Watcher of the Dead

by J. V. Jones

  “You have it.”

  Chella Gloyal knew how to give her word with conviction. Her gaze was steady and knowing. She had heard everything then, including the command that would send her husband back to war and the treasonous order to spend Blackhail gold. Trouble was hers if she wished it, yet Raina did not think she would break her word.

  “Chella.” The word was a dismissal. Raina Blackhail was done here.

  Chella spoke to halt her. “If I may offer some advice?”

  “You are bold.”

  Chella Gloyal did not deny it. Stepping closer, she said in a low voice, “You made two mistakes.”

  Gods help me not to slap her. Raina headed toward the tack room. She would not listen to this.

  “You should have sent an archer in Stellan’s place,” Chella murmured, keeping pace. “A party made up solely of sword-and-hammermen cannot protect their cargo at distance.”

  Raina halted. She was keenly aware that only twenty paces separated her and Chella from the tack room door. “Quiet yourself,” she commanded.

  Chella raised her eyebrows. Her voice had barely risen above a whisper and they both knew it. Who was this clever and self-possessed woman? Raina wondered. Were the differences between Croser and Blackhail so great they could explain her?

  “When I require your counsel I shall ask for it,” Raina said coldly. She did not trust this woman. “Leave me now.”

  Chella bowed lightly and immediately stepped back. Holding Raina’s gaze she said, “I pray ask soon, for you have just placed yourself at great risk.”

  Raina watched her walk away, and then went to inform the grooms of their task. Fear had pierced her heart.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Sull

  WE ARE BLACKHAIL, the first amongst clans. We do not cower and we do not hide and we will have our revenge.

  Raif’s lips moved in time with the clan boast, but he could not tell if he spoke the words or thought them. Differences like that were getting harder to separate. Whole days had passed where he could not be certain if he was asleep or awake.

  He was pretty sure he was awake now. Mosquitoes were feeding. A couple of hours of sunlight and they would hatch from pools in the snow and rise in a cloud to torment him. He made an easy target. A sitting duck. Throwing his weight forward, Raif forced the cage into motion. The mosquitoes took flight and he had a minute of peace as the insects scrambled to match trajectories with the cage.

  We do not cower, Raif thought with satisfaction. Maybe he said it.

  A hunger cramp sliced through his gut and he pulled up his legs and chest to wait it out. His body hardly seemed to belong to him anymore. He could not keep track of all its weaknesses. His back and shoulders were a landscape of pressure sores raised by the ridges of the cage. At night he used the waterskin as a pillow for his head but there was nothing to cushion the rest of him. He was beginning to understand it didn’t matter. The worst sores, the ones that were leaking and beginning to ulcerate, were tended.

  And they took good care of his hands.

  Raif shivered. He did not want to think about his body in their possession. Taking a shot of water, he focused his gaze on the rising mass of the Boreal Sway. The sun had come and gone and snow clouds were closing in from the north. The first stirrings of wind moved the forest canopy and Raif watched as the wave it created rolled toward him. His sole unobstructed view was to the north. This was it. Wake in the morning and wonder if he’d been darted and drugged overnight, piss and shit through the cage, drink, sleep.

  Patrol.

  He had a place to go to now. The line between days was dissolving, and although he could look at the record of his days spent in the cage—eleven horizontal scratches on the northeast corner post—he could no longer recall when he’d added to it. Time moved differently in the other place. Shifts in light, wind and gradient were what mattered. Raif licked his lips and scanned the forest. The light was changing now, decreasing. Hearts were on the move, hunting, evading, feeding.

  It was an easy thing to loose his sights, to send his mind’s eye out of the cage and into another living thing. A shock of heat, a switch in rhythm, a seasickness moment where movement and mind did not match, and then he was inside, in the heart. Elk. The index finger on his right hand twitched. The reflex to release the bowstring was strong. Enter, mark the target, loose the arrow: that was how he hunted. Yet there were no arrows anymore, no heart-kills, just Watcher of the Dead and beating hearts.

