by J. V. Jones
The ranger’s eyes glittered cold. Any other man and the deal would be done by now, for talk was cheap and confidences easily betrayed. Yet Angus Lok was not any man . . . and he had lived twenty years with the Phage. He said, “I am no petty traitor, Dog Lord, and I go running to no man with news given to me in confidence. Nor would I speak a word that endangered friends or kin.” A pause, while the ranger allowed Vaylo time to remember that the man standing before him was kin to Raif Sevrance, murderer of Vaylo’s own grandchildren. “Yet there are matters where our interests meet—” a dangerous smile “—not least of which is setting me free.”
Vaylo inclined his head. The deal was done. Neither man would insult the other by haggling over terms.
“So,” Angus continued briskly. “You would have information from me. Well, much though I hate to come courting with swords, I should warn you to watch your back.”
“Blackhail?”
“No. Dhoone.”
The word seemed to warm the vault, Vaylo swore it. All around stonework creaked and settled, sending spores of blue sandstone to seed the air. “How so?”
Angus shrugged. “The battle for the chiefship is coming to a head. On one side you have Skinner Dhoone, brother to the slain chief Maggis. He names himself chief-in-exile and gathers men about him at the Old Round outside of Gnash.”
“Aye.” The Dog Lord nodded. He had Skinner’s measure. The Dhoone chief-in-exile put no fear into Vaylo Bludd. Skinner had a high temper and he blew hard and long, but he had lived too many years in the shadow of his brother and no longer had his jaw. Any other man would have tried to retake Dhoone by now. A month ago Skinner might have seized it if he’d had the balls, for Vaylo and Drybone were housed at Ganmiddich, and the Dhoonehouse was held by Pengo Bludd. Vaylo snorted air. He had nothing but contempt for a man who had a chance but failed to seize it.
“And on the other side you have Robbie Dhoone,” Angus continued. “The golden boy of the Dhoone warriors, who claims chiefship through some questionable second-cousining and the Thistle Blood through his dam.”
Vaylo pushed himself off from the wall with force. “A young pretender, nothing more.”
“Not from what I’ve heard, Dog Lord.” Angus’s voice was strangely light. “Then again, perhaps you have better intelligence than I. After all, there are limits to what a man can hear in a cell.”
Put in his place, there was nothing for Vaylo to say other than, “Go on.” They both knew who was master of secrets here.
“Robbie Dhoone has the golden hair and fair eyes of the Dhoone Kings, and he knows how to cut a figure with them. They say he’s born to the sword, but the weapon he draws in battle is the great ax, much loved of the old kings. By all accounts the Thistle Blood runs true within him, and he can trace his line back to Weeping Moira. And I’ve heard it said by more than one man that he signs his name Dun Dhoone.”
Dun. “Thistle” in the Old Tongue, the name the Dhoone Kings took as their own.
Unease must have shown itself on Vaylo’s face, for Angus said, “Aye, Dog Lord. You see the way the lake drains now. He’s young and ambitious and well loved in Castlemilk, and he’s puffing himself up to be a king.”
“He quarters in Castlemilk?”
Angus nodded. “He raises an army there.”
Vaylo turned his back on the ranger to give himself time to think. The likenesses of the Dhoone Kings watched him, stone eyes alive with moonlight. The pretender will try to retake this place, he thought. That is the warning Angus Lok would have me heed. All talk of kingship is hollow unless a king holds the land he claims.
Behind him, Vaylo heard the sound of Angus crossing to the far side of the vault. Shadows lay deep there, amongst the oldest of the standing tombs. All edges had been worn to curves by nothing more than air. “And there’s more, Dog Lord,” Angus said softly, causing Vaylo to turn. “The border clans best ready themselves against raids from the Mountain Lords.”
Vaylo grunted. There was always more. “The Surlord and the King on the Lake have long had an eye for the green hills and black mines of Bannen and Croser. Spring raids are nothing new. Heron Cutler led a sortie five years back, and took a blade in the kidneys for his trouble.”
