A Sword From Red Ice (38 page)

Spying a T-junction ahead, Raina took a moment to
rest the weight and run over the directions in her head. She did not
want to make a wrong turn. Effie Sevrance had shown her this place.
That girl knew the roundhouse like the back of her hand. Strongrooms,
crypts, wet cells, mole holes, clay pits, ice pits, well heads,
dungeons: Effie knew all the dark and secret spaces beneath the
roundhouse. She would go missing for entire days and no one, not even
her brothers, could find her. When she finally emerged, blinking and
baffled at all the fuss, she would say simply, "Sorry. I
forgot." Raina had come down hard on her after the time she'd
gone missing for three whole days. "You will stay here in my
chambers, within my sight, for the next ten days. And you'll spend
that time composing apologies for all those you have worried and
inconvenienced." Poor Effie had done just that.

Raina became aware of the water in her boots,
lukewarm and turgid, congealing like jelly. Effie was alive; she had
to be. Raina was sure she would know if it wasn't true. A messenger
had come from Dregg only two days ago, and the word was still the
same: no sign of the cart containing Effie Sevrance, Clewis Reed, and
Druss Ganlow. Raina understood that something must have happened on
their journey—a detour, a mishap, a mistake—but it didn't
mean that Effie was dead. Just waylaid.

Breathing heavily Raina took the turn. How am I
going to tell Drey? She had put off sending a message to Effie's
brother three times now. Between his responsibilities defending the
Crab Gate and his heartache over his brother's treason, Drey Sevrance
had enough on his shoulder. Besides, she owed it to him to deliver
the news in person, to look into his eyes and accept the blame. I was
the one who thought Effie would be better off at Dregg.

Besides, Drey was gone now, called to war. It was
not a good time to give a Hailsman bad news. The rumors from
Ganmiddich were worrying: whispers of city-men armies on the march
from the south whilst Bludd forces were cracking down from the north.
Hailsmen would die. Drey might die. If the gods truly loved her Mace
Blackhail would die.

Raina shivered at her own coldness. Her clan was
marching south to defend the Crab Gate, and here she was wishing that
some steel-plated city man would thrust his blade through her
husband's heart. What was it Bessie Flapp always said? Be careful
with wishes. Once in a blue moon a god will grant them and show us
just how selfish we are.

Bessie was right. The clan would not benefit from
losing its chief. Not now, with wars against Dhoone and Bludd to be
fought. It wasn't even certain that she, Raina Blackhail, would
benefit from her husband's death. If Mace were to die in battle his
title would be up for grabs. She had told exactly two people of her
plans to be chief—Orwin Shank and Anwyn Bird—and their
support, while gratifying, was hardly enough to claim the prize.
Anyone with enough jaw could step ahead of her.

Shaking her head in frustration, Raina set the
matter aside. She could not afford to be distracted. Her destination
was drawing close and if she wasn't alert she would miss the
entrance.

After Effie's three-day disappearing act, Raina
had forced the girl to show her the paths she took below the
roundhouse. That way, if Effie ever went missing again, Raina would
know exactly where to find her. Effie had frowned and tutted and
looked critically at Raina, before finally saying, "It will ruin
your dress."

A ruined dress was a small price to pay for an
education. Effie moved around the roundhouse like a mole in a set,
diving beneath footstones and through holes in the walls, and
scurrying between cracks. Raina had been afraid to blink lest she
loose sight of her. She had still been afraid of rats back then, and
remembered getting cross and a little bit shaky and commanding Effie
to slow down. Still, it had been worth it. Blackhail was the oldest
clan in the North and it had the oldest roundhouse, yet most of the
time when you were aboveground you didn't see its age and its
history. Belowground was different. There were no plastered panels or
tapestries concealing the rough stone walls, no wooden boards laid
over floors. No chief, dissatisfied with what he saw, had ordered its
halls to be knocked down and rebuilt. The underlevels of the
roundhouse had been left alone and disregarded. Oh some clansmen
stubbornly maintained cells here and the great open space of the
cattlefold was still in use, but mostly this was dead space. Rats
swam in the standing pools. Bats nested overhead between the ceiling
groins. History lived here, quiet as dripping water.

