A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (24 page)

The knight raised his clenched fist. “We search.”

“For what?”

“The city of the Old Ones. The Fortress of Grey Ice.”

Raif felt himself begin to shake, not strongly but intensely, as if something within him were vibrating. As he looked on a wisp of shadowy fluid rolled over the knight’s eye, and he knew it was time to reach for his sword.

The knight knew it too, and drew himself up a fraction against Raif’s coat. Raif hefted the sword, testing its weight. Drying blood sucked at the soles of his boots as he took his position above the knight. He was still shaking, but he didn’t think it was from weakness or fright. Gravely, he raised the point of his sword to the knight’s chest. The knight’s eyes were open, and they were clear and shining, and Raif found a measure of understanding there.

Kill an army for me, Raif Sevrance.

Putting the weight of his body behind the blow, Raif thrust his sword through the heart.

He must have lost time after that, for he could not remember freeing the sword from the knight’s flesh, or closing the man’s eyes, or entering the main hall and taking the purple cloth from the altar and laying it over the knight’s corpse. He remembered only a feeling of terrible weariness and, as he stumbled over a pallet in the main hall, deciding then and there he needed rest. He remembered the luxury of curling up in wool blankets, and then nothing but the deadness of sleep.

When he woke many hours later, sunlight was streaming down on his face. For a long moment he did not open his eyes, merely lay still and enjoyed the play of light and warmth on his eyelids. How had he not noticed such a beautiful thing before? Hunger and the need to relieve himself eventually roused him, and he swung his feet onto the floor and looked out across the hall.

All that remained of the bodies were skeletons and gristle. Longbones were darkly stained, and the tendons still attached at their heads curled strangely in the freezing air. Wisps of smoke rose from the ribcages like fumes. Seeing them, Raif thought he must be the greatest fool in the North. How could he have fallen asleep here? It was madness. And for some reason he found himself thinking of Angus. His uncle had once told him that the best way to stay alive in a hostile city was to walk through its busiest streets jerking your arms and muttering wildly to yourself. No one would interfere with a madman. Perhaps not even fate.

Feeling strangely light-headed, Raif skirted the knights’ remains and made his way outside.

Retrieving his pack near the gate, he decided to walk the short distance to the trees. The sun was low and weak, but it felt good on his back. It felt good also to drink the meaty-tasting water from his seal bladder, and to feast on the Ice Trappers’ peculiar idea of travel food. There were cakes of caribou marrow streaked red with berries, rolled strips of seal tongue, and the last of the boiled auk. Raif sat down amidst the pale gray needles of the dragon pines and ate and rested and did not think. Overhead the sky was the rich blue of twilight, though it was barely midday. An osprey was rising on thermals channeled by the lake, and the warning cries of small birds pierced the calm.

Raif packed and stowed his provisions. He was feeling the lack of his inner coat now, and the bitter cold sank against his chest. He didn’t want to return to the redoubt and had no intention of retrieving his seal coat from its position beneath the dead knight’s head, but he had to know if the knight had been spared the fate of his companions. And he had to bear witness for them all.

In the low light that passed for day the redoubt looked little more than a fortified cabin. Eight men had crossed hundreds of leagues to build here and now they lay dead. What had the knight said last night?
We search.
Raif felt the sadness of those words. And the hope. Grimly, he crossed the defensive ward and reentered the main hall.

The cold, otherworldly odor to which his slumbering body had grown accustomed rose to meet him anew. It was subtly changed now—staler and less concentrated, like smoke dissipating after a fire. The knights’ remains had stained the timber flooring in dark, man-shaped patches. Raif thought he would like to torch this place, but the knights were not clan and he did not know if such an act would honor or further defile them. The marrow had been sucked from their bones, and their skulls were hollow except for the black liquid trickling from their teeth and eye sockets. It was hard to believe these men had been dead less than a day. Raif thought about the blessings he’d spoken over them, and then quickly turned away.
I arrived too late.

The knights’ souls were already gone. Taken.