Angus squatted to inspect the capstones surrounding the effigy of an ancient and faceless king. As he spoke he ran a finger along the mortar lines, testing. “If I were you, Dog Lord, I’d watch the clans nearer home. The Lord Rising of Morning Star stands close enough to HalfBludd to smell the staleness there.”
This was news. “Cawdor Burns plans to strike against the Bluddsworn clans?”
The ranger did not look up from inspecting the wall as he said, “Who can say? The Lord Rising is no man’s fool. He’ll sit and watch the clanholds crumble from the safe haven of his Burned Fortress, and as soon as he spies a weakness he’ll move. HalfBludd is past her glory. She’s been in decline since Thrago HalfBludd deserted his birthclan to name himself chief of Bludd.”
Vaylo found himself nodding. It was so. Thrago HalfBludd was his grandfather, the Horse Lord who brought back glory to the Bluddhouse after the defeat at Crumbling Wall. Yet whilst Thrago was in the field winning victories for Bludd, his birthclan suffered for want of a strong chief, and Bludd’s gain was HalfBludd’s loss. “I’ll send word to Quarro at the Bluddhouse, get him to send a crew of hammermen to HalfBludd’s southern reach.”
“Do that. But be sure to keep your watch.”
Vaylo bristled. He did not care for advice from any man, let alone from some cocksure, trusty runner for the Phage. He was the Dog Lord, and he had lorded his clan for thirty-five years, and a chief did not hold his place that long by being anybody’s fool. “Get up, man,” he commanded. “Go and present yourself to Drybone and tell him the nature of the deal we have struck. He’ll return your arms and provision your drypack and see you on your way.”
Still Angus did not rise. “And my horse?”
The magnificent bay gelding. As soon as Vaylo had set eyes upon it he had known it for a Sull horse. “It will be returned.”
“I thank you for that, Dog Lord.” The ranger stood and faced him. His fingertips were white with mortar dust, and Angus saw Vaylo’s gaze upon them. “’Tis nothing,” he said, with a small shrug. “I heard once that a tunnel led from this tomb all the way north to the Copper Hills. It’s said that it was dug so long ago that not even the Dhoonesmen can remember it.”
“Yet you and your brotherhood do.”
The ranger brushed the dust from his fingers. “We remember the old words and the old rhymes, nothing more. In the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes there be/A bolthole for those who canna look nor see.” He grimaced. “Poetry was never a Dhoonish art.”
“Nor patience a Bluddish one.”
Angus accepted the reprimand with a bow. “Well, I’d best be on my way. Let no one say Angus Lok outstayed his welcome in the Dhoonehouse.” He offered the Dog Lord his arm, and after a moment Vaylo stepped forward to clasp it. “I shall call back when I have more news. Expect me when the wind blows cold and from the North.”
“That’s near every day in the clanholds.”
Angus grinned. “Then I’ll be sure to pick an especially stormy one.”
Vaylo released his arm. “Aye, I’m sure you will.” He made himself wait until the ranger was long gone before following him out of the tomb.
FOUR
The Beast Beneath the Ice
Raif pushed the sealskins from him and swung his feet onto the floor. The band of ice sealing the door glowed blue and milky in the growing light. The little soapstone lamp was dead, the whale oil in its chamber long congealed to a wedge of fat. A fur of hoarfrost had grown on the ceiling above where he had slept, each rising breath adding crystals to the mass. It was bitterly cold. And he was alone.
Ash was gone.
Raif waited, but the panic didn’t come. He would go after her, that was all. Wherever she was, wherever they had taken her, he would find her and bring her back.
His head hurt when he moved his eyes, and the skin on his face was tight and numb. Something dry and scaly coated his tongue, and he remembered the oolak the Listener had bade him drink. Strong brew, and like a fool I drank myself into oblivion. I should have known what Ark Veinsplitter wanted. The truth was in his eyes.
Raif pressed his fingers into his face, trying to banish the numbness. They’d had it all planned, the two Far Riders and the Ice Trapper. Make him drink until he’d passed out and then steal away with Ash. From the look of the hoarfrost over the bench, he’d slept longer than one night . . . and that meant that Ash could be leagues away by now. No one could travel further in white weather than the Sull.
But a clansman could always try.
