A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (77 page)

Passing patrols of brothers-in-the-watch, Iss headed in the direction of his private quarters. As always the Bastard Walk, with its hugely curving walls and grotesquely hewn statues, calmed him. This was his domain, and his alone. Only he and the fortress servants ever walked here. Drawing to a halt by the steel-plated door that led to the unused east gallery, he unhooked one of the three keys he kept in a pouch sewn to the inside of his silk robe.

As he waited for Caydis to arrive with the honey he studied the door. The Killhound standing rampant above the Splinter had been stamped into all eight of its metal plates. It had been some time since he’d last opened it—weeks, perhaps even months. What was the use of entering an empty storeroom? The Bound One was failing, useless. If it hadn’t been for the occasional ministrations of Caydis Zerbina he would already be dead.

Still.
Still
. Iss was loath to give him up. A bound sorcerer was not something one disposed of lightly. Their value was high . . . and there were risks.

Iss turned the key. With Sarga Veys gone—the devil knew where—and the Bound One unresponsive, Iss had lost various options. Sorcery wasn’t power in itself, but it did provide the means to achieve it. Iss likened it to one of the light and deadly sickle-knives used by Caydis Zerbina’s people. The blades were specially constructed to be used in the left hand. You could fight without one, using just your sword, but you lost the ability to surprise your opponent. And why wield one blade when you could wield two?

Sorcery had always been the weapon in Iss’s left hand, yet for months now he had been fighting one-handed. Oh, there were the darkcloaks—the surlord’s special force, his spies—but they hadn’t consciously drawn sorcery in centuries, and though they used the remnants of it they did so without acknowledging the source. They threw birds into the sky, waited in alley-ways and listened outside doors, poisoned, bribed, procured, fought with live steel when they had to, and silenced loose tongues with knives: All the while throwing the suggestion of shadows around themselves—a fluttering, an inconsistency of light that could not withstand a hard stare from an onlooker. It was how they got their name: Darkcloaks. They had magic, but it was as insubstantial as the shadows they drew around themselves to enhance their stealth. It was a pretty trick, no more.

Skills such as Sarga Veys and the Bound One possessed were something else entirely. They had the power to hold back nature. There were a dozen things they could do with mist. They could compel wild animals to spy for them, looking out through the uncomprehending eyes of a rabbit or a fox; they could steal into a man’s body and snap his ureter so his urine drained into his pelvic girdle, not his bladder; they could throw a false landscape across hills and plains to confuse a traveler; they could aid or obstruct healing, command shadows, defend themselves with a single thought, and track others of their kind like hounds. Necromancers could hold a man’s soul in his corpse while it rotted. Spellbinders could cast a spell on an object that lasted for thousands of years. Archmages could cloak fortresses, men, and armies. And the Sull maygi could stir time.

This was what Iss wanted. All of it. Yet though many men and women were born with traces of the Old Skills—Iss could name at least ten people in the fortress who had them in some small measure, Corwick Mools and Caydis Zerbina amongst them—very few were born with enough to make them sorcerers.

And Iss knew he was not one of them. That was why he’d bound one to him, a chained sorcerer who would do his bidding.

For nearly two decades he had enjoyed the advantages access to such power brought. Nearly fourteen years ago, when the day came to storm the fortress and overthrow the aging and sickly Borhis Horgo, the Bound One had thrown a shadow over the entire city. And later, during the ten bloody days of the Expulsions, it had been the Bound One who had tracked down the Forsworn knights in their lairs so Iss could send red cloaks to slay them. And so it had continued on over the years: compulsions, far-speaking, ensorcellments. Iss was in little doubt that he would have made surlord without the Bound One’s aid, but it had hastened his rise, and fortified his position in a hundred different ways.

The Bound One had ever been Iss’s sickle-knife, but now the left-handed blade had grown dull.

Iss sighed as he watched Caydis Zerbina approach, holding a cloth tit of honey, a pewter flask and a tiny guarded lamp. “Wrap them for me,” Iss commanded, and waited while his servant detached a length of fabric from his linen kilt and fashioned his surlord a makeshift pouch.

Caydis’s hands were finely shaped, the fingers elongated and capped with startlingly white nails. When he was done, Iss said, “The Eye Men, the ones who follow me day and night. I would prefer to see less of them.”

