A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2)

by J. V. Jones

  With that Tanjo Ten Arrow took his final shot. The arrow moved in the exact same arc as his last one, almost as if it were following a trail. The only difference was a fraction of extra pull to the right that guided the iron head even closer to the center of the bull.

  Raif flinched as the arrow hit. Maimed Men began pounding rock with the butts of their weapons and booted feet, chanting a word that it took him a moment to understand. For an instant he thought they were calling his name and he wondered what had happened to change their allegiance—but then he realized they were speaking his death sentence instead.

  “Rift! Rift! Rift!”

  Grimly, Raif nocked his arrow. A sort of dark calm was descending upon him, and the pulse in his neck began beating with the quiet force of a second heart. He knew Death. He’d met her. Did they think they could scare him by threatening to send him back?

  The arrow flew hard from the plate. Whatever force had possessed Raif’s body had transferred to the bow, and the recoil lashed against his hand. The pain barely registered. He’d sent his arrow too high, and all its power was being wasted as it climbed almost vertically toward the sky. Raif cursed himself. It was all over. Arrows like that peaked and then fell. They were good for taking an enemy’s eye out on the field, but not for hitting targets. Already the Maimed Men were closing on him, their chant rising as the arrow dropped.

  “Rift! Rift! Rift!”

  And then the updrafts rose. Suddenly the air moved, lifting cloak hems and scalp hair and filling the women’s skirts until they puffed like bells. Raif felt a drying warmth upon his eyeballs, and then his warrior’s queue lifted from his shoulders like a pennant.

  Invisible columns of force rose from the hole in the earth, making the air ripple as if it were melting, and catching in the flight feathers of Raif’s arrow. It happened in less than an instant, but to Raif it seemed as if he watched the path of his arrow change over minutes. Air buoyed the shaft and nudged the point upward, shifting the flight from a sheer drop to an arcing fall. All was quiet for a moment as the arrow traveled westward on the thermals. Eight hundred faces turned skyward. Breath was held. The updrafts blew steadily for perhaps another second, and then died.

  The arrow dropped with the wind.

  Thunk. Dead center of the bull.

  Silence. A stillness possessed the Maimed Men. It was as if no one wanted to be the first to move or speak into the void created by the receding wind.

  Defiantly, Raif rested his bow, causing the wood to tap against the rock. He couldn’t understand what had just happened, but he sensed danger, and he knew he would be a fool to show these men his fear. Steadying himself, he turned to Yustaffa. “Announce the victor.”

  All animation had drained from Yustaffa, leaving him looking fat and charmless. His tunic strained at the seams, and grease in his over-coiffed hair had attracted stray filaments from the arrows’ flight feathers. He cleared his throat, and Raif did not miss the glance he sent to Traggis Mole before daring to open his mouth. “Third and final round goes to Raif Twelve Kill.”

  The crowd surged forward, mouths shrinking, fingers closing around air. Someone threw a stone.

  Yustaffa raised his palms skyward and rushed on, his voice almost squeaking. “Now, Rift Brothers, we mustn’t be hasty. The contest isn’t done yet. In the event of a tie we fall back on that most glorious and perilous tradition: sudden death. Yes, my friends. Sudden death. One target, one shot per man. Best shot wins.” Yustaffa swung his head back and forth, looking for an appropriate target. Clearly, none had been arranged. No one had thought the outsider could win.

  Raif looked away. For some reason he found himself thinking of Ash. Where was she this moment? Did she ever wonder if leaving him had been a mistake?

  “Let them shoot the hog.”

  The sharp, rough-edged voice of Traggis Mole brought him back. Raif looked up to see the Robber Chief’s black gaze upon him, and he was almost glad of it. Glad because it took his mind away from Ash.

  Charged silence followed Traggis Mole’s words. Maimed Men eased back, but did not appear eased. Their chief’s voice stirred them, and Raif could see the need for violence in their eyes. They’re not clan. He’d been told it by Tem and Angus and a dozen other people he knew. Three nights ago Stillborn had told him the same. Yet he’d listened without truly hearing them. Now he knew they were right. The Maimed Men looked and sounded like clan, most of them, but there were no gods living in this stone city and nothing but shared desperation to bind it.

