A Sword From Red Ice (42 page)

Aware he was being reprimanded, Bram bowed his
head.

"Come, Bram Cormac," Wrayan said. "Take
a walk with me around the pool." She did not wait for him, and
began walking a circuit of the artificial lake.

It was a perfect circle, about eighty feet in a
diameter. Only a three-foot grass verge separated the lake from the
wall that enclosed it. Bram was nervous as he followed the chief's
footsteps, worried that some errant impulse might make him leap into
the water.

And that was one place he did not want to be.

He could see the lead coffins, dozens of them,
lying beneath nine feet of water. Round and encrusted with mussels,
they looked like pale, ghostly boulders. Bram wondered how the bodies
of the Castlemilk chiefs had been fitted inside them, and didn't very
much like the answer he came up with.

"Skerro Castlemilk, the Winter chief, used to
farm the mussels and eat them." Wrayan came to a halt by the
edge. "He went insane. Some say it was the lead."

Bram could think of no suitable response. He
frowned at the water, hoping to look serious and alert.

Wrayan Castlemilk did not appear to notice. "The
milkstone silt at the bottom is nearly a foot deep. At one time it
was custom to have a boy stir it every day with a paddle so it looked
as if the caskets were submerged in milk." She smiled flatly at
Bram. Sunlight sparkling off the shoulders of her silver cloak threw
a strange brightness upon her face. "My brother Alban lies here,
though he swore every day of his life that he did not wish to end up
in this pool. Once a chief is dead, though, he has no say over his
clan, his body. His sister."

She had ordered her brother buried here against
his wishes, Bram realized.

Wrayan acknowledged Bram's expression with a small
nod. "Someone will do it to me one day, order my body cut and
sunk. It is the Milk way, and a clan is nothing without its ways.
Dhoone, Blackhail, Bludd: what do you think makes them different?"
A tiny movement of her wrist indicated that Bram need not bother
formulating an answer: the Milk chief would supply one for him. "Our
customs are the only things that separate us from other clans. We
worship the same gods, abide by the same laws, want the same thing.
It is in the small details that we forge an identity as clan; boasts
we speak, weapons we carry, the manner in which we dispose of our
dead. Twenty-eight years ago, when given a choice between betraying
Alban and betraying the customs of this clan, there was only one
answer for me. I am chief. If I fail to uphold the old ways I
diminish us." She gave him a cold look, a warning, before
continuing.

"Castlemilk is an old and proud clan, Bram
Cormac, and I am an old and proud chief. We dance the swords, and mix
our guidestone with oil and water and drink it like milk. Our best
warriors fight with two swords and name themselves the Cream, and our
girl children are taught one new way how to kill a man every year
until they reach sixteen. We have been sworn to Dhoone for four
hundred years but before that we stood alone. If you believe you have
come to a lesser clan you are mistaken and you can march yourself
right back to Dhoone. I will have you only on one term: and that is
absolute loyalty to Castlemilk. Drouse is in the guidehouse, waiting
upon my word. He expects to hear an oath and so do I."

She paused, her chest rising and falling beneath
the fine silver weave of her cloak. For the first time Bram noticed
the elk lore, fastened to the cinch of her braid. A thick hoop of
spine. "I will leave you now," she said, her voice calm.
"You have a quarter-hour, then you will either make your way to
the guidehouse or collect your belongings and depart this clan."

Bram nodded once in understanding and she left him
standing by the man-dug lake. A moment passed and then something—a
fish or an eel—broke the surface of the water, flashed briefly,
then was gone. Bram wasn't sure but he thought he saw teeth.

Clouds heading in from the north were moving
swiftly toward the sun and he could tell it wouldn't be long before
they killed the sunlight. For no good reason whatsoever he drew his
sword and stood on the grass and inspected it in the last of the full
sun. Light on the watered steel moved upblade toward the point. He
tried angling the sword in different directions but he could not get
it to move the other way.

"It won't be so bad, Bram. We both know you
were never really cut out for Dhoone." Robbie's parting words
sounded in Bram's head.

