A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (74 page)

Maimed Men grunted at this. Already, tension was mounting. A few men were squatted around their packs, casting blocks. Gambling was normally serious business for the Maimed Men, and disputes and fighting common, but this time the gamblers were subdued, their gazes flicking to the setting sun more often than to the faces of the wooden blocks. Stillborn and Addie were speaking quietly, Addie gesturing northward with his fist. Moodie had folded and stowed his scarlet cloak, and was fixing a plain gray one around his throat. A mine was no place for finery.

“Tonicker?”

Raif looked over his shoulder to see Yustaffa walking toward him, holding out the hollow stopper of a jug. The fat man’s eyes were twinkling. The very things that made other men nervous seemed to delight him. Raif shook his head; he wanted no malt.

“Your loss.” Yustaffa held the stopper to his lips and drank. “Quite a bite.” He sent a hand questing inside his pieced-fur tunic. “How about something to eat instead? I’ve some bannock—stale as stones, sadly, but you can always nibble around the blue bits—a little pot of sotted oats, and a few wilting leeks.”

“Nothing.”

The word had a hard edge, and Yustaffa ceased searching his tunic for items they both knew weren’t there. Reciting the names of clan foods was just another of the fat man’s taunts. Yustaffa smiled, sending cheek fat up to eclipse his eyes. “You’ll be hungry later.”

“I’ll be many things later. Hungry isn’t one of them.”

Yustaffa beamed at this as he walked away. “Remember,
Azziah riin Raif
. It’s the excitement I wish to share, not the danger.”

Oh gods.
Sometimes Raif felt like a joint of meat on the fire; men kept prodding him to test for doneness.

As the sun sank below the cloud cover he loaded and saddled the pony. It was going to be one of those showy sunsets where the sky turned orange and pink. The wind was picking up, and he stood by his pony’s head and let the gusts numb him. Time passed, and the sky flared like a fire, and the Maimed Men gathered in a group to watch it, and as soon as the sun disappeared beneath the horizon they mounted their horses and rode west.

Raif led the way. He knew of a game track here, yet had decided against taking it. All known tracks were a risk, and the guarantee of a smooth ride didn’t mean as much when the snow had shrunken back and you could search the ground for yourself.

The wind brought them sounds from the shanty well before they approached it. A hammer striking stone rang clear, and the
snick
of a latch as something was bolted away for the night. Raif could smell the smoke now, a pitchy, mineral scent that did not come from wood. Timber fit for burning did not grow in the balds, and the miners burned fuelstone or turf.

The same wind that brought the scents and smells of the shanty toward the Maimed Men blew signs of their own approach away. When they reached the second hill, Raif decided to hold their course and keep the wind in their faces. He was calm except for a murmur in his heart that sounded between beats. The lack of cover worried him, and with every step he took he expected to hear a warning cry of discovery.

Just before the raid party crested the second hill, Raif slowed them. The shanty lay in the valley beyond and they had to decide how best to approach it. Even in the darkness Raif could see the telltale signs of mining: the sunken, undermined slopes, the heaps of slag, the exposed earth where pumped mud and water had stripped away the grass.

When the last of the Maimed Men had gathered about him, Raif said, “We’ll work our way down and around. Cresting the hill’s too big a risk. If I was the Lode Master I’d have an archer train his arrow on that ridge.” He had expected a fight—he was asking them to travel an extra league out of their way—but the Maimed Men merely nodded their assent, and he wasn’t sure how this made him feel. “The Bluey’s down there,” he continued, nodding toward the mine valley. “We’ll skirt its banks and approach the shanty from the west. They won’t be expecting anyone from that direction.”

“The wind’ll no longer be in our favor if we move west,” Moodie said.

“Then we’ll have to be quiet.”

“And not fart,” Stillborn added.

Raif threw him a look of gratitude. It might have been a poor joke, but it
was
an endorsement. In a choice between keeping the wind and cresting the hill, or losing it for the chance of taking the miners by surprise Stillborn was with Raif Sevrance.

The roundabout descent took an hour. At the halfway point the shanty and the mine lake became visible below them. The shanty was a collection of squat stone cottages built a short walk east of the mine. Orwin Shank used to say they were so small and ill-constructed they looked like outhouses. Which was strange really, Raif considered, as the miners had to possess considerable skill when it came to stone. They knew how to cut, brace and move it, yet lived in unmortared, poorly chinked shanties.

