Watcher Of The Dead (Book 4)

by J. V. Jones

  Raif paused on that thought. It told him something fundamental about the Sull. They were not clan. They were not even human. The possessions humans coveted held no value for them. It occurred to Raif that to understand a people you had to know what they valued . . . and in that regard Clan knew less than nothing about Sull.

  His best chance for survival here would be to watch and learn.

  Not that a man in a cage had much choice. It hurt to grin. It hurt to breathe. His unconscious body had not been treated kindly. Shifting position, he rested his knees. The cage bobbed like a cork in water. Pine needles that had settled on the top of the cage fell through the gaps and rained on him. They smelled like soap.

  As he brushed them away, movement below caught his eye. A figure emerged from beneath the canopy. Even seen from above at eighty feet, the figure was unmistakably Sull. Muscle in Raif’s gut loosened. He couldn’t control it. It was what all clansmen felt upon spotting the race who reigned in the East: fear of the unknown.

  The figure, an unarmored male with hair notched into a battle ridge that ran from the center of his forehead to the base of his neck, strode with purpose across the clearing. He did not look up. Raif tracked him as far as a stone platform ringed with a barrier wall before losing him from sight.

  A wind gust rocked the cage as Raif tried to get a better look at the platform. Branches from surrounding trees limited his view. He could see the area directly below the cage, but densely needled bloodwood limbs cut into his line of sight in all directions except north across the ray skin canopy. As far as he could tell, the platform and ringwall were falling to ruin. Chunks of stone were partially embedded in the platform, as if they had fallen from a great height. Saplings and staghorn ferns had rooted in the cracks. Raif pumped the cage, forcing a sharp upswing. At the upswing’s zenith he caught a brief glimpse of the platform’s far wall and what looked to be more ruins stretching back into the forest. He swung again. Dozens of canvas shelters had been erected amid the ruins, utilizing standing walls, stone piers and decrowned trees as anchor points. Lean figures wove through the maze, shadowy, silent, armed for war.

  Rolling onto his back, Raif let the cage fall still. Directly overhead, his view of the sky was partially blocked by the dense mass of the bloodwood. Needles ran along its branches like oars on a longboat. The longer Raif looked at them the more they seemed to move. To row.

  Shortening his focus, he concentrated on the cage. A waterskin was hooked halfway down the wall that faced the tree trunk. Besides that, there was nothing in the cage, only him. Raif took inventory of his body and clothes. The Orrl cloak was gone. He tried not to let it bother him. His sealskin was stiff with dried mud and blood. So were his pants. Resin oozing from the bloodwood had stained both fabrics with dark, sticky spots. A flattened mosquito was glued to one of them.

  He would get cold, that was his first assessment. If he was held here overnight he’d get chilblains, possibly frostbite. Bending at the waist, he reached for the waterskin and weighed the water. About a gallon. No food. Judging from the light, it was close to midday. Raif lay down, went back to watching the needles. This had to be a temporary holding place. If the Sull wanted him dead they would have killed him. If they wanted him to die in the cage they would have withheld water.

  Unless they intended to let him waste away—die without staining their hands with blood. Raif twitched. The movement dislodged something at the base of his throat. Raven lore, the hard black piece of bird ivory that had been given to him at birth, jerked against its twine. So it was still here. He and the Sull had something in common. Neither of us wants the raven.

  Raif closed his eyes, shifted his position to relieve pressure on his shoulders and buttocks. He listened to the mosquitoes swarm him. Tomorrow they’d all be dead.

  “Addie,” Raif bellowed at the top of his lungs. “ADDIE.”

  The only reply was the drill of mosquitoes.

  It took a while for his heart to calm down. Where was Addie? What had they done to him? Raif couldn’t imagine a worse fate for a cragsman than to be hung in a cage. Cragsman lived their entire lives in the open spaces of the clanholds, following their herds. They hated confinement. “Even the largest roundhouse in the clanholds,” Addie liked to point out, “is just so many walls.”

  Raif forced himself to think. No sign of Addie might be good. Perhaps the Sull only caged those they feared. Yiselle No Knife and Ilya Spinebreaker had barely spared a glance for the cragsman during that meeting thirty days ago at their camp. Raif recalled the cold glitter in No Knife’s eyes as she figured out his identity. He was lucky she’d let him go. So why pick him up now? What had changed?