  “I yield first shot to the clansman.” Tanjo Ten Arrow bowed to Raif as he spoke, his face a mask of politeness as his shoulder blades sliced air.

  Raif did not return the courtesy. It was a sham. The hog was perhaps three hundred and fifty paces away, far wide of the central lane, suspended above a snakepit of flames. Heat distorted the air, and smoke clouded it. Tanjo had not relinquished first shot out of kindness. No practice shots were allowed in sudden death. The man who loosed his arrow first would be shooting blind. How much pull and height would be needed? Was the heat of the fire great enough to affect the arrow’s flight? Any experienced bowman was capable of making such judgments, but the decisions were that much easier when you could learn by someone else’s mistakes. Tanjo had decided to stand back and let Raif make some.

  There was nothing to be done but shoot. Raif flexed the longbow and waited for the women to clear the cook fire. The hog had been turned to present its flank to the archers, and although the animal was large it was winter-starved and bony. Raif wondered where it had come from, for Stillborn had said the Maimed Men were short of meat. Did raid parties ride south and seize livestock from tied clansmen? How did they cross the Rift?

  He fitted an arrow to the longbow. The carcass was hideous. Heat had shrunk the tendons, and all four limbs were raised and contracted. The tail looked stiff enough for a child to swing on. The snout had split and split again, and glimpses of steamed pink flesh could be seen beneath the char. Raif tried not to shudder as he focused his gaze upon the flank.

  Dead. Something deep inside him, in the place where his brain fused with his spine, sparked darkly like a single beam of moonlight moving across black water. Saliva wetted Raif’s mouth. The cooked gray chambers of the hog’s heart sucked him in. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He was surrounded by reeking flesh. Nothing of life remained here, just a spongy mass of exploded cells, and arteries choked with boiled blood. Dead. And even though it was hot inside the chamber, an immense and merciless coldness lay beneath. Waiting.

  Fear squeezed Raif’s stomach. He had to get out of here. Now. Death was moving closer, its tendrils uncurling like drifts of smoke as it reached out to touch his mind. The Gates to Hell. He could feel them pulling him in: the sucking blackness of swamp water, the fumes and taint of death. There was no bottom to the swamp, just a lifeless, eternal void. Once he went under he’d never stop falling.

  It wouldn’t let go. The hog’s heart was a sprung trap. He should never have entered. A pumping heart was a force of nature. A still one was a portal to death. And it pulled, it pulled him. Roaring filled his ears, and his thoughts began to twist around themselves as the tow grew stronger. The smell of cooked flesh faded, replaced by the sparkling blue odor of ice. Shadows moved at the periphery of his vision. Something sighed. The weight of corrupted flesh, soft and liquid with rot, bore him down.

  Yet his mouth still watered, and deep within his brain stem something quickened. He could feel his retinas dilating. This territory was known to him. Coming here was like coming home.

  Afterwards he could not remember releasing the string. He recalled only the shock of emerging from the darkness and the dizzying confusion of feeling sunlight on his face. His breaths were coming hard and fast, and he felt the iciness of the wind as keenly as if he were naked. He blinked like a man shaken suddenly awake, and his eyes showed him a sight it took his mind several moments to understand.

  A crowd of people, so still and silent they might have been clot
hed statues, were staring beyond him to the spitted carcass. An arrow—his arrow—had plunged deep into the creature’s heart. The force of impact had split the crisped hide in a star-burst pattern, and flaps of blackened flesh blew in the breeze, curling back to reveal the fatty hoops of the ribcage and a fist of shattered bone. It looked as if someone had taken a hammer to the ribs that lay directly above the heart and smashed them like pieces of pottery. The steaming gray mound of the hog’s heart could be glimpsed beneath the shards. It had been split clean in two.

  Raif swallowed. A sour taste was in his mouth. The yew longbow stood upright in his grip like a staff, yet he had no memory of resting it. He thought he should perhaps act; force Yustaffa to pronounce the shot good, acknowledge the fearful quiet of the crowd with an easy wave of his hand, bow smartly to Tanjo Ten Arrow and say, your shot, I believe. Yet he couldn’t move.