If she had taken a left turn instead of a right
one at the T-junction Raina knew that she would have ended up in a
room full of grave holes. Nearly two hundred people had been interred
in the dome-shaped chamber, their bodies inserted head first into
narrow, deeply dug holes. Stones so heavy Raina wondered how they had
been transported here capped every grave, and if you walked into the
room with good lighting you could discern a pattern in their
placement. The stones formed a map of Bannen's clanhold.

Fifteen hundred years ago the great Bann chief
Hector Bannen had launched a surprise assault on the Hailhold.
Blackhail was in decline and infighting had left it vulnerable;
Hector had seen an opportunity and seized it. That wasn't his sin
though, and no one judged him for it. No, what Hector had done to
deserve being buried on his head along with his two hundred best
warriors was break his oath to Blackhail. Only five years earlier
Hector had sworn allegiance to the Hail chief Dowerish Blackhail.
Dowerish was still chief at the time of the assault—though his
younger brother Eagon was pursuing that position for himself—and
with a cleverly staged mock-surrender Dowerish had lured Hector's
front line into the roundhouse, cut them off, and then cut them down.

It had not been a proud moment for either clan,
and most current histories did not include it. But the stones did not
lie. Raina had stood and watched as Effie Sevrance skipped between
them, attempting to locate the stone under which Hector Bannen had
lain for fifteen hundred years.

Feeling her thigh muscles begin to shake, Raina
picked up her pace. The lode was digging into her back and it was
becoming difficult to inhale two full lungs of air. She couldn't go
much farther. Where was the opening?

A breeze hitting her cheek made her turn to look
down a corridor. Iron bars, thickly crusted with rust, flickered in
the light from the safelamp. Down that way lay Blackhail's ancient
and derelict dungeon, the Hellhold, and that meant she was getting
close. Another breeze confirmed it: the narrow passage to the left
led to the chief's chamber. Effie said it didn't look like it would,
but if you took the ramp instead of the stairs it led straight to a
secret entrance. Raina shook her head. How could Effie have possibly
learned such a thing?

Taking small, slow steps through the water Raina
began to study the sandstone walls. Every few paces brick stanchions
stood out from the stone at right angles, bracing the great weight of
the roundhouse. The shadows and hollows they created had to be
carefully inspected. Not all sunken panels were as they seemed.

Spying the faint outline of a palmprint on an
inset block of stone, Raina halted. This was it. She placed her hand
on the palmprint and was glad to see it matched perfectly—no
one else had been here since Dagro's death. Pressing firmly against
the stone, she pushed her hand sideways and drew the stone aside. It
was a tile set on a track lubricated by superfine sand. Once it was
in motion it moved with ease. A line of sand spilled from the edge of
the track as air trapped in the darkness for five months rushed
through the opening.

Am I doing the right thing? she wondered, knowing
there was no one to give her an answer. Sometimes she imagined there
weren't any right answers, just things men and women did and the talk
they used to justify them. Could she justify this then? Yes, she
could.

The opening was at hip height and Raina realized
she could not climb through it with the load on her back, so she set
down the safe-lamp and shouldered off the pack. It was a lot heavier
in her arms than it had been on back and as she lifted it through the
opening her arm muscles wobbled. Quickly, she lowered the pack to the
ground.

The water in her boots ran up her thighs as she
hiked into the room. It was not a pleasant sensation. By some
unexpected piece of luck the ground here was dry. Good. Turning, she
slid the tile facade back in place and then took a moment to enjoy
the relief of no longer bearing a five-stone weight on her back. She
would pay for it tomorrow, but right now she felt strong and capable.

She, Raina Blackhail, had carried the largest
remaining piece of the shattered Hailstone to safety whilst thirty
feet above her Scarpemen were working to grind the remains down to
nothing and dump them in Cold Lake.

It was an outrage and she was powerless to stop it
and the only way she had of fighting back was to steal a piece of the
stone before it was destroyed and hide it in a place where Scarpes
would never find it. Here, in this ancient strongroom outfitted by
the Silver chief Yarro Blackhail to conceal his treasures, was where
the last piece of Hailstone would come to rest.