  The elk heart raced with fear. She was young, a yearling separated from her dam and herd. She’d lost their scent and was heading southeast through the forest. Blood was rushing through her arteries at force. Raif felt her terrible alertness. Any movement in the trees could be her death. Nothing large enough to take her down was close, but she did not know it. She saw shadows beneath the bloodwoods and smelled wolf scat. Raif stayed with her as it grew colder and darker, living her fear and exhaustion. As she moved further east his connection began to fade and he strained to keep it intact. Slowly, she drifted from him and he found himself back in the cage.

  It was dark and the mosquitoes were gone, killed by the cold. His body was shivering and his fingers were numb. Tucking his hands under his arms, he shifted his position to ease the pressure on his butt. The motion rocked the cage, driving it against the canopy. Raif spotted pale fires to the east. He had to search his mind for their meaning. Sull, the word came to him.

  His knee-jerk reaction was to escape and he refocused his attention on the forest, searching for something to carry him away. Night brought out the predators. A gray owl was circling above the ridge, silent as the dead. Raif touched it briefly, felt the surprising heft and unfamiliar geography of its heart. Again there was the reflex to release the string. He moved away, descending beneath the canopy, questing for another heart.

  Fox. A female in her prime with a strong and steady heartbeat. She was still, listening intently. The instant she located her prey the great veins descending from her lungs to her heart expanded, fueling the muscles in her haunch. Within a second she pounced. Saliva jetted into Raif’s mouth as she muzzled through the snow to reach the stunned mouse. As her jaws sprung to snap its neck, she heard something. Releasing the carcass, she listened. Raif could not understand what she heard but he understood her reaction. Abruptly she took off, abandoning her kill and fleeing north.

  Raif withdrew his sights and scanned for the source of her fear.

  The Sway at night was studded with hearts: voles, skunk, mink, winged squirrels, deer, lynx, bears. Raif saw them as small fires in the darkness. The fox had headed north so he patrolled south.

  Something large was on the move. Raif’s fingers hooked the walls of the cage as he perceived the creature’s heart. Muscular, cool and alien, it had a rhythm he did not recognize. Pushing away his misgivings, he entered.

  An inkling of awareness, like the partial opening of an eye, acknowledged his presence. It knew he was there. As quickly as Raif received the sensation it was gone, and he was left with the strange tows and suctions of a reptilian heart. Three chambers instead of four pumped blood around the body, and there was a place where fresh blood and stale blood mixed, a delta of dark currents that flowed both ways. The creature was moving at speed across old, hackled ground-snow, sidewinding in perfect silence, white upon the white.

  Moon snake. Its name cast a spell, conjuring dread in its purest form, smoking with old myths. Generations of hunters had murmured its name around campfires. At night—always at night—after long bloody days spent butchering their kills, with the stench of organ meat weighing their shirtsleeves and malt liquor concentrating in their veins, hunters spoke in hushed voices about moon snakes. Someone in the party would know someone who had lost a sheep, a calf, a mare. The stories, like elk, migrated east. Raif had listened to Dagro Blackhail’s account of the time his father, Burdo Blackhail, had parleyed with the new-minted Dog Lord at Bludd. No Hail chief had ever set foot in the Bluddhouse and Burdo had camped to the nor
th with a company of twelve men. Right from the start the horses were spooked and Burdo ordered the corral to be raised to a height of eight feet. Afterward, he realized it made no difference. The moon snake slid under the barricade and tore off a stallion’s leg. Within seconds the screams of the horses brought clansmen from their tents. When torches were lit, a bloody trail leading east into the forest was clearly visible. Burdo gave the order: Do not follow. As Dagro told the story, it was the only time his father’s jaw failed him. It was the marks the thing left behind, Dagro had whispered, like whip cracks in the snow.

  Back in the cage, Raif’s body shivered. In the forest, at ground level, he cast off the memories like snakeskin.

  The night was a revelation, a wholly new world of taste and heat. Animals were silver forms against the black. The owl overhead, the fox, the dead but still warm mouse, the elk: the moon snake saw them all, knew them all. Feared none. Licking the taste of their exhaled breath from the air, she tracked and calculated, applying the sure mathematics of death. Distance, direction, size, state of health: they were her parameters. Her heart beat smoothly as she muscled across the snow, choosing her prey.

  In all the years he had entered hearts, Raif had never experienced anything like it. Snagcats, bears, wolves: predators, but they lived with fear. The moon snake was beyond emotion. She tracked the possibilities, figured the odds. Killed.