No going back.

Abruptly, he sheathed the sword and headed out of
the walled enclosure. He had made his decision.

The Birch Way

It was the fourth day amongst the birches. The
mist that had formed overnight rolled through the forest in breaking
waves. It was a landscape of ghosts, pale and silvery, with nothing
green or blue to be seen. The trees disappeared into the clouds,
their straight white trunks the same thickness from base to crown.
Hundreds of thousands of birches had seeded from a single mother
tree, and the dark charcoal-colored scars where limbs had broken off
were the only way of distinguishing one tree from another. Minute
differences in spacing and light had produced branches at differing
angles and heights, and the marks they'd left behind dappled the bark
like paw-prints. Lan Fallstar read these prints, and they appeared to
provide him with enough information to navigate the unchanging
landscape of the birch way.

Ash March tracked the Far Rider's gaze as it
jumped from tree to tree, noting the birches it settled upon and
attempting to discern a pattern in Lan's choices.

They were walking their horses through the mist.
The sun was a diffused steel disk low in the east. The air was
damply cold. Underfoot the snow was wet and uneven. Ash had learned
it hid potholes and pools of standing water. She was cautious as she
placed her feet. The birches had grown on low-lying saturated
topsoil, not all of it frozen. Often brown water oozed from the snow
as she stepped upon it. Other times her feet would sense give
followed by traction followed by more give, as the soles of her boots
pushed through sloppy layers of snow, sedge, water, mud and dead
leaves. Today she could not see her feet and relied upon following
Lan's path as closely as possible.

She had not realized it would be such a long
journey through the trees. Nor had she imagined that walking through
them could make her feel as if she were imprisoned. The birches were
like iron bars. Fifty feet tall and stripped bare of leaves, they
stretched in all directions as far as the eye could see.

She could not escape them, not on her own. While
she was here she was dependent upon Lan Fallstar. If the Far Rider
were to walk away and leave her she could be lost forever in these
trees. Every birch and square foot of land looked the same. She had
tried to apply what little she knew of the Sull path lores, looking
for chips in the bark two feet off the ground, double nailheads sunk
into the wood that looked like beetle holes until you stopped and
inspected them, and subtle yellow burns in the tree moss where flames
had been brushed against them in curving motions to form moon-shapes,
but she had yet to spot anything so far. Most blazes did not seem to
apply here. She knew the Sull often selected a single branch on a
tree, stripped it bare of twigs and leaves and used it as a signpost
to point the way of a trail, but the spindly crowns of the birches
were as good as bare to begin with. And the slim, branchless trunks
would be almost impossible to climb without spiked boots or ladders.
They offered no footholds or handholds to aid an ascent. Rock blazes,
bush blazes and fallen log blazes did not seem to apply either, as
there was not a single fallen log, bush or rock to be seen in the
entire forest. Snow, sedge and trees: they were its only features.

She had noticed osprey nests in some trees, big
whirlwind-shaped constructions built out of twigs and scraps of
sedge, and had spotted frequent elk and bear tracks, but although she
suspected there was something to be learned from their presence she
was unsure what that might be. Ark Veinsplitter would have helped her
if he'd lived, explained how it was possible to navigate this land of
phantom trees. He had made her Sull, drained her human blood to make
way for Sull blood. He would have trusted her with the secrets of the
birch way.

Lan Fallstar did not. She had asked him outright
last night as they'd made a miserable and tentless camp in the mist.
The fire had slowly reddened and died, suffocated by the film of mist
that coated every log. "How do you find your way here?" she
had said. "I should know in case anything happens to you."

The Far Rider had been rubbing clarified horse fat
into the crusted and canyonlike burn on his left arm. He stopped and
turned his deeply angled face toward her and said, "Nothing will
happen."

"That's no answer."

The horse grease was stowed in a horn of
fossilized ivory and he sealed it before speaking, thumping a stopper
into the opening with the heel of his hand. "This Sull does not
believe he has need to answer questions."

