too deeply roused and shamed. Unable to bear his thoughts, he headed out toward the sea ice, drawn by the terrible noise of it and the great glowing blueness of its mass. Starlight lit a path. Mountains lay quiet to the north, marking territory where no clansman had ever been. The Lake of Lost Men was out there, and beyond that the Breaking Grounds and the pale endless ice of Endsea. Raif thought of Tem. He had taught his sons and his daughter about the land, making maps in the dirt and the snow. His broad fingers would draw lines marking coasts and forests, and sometimes to please Effie he would raise little dirt mounds to represent mountains. Always he spoke of clan.
This is the Milk River that runs into the Flow; when clansmen first arrived on its banks its waters ran milky with stone dust from the White Mines of the Sull . . . Here lie the Floating Isles; when Arlech Dregg, the Restless Chief, first laid eyes upon them he set his men to making boats so he could see the isles first-hand. Yet Dreggsmen are no watermen and the boats they built were green and flawed, and halfway across the channel they foundered and killed all hands . . . Beyond these hills lies the part of the badlands known as the Rift Valley; the Maimed Men make their home there, and send their dead, eyeless, into the Rift.

Raif stepped onto the hard plate of shore ice that rose like a stone pier from the beach. The great body of ice created its own weather, and currents spiraled around him, channeling up his legs with each step. For the first time since leaving the Listener’s ground he felt the cold. Shocked by its depth and fierceness, he hastily tied the fastenings on his coat. Part of the ice had been hacked here, smashed and then picked out for use in the village. All salt had long since drained from the topmost layers, leaving pure freshwater ice. Raif supposed the sea beneath to be saltier for it, its waters concentrating through the long winter to a stock of strongest brine.

It was time to leave this place. The worst of the white weather had passed, and the unclouded sky promised stillness for the first time in many days. Ash had a good head start on him; their paths were unlikely to cross. He needed supplies, warm clothing. A weapon. Guidance to set him on the right track. Too much to ask from strangers, yet he had no other choice. He could not stay here. He had seen the way the Ice Trapper hunters looked at him; he needed to find a place where men would not fear or distrust him.

He needed to be amongst clan.

“The Gods Lights burn this night.”

Raif turned at the sound of the voice and saw the Listener, well wrapped in several shaggy furs, standing behind him on the ice.

“You look the wrong way, Clansman. The Gods Lights always show in the north.”

Raif could find no answer to that, other than to turn his face north. He didn’t see the Lights at first, so slowly did they move, rising behind the mountains like green smoke. Then the horizon itself began to glow. It was easy to believe that a forest fire in some distant and unreachable valley had to be raging to give off such light. Even in the clanholds, where the lights were rarely seen, it was known that strange unclannish gods sent them at times of change. Raif didn’t want to think of it. He said, “When did you return, Listener?”

“Last night.”

Raif should have been surprised, but wasn’t. The little old man was full of tricks. “Did you listen for the seals?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“They did not come.” The Listener moved forward so he stood alongside Raif. His hard, wrinkled face glowed green as the Gods Lights brightened. “They swim west, away from the land, and the fish and krill go with them.”

Sensing an accusation there, Raif said, “I leave tomorrow.”

“Good.”

“I’ll need to be shown the path east.”

“You cannot follow her.”

“I know . . . but I can’t return to my clan.”

“So you head to the badlands?”

Raif nodded. “I go in search of the Maimed Men.”

The sea ice groaned and lifted, as the sea beneath swelled. Somewhere far in the distance two plates ground together, making a sound like the sawing of wood. It did not occur to Raif that the Listener had not heard of the Maimed Men; the set of the old man’s jaw spoke for itself. The Maimed Men were clansmen, most of them. Tem said they had first come into being the year Burnie Dhoone destroyed Clan Morrow out of jealousy for his wife, Fair Maida. Hundreds of unhoused clansmen had nowhere to go, and no clan would take them in for fear of the Dark King’s anger. They headed north, legend said, to the vast bleak spaces of the badlands where time and hardness changed them. No man amongst them was whole; the terrible dry cold and fierce badlands predators saw to that. Every clansman knew they had no honor, for they raided villages, outlying farms, guard posts and hunt parties, and they had no guidestone to offer shelter to the gods. The living was hard, and little was known of them, and Raif thought they would suit him well enough. Traitors and outcasts had few choices.

Raif thought the Listener would say something, some caution, but after many minutes of silence Sadaluk turned for home. “Come,” he said. “The lights burn red and it disturbs an old man to stand beneath them.”

Raif hesitated.

“The girl has gone. I sent her home with the last of the meat.”

Oh gods.
Remembering made Raif want her as strongly as before. His face heated as he wondered how much the Listener knew.