Crossing to the stone and timber altar, he raised a hand to touch the Eye of God. Its price was unimaginable, so heavy and pure was the gold that surrounded it, yet it seemed to Raif that it would be safe here. It would cost a man much to walk through this hall and steal it in sight of the dead. The crystal in the Eye’s center sparkled so brilliantly Raif wondered if it might be a diamond. But he had little knowledge of gems and doubted if something the size of a sparrow’s egg could be anything other than rock crystal. Hesitating at the last instant to touch it, Raif stepped back. He already knew what it would feel like: ice.

His gaze found the carved wood of the dragon-pine stand, and the book laid open upon it. The book was very old, bound in animal hide that had been inexpertly tanned so that a nap of fine hair remained. The pages were yellow and warped, and their edges had been darkened by countless generations of fingerprints. The book was opened to a charcoal drawing of an icebound mountain and a passage of ornately rendered script. Meg Sevrance had taught both her sons to read, but Raif still had difficulty deciphering the words. They were set down in High Hand, an archaic written form of Common, and they bore little resemblance to anything he’d learned at his mother’s knee.
Mountain
he thought he recognized, and the phrase
North of the Rift
, but the script was too stylized for him to be able to read much more. Frowning, he turned his attention to the drawing. It was of no peak he had ever seen, craggy and spiraling, with nothing green or living upon it.

He thought about turning the pages and seeing what else the book held, then decided against it. It seemed to him that while he stood here, first at the altar, now at the lectern, the hall was changing around him, settling into the silent deadness of a tomb.
This place should be sealed.

Suddenly eager to be gone, he went to fulfill his final obligation.

The small chamber the head knight had fallen in was so cold Raif’s breath whitened as he entered. The water in the font should have been frozen, but it wasn’t. Raif worked to keep his gaze from settling upon the gently rippling liquid. He still did not want to see what it showed.

The knight lay where Raif had left him, his body wholly covered by the altar cloth. Taking the corner of the cloth in his fist, Raif began naming the Stone Gods.
Ganolith, Hammada, Ione, Loss, Uthred, Oban, Larannyde, Malweg, Behathmus. Please may this man be whole.

A sharp tug on the cloth was all it took to reveal the knight. The livid pink flesh of a frozen corpse met his gaze. Plump flesh, whole and at rest.

Raif closed his eyes. He could find no words to give thanks, and as he let the cloth float to the ground, something wound tight inside his chest relaxed.

I have done no harm here.

It was a comfort he took with him as he passed through the redoubt and continued his journey east.

TWELVE

Fair Trade

“Y
ou’d better move faster next time, you big ox, or I’ll take the legs right off you.”

Crope cowered by the roadside, waiting for the wagon train to pass. The head drayman had a whip, and Crope’s gaze stayed upon the six-foot curl of leather until it was nothing more than a line in the distance, and the mud flung up by the wagons’ wheels had settled once more upon the road. He did not like whips, or the men who wielded them, and the dread beat hard in his chest.

It was morning and it was icy cold, and he had thought to enter the next town and trade his goods for warm soup and crusty bread, but the drayman and his wagon train were headed in the same direction, and Crope feared to have that whip raised against him.
Stupid, thick-headed fool. I always said you had no guts.
The bad voice made him climb from the ditch and brush the mud and twigs from his coat. A waystone marked a fork in the road ahead and since he could think of nothing better to do he headed toward it.

His feet hurt, for although diamond-miners’ boots were made sturdy and tipped with bronze to deflect glancing blows with an ax, they were not meant to be walked in. Yet he had walked in them now for many days—exactly how many he could not say, for the numbers kept getting muddled in his head. Very long, it seemed. Past frozen lakes boiling with mist and queer little villages where men armed with pitchforks and cudgels had lined up along the roadside until he’d passed. Always the mountains followed him, a world of peaks rising sharply to the south. It was cold in the shadow of their snowy slopes, and the wind blowing off them shrieked like pack wolves at night. He did not like to sleep anymore. He took shelter in ditches and abandoned farm buildings and once in the rubble-filled shaft of a dry well, but he could never get warm or feel safe. The bad voice always told him he’d picked a poor place to rest and as soon as he closed his eyes the slavers would come and chain him.

Crope shivered. He missed being in the pipe. Men knew him there, and no one looked at him with mean eyes and shouted bad things. He was giant man, and when a hard wall needed breaking everyone knew to call upon him. Now there were no walls to break, and after seventeen years of wielding an ax—first in search of tin, then diamonds—he did not know what he was good for anymore.

