by J. V. Jones
High it was, high and terrible and so close to human that it might have been children instead. Meeda’s fist closed around the three feet of icewood that had been her walking stick for a hundred seasons. The wood was pale as milk, and so smooth it ran with moonlight like live steel. Icewood, from the heart of the tree; no earthly cold could warp it, and none but master Sull craftsmen could shape it to their will. It dulled saws, people said. Made bows so powerful that they defied air and wind. Only the Sull King and his mordreth, the twelve sworn men who guarded him and were known as the Walking Dead, were allowed to carry bows of its making. A single tree had to grow for a thousand years and its timber aged for fifty more before a master bowyer would dare cut a stave from the dann, the late-wood that was laid down in the sacred months of summer and late spring.
Meeda hefted the stick across her chest, taking comfort from its familiar weight and hand. It was a hard life she had lived and chosen, and she had not reached such an age by being easily cowed. The night was alive with noises, with black lynx and horned owls, moon snakes and old ghosts, and she had long since realized that none of them liked the smell of living men. Rising to her feet, she called once more to her dogs.
As she waited for them to respond, something crunched softly on the frozen snow beyond the shoreline. Water swelled beneath the ice. The dogs fell silent one by one.
Meeda bit off her outer mitts, and spat them onto the ice. The sky was dark, darker than it ought to be when quarter of the moon hung there for all to see. There were no stars, or if there were they shone black like volcanic glass. Moon and night sky. No Sull prayer was complete without those words, and Meeda found herself mouthing them as she stepped toward the shore.
Damn her eyes! Why couldn’t she see anything? Her hard old corneas were slow to focus in the biting air, and she felt the anger come to her as quick as if it had been hiding beneath her fear all along. She hated her old woman’s body with its humps and slack pouches and dry bloodless bones. Some nights she dreamed Thay Blackdragon, the Night King, came to her, offering youth in return for her soul. Sometimes she dreamed she said yes.
Frost smoke steamed above the ice margin, switching colors from blue to gray. Meeda felt its coldness in her mouth, stinging her gums and numbing her tongue until it felt like a piece of meat against her teeth. Underfoot the ice was black and transparent, swept clean of snow by northern winds. It ticked as Meeda’s weight came down upon it. As she stepped beyond the candle’s light, something red broke through the trees, something broken and limping and not right. Meeda braced her stick with both hands, and then recognized the bloody shape of one of her dogs. Marrow. Its rear left leg was gone, and the skin on its rump and belly had been torn away, revealing glistening muscle and coils of gut.
Meeda feared to call to it. She knew the look of wolf- and lynx-made wounds. She knew what wolverines could do to creatures twice their size and what a coven of moon snakes was capable of when they hadn’t fed in a week. Yet this didn’t smell like wolf or cat or snake. This smelled like night.
The dog had caught its mistress’s scent, and it dragged its lower torso across the ice to reach her, trailing blood and viscera from its great black wound. Meeda barely breathed as she waited for the creature to heel. She did not think, knew better than to think, just raised her stick to the height she needed, waited to feel the push of the dog’s snout against her leg, then drove the butt through its heart.
“Good dog,” she said quietly, as she pulled the stick free of its ribs.
Blood and bits of bone were already freezing to the wood by the time she turned to face the shore. “Come for me, shadows,” she said, “for I stand ready in the light of the moon.” The words were old and she did not know where they came from, yet they were Sull words and she felt something fill her as she spoke them. She thought at first it was courage, for her heart quickened and her grip tightened and something hard and excited came alive in her chest.
Then the ice around the shore began to crack. White splinters shot up from the surface in a footstep pattern toward where she stood. Crack! Crack! Crack! The air rippled like water, and suddenly it was cold enough to turn her breath to grains of ice. Meeda’s hands ached as she adjusted her grip on her stick. Her eyes burned as she tried to see. Something glinted. Moonlight caught an edge and ran along its length. A man-shape shimmered into existence, dark and silvered, like no man at all. Its eyes were two holes that held no soul. Its hand gripped a blade that drank the light. Meeda watched as the cutting edge came up and up, saw how moonlight outlined the thing’s arm and mailed fist, yet found no purchase in the black and voided steel. It was like looking at a distilled piece of night.
