A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2)

by J. V. Jones

  Crope thought he spied Hadda the Crone, in line with the other hags, her black wool cap bobbing up and down as she raked and clawed and sorted. Hadda scared Crope. She had long, sunken breasts shaped like spades that she bared to any digger who looked her way. Scurvy, Bitterbean and the rest looked her way often, but Crope did not like Hadda, and he would not look at her breasts.

  When the lash came he was half expecting it. The sting was cold, cold, and it took the breath from him like a punch to the gut. The tip of the whip curled around his ear, licking flesh hard with scars. Tears of blood welled in a line around his neck, and he felt their hotness trickle down his shoulders to his back. The salt burn would come later, when the gray crystals of sea-salt that the Bull Hands soaked into their whips worked their way into the wound.

  “It’s not enough that they whip us,” Scurvy always said. “They have to make us burn.”

  “I can smell you, giant man.” The Bull Hand pulled back the whip with practiced slowness, drawing the leather through his half-closed fist. He was a big man, hard-mouthed and fair-skinned, with broken veins in the whites of his eyes and the shineless teeth of a diamond miner. Although Crope had seen him many times, he couldn’t remember his name. That was Scurvy’s job, the remembering. Scurvy knew the names of every man in Pipe Town; knew what they were called and what they were.

  The Bull Hand thrust the whip into his belt. “You stink like the slop pots when your mind’s not on the wall.”

  Crope kept his head down and continued to break rock. He was aware of many eyes upon him, of Bitterbean and Iron Toe and Soft Aggie down the line. And of Scurvy Pine beyond them, watching the Bull Hand, yet not seeming to, his eyes so cold and hard they might have been mined in the pipe.

  Scurvy’s gaze flicked to the chains at Crope’s feet. Iron they were, black with tar and dead skin, and they ran from ankle to ankle, from digger to digger, joining every man in the line. “Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. You be ready when I give the word.”

  Crope felt Scurvy’s will working upon him, warning him to keep swinging his ax. Eight years ago they’d met, in the tin pits west of Trance Vor. Crope never wanted to go back there again. He hated the low ceilings of the tin caves, the darkness, the stench of bad eggs, and the drip, drip, drip of the walls. Spineless, that was what everyone had called him, before Scurvy had made them stop. Scurvy had picked no fight nor raised a weapon; he had simply told the other tin men how it was going to be. “He carved the eyes out of an ice master who cheated him at dice,” Bitterbean had once told Crope. “But that’s not the reason they ’prisoned him.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Crope thought he saw Scurvy nod minutely to Hadda the Crone.

  Time passed. The diggers continued breaking the wall and the hags kept sifting through the dust. Crope’s lash wound began to burn with the hot sting of salt. Softly, so softly that he wasn’t even sure when the sound began, Hadda the Crone began to sing. It was like no song Crope had ever heard, high and wavering and strange to the ear. It made the hairs around his wound stand upright. Other diggers felt it too. At Crope’s side, Soft Aggie’s chains rattled as he stamped his feet in the mud. Bitterbean and the others slowed their strikes, and the sound of breaking rock lessened as Hadda’s song began to rise.

  If she sang in words Crope did not recognize them, yet fear entered him all the same. High and higher, her song rose, keening and wailing, her voice disappearing for brief moments as she reached pitches that only dogs could hear. Other hags joined in, chanting low where Hadda soared high, rough where she was as clear as glass.

  Crope felt a queer coldness steal into the pipe. He watched as the shadow cast by his ax lengthened and darkened, until the shadow seemed more real than the ax. One of the pitch lamps blew out, and then another. And then one of the Bull Hands cracked his whip and shouted, “Stop that fucking wailing, bitch.”

  Crope risked a glance at Scurvy. Wait, his eyes said. Be ready when I give the word.

  Hadda’s song turned shrill. The diamond drilled into her front tooth was the only thing that glinted in the darkening pipe. Crope felt sweat slide along his fingers as he raised his ax for another strike. A memory of a time long ago possessed him, a night roaring with flames. People burning alive; precious stones popping from their jewelry in the heat, smoke curling from their mouths as they screamed. Bad memories, and Crope did not want to think of them. Driving his ax deep into diamond rock, he sent them smashing against the wall.