  Raif settled into her primitive heart and moved with her as she tracked the elk yearling east. Later, he would understand that his connection with the moon snake was stronger than the ones he’d formed with other creatures. He traveled farther with her, far beyond the point where he’d lost contact in the past.

  The night was at its coldest and the snow began to steam as the moon snake closed distance on the elk. Reading the exhaustion in its breath, she moved downwind and picked up speed. Back in the cage, a blow dart pierced Raif’s neck. The impact did not register. Within seconds his body was limp. Raif felt the familiar pull to return to the cage as his mind dimmed along with his breaths. He fought it, holding fast to the moon snake’s heart. She flicked her consciousness toward Raif, touched him, and then returned to the hunt.

  Raif felt it as an act of kinship. He had been allowed to maintain his hold.

  As the Sull lowered the cage containing Raif’s unconscious body, Raif’s mind ran with the snake. Moving on a tangent to intercept the trotting elk, she accelerated like a bolt shot from a crossbow. Ice mist dampened the sound of her belly whipping against the snow. The elk’s form brightened and clarified, its details rendered in silver and white. The moon snake observed the motion of its forelegs and hindlegs, calculated the pattern, switched a valve in her heart like a trap so only fresh red blood pumped through her arteries, and then struck.

  There was an instant when the elk understood everything. Veins in its eyes ruptured. Its bladder failed and the musk of fear seeded the air. Quarter of a second later, the moonsnake closed her jaws around her front hoof. With perfect violence, she wrenched off the leg at the shoulder. Blood jetted onto the snow. The elk moaned, a terrible low wail that Raif would remember for the rest of his life. Briefly, he had a glimpse of its heart: the rhythm he had become familiar with earlier that night was gone. In its place was a fluttering, fading pulse.

  Raif discarded the elk and refocused on the moon snake. Flinging aside the severed limb, she set upon the fallen elk. No heart-kills for the moonsnake, she tore her live prey into parts. Raif felt a cool flicker of satisfaction as she began to feed.

  She took the limbs whole, disconnecting her jaw and gorging. Her heart slid back and to the side to make way. Her senses tracked the nearing of pack wolves, drawn by the smell of carrion. She was alert but unafraid. After swallowing two limbs she nosed through the torso and detached the elk heart. Sending a single glint of awareness to Raif she devoured it.

  Raif shivered.

  Kill an army for me, Raif Sevrance. Death’s words echoed in his head. Somehow they were now connected to his father. Da was dead. He, Raif Sevrance, was the only person who knew the killer. And that made him the only person who could avenge Tem Sevrance’s death. Why hadn’t he done it? He had slain four Bluddsmen at Duff’s for less. He had slain Bitty Shank at Black Hole for less. Death promised him he would kill an army: wasn’t the only death that mattered Mace Blackhail’s?

  Raif fed on this thought as the muscles in the moon snake’s abdomen pushed the elk heart into her gut. She was still for a moment, tasting the air. Picking up a whiff of dawn, she withdrew from the elk carcass. She was heavy now, swaying like a pregnant mare. The pack wolves danced nervously as she cut into the territory. The top dog howled as if he’d caught sight of the moon. Ignoring him, the snake homed. A deep languor was setting in. She needed to sleep and rest. Hunting did not strain her heart, digestion did.

  Sidewinding north, she began to shut down. Her movements and responses slowed. Her heart engorged, sending enriched blood to her gut. Raif experienced her lassitude as his own. Even now, she possessed no fear. She inhabited a world where nothing could challenge her.

  That thought stayed with Raif long after she burrowed through the snow to her den and slept.

  “Wake.”

  Raif snapped into consciousness but did not show it. He was immediately on alert and on his guard. It was the first word spoken by another person he had heard in days. With eyes closed, he inhaled deeply. He could smell them. The Sull. They smelled like the full moon on cold nights. Just as swiftly he was aware that he was on solid ground. Deep inhalation shifted weight in his body, and that shift always stirred the cage. Nothing stirred. Furtively he flexed muscles in his feet, pressing his toes against stone.

  “Open your eyes. Your friend is here.”

  Raif recognized the voice. It belonged to Yiselle No Knife.