Standing, Raif tested his body for aches. There seemed too many to count so he ignored them and concentrated on his thirst instead. A small copper pot stood beside the lamp, its rim caked with caribou hairs and frozen soot. Snapping surface ice with his knuckles, he discovered liquid water beneath. The water was so cold it smoked from his mouth as he drank, and he could feel it sliding down to his gut. The horn bowls and the stone warming basin that had contained the oolak were gone. The only evidence that Ash had been here were the footsteps stamped in rime on the floor.
How could I have let them take her?
A soft chuffing sound broke his thoughts. The raven. The Listener’s great black bird stood to attention on its bone perch, its wings tucked and folded, its sharp-eyed gaze upon Raif. Raif thought he would like to swipe it with his fist, but seriously doubted that he was faster than the bird, and didn’t think it would be dignified to miss. So he turned his back instead. He was sick of ravens and their omens. And he didn’t want to think about his lore. Ash had it, that was enough. The last time he’d seen the hard piece of bird ivory, it had been suspended from twine at her throat.
Suddenly eager to be gone, Raif kicked the driftwood door. The ice seal cracked, and the thick sea-salt-cured planking swung back to reveal a twilight landscape of day-burning stars and ice. The sun was somewhere north of the horizon, unseen, but sending out rays of red light that stretched across the floes toward the sea. The air smelled of a coldness beyond frost. When Raif exhaled his breath whitened so violently it seemed to ignite.
“Sila. Utak.” The small hunched figure of the Listener was heading toward him, leaning heavily on a staff of twisted horn as he made his way across the cleared space at the center of the stone mounds. His words sent a young girl racing off to do his bidding, and made two older hunters who were hacking frozen meat by a cache hole stand alert.
Raif stepped forward to meet him. The man’s finery and tokens of power were gone, replaced by grubby sealskin and stiff furs, yet he appeared no smaller for it . . . and he did not look repentant.
Anger sparked within Raif. “Where have they taken Ash?”
Close now, the Listener shook off Raif’s question as if it were nothing more than snow on his back. Coming to a halt, he repeated the words he had spoken to Raif when first he saw him: “Mor Drakka.”
Raif felt the same strange thrill, almost as if he were hearing a god speak his name, yet he would not let himself be distracted. “The girl. Where is she?”
The Listener crooked his mitted fist and turned. Slowly, he walked away, heading for the hills and frost boils that rose sharply to the north of the village. A low wind buffeted the snow and set the sea ice creaking. Raif did not want to follow. He’d been trapped once in this place. How difficult could a second entrapment be? He was a stranger here. An outsider, and without warmth and food and knowledge of the land, he’d be a dead man within a day.
Reluctantly, he grabbed his Orrlsman’s cloak from the ground and followed the Listener north. There were no choices at the edge of the world, and a clansman could do well to remember that. The Stone Gods’ power was stretched thin here; the earth and rock they lived in was buried deep beneath the ice.
The Listener led him north across treacherous ground. Ice fog had frozen the top snow to glass, and it shattered with tiny explosions underfoot. The cold made Raif weary, and the bleak whiteness of the landscape drained the willpower from him. It was hard to imagine journeying alone in this place.
Frost boils broke through the ground like shrunken volcanoes, their stone rims too sharp and narrow to bear snow. The Listener stepped around them with ease, prodding at drifts and suspect ice with his staff. When the land began to rise he slowed his pace, yet Raif still found it difficult to keep up. He could barely hide his relief when the old man came to a halt by the leeward edge of a frost boil. Raif clambered up the slope to reach him.
“Turn around, Clansman. Tell me what you see.”
It took Raif a moment to realize that the Listener had spoken in Common Tongue. How could this be? What had happened to the old man who had not understood a word he’d said the other night, and had needed Ark Veinsplitter as a translator?
Seeing Raif’s surprise, the Listener’s eyes glinted with satisfaction. “Never assume you know your enemy until he is dead.”
Feeling heat come to his face, Raif said, “You can’t learn anything from a corpse.”
“You can learn that only a dead man cannot surprise you.”