Arriving at the waystone, he knelt on the roadside and brushed the snow from the worn, thumb-shaped marker. He could not read the words scored into the stone’s surface, but he recognized the arrows and signs. One arrow pointed due north, and there was a number with several slashes marking a great many leagues by it, and a seven-pointed star atop that.
Morning Star
, Crope thought, a small flush of satisfaction rising up his neck. Bitterbean said that Morning Star was two weeks west of the pipe. Now he was north of it . . . which meant he’d traveled quite a way. The second arrow pointed south-west, and the number alongside it was even longer than the first. A dog’s head surmounted the point, and Crope tested the image against his knowledge of the land.
Dog . . . Dog Lord . . . Clan Bludd.
No, all clans lived to the north, everyone knew that.
Wolf . . . Wolf River.
No, Bitterbean said that was north, too.

Suet for brains. Wouldn’t remember your own name if it didn’t rhyme with rope.
Crope’s shoulders sank. The bad voice always knew what he was thinking. It made him feel small, but it also made him try harder, and he frowned and concentrated as fiercely as he could.
Dog . . . pup . . . hound. Hound’s Mire!
That was it. Hound’s Mire.

Slapping a hand upon the waystone, Crope raised his great weight from the road. His back ached in the deep soft places where his ribs met his spine. Diamond back, Bitterbean called it. Said that once a man had dug for the white stones his bones knew it for life.

Turning slowly, he surveyed the surrounding land. Ploughed fields lay to the north, their furrows tilled for onion and turnip planting come spring. A small flock of black-face sheep was nosing through the snow close to the road. The town lay to the west, its buildings raised from timbers and undressed stone. Most of the houses had thatched roofs, but one or two were tiled with slate or costly lead. Crope had traveled enough with his lord to know that money lay beneath such roofs, money and comfort and hot food. His stomach rumbled. The last thing he had eaten had been a meal of six stolen eggs. He felt bad about that—though the farmer he had taken them from hadn’t known enough about hens to cut off their wattles and combs in such a climate. Some of the hens had gotten frostbite, for they were tender in those unfeathered fleshy parts, and Crope feared the black rot might set in. He would have liked to stay and tend them, but he could not ignore the call of his lord.

Come to me
, he commanded, his once beautiful voice cracked and raw. He was trapped in a dark place, broken and hurting, and he needed his sworn man to save him. How Crope knew this he could not say. He had dreamed during the night spent in the dry well, a strong and terrible dream where flies broke free from his living flesh and shackles circled his wrists. Suddenly there was iron, not stone, beneath him and the darkness was so deep and black it felt like cold water upon his skin. He woke up shivering, and as he blinked and worked to still his racing heart his lord’s voice sounded along the nerve that joined his ears to his throat.
Come to me
, it said. And Crope knew he must.

Eighteen years had passed since the day in the mountains when his lord’s burned body was taken from him by men wielding red blades.
Unhand him
, a cold voice had commanded.
If you fight you’ll die.
Crope remembered the man’s pale eyes and the hairless shine of his skin. Baralis’s body was bound to the mule, his bandages wet and stinking. The fever was upon him and he had not spoken in three days. The left side of his face was burned and his hair and eyebrows were gone. Crope feared for his lord’s life, and doubted his ability to save him. It was one thing to heal creatures. Another to heal a man. The rider with pale eyes commanded his red blades to circle the mule, and then spoke again to Crope.
Your lord’s so close to death I can smell it. Fight and the struggle will kill him—don’t make the mistake of guarding a corpse.

But Crope had fought anyway, for he could not abandon his lord. He remembered the pain of many cuts, the laughter of the red blades, and the taste of blood in his mouth. Still he fought, and he hurt many men, dashing their bodies onto the rocks and ripping their arms from their sockets. He could see the fear grow in them. They had thought him simple, but they did not know that a simple man with one thought in his head and one loyalty in his heart could be transformed into a force of nature. Crope felt his own strength burn like a white light within him, and when a mounted red blade charged him, he stood his ground, waited until horse breath puffed against his eyes, fixed his hands upon the stallion’s neck and wrestled the creature to the earth.