  Loss, he realized. The sword had been under ice when he’d met Yiselle No Knife in her tent north of the Rift. She had helped him find it, though Raif seriously doubted that had been her intent. “They will never find Mish’al Nij,” she had murmured as he and Addie left. Until that moment he’d had no idea where to look for the sword. Mish’al Nij was the answer. The Place with No Clouds.

  Raif grabbed the water sack from the cage wall and drank deeply. The water tasted green and sharp. Acquiring the sword made him more of a threat. He considered this for a while. The Sull were now in possession of Loss. If that’s what they wanted why not kill him or let him go? Why imprison him? Clansmen took prisoners on the battlefield so they could ransom them later for goods. Blackhail would pay nothing to retrieve Raif Sevrance, and the Maimed Men had nothing to pay. Ransom couldn’t be the reason. It made no sense. The Sull didn’t play that game. Was it punishment then? Or were they awaiting word from He Who Leads? Perhaps No Knife didn’t have the authority to decide Watcher of the Dead’s fate.

  The temperature was dropping. Raif rolled onto his knees to check for activity below the cage. Two horses, both saddled, were cropping grass alongside the canopy. He hadn’t heard them arrive. One of the horses had hard-sided panniers leveled across its rump. Supplies? Food? Raif’s gut clenched. His stomach was empty except for the water. When had he eaten last? How long had he been here?

  He watched and waited. The canopy rolled in the breeze. Someone, one of the horses’ riders, strayed close to the edge of the shelter. Raif saw an arm, a hip, a weapons belt. Female.

  It didn’t make him feel any better. He shunted into a squat, head brushing the top of the cage. It was a relief not to be pressed against the mesh, let the soles of his boots take the punishment. Relief didn’t last long. His thigh muscles started to ache and the cage wouldn’t still. Dropping to a sit, he steadied the motion of the cage. He tried, but couldn’t steady his thoughts.

  Why hadn’t they acknowledged him? What were they doing under the canopy? The horse with the panniers pricked back its ears to listen to a command. It turned and walked under the canopy. A moment later, the second horse followed. Raif strained to hear something. Dimly he was aware of four hearts beating below the canopy. Two large and relaxed: the horses. And two faint and alien and more difficult to read: Sull.

  He drank more water. Waited. In the quadrant of the sky that was visible from the cage, clouds were moving. He watched them until the snap of metal buckles caught his ear. The Sull were mounting their horses. Minutes passed and then two riders emerged from the canopy, trotting their mounts south toward the settlement. The first rider was a woman warrior decked in a cloak of clarified hide and armed at the waist and shin with chained knives. Her hair was as dark and glossy as a river at night. A quarter-moon section above her left ear had been shaved to the scalp. The second rider was Spinebreaker.

  Raif grabbed the cage and shook it. “Where’s Addie?” he screamed at him. “What have you done with him?”

  The riders held their spines steady, muscles taut. They did not look up. The horses’ ears twitched but their legs didn’t break stride. Raif watched as they passed beneath the forest canopy and disappeared from sight. He was breathing hard. A new kind of fear lit his chest. It was so unknown to him that he couldn’t have defined what it was. It existed in
the space between words. Unseen. Alone. Disregarded.

  Raif recalled the story of Rangor Bannen, the Echo Chief. Rangor’s son Poadie usurped the chiefship in all but name. Out of loyalty and cruelty, Poadie did not kill his father and did not take the title chief. Instead he imprisoned Rangor in a pigpen, chaining his father to the seven-foot wall. Poadie and his men would come by every day and taunt him. They grunted like pigs and asked if he had any pronouncements to make from the mud. At first Rangor was bitter and would rattle his chains and demand to be released. “You are not my son,” he would shout at Poadie. “You’re a spineless disgrace of a man.” After a while the taunting lost its novelty and Poadie and his men ceased to visit the chief-in-name-only. Bannen slid into a war with Scarpe and Harkness, and the old chief went disregarded. A kitchen girl would bring slops once a day, and there came a time when Rangor no longer bothered to pick up the carrot stumps and chicken bones with his hands and gobbled them from the mud like a dog.