The old man could read thoughts, Raif swore it, for the Listener frowned deeply and shook his head. Unspeaking, they returned to the warmth and the heat of the Listener’s ground.

The first thing Raif noticed was that the mute raven had been returned to its whalebone perch. The big black bird made a retching sound at Raif’s entrance, throwing its head back and forth as if it were a jester playing sick. Raif took it for an insult and scowled.
Insolent bird.
The soapstone lamp Sila had diligently tended for two days was now smoking from lack of care. Raif thought he would try and adjust it, but the Listener brushed him away. “Sit,” he said, pointing to the bench against the wall. “Perhaps the next gifts I offer will not be so willfully refused.”

The old man crouched in the center of the chamber and began pulling away the blankets and grass mats that covered the floor. Clawlike hands pried up four stones that concealed a cache hole. Out of a sense of honor Raif did not watch as the Listener pulled out a long chest and struggled with its metal latches. After a minute of watching shadows, the Listener complained to him, “Can you not see when an old man needs your help?” Chastised, Raif moved quickly to aid him.

The chest was not Ice Trapper-made. Fine wood had been carved and steamed into curves, and filigreed ironwork protected the corners and was mounted as latches on the lid. The latches were badly corroded, and Raif had to take a knife to them to pry them open. At once the smell of dust and age hit him; old parchment, old metal and mold. The Listener drove his hands deep into the opened chest, scattering clumps of parched brown moss that had been used for packing and for keeping the contents dry. “Two things, Clansman. Tell me which is the greater, the arrow or the sword?”

Raif replied without thinking. “The arrow. You can kill at distance without endangering yourself or your companions.”

“So you do not want to look into the eyes of the man you kill?”

Feeling tricked, Raif said, “I would prefer not to kill at all.”

“A wistful sentiment from a man named Watcher of the Dead.” The Listener raised his gaze to meet Raif’s. “Do not look at me that way, Clansman. I’m old enough to have earned the right to speak my mind. You, on the other hand, are at an age when it would serve you well to listen and speak not at all. Now, what if I were to tell you I have an arrow that would be wasted if you used it to kill a man?” The Listener did not wait for an answer. “You would ask what is it for. And I would give the only answer I have: Not many arrows have names, no blacksmith toils months over their making, no jeweler mounts stones upon their hilts, and no fine clansman lovingly oils them each night. Swords have names—Daybreaker, Fear Me, Taker of Lives, Ghostfriend, other such foolishness as that—arrows do not. Well, very few. I possess one of them.”

The Listener’s hand closed around an object in the chest, drew it up through the layers of moss. “Here she is: Divining Rod.”

Bright metal caught the light.
Silver
, Raif thought.
No steel, or white gold force-hardened with arsenic and nickel like the arrows loosed by the Dhoone Kings.
Then he looked more closely, and saw he was wrong. It was the hard, white-blue metal of the Sull. Clans did not know its name or where to mine it. Some whispered that it fell from the stars in great rocks that had to be cracked open like eggs. The arrowhead was three-bladed, slender as if for hitting targets, not game, and held to the shaft not by thread or metal wire like clannish arrows, but socketed by a banded ferrule so expertly tooled that it made Raif’s breath catch to see it. A skeleton ferrule: he’d heard tell of them from Ballic the Red, but never until now had he seen one. Such a socket added stability and accuracy to the arrow, holding shaft and point more surely than a bobbin’s worth of twine. He couldn’t help himself—he had to reach out to touch it.

“Ha!” gloated the Listener, offering it up. “I see you are capable of wanting something without guilt.”

Raif accepted the reprimand; he deserved it. He had acted like a fool and treated Sila badly, and he wouldn’t blame her if she hated him. Yet he hoped she didn’t. For a reason he couldn’t understand her good opinion was important to him.

The Listener pressed the arrow into Raif’s palm. “Take it.”

The instincts of a bowman overcame Raif, and he weighed the arrow in his hand, reading it for draw and height. It was surprisingly light; a windcatcher, Ballic would say, needing little height to aim it. The shaft was strangely made—bone, it looked like, with the kind of inlay work Raif was accustomed to seeing on bows, not arrows. Such tooling, if wrongly done, could greatly affect the arrow’s flight, for any flaw in the shaft would create drag. Yet when Raif ran his fingers over the bone he felt only perfect smoothness. It had once been stained red, for traces of color hid within minute striations in the bone. The arrow’s flights spiraled along the bottommost third of the shaft, and as Raif traced their course he felt his excitement growing.
A spinner.
This arrow would rotate in flight, spinning the moment it left the plate, protecting itself against the random buffeting of air and the gradual curving trajectory of all thrown missiles by its own spiraling motion. He wanted to loose it now, set its point against the riser and release the string. No arrow he’d ever held had been so exquisite.