Raina did not know much about the gods, had never
understood their secret motives, and had not once in her
thirty-three-year life felt touched by them, but she had been moved
to act by a strong sense of wrongness. Stannig Beade, the new clan
guide from Scarpe, had not wasted any time asserting his power. "The
Hailstone is dead," he had told the crowd assembled on the
greatcourt five days back, "and just like a corpse we must mourn
and bury it."

The word bury had been a mistake. This was
Blackhail, not Scarpe, and a Blackhail corpse was left to rot above
ground in hollowed-out basswoods, and the crowd had grown restive.
Stannig Beade had a sharp eye and a subtle mind and had quickly
realized his mistake. "Just as a slain Blackhail warrior is left
in sight of the gods, we will do the same with the stone. We will
grind it down to powder and scatter it over the earth. I know it is
hard to hear. I look before me and see good men and women who loved
the Hailstone like a god. But make no mistake, the Hailstone was
never a god. It was a place where the gods rested, and now it has
been shattered they have nowhere to dwell when they come to
Blackhail. Do you want that, Hailsmen and Hailswomen? Do you want the
Stone Gods to pass by your roundhouse and your clan?"

No they had not, and many in the crowd began to
nod their heads in agreement. Stannig Beade was a clever speaker; his
voice had been sharp and rasping, but his words had got him exactly
what he wanted.

Already he had made a lie of them. The remains of
the Hailstone were being dumped in Cold Lake, not scattered on open
ground as he had claimed. The first cartload had been hauled west
yesterday at dawn. Raina had seen it leave. She had asked questions
and got no answers, so she had saddled Mercy and followed the tracks
left by the cart. Tarp had been roped over the rubble, but a wormhole
in the cartbed leaked dust. Raina was not given to fancy, but there
had been a moment when she had first spotted the trail of granite
powder lying lightly amid the yellow winter grass where she felt as
if the Hailstone was letting her know where it was and what she must
do.

The trail of Hail dust led all the way to the east
shore of Cold Lake. She had watched from a careful distance,
concealed by the boughs of a two-year hemlock, as the Scarpeman
driving the cart had backed the bed up against the lake, released the
tailgate and let the cart roll down to the shore. The rubble had gone
crashing into the water. Raina had not waited to see the dust cloud
settle and had promptly turned Mercy and galloped home.

At first she had wondered about the lie. Why would
Stannig Beade risk being discovered in such an obvious deception? The
answer came when she got back, and it surprised her. There were
people in the roundhouse—Hailsmen and Hailswomen—who were
already aware of what Stannig was doing. Merritt Ganlow was one of
them. "Oh come on, Raina," the head widow had said after
Raina informed her of what she had seen. "Of course the
Hailstone was never going to be scattered—it'd cause dust
storms for a week. Best place for it is the lake. That way it'll stay
in one place. Whole almost. Stannig told me that after he made the
announcement to the clan he spent time with Scarpestone, alone, and
the gods told him he'd made a mistake. The Hailstone wasn't a corpse
and should not be treated like one. The remains should be shown
deeper respect."

Raina had actually laughed, a bitter sound not
much to her liking. "You don't actually believe that, Merritt?
Stannig Beade doesn't care about the Hailstone. He wants to see it
destroyed so thoroughly it can never be resurrected, and all its
power becomes his."

Merritt Ganlow had jumped on her words. "The
Hailstone is destroyed. He didn't do that. We did, as a clan. All
Stannig's doing is trying to dispose of the remains in a decent
manner. Tell me, Raina, what else is he supposed to do?"

They were both shaking. They had been standing
outside the closed door of the widows' hearth and Raina felt weary
and exposed. She had not expected this from Merritt. Edging farther
away from the door, she said, "Why does he insist on grinding
every bit of the stone to nothing? I've seen what's he's doing, not
even a chip as big as an apple core will remain by the time he's
through."

The head widow had already begun shaking her head
whilst Raina was speaking. "We are clansmen. We grind our stone.
That's what we've done for centuries. Stannig Beade is doing what
every guide since Ballard the Scared has done before him: he loads
the stone in his mill and breaks it."