Some of the cottages were lit, others not. Tracks worn in the soft mud led to and from the entrance to the mine. Black Hole was just that: a hole in the hillside, braced with squared-off timbers. The mouth was about six feet high and the same wide; sufficient for ponies and their muck carts to pass through. Two lamps burned at either side of the mouth, and a third, more diffuse source of light came from a vent shaft located a few feet farther up the hill.

The Bluey was a lake wholly created by pumped mine-water. It was too dark to see its color now, but Raif and Drey and the two youngest Shank brothers used to marvel at its unnatural hue. Its water was the same vivid blue-green as weathered copper. No animal would drink from it, and any birds that landed on its surface soon took off for fairer waters. It was, as far as young boys from Blackhail were concerned, a splendid place to swim.

Raif thought about that now as he led his party around its southern shore. Between drinking Tem’s home brew and swimming in the Bluey it was a wonder he and Drey weren’t dead.

He killed his smile before it could warm him. Memories of Drey had no place here tonight.

The wind was blowing from behind them now, and they slowed their pace as a precaution. The mud helped, muffling hoofbeats, but bridle fittings could not be jounced. Addie was already on his feet, his shared mount abandoned. The outlander had fallen back about thirty paces, and no one seemed concerned with hurrying him up.

As they neared Black Hole more lights went out in the shanty. Raif slid Tanjo Ten Arrow’s Sull bow from its makeshift case of coarse sacking. The varnished wood felt cool and glassy. His gaze swept in a quarter-circle back and forth, from shanty to mine, mine to shanty. When he perceived a heart beating in the darkness he did not hesitate: simply put metal to the riser and released. The arrow sped east like a night hawk, silent and deadly. Even before the rest of the raid party realized what had happened a miner lay dead.

“Raif?” asked Stillborn.

Raif spat to remove the taste of sorcery from his mouth. He could not explain to Stillborn, Addie and the rest that he had perceived a heart, not a man. Nor could he explain that the heart’s rhythm had undergone a swift change, accelerating from a steady pulse to a jerky gallop as its owner spied a movement along the lake. Raif’s arrow had cut off the miner’s cry of warning . . . but he couldn’t explain that either. “I saw eye whites,” was all he said.

Stillborn delayed his answering nod long enough for Raif to know that the Maimed Man suspected more.

Raif spoke hastily to head off Stillborn’s thoughts. “There’s a dead man at the mouth of the mine. We’d better get started before he’s found.”

You could tell the Maimed Men weren’t clan, for they accepted this without question and drew weapons. Stillborn released the Forsworn sword from its sheath, its edge glimmering softly. Addie slung a thick eweman’s flatbow across his back, leaving his weapon hand free for his longknife. Moodie brandished a bell-bladed ax, the kind meant for throwing. Raif left his borrowed blade were it was, choosing to keep his hand on his bow. Kicking the pony forward, he set his sights on Black Hole.

All was quiet. Mist had begun to peel from the lake and was moving east with the wind. Something about it struck Raif as strange, but he couldn’t decide what and he dismissed it from his mind. The murmur was still sounding between his heartbeats, and he was aware of the need to think only in the now. When the cry came he was almost expecting it.

“Raiders! Raiders at the mine!”

As the raid party mounted its charge on Black Hole, Raif loosed another arrow. It occurred to him that Traggis Mole must have known all along that this raid could not be carried out by stealth. The Robber Chief had dealt lives, hoping for a return in gold.

Ahead lights were being struck in the shanty. Shouts sounded. An arrow whistled past Raif’s ear. Two miners raced down the mud tract that ran between Black Hole and the cottages. Addie Gunn picked one off with a shot to the thigh; Raif took the other with a shot to the heart.

Stillborn and the other bladesmen in the party bore down on Black Hole, Raif and Addie covering them. Raif slid down from his pony. The mist was rapidly thickening, and he could see Addie squinting into it to close a shot on a miner who was running down the hillside toward the mine. Addie released the string of his flatbow but his vision had failed him and the arrow went wide.
He doesn’t know it
, Raif realized with a thrill of fear, as he watched the little cragsman nod to himself and move on to another target.

