A Sword From Red Ice (23 page)

Raina glanced at the door. She heard voices from
outside but couldn't see anything beyond the great crush of clansmen
on the threshold. She heard herself ask in a calm voice, "Do you
know what the wagon's about?"

Corbie shook his misshapen head. "I best go,
Raina. Meet him at the door."

The east wind was howling through the roundhouse
now, pushing men's cloaks against their thighs and blowing out
torches. From her place, three steps up, Raina could see the great
circle of the entrance hall. She watched Corbie navigate the crowd,
listened to the rumble of something heavy approaching.

Suddenly there was a great push toward the door.
Raina thought she heard Mace's voice, but she couldn't be sure.
Clansmen were shouting out the news.

"Bludd rides to Ganmiddich."

"Dhoone is retaken."

Raina's heart beat in deep powerful strokes. A
lamp close by blew out, then another. She smelled the strong black
smoke of extinction. On the other side of the doorframe a conference
was taking place. She knew Mace was there now, for his presence could
be detected in the silences. Men were quiet, listening.

A lone clansman cheered. Another followed, and
soon over a hundred clansmen were shouting, "Kill Bludd! Bill
Bludd! Kill Bludd!"

Mace had pleased them. He must have spoken again,
for the noise quickly died. A group of hammermen broke away and
headed through the roundhouse with purpose. Corbie Meese wasn't one
of them. Raina resisted the urge to run after them and discover what
was happening. She was desperate to know and desperate not to know,
her mind rolling back and forth like a boat in a storm.

Orwin Shank was the next to make his way inside.
His face and ears were flushed. As he crossed the hall he saw her,
but quickly averted his eyes. Like a sleepwalker, Raina began
descending the stairs. Men made way for her, opening up a passage to
the door. She was chief's wife, and sometimes she forgot her value.
Scarpes had no respect for her, but this was a crowd of Hailsmen, not
Scarpes. Walking into the space they created for her, Raina felt the
heat of their bodies. Big, powerful men they were, dressed in black
wool and worn leather, their bodies weighed down with hammers and
longswords, axes and gear belts, knives, ice picks, shovels.

"Do we still ride tomorrow?" she asked
no one in particular.

A dozen replied, "Aye, lady."

Sunlight from the door blinded her. "And my
husband, does he still ride at the head?"

Bailie the Red placed a steadying hand on her
elbow. She had not realized she had begun to sway. "Mace will
ride with the first thousand as planned," he told her in his
rough burr. "The second force will be led by Orrin Shank."

Bailie smells like beeswax, she thought inanely.
Probably uses it to waterproof his bow. She stepped outside. For a
moment she couldn't see anything, so great was the contrast between
the dark, smoky entrance hall and the harsh sunlight of midday.
Man-shapes coalesced from the brightness. The blocklike form of the
war cart came into view. Seen this close it was bigger than she had
imagined, a stovehouse on twelve wheels. The teamster was releasing
the lathered and shaking horses from their yokes.

"Who'll be in charge of defending the
Hailhouse while they're gone?" she asked the nearest warrior.

"Chief gave Orwin the honor."

She did not recognize the young Hailsman's voice,
and did not turn to look at him. Her thoughts were like beads,
connected only by the slenderest thread. So far so good. Orwin Shank
was the best, most logical choice. He would not interfere with her
plans.

When she was ready, she turned her gaze to her
husband. Mace Blackhail was standing by the wagon's front axle,
speaking with two men. One was the Scarpeman Mansal Stygo, who was
never far from Mace's heels. Mansal had killed the Orrl chief with a
hammer blow so hard it had driven Spynie's head into his chest
cavity. A month later Mace had invited Mansal and his crew to
overwinter in the Hailhouse. The second man had his back to Raina. He
had the shoulder breadth of a hammerman, but something in his posture
warned her there was more to know. His full-length cloak was narrow
across the back and oddly formal. The fur collar was a deep,
luxurious brown; she couldn't decide what animal it came from. By
contrast the cloak's hem was in poor shape, tattered and black with
mud. When the stranger noticed Mace's attention shift away from him,
he turned to see who the Hail Wolf was regarding.