Meeda knew then that what she felt wasn’t courage. The fear was in her, twisting her bowels, speaking to her in a voice that sounded like her own, warning her to run for the thin ice at the lake’s center and find for herself an easy painless death. Yet something older stopped her.
Not courage, she told herself; she would not lie about that. Remembrance. The old memories were coming back.
Ice shattered and exploded as the thing came for her. Fracture lines raced along the lake’s surface like lightning branching in a storm. Meeda saw shadows and gleaming edges of light, smelled the dark odor of another world. Eyes that held nothing met her own. She braced her stick to meet that cold black blade. And then, as the sword hummed toward her, burning a mark in the air that hung there long after the blade had passed, she noticed the shadow man’s chest. Rising and falling like a living thing.
A heart lay somewhere within the darkly weighted substance of its flesh. It was beating. And it made Meeda’s mouth water like a meal of ham and wine.
Icewood and voided steel met with a crack that sounded the beginning of an Age. White pain shot up Meeda’s arms, and it took all she had to hold her ground. Three feet of ice bowed under the mass of the shadowed thing. Yet still Meeda did not lose her footing. She was Sull. Every hair on her body and drop of blood in her veins demanded that she should fight.
ONE
The Ice Fog Rises
They found blood on the trail on the seventh day, five spots, red against the gray of old snow. It wasn’t new-spilt, but it might have looked like it to someone who was unfamiliar with killing game in midwinter. Blood began darkening to black the moment it left the body, thickening and distilling until there was nothing but copper and iron left. It was different when the air crackled with ice. Blood could freeze in perfect red drops in the time it took to drip from an elk’s collarbone to the tundra below. Raif remembered how he and Drey would scoop up frozen beads of elk blood after a kill and let them melt upon their tongues; sweet as fresh grass and salty as sweat. The taste of winter and clan.
But this wasn’t elk’s blood before them.
Raif glanced ahead to the top of the rise where towers of white smoke rose straight in the still air. The trail had been rising all day and they still hadn’t found the source of the smoke. The ground was hard and brittle here, formed from basalt and black chert. Cliffs soared to the east, high and straight as fortress walls, guarding knife-edged mountains beyond. To the west lay the farthermost tip of the Storm Margin, its rocky draws and moraines disguised as rolling hills by a thick layer of snow. Beyond there lay the sea ice, and beyond that lay the sea. Stormheads gathering on the westernmost horizon had begun to silver the floes.
“What happened here?” asked Ash, who was standing above Raif as he crouched over the blood. Her voice was clear, but there was too much space between her words.
“One of the Sull breathed a vein.”
“How can you be sure?”
Raif faked a shrug. “Even a clean kill leaves more blood.” He fingered the red spots, remembering frozen carcasses, ice-bent blades, Tem Sevrance laughing at his sons as they strained to push an elk kill down a slope only to have it crash into the lake ice at the bottom and sink. When Raif continued speaking his voice was low. “And the blood wasn’t sprayed. It dripped.”
“How do
you know it’s human?”
Abruptly, Raif stood. He felt an irrational anger toward Ash and her questions. They both knew the answer here. Why did she force him to speak it?
“Listen,” he said.
Standing side by side on the headland, their breath whitening in the freezing air, Raif Sevrance and Ash March listened to the sound they had been heading toward all day. A crackling hiss, as if lightning was touching down upon water.
Raif counted the columns of smoke as he said, “They were here: Mal Naysayer and Ark Veinsplitter, they heard what we hear. They saw the smoke.” And knew it was something to be feared, so they let blood to still their gods.
Ash nodded, as if she had heard what he had not spoken. “Should we make payment too?”
Raif shook his head and started forward. “This is not our land and not our business. There are no debts here for us to pay.”
He hoped it was the truth.