  Strangely, he recalled a tale Angus had once told him, of how the people who wandered the hard, red desert of the Far South named their sons. The father would choose a name but tell no one, not even his wife, of his decision and the child would grow to manhood never knowing what his father had named him. The son’s mother and siblings would call him by pet names until he became a man, strong enough and brave enough to challenge his father to a fight. The fights were bloody, Angus said, for the pride of the desert men was a terrible thing, and no father wanted to lose a fight to his son. To win, the son must be merciless and beat his father to the ground. Standing over his father, he must say, I claim my name. Give me what is mine. And the name is spoken, and the son walks away, leaving his father on the desert floor for the women to tend to, and departs the camp to hunt. There is magic that first night, Angus said, and animals will throw themselves onto the son’s spear and the gods send visions to guide him.

  Raif did not expect visions or animals lining up for the honor of being killed by him. But still.

  I claim my name.

  Looking at the carcass, at the arrow splitting the cooked heart, Raif knew that somehow he had claimed his name. Mor Drakka. Watcher of the Dead. How many arrows had he sent into beating hearts? He didn’t know. But this . . . this was the first arrow he’d sent into a dead one.

  He looked away, gazing down at the rimrock without seeing it. From what seemed like a very great distance, he heard Yustaffa speak. “Well. A shot, a shot, certainly a shot. Leaves a few less bones for Old Bessie to carve.” He made an odd hiccuping sound. “Well. I suppose we’d better write an end to this. Tanjo. When you’re ready.”

  The crowd began stirring as Tanjo prepared to take his shot. Maimed Men murmured, their leathers and metalwork creaking as they stretched numbed limbs and worked cricks from their necks. Raif heard an arrow being fitted against the plate, and looked up in time to see Tanjo draw his bow. Tanjo Ten Arrow’s burned face was made golden by the morning light. The Sull bow shimmered with power as it curved in his hands. Tanjo breathed once against the string and then lifted the jade bowring clear of the bow.

  The shot was beautiful, Raif would remember that for always: Tanjo’s release, his perfect stance, the particular sound—the trill of the discharged arrow—that said the shot was flawless. It flew high and then dropped like a hawk onto the carcass. Almost it matched Raif’s arrow. Three hundred and fifty paces through smoke and warped air, and it landed in the bulb-shaped aorta that exited the hog’s heart.

  Even before the Maimed Men had a chance to react, Tanjo Ten Arrow turned to Raif and bowed. Pride kept his face muscles taut as he straightened his spine and held out the Sull bow. Out of the corner of his vision, Raif saw Tanjo’s son weaving through the front row of the crowd, moving urgently toward his father. Someone, a big fair-haired hunchback, put out a hand to halt him. The boy kicked and fought, but the hunchback held him firm. An old hag near the front handed the hunchback her wool cloak and bade him cover the child’s face.

  Raif knew Tanjo Ten Arrow had to be aware of what was happening to his son, but the burned man did not react in any way. His gaze held steady on Raif. “Take the bow. It has served me well.”

  Yustaffa had begun speaking, his voice rising in high drama, but Raif did not hear the words. The Sull bow was no longer something he wanted, yet he moved his hand toward it all the same. I claim my name. And now it seemed to him that he understood why the sons of the desert men walked away and left their beaten fathers on the ground. Shame burned both men, yet neither could let it show. Raif met Tanjo’s pride with pride of his own, and their hands touched briefly on the belly of the bow.

  I owe you respect, Raif wanted to say. You are the greater bowman. Yet the words would never be said. Instead, Raif bowed low as he took possession of the bow, and pretended not to see the darkly moving shadow of Traggis Mole sliding toward them, and the brief flicker of fear in Tanjo Ten Arrow’s eyes.

  “Rift! Rift! Rift!” the chant began as Traggis Mole pulled his knife from its sheath of fossilized wood. Tanjo straightened his spine and turned to face him. The fear was gone now, and the pride that remained made the women weep.

  “Unhood my son.”

  As Raif heard those words he felt a hand touch his shoulder. “Come on, lad. Step away. Best give them chance to forget you.” Stillborn gripped Raif’s arm and tugged him back. Raif thought for a moment he would fight him, but Tanjo’s son now stood quiet and free from restraint, his face uncovered, his small body quaking with the effort of matching his father’s pride. The child was younger than Effie, and Raif let Stillborn draw him back.

  “Rift! Rift! Rift!”