  Raif had heard the story told many times. In some tellings Rangor was left alone and disregarded for years, in others it was just two seasons: summer and fall. All stories agreed on what became of Rangor Bannen. He went insane. Alone and disregarded, his mind turned in on itself, went as soft and rotten as the carrot stumps left in the mud. No one spoke to him anymore. Mothers feared to let their children close to the stinking old man who lived in his own filth. Warriors did not acknowledge his existence. He shamed them and they shamed him. If anyone spoke of the old chief at all it was when mood was darkened by strong malt. “Poadie should have killed him,” they muttered. “What purpose is served by letting him live?”

  Poadie was struck down at the Battle of Barrel Hill by a Harkness sharpshooter positioned deep behind the treeline. In the chaos that followed, five hundred Banmen lost their lives. No one with sufficient jaw to be chief survived. That was when the elder warriors made the decision to release Rangor from the pen. “He never stopped being chief,” they told themselves. “And he’s led us before in hard times.”

  They freed him and scrubbed him, shaved his beard and clipped his hair, and dressed him in the fine gray lamb fleeces of chief. Yet even as they tended him, they knew something was wrong. When he was asked a question—which sword, which robe, which boots—his answer was to repeat the question. “Wool or linen?” he recited back to his attendant, face slack, eyes focused on the space between objects. “Wool or linen? Wool or linen?”

  Rangor became known as the Echo Chief. Raif supposed someone must have assumed the role of clan chief, but that part of the story was seldom told. A man could lose his mind, that was the point of the story. A man alone and disregarded could float so far away from his body that there was no coming back.

  Raif pulled open his pant laces and pissed through the cage wire. He thought of Rangor gobbling food from the mud, and then closed his eyes and didn’t think at all.

  Sleep took him to all the old places: the Blackhail roundhouse, Da’s tent in the Badlands, the greatcourt on the day he swore his yearman’s oath. The past was so close he could touch it. He could feel the rough texture of the swearstone beneath his tongue, taste its mineral coldness, hear Inigar Stoop cry, “Swear it.”

  Raif woke. The past slid back into its place and the illusion that it might be changed evaporated.

  It was growing dark. The sun had descended below the canopy and the pines were black. Raif sat up, bringing his knees to his chest to conserve heat. Stars appeared as the cage rocked. After a while he grabbed the waterskin and drank. He could smell Sull cookery; charring fruit and spices. Lamps had been lit in the settlement, blue and violet specks in the distance. Some moved and Raif imagined Sull carrying torches as they walked between tents.

  At first he didn’t realize that his expectation was that one of the lights would break away and move through the forest toward him. At first he thought he was just watching. Not waiting. Minutes passed and then hours, and night chills shook his body. No one approached. They would come tomorrow, he told himself. They had to. The waterskin would be flat by morning.

  He slept again. Wires cut into his flesh as he dreamed. Da stood before him, his opened torso bluing as it froze. “Son,” he said. “Why does the man who killed me still live?”

  Pain bolted through Raif’s left shoulder. He awoke, or thought he did. But no, he was mistaken, for dreamlike forms moved through the darkness. Teeth flashed. Hands that did not love him touched his bare flesh. A night heron shrieked a warning, and then the dreams withdrew. He slept like the dead.

  He awoke to a world of mist. Gray cloud pressed against all six planes of the cage. It was dawn, and the temperature balanced above freezing. Raif took stock of his body. Some pounding in his head, an ache in his shoulder, but surprisingly no numbness in his fingers and other extremities. Sitting up, he reached for the waterskin.

  It was full. The deer hide was taut and round, jutting out from the cage wall like a ripe fruit. Last night it had been slack, barely a cup of water left inside. Raif unhooked it, needing to feel its weight. Every hunter knew that gas could bloat an unopened carcass, but he didn’t think this was gas. The skin was heavy. A beat of fear passed through his heart. He uncorked the skin and sniffed. Same water as yesterday. Sharp, colder than the air that surrounded it. Sull.