“Master.” Caydis bent his long gazelle neck.

“A little illness in the ranks would be sufficient.” Iss considered his options. “The flux, perhaps.”

Again, there was another bending of the neck. It would be done.

Iss took the linen pack and the lamp, and passed beyond the steel-plated door and into the unused east gallery. It was dark here, the windows boarded, the torches unlit for over ten years. Pigeons warbled in the roof groins. A fine dust of dried bird droppings and crumbled masonry crackled beneath Iss’s feet. Once the air had held a charge that grew stronger as one approached the interior doorway of the Splinter, but it had weakened to almost nothing over the past six months. Now all Iss felt was a sense of settling, of things drawing to a close.

The door to the Splinter was set in a wall carved with stone reliefwork. The Impaled Beasts of Spire Vanis sat with surprising triumph upon poles, and as always Iss was glad to put the sight of them behind him. Once within the Splinter he adjusted the flame on the lamp. He had forgotten how cold and utterly dark the oldest of Mask Fortress’s four towers could be. Even now, with spring showing in the city as budding trees and thawed lakes, winter held here. Hoarfrost plated the walls just as surely as steel plated the Killdoor. Seven thousand feet below the snow line on Mount Slain, yet the temperature and conditions were the same. Just as lightning rods drew lightning, so the Splinter drew ice.

Iss shivered and moved quickly to the underspace below the stairway where the entrance to the Inverted Spire could be found.

Speaking a word of command he revealed the portal, its gate rumbling back to display a descending flight of steps. He took them with some haste, not wishing to dwell on the weakness he experienced performing a single small act of sorcerery.

The Inverted Spire was calm this day, its winds barely stirring. The small lamp Iss carried lacked the power to illuminate the great chasm at its center. Down the steps wound, past walls ground with lenses of ice and veined with hairline cracks.
Have they been here all this time?
Iss wondered.
These flaws forking through the stone?

By the time he’d finally descended into the first of the round chambers Iss was weary. The thought of having to climb back up disheartened him, and he wished suddenly he had not come. Steeling himself, he passed through the Inverted Spire’s upper two chambers and into the dark well below.

The Bound One stank, not of the foulness of human waste, but of the sharp sourness of old men close to death. He lay in his iron cradle, his arms and feet drawn up close to his belly, his chains wrapped like an umbilical cord around him. He did not move, yet he seemed to for a moment as the lamplight impelled the caul flies crawling upon his body to take flight.

Iss moved closer. The Bound One’s skin had a gray-yellow cast to it, the kind that came with a drawing inwards of the blood. The chafe marks on his wrists were no longer red, but black, and that same blackness had spread like welts around his pressure sores. Iss knelt to touch him, his heart aching softly in his chest. There had always been love between them; some deep, needful breed of it born out of dependency and isolation and the terrible act of Binding. For eighteen years the Bound One had drawn toward his master’s touch, had sought it like a dog seeks affection from its owner. And Iss had always felt the corresponding pull. He felt it now, as he touched the Bound One gently on his cheek.

Nothing. Not even a tremor of acknowledgment or recognition. Iss let the linen pack containing the water and the honey drop to the floor, out of reach. Great sadness filled him. An end was drawing near, but it was surely better this way, letting the Bound One weaken gradually over many days and weeks. Less dangerous. Only a very great fool would forget who lay here. And only a greater one would attempt to end that life by other means.

Iss leant over and laid a kiss on the Bound One’s head. It was over between them. Eighteen years—now this.

With a heavy heart Iss departed the iron chamber, closed the door and drew the bolt.

He waits, waits. Such a small and terrible thing to wait, such a relinquishing of self. Yet wait he must, and he concentrates on moving air in and out of his lungs in small degrees as he listens to the Light Bringer retreat.

He knows he is failing, and sometimes that fills him with such despair that he begs the darkness to take him. Surely he has endured enough. When do you give in and say,
This life is too painful, let me end it?

Not yet
, comes the reply from inside himself, surprising him with its heat.
Not yet, Light Bringer. Not yet.
So he waits and gathers his power about him, and sometimes the moisture in the chamber condenses and rains down upon him and he open his lips and lets its sweetness fall on his swollen tongue.