She had not argued with him. The tone of his voice
was clear enough. He believed her to be an outsider, and he was
right. In a way she could not fault him. The one clear thing she
understood about the Sull was that they believed themselves to be a
people under threat. They had once claimed the vast continent to the
south; glass deserts, warm seas, city ports, rain forests, salt
flats, marble islands, grasslands, high steppes, vast snaking rivers
and mountains so tall their peaks could only be seen on a handful of
days each year. And then there were the places beyond this continent,
places with names that sounded alien and threatening to Ash. The
Unholy Sea. Sankang. The Spoiled Lands. Balgaras. The Ore Islands.
All this and more had once belonged to the Sull. Now they were
reduced to a strip of land in the Northern Territories, perhaps a
third of a continent.

And they lived in fear they would lose it. Ash had
grown up hearing stories of the Sull's ruthlessness. Tales of the
bloody battle at Hell's Core, where the Sull slaughtered the Vor
king's son and ten thousand of his men and then refused to allow
Vorish priests onto the battlefield to collect the bodies; tales of
the massacre of innocents at Clan Gray where eight hundred women and
children were killed in under an hour for daring to set foot on Sull
land; and tales of the great burning of ships on the Sea of Souls
where thirty-one vessels went down with all hands. What she had not
heard at Mask Fortress was the other side of the tale. Of Sull
dispossession and defeats, and of their great and driving fear they
would one day lose their home. Every slaughter they carried out was
defensive.

Ash raised a hand as she passed one of the trees
and touched its flaking and silvery trunk. These birches were part of
the Sull's defenses. They were an impenetrable wall guarding a
vulnerable portion of its western border, and it wasn't surprising
that Lan Fallstar would not share their secret with someone who
claimed to be Sull, yet neither acted nor looked like Sull.

Glancing at the Far Rider, she wondered why she
hadn't told him about Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer, about the
mountain pool where she had been made Sull, and about her journey
east across the margins of the Want. There was still a chance that
the Naysayer was tracking both of them . . . and she hadn't mentioned
that either. Lan had not asked about how she had come to be in the
Racklands south of the Flow, and she wondered about that also. What
did he know or assume about her? She tried to think back to the
moment she had given him her name. She had been so nervous, so
determined to stand her ground, that she had not thought to read his
reaction. Had it meant something to him? Had word of Ash March, the
Reach, traveled ahead of her?

Lan Fallstar was walking beside his fine black
stallion and occasionally he would raise his hand to touch the
horse's neck. He was dressed in serviceable riding clothes, deerhide
coat and pants, a cloak collared in marten, and stiff boar's-hide
boots. If he had been wearing a hat he might have passed at distance
for a ranger or hunter. His black hair, gleaming with bone oil and
part braided with lead clasps, gave him away. A bluish tint flashed
when the sun hit it. That, together with the lead clasps that had
weathered to a color and texture not unlike the surface of the moon,
pronounced him as Sull. Only when you drew closer did you see the
faint goldenness of his skin and the deep triangular shadows cast by
his cheekbones upon his cheeks.

He knew she was minding him, yet said nothing and
did not turn. Ash wished she were the sort of person who found
conversation easy, who could say the kind of interesting and clever
things that left people wanting to reply. Right now she could think
of nothing but trees. Trees and more trees. And as they all looked
the same she could hardly say, Look at that one. Isn't it unusual?

Frowning she kicked up the mist and watched as it
swirled like grease on water. She wondered why she didn't trust him.

And he didn't trust her.

"How long before we leave the birches?"
she asked.

Something about his shrug made Ash think he'd had
it ready and waiting. "The birch way is long and not all paths
are open. We travel as we must."

Snow squelched beneath Ash's feet and she lifted
the hem of her lynx fur off the ground. The Far Rider had told her
nothing, and she doubted whether the subject was worth pursuing but
went ahead and spoke anyway. "How long did it take you last
time?"

He turned to look at her, his expression cool. It
took a moment before she realized that this look was to be his only
reply.