The mist. Addie couldn’t see through he mist—none of them could. Raif couldn’t. He couldn’t see men or landmarks . . . but he could perceive hearts. He hadn’t seen the miner escape Addie’s shot, he just knew that the miner’s heartbeat had continued on uninterrupted.

Raif took a breath, made a decision. “I’m going into the mine.”

He hardly cared if Addie heard him. He simply knew that he couldn’t continue to stand here and pick off men through the mist. Three dead so far by his hand.
Miners
, he told himself.
Miners.

Stillborn and five other Maimed Men were battling to gain entry to the mine. Miners, the skin on their faces rutted with huge pores, the breath wheezing in their throats, had formed a defensive line around the mouth. They wielded pickaxes and hammers and had claimed the high ground of slag that had been heaped against the entrance. Raif slid the Sull bow into the case on his back and drew his sword.
It’s time you learned how to kill someone and look them in the eye.

The Listener’s words tumbled crazily in Raif’s head as he joined the Maimed Men. The fighting at the mouth was savage and ungainly. Although the miners had the higher ground their weapons were not suited to close-quarter combat. Stillborn was leading the assault, his seamed faced red with fury, the pearly tooth at the base of his neck snapping as if it wanted to bite. The Forsworn sword screeched as it slid along the poll of an ax. Raif thought he saw the curl of iron as the sword shaved the ax blade. Other Maimed Men were following Stillborn’s lead, fired by his aggression. Linden Moodie threw his ax and it sank deep into a miner’s face, cutting his mouth and nose in two. As he fell he caused disruption in the line as some miners moved to catch him and others shoved him aside to fight.

Raif spotted an opening. Springing forward, he raised his borrowed sword and, guiding it through a space just vacated by a miner’s hammer, thrust the point hard into a man’s hand. The man had been helping Moodie’s victim to the floor, and he dropped the body and shrieked in pain. Seconds of chaos followed as one dying man and one wounded man blocked the miner’s line.

The murmur in Raif’s heart was deafening now. When a rock hammer swung toward his neck he did not hear it coming, and only Linden Moodie’s newly drawn sword stopped him from taking a mortal blow. Moodie’s weapon was an old-fashioned broadsword with a single edge, black as iron and heavy as a log. It bent as it absorbed the hammer blow, but did not break.

The miners were losing ground. Not one of them could stand against Stillborn. His fury was relentless, and while his sword was in motion he raged at them. “Come on, pretty boys! Here’s your chance to take me, big ugly bastard that I am.”

Once he’d started spotting openings, Raif couldn’t stop. In a way it was like watching Yelma, waiting to see where she’d swing. The miner’s line was crumbling, and there was dead air between the men. Raif moved in and out of it, spiking elbows and knees and necks. Fighting miners wasn’t the same as fighting sworn clansmen. The battle fury wasn’t there. One wound was enough to discourage them.

Finally the line broke, and the miners began to scatter. Behind him, Raif was aware of Addie picking a few of them off with his bow. Stillborn chased one man down and put a sword through his guts, and the sight of that made the other Maimed Men sober up. Breathing hard, they lowered their weapons, some bending to wipe the blades on the bodies of dead miners. Half a minute passed while they got their wind back. One Rift Brother, a big southerner with a bald head, had a nasty-looking gash in his forearm where the edge of a pickax had fallen. The ragged hole was full of blood.

Raif wiped sweat from his eyes, and his palm came back black with mud. His heart would not calm down. He wondered where the outlander was, for he had not seen him during the fighting. Yustaffa was there, but he had kept to the edge, claiming something about the miners possessing no swords for him to break. Still, there was blood on his curved scimitar, and his chest and belly heaved as he pulled in air.

The mist had turned stringy and was receding. Raif could see all the way back to the shanty now. All was quiet as miners returned home to nurse their wounds.

“Right,” Linden Moodie said. “First things first.” He held his bent sword blade up to the lamplight. “Anyone got a spare?”

The Maimed Men managed a kind of groaning laugh. Stillborn held out his longknife by the blade for Moodie to take.

“Gully. Kye. Hold the entrance. Rest of us’ll take a look inside. If one of those miners as much as looks at you the wrong way, holler like you’re on a hot spit. D’you understand?” Moodie paused to let the two Maimed Men nod. Satisfied, he told Addie to fetch one of the lamps hanging from a nail on the upright bracing timbers, and then lead the way into Black Hole.