Not yet.

FORTY-ONE

Desertion

T
he earth tremor in the night had left the dogs uneasy, and the Dog Lord found himself impatient with their fussiness. They had not eaten the horse liver he’d cut up for them this morning, and they’d fought their leashes as he pulled them outside. Damn-fool dogs. So what if the earth was shaking? Did they think themselves safer in the roundhouse, chained to their rat hooks, than here under the open sky? Briefly, Vaylo wondered why no man had invented a dog whip—they worked passing well for horses, by the gods!

“It’s just beyond the basswoods,” Hammie Faa said, leading the way from the Dhoonehouse. “You’ll see it in just a bit.”

Vaylo huffed. Hammie Faa was getting fat. Some people did that, he’d noticed, grew into their names as they matured. Molo Bean had been the same way. His head had started out a normal shape, but somewhere along the way it had developed a certain off-centeredness—a bulbous forehead and a bulbous chin and a concavity in between. Bean-shaped, no doubt about it. The Dog Lord wondered what that meant for him. Quickly deciding it didn’t bear worrying about, he kicked some speed from his dogs and followed Hammie Faa through the trees.

The day was a fine one, despite the violent shake-up in the night. There were clouds, but they didn’t mean anything, just some puffed-up sheep shapes in the sky. The sun was pale and still rising, and there was a tickler of a wind. The bare branches of the basswoods clicked together as they swayed; a dozen of them had been planted too closely and were now competing for the same space. If Vaylo had his way he’d chop them all down and be done with it. The basswood was a Blackhail tree. They hollowed them out and laid their dead in them—perhaps he’d have them felled and sent there as a gift. As always, thinking of Blackhail made the pressure build in his head. Seventeen grandchildren slain. And Blackhail had not paid for it. Vaylo woke every morning into a world where Blackhail had not paid.

Breathing out heavily, he yanked on his dogs’ leashes to bring them into line. Some things a man could not think of and remain sane.

Ahead, Hammie Faa had drawn to a halt by the curiosity he had brought his chief to see. There had been a well at the center of the grove, but Vaylo did not know what it could be called now. The entire bricked well-shaft had popped out of the ground like a cork forced from a bottle.

The Dog Lord felt a chill take him.
We are Clan Bludd, chosen by the Stone Gods to guard their borders.

Hammie inclined his pink face toward the queer cylinder of stone. “Happened in the night. Tremor did it.”

The dogs would not go near it. They were already spooked enough. Aware that Hammie was watching him expectantly, Vaylo kept his expression bluff. “Well, that’s one less place to draw water from, eh? We can always use the bricks to build another outhouse—you can never have too many of those.”

Hammie had been hoping to astound his chief, and Vaylo could tell he was disappointed. Faa men had never learned to rule their faces; that was partly why Vaylo trusted them. Masgro, Hammie’s father, had been a devil of a man, a gambler, a wencher—and straight to the hilt.

Vaylo made an effort. “It’s a sight, Hammie, I’ll give you that. Has anyone else seen it?”

“I told Pengo where it was. He said to fetch you first thing to take a look at it.”

Something about this statement struck the Dog Lord as odd. An instinct he didn’t fully understand made him glance in the direction of the Dhoonehouse. He and Hammie had come about a league east, and the trees and the slight rise in the land prevented him from seeing the domed and gated structure. “I think we’ll head back, Hammie,” he said, crouching to release the dogs from their tethers. “Go!” he commanded them. “Home!”

The dogs raced off eagerly, and Hammie and his chief followed at a brisk pace. Vaylo noted the presence of a knife and sword slung from Hammie’s gear belt. Good. But he’d wished they’d thought to bring horses.

What had been a moderate walk downhill was a climb on the way back, Vaylo swore it. His old Bludd heart was beating harder than it should have, and he felt a weariness that wasn’t solely due to lack of sleep. True, he had been woken at midnight along with everyone else in the Dhoonehold—probably the entire North—as the earth shook and the roundhouse ground and rolled above him. But there weren’t many times when he slept through the night. His body was accustomed to hard use. No. This was something else. An accumulation of worry. Angus Lok’s visit had added to the tally, and now it had reached the point where he could find no restful place in his mind. And when that happened the body suffered.