Something hard and ancient shifted behind the Listener’s eyes, and Raif knew he had been told a truth worth remembering. Yet it didn’t mean he had to like the old man for it. Turning to face the way they had come, Raif looked out across the Ice Trappers’ territory and the frozen sea. His gaze traveled to the stone grounds of the village, then toward the shore, where a second village, built of wood and whalebone and mounded earth, stood abandoned close to the ice.
“Our summer life,” said the Listener, following his gaze. “Soon it will be eaten by the ice. A storm will move the sea, and the shore ice will break its mooring and come crashing onto the beach. Much will be destroyed. So we gathered our lamps and harnessed our dogs and took refuge in the old places.” His eyes flicked to Raif. “It’s a foolish man who thinks he can stand in the way of fate or moving ice.”
“How can you know this?”
“I listen while others sleep.” The Listener poked a mitted finger at the remains of his left ear. “Gods and things older than gods whisper in the darkness, telling the tale of what has been and what is to come. If you are lucky you cannot hear them. You grow, you hunt, you enter a woman, and the world you live in is a knowable place where a man can make his own way and find his own death.
“If you are unlucky you learn more. Oh, men will honor you for it, send the women with the best cuts of meat and their daughters with animal skins beaten till they run through your fingers like grains of sand. And all the while they fear you. And though they need the knowledge you bring them, they do not love you for it. For you have heard whispers from the beginning of the world, and no man can listen to those echoes and remain unchanged.”
The Listener rested his weight on the yellow and twisted horn of his staff. His face was dark and knowing, lit by the farthest edge of the sun. When he spoke again there was anger in his voice, and his breath crackled in air that was suddenly still. “Days darker than night lie ahead; that is the truth here. That is the answer to your question. The girl has gone and you cannot follow her. How can you track someone in utter darkness? What good would it do to find her, when you can no longer see her face?”
“Where have they taken her?” Raif heard the stubbornness in his voice. He could not let this man’s words distract him. It was a trap, like the oolak. Fine drink. Fine words. He just wished they sounded less like the truth.
“Better ask why, not where, Clansman. Follow me.” The Listener raised his staff to the hummock wall and began the final ascent to the rim. He moved like a spider, light and skittering, stepping sideways more often than forward. Raif envied his technique. The little tribesman was full of surprises.
The frost boil was a crater of raised rock, forced upward by earth that had expanded as it froze. Raif had seen their like in the badlands. They were good plac
es to set camp by, and Tem said that clansmen used to fight duels in their hollows as they were reckoned a worthy place to die. When Raif gained the rim he saw the crater’s basin was filled with snow-crusted ice. Hard black basalt ringed the core.
The Listener wagged his head toward the ice. “Drop down and scrape off the snow.”
Raif had half a mind to tell the Listener to go to one of the nine spiraling hells. He was getting tired of games. And he feared another trap.
“I am an old man,” snapped the Listener, “and the women tell me I must save my strength for winter’s end. So if I had a mind to kill you I’d have done so closer to home.” He bared tiny brown teeth. “Save myself the trouble of hauling back your body for the dogs.”
Raif let out a breath. Why was it that all holymen thought they had a right to taunt him? Inigar Stoop had been no different—but at least he was clan. Laying a mitted hand on the crater’s rim, he vaulted onto the ice. He landed hard, ten paces below the Listener, on a basin of ancient water that was frozen to its core.
“Here. Use this.” The Listener dropped a flat-bladed knife onto the ice. “Ulu. Woman’s knife. Should serve a clansman well.”
Raif stabbed at the snow. The top layer was hard and brittle, but softer grains lay beneath. The little knife, with its center tang, had been designed for scraping skins, and it made good progress toward the underlying ice. Raif decided it wasn’t worth thinking about why he was being made to do this. The Listener reminded him of one of those spiteful little imps who always guarded bridges in crib tales: they’d never let you cross until they’d humbled you first.
Fumes rose from the ice as he worked. When he reached the final layer of snow, a chill went through him. Something was casting a shadow on the ice. Turning, he looked up at the Listener and the twilight sky beyond. Neither the sun nor the moon had risen high enough to cast shadows. Yet it was there, a darkness upon the ice.