Raina Blackhail stared right back. The flesh on
the stranger's cheeks had been scarified and tattooed to create the
illusion of depth. Sunlight disappeared into carefully manipulated
pits in the skin. He was a Scarpe, she saw that now, for black
leather traces were woven into his shoulder-length braids and his fur
collar was the fancy weasel known as mink. He appraised her, there
was no other word for it, looked her up and down and decided what she
was worth.

Mace spoke a word and the three of them moved
toward her. Three Scarpes. One plan. Raina kept her shoulders
straight as the pieces came together in her head. The wagon. The
cloak hem. Mace's face.

"Raina." Mace's voice was tightly
controlled. Beneath the hardened leather carapace of his riding
armor, his lungs were portioning air. "I don't think you've met
Stannig Beade, clan guide of Scarpe and counsel to its chief. He's
brought us a gift from his clan."

Dear Gods. No. Wind knifed across the greatcourt.
Hammer chains rustled, dry snow snaked over the stones. Everything
that was Blackhail was being blown away, and she had been a fool to
imagine that she could be the one to stop it. Raina glanced at the
wagon. The sawn ends of the poison pines were oozing sap. Poor Anwyn.
She had not seen this coming. But the gods had. That's why they left.

Unable to find her voice, Raina nodded at the
stranger with the darkly watchful face.

"Raina." He did not bow; she had not
expected him to. Nor had he offered her the courtesy of "lady."

"Stannig has split the Scarpestone,"
Mace said, raising his voice so all gathered on the greatcourt could
hear. "Today he brings us our half. Blackhail is no longer a
clan without guide or guidestone. For a thousand years we've shared
warriors and oaths with our brother clan, now we share their stone."

Silence followed. The wind blew. And then Mace
Blackhail spoke again. "Stannig will stay in our house until the
Stone Gods return."

The Crab Gate

The Ganmiddich roundhouse commanded a bend in the
Wolf where the river changed course from west to south. Built from
the same green traprock that formed the cliffs and banks of the
river, it sat on high ground above a crescent-shaped gravel beach.
The great dome of the roundhouse dwarfed the east and north wards,
which had been added at a later date. The primary entrance to the
dome was through a pair of ten-feet-high double doors known as the
Crab Gate. Carved from seasoned oak and armored with plates of fossil
stone, the Crab Gate was held to be one of the great wonders of the
clanholds. How the fossils had been fixed to the wood, where they
came from, and what creatures they revealed were sources of wonder
and myth. Marafice had once seen them up close for himself and they
had given him a chill. Segmented eyes, pronged claws, winged fish,
cloven tails, serrated fangs, scaled birds, basilisk spines, kraken
heads: all displayed in deep relief in bone-yellow limestone.

It made for a good show, but not necessarily good
defense. Marafice knew the gates were heavy and resistant to flames,
but he suspected the fossil stone would crack if barraged with
missiles, and double gates, by their very nature, were weaker than
single ones. If he remembered correctly, there were two big couplets
on the interior of each door that were large enough to accommodate
the girth of a hundred-year oak. So a single tree trunk barred the
entrance to Ganmiddich. Marafice saw it most nights in his dreams.

Now, though, looking north upriver toward the
bend, flanked by an army of eleven thousand hideclads, mercenaries
and brothers-in-the-watch, he looked upon the Crab Gate's pale
exterior a quarter-league in the distance and felt some measure of
fear. He did not believe in the God of priests and knights, of
temples and prayer books and a thousand fussy rules, but he did
believe in something. Exactly what was hard to quantify, but if
pressed he'd call it power. He spoke to that power now. Guard me.
Guard my men.

Snow fell as the army of Spire Vanis advanced at
slow march. The wind was from the east and it channeled along the
river and through the bluffs. The Wolf ran shallow here, boulders and
gravel banks slowing the flow. Birches and willows choked the water
margin, and evidence of recent high water could be seen in uprooted
trees, undercut banks and newly exposed stone. The frost that begun
in the early hours of the morning had claimed shallow pools and slow
meanders, coating them with opaque crusts of ice.

Close to midday now, the temperature was barely
warmer. Marafice felt his plate armor sucking away his body heat and
did not much like the thought of donning the birdhelm. Like many in
the lines he was putting it off until they were within fire range.