  The cry of the crowd rose to a frenzy as Traggis Mole descended upon Tanjo Ten Arrow. There was a movement too quick to follow with the eye, and then the Robber Chief yanked Tanjo to his chest. A violent wrench broke bones in Tanjo’s neck and spine, and then two streams of blood jetted across the rimrock as Traggis Mole’s knife took the lids from Tanjo’s eyes. The burned man’s body slackened and twitched in Traggis’s grip. The white globes of his eyeballs rolled forward, the corneas sheeting with blood. Raif’s hand dropped to his waist, searching for a measure of powdered guidestone that wasn’t there. Please, gods, take him now. But the Robber Chief had broken only the bones needed to paralyze, not kill, and when the crowd surged forward to take possession of the body, Raif clearly saw Tanjo’s gaze focusing upon his son.

  The Maimed Men fell upon him. Raif had once seen a man torn apart by a pair of horses at Gnash, and the same forces that worked to rip limbs from sockets and the pelvis from the spine came to bear on the burned man’s body. The mob pulled him apart. They dragged him to the edge of the rimrock, heaved him high on to many shoulders and then threw him violently over the brink.

  Tanjo Ten Arrow’s eyes were open and no sound ever came from his fall.

  Raif shivered and walked away.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Nine Safe Steps

  “A longsword is no weapon for a girl. You could train for a year and still not grow the muscle to use it.” Ark Veinsplitter held out his hand. He wanted his longsword back. Ash had slid it from his weapons holster while he’d been busy covering the fire. The fire had burned through the night, and like most fires started by the Far Riders it had barely smoked, and had produced scarcely enough soot to stain the snow. Now that Ark was done with it Ash couldn’t detect the exact patch of ground where it had been. For some reason this annoyed her, and she decided she wasn’t about to give up the sword.

  Ark was right: it was too heavy for her—and long, too. About two feet too long. And the weight of it seemed to shift from tip to pommel as she tilted it this way and that, as if it had something liquid in its core. It was so very beautiful, though, shining as brilliantly as a mirror so that sometimes you couldn’t see it, just the things it reflected like mountains and sky. Ash’s arms began to wobble with the weight of it, so she rested the tip in the snow. “Mal said he would begin teaching me how to defend myself today.”

  She expected Ark to be irritated by her refusal to give up the sword, but instead he nodded gra
vely. “The Naysayer is right. Sometimes I forget you were not always Sull.”

  She nodded quickly, not wanting him to know how much she valued his words. Tell me how much you love me, Asarhia. The old request came to her unbidden, spoken as always in her foster-father’s voice. It was a warning, that request, for when you let someone know how much you loved and wanted to belong to them, they could hurt you and shut you out. Casually, she tugged the Sull blade from the snow and handed it, grip first, to Ark Veinsplitter.

  He watched her for a moment, and then recouched his steel.

  Dawn light slid across the ice fields, revealing melt holes and pockets of gravel frozen just below the surface. Overhead the sky was deep blue, streaked with high clouds that were heading out. Ash shivered as a low wind set her lynx fur rippling like a field of grass. She did not know where she was. To the west lay the shimmering phantoms of the Coastal Ranges, white peaks that floated weightlessly above the horizon as if they were no longer anchored to the earth. In every other direction there was nothing she knew or recognized. The land was flat, almost featureless except for the steaming beds of ice that surrounded her. Sometimes she thought she saw shapes—ridges and rock forms in the distance—but if they existed they lay at the far edge of her perception and she could not trust her eyes to show the truth.

  Mal Naysayer had left the camp sometime in the long night. The Far Rider was often away. Ash imagined him scouting for landmarks and drinkable water, standing on raised ground and peering into the territory ahead. She did not want to think about the black substance on his sword that day in the high valley, the way the liquid smoked as it melted snow. No. Better to imagine Mal surveying, rather than protecting. Safe, not in harm’s way.

  “Ash March. I would take on the promise my hass made you.”

  Ash looked over to see Ark Veinsplitter coming toward her. He had left his packs by the horses and shrugged off his heavy furs, and was bearing a small arms case covered with blue silk. Ash realized he was making a formal gift of the case and its contents when he placed the case on the ice at her feet rather than directly into her hand. It was the Sull way. They were sensitive about gifts, she’d noticed, adhering to rules she didn’t quite understand.