They had been following the Sull warriors’ trail for nine days. It had led them north and west from the Hollow River, across land Raif would never have dared to cross if it hadn’t been for the telltale markings in the snow. Horse casts buried shallow, human hair snagged on the bark of a dead pine, a footprint stamped on new ice. The Sull had left “Such a trail as can be followed by a clansman”. Raif’s shoulders stiffened as he walked, aware of the insult in Ark Veinsplitter’s words. “We travel without leaving any trail,” they boasted, “but will make effort to leave one for you.” Even as Raif had resented the Sull’s arrogance, he knew to be thankful for their skills. No clansman would cross a green-froze lake, nor scale an unknown ice sheet in the hope of finding a pass.
The journey had not been easy. The days had been short and the nights long and full of silence. What could he and Ash say to each other? Raif wondered as he stripped bark for the watch fire each night. They could not talk about the Cavern of Black Ice, nor what had happened later, when they emerged from the river and something, something, came with them. All Raif had seen was a shadow, but shadows don’t make pine needles crack beneath them . . . and shadows can’t scream.
Raif shivered. Whatever it was, it was gone now. Fled. And even though they had seen nothing since, it had changed everything.
Ten days ago, in the cavern beneath the frozen river, he and Ash had spoken of returning to the clanholds, of finding Angus and journeying with him to Ille Glaive and visiting the Broken Man one last time. Heritas Cant had a promise to keep. “Return safely from the Cavern of Black Ice and I will tell you the names of the beasts,” he had said. But now the word safely seemed an impossibly high standard to keep. They were not safe. Raif did not count himself a clansman anymore, but the old instincts had not left him. He knew when to fear. A deep unease had settled upon him, making him watchful and ready. The ice pick he counted as his only weapon lay cooling the skin at his waist.
He could not say whose decision it had been to follow the Sull north. It was something else he and Ash didn’t speak of, the need to learn more. The two Sull warriors knew what Ash was. They could provide proof that it was all over. And it was safe to return home.
It took them an hour to top the rise. Ash pushed ahead, and Raif was content to follow the shadow she cast against the full moon. Neither spoke as they surveyed the valley below. Twelve geysers of steam erupted from the ice and rubble of a dry glacier bed. A ring of blue fire blazed at the base of each column, leaping up from a crater of ash and melted stone that had formed around the burn. The roar was deafening: the crack of exploding rocks, the hiss of melting snow, and the constant rip of igniting gas.
The quickening wind brought the stench of char and lightning to Raif. He had no words for what he saw. To find fire and smoke here, at the frozen edge of the Storm Margin, seemed as impossible as finding breath in a corpse.
“Is this where the trail leads?” Ash asked, turning her face toward him.
He found he could not look into her eyes. Once they had been the gray of silver and hailstones. Now they were the color of the sky at midnight. A perfect Sull blue. “The trail cuts through the valley, toward the coast.”
“So we must cross here?” As Ash spoke the ground moved beneath them, and rocks and snow spewed forth as a new column of smoke rent the valley floor.
Thirteen, Raif counted, feeling the heat of the explosion puff against his face. He remembered the tale of Murdo Blackhail, the Warrior Chief, who had led his men to war across the Stairlands. On the final day of their descent, the mountain had erupted above them, and a spray of molten rock had burst forth. Murdo had been riding at the head of the party, high atop his stallion, Black Burr. His breastplate had burst into flame with the heat, and later, when his armsman pulled it from him, Murdo’s skin and muscle came with it. In the two days it took him to die, Murdo Blackhail directed his men to victory over Clan Thrall and took his wife to his bed, fathering their only son. Bessa, his wife, was led to her husband blindfold and with plugs of wax within each nostril, for the sight and stench of his burned flesh was said to be terrible to behold.
Raif grimaced. “We travel through the valley,” he said.
The gas vents glowed blue in the failing light. Ash had little fear of them and picked a path through their center, once drawing close enough to a crater to drink water from its moat of melted snow. Raif spoke no word of warning, though he saw the danger clear enough. The entire valley floor was under pressure, its ancient rock buckled and twisted by whatever forces lay below. It might have been beautiful, this corridor of burning gas and rising smoke, but all the tales of hell he had listened to as a child had begun with an approach such as this.