  Two Bull Hands jumped down into the lower tier, where the hags squatted as they sifted dust. A tongue of black leather came down upon a thigh, opening skin stained blue with mud. A woman screamed. A basket full of rubble dropped to the floor, sending stones the size of rat skulls bouncing into the hole at the center of the pipe. “That’s where the diamonds come from, that hole,” Scurvy had once told Crope. “Leads right down to the center of the earth. And the gods that live there shit them.”

  Fear quieted the hags. Hadda’s song rose alone and defiant, beating against the walls like a sparrow trapped in the pipe. As the Bull Hand moved toward her, the Crone set down her basket, straightened her back and looked into the blackness at the bottom of the pipe.

  “Rath Maer!” she murmured, and although Crope had no book learning or knowledge of foreign tongues, he felt the words pull on the fluid in his eyes and groin, and he knew she was calling something forth. “Rath Maer!”

  “RATH MAER!”

  One by one the pitch lamps blew out. Crope smelled the dark, wet odor of night, caught a glimpse of something rising from the center of the pipe . . . and then Scurvy Pine gave the word.

  “To the wall!”

  Men moved in the shadows with a great rattling of chains. Quickly, and with perfect violence, Scurvy sent the tip of his pickax smashing into the nearest Bull Hand’s face. The guard jerked fiercely as he dropped to the floor, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching as he worked on a scream that would never be heard. Bitterbean moved quickly to finish the job off, the pale flesh on his arms and many chins quivering as he stamped the life from the Bull Hand’s lungs.

  In the lower tier of the pipe all was chaos. The Bull Hands were lashing the hags, sending up sprays of blood and pipe-water to spatter against the wall. Hadda was still standing, but as Crope looked on, a hard leather edge snapped against her temple, pulling off her cap and revealing her scarred and shaven scalp. A second edge found her robe, and another found her legs, and the Bull Hands stripped her bare, and lashed her sagging flesh.

  All around, diggers were attacking Bull Hands and the few free miners who remained in the pipe. Iron Toe had gotten hold of a whip and was forcing the leather butt down a Bull Hand’s throat. The tiny cragsman was speaking to the Bull Hand as he choked him, asking him, quite softly, how it felt to eat the whip. Soft Aggie was sitting propped against a wall, blood sheeting down his chest from a lash wound so deep that Crope could see the bones at the back of Aggie’s throat. Jesiah Mump was kneeling at his side, his mud-caked fingers sliding in his pipebrother’s blood as he struggled to close the wound. Down the line, Sully Straw was frozen in place, unable to move because of the tension in the chain that connected him to Jesiah Mump.

  “Giant man!”

  Crope swung his head when he heard Scurvy’s call.

  A single tooth was embedded in the gore on Scurvy Pine’s ax, and he drove it deep into the spine of a free miner as he screamed, “The chains! Break the damn chains!”

  Crope felt heat come to his face. “Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. When we start attacking the Bull Hands it’s your job to break the chains.”

  Putting all his weight behind the drop of his ax, Crope severed the links that connected him to Old Bone. Half-wit, the bad voice said. Can’t even remember to break the chains. His was the only ax crowned with a blade broad enough to chop metal; and his were the only shoulders capable of delivering such a blow. Scurvy had made him practice on the iron staves that bound the water buckets. “Chop, chop, chop,” he’d say. �
��Like you did when you cut the leg-irons from Mannie Dun.”

  Crope didn’t remember cutting any iron the day that Mannie broke his back. He remembered only that Mannie was hurt and his body was twitching and all the Bull Hands cared about was sealing the lode. It was later, when Scurvy pulled him aside and told him that he, Crope, had broken Mannie’s chains with his ax, that he realized what he had done. “Say nothing, giant man,” Scurvy had warned. “The Hands are so busy pissing themselves over the Red Eyes that they don’t know who did what.”

  Crope brought his ax down on another chain, splitting the iron as if it were wood. Mannie was dead now. One of the free miners had given him some of the black. The black was poison, Bitterbean said, and the free miner had given it to Mannie as a mercy, for everyone knew that a digger with a broken back was as good as dead.