  He had no choice but to drink. Even suspecting what he did, he had to drink. He knew what thirst looked like when it killed. It looked like a weary, shivering horse.

  “Bear,” he said softly, letting the memory of the little hill pony who had guided him through the Want turn in his thoughts before shutting it down.

  He needed to think. Mist pushing against the wires was sliced into cubes as it entered the cage. Raif watched the cubes dissolve as he pieced together what had happened. A quick investigation of his right shoulder revealed a small red hole in the skin. The surrounding flesh was tender but clean. Some kind of shiny ointment had been spread over the wound. Raif sniffed it. Nothing.

  They had put him to sleep. Fired a tipped dart through the wire, waited until he was unconscious and then lowered the cage. Once he was on the ground, they’d plucked out the dart, tended the puncture wound, refilled the waterskin. What else? Raif did not want to replay last night’s dreams in his head. If the answer was in them let it stay there. Instead he looked hard at the cage. Condensed mist slickened the steel. One small drop in temperature and the water would turn to ice. Had they given him something to prevent frostbite? Did such a thing exist?

  The mist began to drain and giant bloodwoods emerged like sunken ships. Dull sounds carried across the forest. Someone below and not far to the east was honing metal. Someone else was hammering stakes. Camp sounds. Raif forced himself to resist their familiarity.

  These people had drugged him. Strange, but all the times Angus Lok had talked of the Sull he had never mentioned their cruelty. Proud, lethal, swift to act: those were the qualities Angus’ stories emphasized. If you crossed the Sull you ended up dead, not strung up a tree and drugged.

  Hooves drumming below signaled the approach of several riders. Raif did not look down to track them. He understood the game now. They would ride to the canopy, stay awhile and then return to camp. Their purpose was to ignore him. The Sull, the oldest race in the North, were trying to break him. They had almost certainly drugged his drinking water. He could feel it; a loosening of muscle around the heart. When required, they would fire a dart and send him to sleep while they cleaned out the cage and replenished his water. Their intention was to deprive him of contact, to isolate and weaken him.

  Raif settled himself in the cage and stared at the pine needles as he tried to figure out how to keep his mind.

  CHAPTER 8

  Stovehouse

  “THE CHOICE IS yours. Stealth or candor: take your pick.”

  “I—”

  Hew Mallin blinked like other men wielded knives. Warning lived in the lean edges of lidded flesh. “Do not reveal your choice to me.”

  Bram Cormac, half-brother to the Dho
one chief Robbie Dhoone and deserter of his adopted clan, Castlemilk, closed his mouth, canceled his reply and considered the anarchy in Mallin’s words.

  Mallin was a ranger in the Brotherhood of the Long Watch, the Phage. He and Bram were sitting in an illegal stovehouse, four leagues southeast of Dhoone. The building had been newly raised but the stove had seen better days. Creosote oozed from the chimney neck and smoke leaked from an out-of-sight crack in the underbelly. All the smells of timber—freshly cut, cured and burned—gave the house a tinderbox feel. Lighting was dim. A handful of men leaned against the walls. Two women shared a bench, drinking steadily. The older one wore a dress cut so low her large brown nipples were exposed. A storm had just passed and cloaks were steaming. When a patron tried to dry his Dhoone-blue cloak over the stove, the stovemaster growled.

  “No colors in my house.” Thickset with a broken nose and brown teeth, he stared the Dhoonesman into compliance. Stovemasters were respected throughout the clanholds. They were hard men. They had to be.

  Mallin did his trick of watching this exchange yet not seeming to. A piece of tack leather rested on the table before him. He was working wax into it with his thumbs. His gaze never left the leather, but a certain stillness in his face revealed to Bram that his attention was on the stovemaster. When the Dhoonesman removed his cloak from the stove and draped it over the nearest bench, the stillness in Mallin’s face relaxed. No fight tonight, not over this.

  Mallin took a mouthful of malt and Bram did likewise. The alcohol was fiery and Bram felt it going down. He’d never been allowed to drink hard liquor before, and when Mallin had bought him a dram he had secretly disapproved. A clansman would not buy strong malt for a boy of sixteen. A sense of responsibility would stop him. Mallin had no such sense.