  He opened his eyes and looked up. She stood above him, tall and slender, dressed in supple hides that had been molded to her breasts and waist, and a skirt armored with leather panels. Her hair was drawn back from her face, displaying the sharp bones of her cheeks and jaw. She smiled coldly.

  “To your left is a sword. Pick it up and use it.”

  Raif blinked. He was lying on his side on a stone clearing surrounded by bloodwoods. Flakes of snow were drifting in the air. He could not tell what time of day it was, just that it was light.

  “The sword,” repeated No Knife. “Take it and defend yourself.” She stepped out of his line of vision, revealing four figures on the far side of the clearing. Addie Gunn, hobbled at the ankles, his hands tied behind his back and a gag in his mouth, was in the custody of two Sull swordsmen. Raif was shocked by Addie’s appearance. The cragsman had lost weight and his eyes were dull. A wound on his neck was black and dry.

  As Raif looked at him, Addie nodded. Raif understood the gesture as if it were words. I’m all right. Take care of yourself.

  “Stand up.” No Knife’s voice was as bright as steel. “If you won’t defend yourself, defend your friend.”

  The snick of steel being drawn from leather followed her words and the fourth figure, the towering form of the Sull warrior Ilya Spinebreaker stepped forward, a six-foot longsword balanced perfectly in his hand.

  Automatically, Raif rolled onto his knees. All sorts of pains and weaknesses shot through him and he stumbled as he attempted to lever his weight onto his legs. His right knee shook, and he had the strange sensation of wanting to right himself against the movement of the cage. Frustrated, he pivoted to the side and grabbed the sword.

  Ilya Spinebreaker’s weapon scribed a perfect arc in the air and falling snow as it descended on Raif. Raif raised his sword in a two-handed T-block above his chest and braced for the blow. It dazed him. The force buckled his shoulders and sent his lower teeth driving against his upper jaw. Spinebreaker’s dark alien eyes looked straight into his as swordblade scissored against swordblade. A moment of relief followed as the Spinebreaker drew back his blade for a second blow. Raif represented his T-block. It was all he had time for.
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  The force of Spinebreaker’s second strike was crushing. His blade slammed Raif’s sword into Raif’s face. Raif felt the hot sting of metal on his nose, lip and chin and immediately smelled blood. The Spinebreaker had a choice; fall to one knee and drive Raif’s own blade further into his skull or withdraw for a third blow. Raif guessed what he would do even before he saw it in the Sull’s eyes. The Spinebreaker would finish this ugly little dance with the elegance of a final blow. Thrusting a man’s blade into his face was pure tavern brawl and Ilya Spinebreaker thought himself better than that.

  Raif had perhaps a second to prepare himself as the Sull warrior positioned both hands on his blade and moved through a form Raif didn’t recognize. Raif’s gaze flicked to Addie and he noticed for the first time that the cragsman wasn’t standing freely; one of the Sull warriors was holding him up. They’ve been treating him worse than me. This was madness. These people weren’t the Sull Angus Lok spoke of with respect.

  Anger focused Raif more swiftly than fear. Ilya Spinebreaker had a beating heart and that meant Raif Sevrance had a chance.

  Raif sent out a line to the swordsman’s heart. It filled his sights like a glance at the midday sun. And it wasn’t human.

  Not even close.

  Fear touched Raif then. He was a clansman far from home and here he would die, at the hands of people he could never hope to understand. Would word ever get back to Drey and Effie? How would they know their brother had loved them until the end?

  Finally, as the Spinebreaker’s great sword descended and Raif pivoted his blade from a block to a strike, Raif recalled the moon-snake. She had no fear. It was all calculation: What could she take down and how? Her assumption was that she could kill anything. He was Mor Drakka, Watcher of the Dead. Spinebreaker should fear him.

  Raif made the calculation and adjusted the sword as six feet of steel descended above his head. He saw the opening and thrust into it, and then a massive shearing force slammed the sword from his grip. As Raif’s fingers sprang apart his entire body moved sideways with the blow, driving him against the ground. The Spinebreaker’s longsword was still completing the motion—a beautiful form like the letter C. Raif could barely understand what had happened. Blood from his face wounds pooled in his left eye.