  Shaking off his leg-irons, Crope crossed to where Jesiah Mump was speaking last words to his pipe-brother. Soft Aggie was already gone—Crope had been around death often enough to read it on any man’s face—but Jesiah spoke to him all the same, telling him how they’d raft up the Innerway in high summer and gorge themselves stupid on raw leeks and fried trout. Crope severed the chains that connected them, though he did not expect them to pull apart.

  He knew what it was to love someone wholly.

  “Here, giant man! Cut me free!”

  Responding to Bitterbean’s voice, the giant digger moved along the ranks, chopping metal. A blackness lay upon the pipe, and men fought in the near-darkness, grunting and cursing, killing in violent spurts, then leaning against the wall to catch their breath and hack up dust. Crope watched as some diggers continued to beat the Bull Hands even after they were dead. He understood little of their need, for dead was dead to him, yet he made no effort to stay them. Men did what men would do, and he’d learned long and hard that nothing good ever came from interference.

  Keep your eyes and hands to yourself, half-wit, for looks start fights and touches set women to screaming rape. The old words could raise the fear in him even now. He was big and he was dangerous, and so he must make himself small and unassuming in other ways.

  He was careful as he stepped around the corpses.

  As he raised his ax to break Scurvy Pine’s chains, the last glimmers of light faded. The cold deepened, and the air began to move. Crope felt it swelling against his back like icy water. Men ceased fighting. Scurvy rattled his leg and hissed, “Cut the chains,” but Crope could no longer see Scurvy and he feared to drop the ax.

  A sound rose from the center of the pipe. Crope had heard the cries of many beasts, of lambs torn apart by dogs and mares split open during foaling, yet he’d never heard a call like this: cold and wanting and alive with pain. The urge came upon him to flee, for he had lived long and seen many things, and knew something of the darkness that lived within the night. Not all things that cast man-shadows were men.

  One of the hags screamed. A great whumf of air shook the pipe, sending the rope bridges creaking and lifting the hair on Crope’s scalp. Men began running; he couldn’t see them, but he heard the clatter of their chains against the rock.

  Scurvy pressed something sharp against Crope’s leg. “Cut me free, giant man. I won’t be taken alive in this pipe.”

  Crope heard the urgency in Scurvy’s voice. The Bull Hands had ways of killing ringleaders. John Dram had been fed a meal of diamonds—chips and splinters and gray and cloudy stones—and then he’d been thrown alive into the crowd at Frozen Square. They’d torn him apart, Bitterbean said, their hands steaming with blood as they plunged into John Dram’s guts.

  Crope dropped the ax on Scurvy’s chains. The digger grunted as he pulled his ankle free. “You bled me, giant man,” he murmured. “Sweet blood, and I’ll hold no grudges for it. Take my arm and let’s begone from this pipe.”

  “But—”

  “But what? There are others still in chains? Would you stay and free their corpses once they’re dead?” A random gleam of light caught Scurvy’s pale gray eyes. “Nine of us came from the tin pits, that winter when the Drowned Lake froze. Who’s left, giant man? Mannie’s gone. Will’s gone. All gone. All dead, except you and me.”

  Crope remembered Will. He knew all the words to the old songs, and could sleep standing up. It was hard to think of him as dead. He said stubbornly, “I’m going to fetch Hadda.”

  Scurvy seized Crope’s arm. “Forget her. She’s just a hag. There’s nothing left to save.”

  With gentle firmness, Crope broke free of Scurvy’s grip. He didn’t like Hadda, but she had sung, the song that brought the darkness. And without darkness they’d still be in chains.

  Scurvy cursed with disgust. He went to turn away, but something stopped him. Reaching into his torn and ragged tunic, he muttered, “Let no man say Scurvy Pine doesn’t pay his debts. Here. Take this.” He held out a small round object. “Show it in any thieves’ den north of the mountains and you’ll find protection in my name.”

  Crope’s big fingers closed around a metal band: a ring, light and very fine. Not a man’s ring, not even a woman’s, something made for a child. He looked up to find Scurvy watching him.

  “Take care of yourself, giant man. I’ll not forget who broke my chains.” With that Scurvy was gone, slipping through the darkness and the snarl of panicking men, a shadow amongst the shadows, moving swiftly toward the light.