They walked well into the night, Raif postponing making camp until the gas vents were far behind them. The next day the sun barely rose above the horizon, and what light it gave could hardly be called daylight at all. The following day was darker still, and the trail left by the Sull became more difficult to follow. As the afternoon wore on Raif began to spot signs of other men. Ice-bleached bones and sled tracks, dog fur and slicks of green whale-oil pitted the path. The snow itself was hard and frozen, the air so dry and clear that even the finest specks of dust were revealed.
They came across the Whale Gate at some time during the long night. Formed from the jawbone of a massive bow whale, the ancient archway rose as high as two men and as wide as four. It stood alone on a headland of frost-cracked rocks and graying weeds, marking entrance into the territory beyond. Raif bit off his mitts and touched it with bare hands. The ivory was stained and scaling, its edges jagged with the stumps of baleen combs. Designs had been burned into the bone. Dolphins chasing stars had been seared atop an older, darker design of beasts slaying men.
Raif took his hands away. In the sheltered valley below the gate, the faintest discernible lights twinkled, and above them a white haze of exhaled breaths shifted in the air like sleeping ghosts.
“The trail ends here.” Raif couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken, and his voice sounded strange and rough. He looked down upon the village, if village it was. Stone mounds, rising mere feet above the ground, formed a circle around a smoking firepit. The mounds were built of obsidian and basalt and other black things, and their edges glowed faintly in the starlight. They reminded Raif of the barrows of Dhoone’s Core. Twelve thousand clansmen dead, each corpse interred in a stone tomb of its own. For three thousand years they’d lain there, rotting to bone dust and hollow teeth. Withy and Wellhouse kept no history of the massacre. Raif had once heard Inigar Stoop name it “the Price of Settlement” but warriors and chiefs gave it another name, whispered around campfires in the deep of night. The Field of Stone.
Suddenly Raif wanted very much to turn back, to grab Ash’s hand and take her . . . where? No land that he knew of was safe.
Abruptly, Ash stepped through the gate, leaving Raif no choice but to follow her into the village below.
Dogs began barking as they approached. Yet even before the first growl of warning caused lights to brighten and stir, a figure stood
waiting at the first of the stone mounds. Raif recognized the pale bulk of Mal Naysayer, his cloak of wolverine fur stirring in the wind, the haft of his great two-handed longsword rising above his back. The warrior stood unmoving as they approached, silent and terrible against a field of burning stars.
“The Sull are not our people and they do not fear us.” The old clan words came to Raif as he raised a hand in greeting, yet they were old words and often said and men who knew nothing about the Sull spoke them, and they fell from his mind when the warrior began to kneel.
Mal Naysayer, Son of the Sull and chosen Far Rider, dropped to his knees as they approached. He held his position until Ash and Raif passed within speaking distance and then laid himself down upon the snow.
Oh gods. So it begins.
Muscles in the warrior’s back moved beneath his cloak as he spread his arms wide to form a cross. Raif could see dozens of white letting scars on his knuckles as he dug bare fingers into ice. Not for me, Raif knew with certainty. No Sull would prostrate himself before a clansman without a clan.
Ash stood silent above the Sull, wrapped in lynx fur and boiled wool, her hair lifting and falling in the changing air. Nothing showed on her face, not exhaustion or fear . . . or surprise. “Rise, Mal Naysayer of the Sull, for we are old friends met in far lands and I would speak to your face, not your back.”
Raif felt a tremor pass through him as she spoke. How could he have come so far with her and not realize she had been leading the way all along?
In silence, Mal Naysayer pulled himself to his feet. The silver chains and brain hooks at his waist chimed softly as he brushed snow from his mouth. Raif watched his eyes. Pale as ice and colder still, they spared no glance for the clansman. The warrior looked only at Ash.
“Snow burns,” he said.
A chill went through Raif . . . and for one brief instant he almost knew why. He saw thirteen columns of smoke rising from a valley thick with snow, heard the old guide chanting a fragment of a cradle song, long forgot: Snow burns, the Age turns, and Lost Men shall walk the earth.