Shifting in the saddle, Marafice looked back over
the ranks. The rear guard, led by the improbably named Lord of the
Glacier Granges, had cleared the bend and was forming ranks.
Hideclads, Marafice thought with some heat, a man could be blinded
looking at so much steel. Which damn-fool surlord had been
responsible for repealing the Hide Laws, that's what he wanted to
know. The Hide Laws had prohibited private armies from wearing chain
mail and metal plate unless directly under the command of the
surlord. The law had given the hideclads their name. For hundreds of
years the armies maintained by the grangelords to defend their
granges were allowed to armor themselves only in hardened hide. It
had been, as far as Marafice Eye was concerned, a very fine law, and
one which he wouldn't think twice about reinstating. Nothing wrong
with a surlord having the best army. Nothing wrong at all.

Facing forward, Marafice gave the command to sound
the drums. Tat Mackelroy, who was Jon Burden's second-in-command but
today was riding at Marafice's right hand, stood in his stirrups and
bellowed the order down the ranks. Seconds passed, and then the
kettledrums began to sound. Slowly, rhythmically, forty drumbeats
fell in time. The deep hollow booms sent waterfowl into flight and
spooked the horses. Some shied and broke the line. One reared and
threw its rider into a rank of foot soldiers. The teams pulling the
scorpions and the battering ram were unaffected by the noise: they
had been brought in from the south and were trained to stillness in
battle. Marafice had thought his own mount trained, but training and
experience were different things and the great black warhorse was
unsettled.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum. The noise hurt Marafice's
ears.

"Shall I call horns?" Tat Mackelroy
asked. He was a six-year veteran of the watch, an expert
broadswordsman who'd been promoted so quickly through the ranks that
some resented him for it. Mackelroy didn't care. He was too busy
doing his job.

"No horns. Not yet." Marafice glanced
east at the Ganmiddich Tower, perched atop the inch. Old beyond
knowing, it was the tallest standing structure in the clanholds. On
clear nights some said you could see the fire burning in its
top-floor gallery from the far side of the Bitter Hills. Marafice
didn't know about that. He looked and saw a five-sided tower erected
on an overgrown rock in the middle of the Wolf. It was not
constructed from the same traprock as the roundhouse and it did not
resemble any structure built by clansmen. It was occupied, the
darkcloaks had informed him of that. Close to a hundred longbowmen,
mostly Hailsmen, lived in and patrolled the three upper floors.

Today, for them, there would be no going back to
the roundhouse. Last night the darkcloaks had sabotaged their boats.
Marafice could see the boats from where he sat, their keels drawn up
high on the rocky beach. They looked fine, but they weren't. That was
the way the darkcloaks liked to work.

"I won't have them," Marafice had roared
at Iss two months back in Spire Vanis. "They're sly, skulking.
They cannot be trusted. And the men won't stomach them."

"Don't be a fool," Iss had replied.
"Stop thinking like a butcher's son from Hoargate and think like
a man with something to lose. You'll be commanding an army in excess
of ten thousand. You'll be responsible for their food, safety, lives.
You cannot afford to indulge your backwoods notions of what is and
isn't right. Take the darkcloaks and use them. Put them to work, let
them be your ears in the ranks and your eyes in the field. The things
they know can tip the balance; tricks with fire and smoke, snares,
bluffcraft, sabotage. They're trained to see what is hidden:
weaknesses in buildings, concealed doors, animal tracks, strategies,
men. If you must, use them only to gather intelligence. It will be
little, but it may be enough."

"They are sorcerers!" Marafice had
cried, punching his fist against the Blackvault's door. "How can
I look my men in the eye knowing I countenance such foulness?"

Iss waved a pale hand, unconcerned. "Do not
look them in the eye then. A surlord does what is best for a surlord,
not what the majority of his acquaintances decree acceptable. You are
going into Ganmiddich blind, with your enemies beside you. I'd say
you need all the help you can get."

Even then Marafice had not relented. Fear of the
old skills ran deep. There was a dirtiness to them, a sense that once
you used them their stench clung to you and you were lessened in some
essential way. It was only a week later, when Iss had visited him at
the Red Forge and casually thrown a curl of parchment on the table,
that Marafice had changed his mind. "What is that?" he had
barked, unnerved at having the surlord interrupt him as he ate his
dinner of ham and beans.