  Crope carefully tucked the ring into the seam of his boot, and then went looking for Hadda the Crone.

  It was cold and gloomy in the diamond well, and not one human was moving. The rock was sticky underfoot and the smell of blood rose from it. Crope went unchallenged as he walked amongst the bodies. It was hard to tell the hags apart. All their hair had been shaved so they’d have one less place to conceal stones. He wouldn’t have recognized Hadda if it hadn’t been for the diamond in her tooth. Bitterbean said the pipe lord himself had given it to her the day she found a stone as big as a wren.

  Hadda was barely breathing, but he picked her up all the same. There were wounds across her legs and belly, lash marks that ran straight and deep. She was so light it was like carrying twigs for the fire, and he was overcome with a sense of shame. Everyone who helped him ended up hurt. You’re good for nothing, you misshapen monster. Should have been drowned at birth.

  Crope shook the bad voice away. Something dark and full of shadow was moving at the corner of his vision, and he knew it was time to leave. He heard the blistering crackle of charged air, the swift snick of something with an edge severing limbs. And screams: screams of diggers he knew. It was hard to hear them, and harder still to turn his back. But he had Hadda, and his chains were gone, and it was time to find the man who owned his soul.

  Sixteen years without his lord was too long.

  Bearing the dying woman up through the pipe, Crope began to plan his search.

  The ice on the lake creaked and rumbled as it cooled, its surface growing colder and drier as the quarter-moon passed overhead. There was no wind, yet the ancient hemlocks surrounding the lake moved, their limbs rising and falling in air that was perfectly still. Meeda Longwalker had made camp on a plate of shore-fast ice, three feet thick and hard as iron. It was the coldest night she could remember, so cold the shale oil in her lamp had frozen to thick yellow grease and she had been forced to burn a candle for light. Smoke rising from the candle’s flame cooled so quickly it floated back down to the ice, and Meeda had to keep pushing it away with her gloved and mitted hands so it wouldn’t cumulate and kill the light.

  She should have returned to the Heart. It wasn’t a night to be out alone on the ice, yet she had something in her that had always rebelled against good sense. She was a Heartborn Daughter of the Sull, mother to He Who Leads, and it seemed to her that any wisdom she had a claim to had come on nights such as this.

  Besides, she had her dogs; they would warn her of any danger. Warn, but not protect. Meeda Longwalker was no fool. She wasn’t like some trappers who drank themselves stupid on green elk milk turned sour
and then passed out around their dark-fires, sure in the knowledge that their dogs would save them if . . .

  If what? Meeda pulled her lynx cloak closer, wishing for a moment she had bare hands so she could feel the sweet softness of the fur beneath her fingers. Almost it was like touching a living thing, and Meeda Longwalker knew some men who claimed it was better. Trappers knew little of women and a lot about whores, and a scraped and combed lynx fur had a warmth to it that couldn’t be bought in Hell’s Town for any amount of gold.

  As she watched the fur ripple beneath her horsehair mitts a cry sounded in the forest beyond the ice. Low and hollow, like the wind moving down a well shaft, it made the skin on Meeda’s shoulders pucker and shrink. The flame above the candle dimmed from yellow to red, and then twitched upon its wick as the sound passed into the ice. Meeda felt its vibrations in her old and rotted bones . . . and knew then that the creature who made it was no living thing.

  “Raaks!” she called. Dogs!

  A hand shot onto the ice to feel for her stick as she waited for her terriers to heel. Damn dogs. She should never have let them go after that elk cow. Yet they had smelled age and weakness and the festering of a wolf-made wound, and such scents were irresistible to any animal trained to hunt. It was either let them go or drive a stake into the ice and leash them to it. And much though Meeda Longwalker hated to admit it, her hands had trouble forming the shape needed to hold a hammer this night.

  As her fingers groped for her stick a new sound rose from the edge of the ice. Fifty years she had coursed these headlands, fifty years of setting traps, snapping necks and peeling skin, and not a day without a dog at her heels. She had heard her terriers moan and yelp in childbirth and pain, heard them scrap amongst themselves over the weeping remains of a skinned fox. Yet never until now had she heard them scream.