by J. V. Jones
“Da always said I was born on Lambing Night, in the last month of winter. But when I was a bairn I remember my mother celebrating my name-day earlier, at Winter Fest.”
As soon as Raif spoke he regretted it. Never before had he mentioned this to anyone, not even to Drey. He’d always used the day Tem had given. But even a child of four can remember things, and he distinctly recalled his mother giving him a tiny wooden boat to sail on the Leak. It was at Winter Fest, he knew, for as he watched his toy boat bob along the icy stream, he remembered the clan maids in their winter whites, singing to lone, pleading with the Stone Goddess to find them a mate before Lambing Night.
Traggis Mole sat perfectly still, watching him. Raif was aware of the man’s power, the potential for absolute violence that charged his body like a drawn bow.
“The Vorlanders say that if you lose an eye in battle it is a good thing, for that eye will go ahead of you to heaven and will send you glimpses of other worlds. Me, I lost a nose, and I’ve come to believe that if I sniff very hard I can scent a lie.” The Robber Chief paused, gauging Raif’s reaction. “Now I will ask you one question, and if you lie to me I will kill you. Do you understand?”
Raif nodded slowly. He feared this man.
The Robber Chief waited, choosing his moment before speaking. His eyes were black as night, and you could not see his soul through them. “The Orrl cloak. Did you kill the man who owned it?”
The question was so surprising it took Raif a moment to make sense of it. The Orrl cloak? He met Traggis Mole’s gaze. “No.”
Time passed, how much Raif was unable to tell. Everything was still and quiet, except the breath piping in and out of the Robber Chief’s wooden nose. Suddenly he moved, stood and crossed toward the weapon stand. Again there was that quickness, as if Traggis Mole knew a way to shrink space. “So how did you come by it?”
Raif hoped his relief didn’t show. “I took it from a dead man’s back. I came across five bodies in the wastelands west of Orrl. I needed clothes.” He wasn’t proud of it, but Traggis Mole had asked for the truth.
“And did you know who they were?”
“No. Orrlsmen, nothing more.”
“Then you’d be surprised to learn that one of them was grandson to an old friend of mine, Spynie Orrl?”
Raif shook his head, knowing he’d fallen into a trap.
The Robber Chief selected a sheathed longknife from the weapon stand. “You’re not what you claim, are you, Raif Twelve Kill? Not a white-winter warrior, not even an Orrlsman.”
“No.”
The word stilled the Robber Chief’s hand. He looked from the longknife to Raif. “Linden Moodie says you’re a Hailsman. Is he right?”
Raif felt sweat prickle along his hairline. “Yes.”
Immediately Traggis Mole was there, at his back, the longknife drawn from its sheath, its point touching the apple of Raif’s throat. “Who are you protecting, yourself or your clan?”
The pressure of the knife made Raif gag. He didn’t understand any of this. What did Traggis Mole want from him? “I—I don’t know.”
Just as quickly as the knife was raised, it was taken back. The Robber Chief released him, and Raif stumbled forward, his hand rising to his throat. His fingers slid across wetness, and whatever it was—sweat or blood—he wiped it away without looking at it.
Traggis leaned against the cave wall and studied him. The longknife was sheathed once more, and only its tortoiseshell grip now showed. “Linden Moodie says you endangered the raid party by letting a sheep herder run free.”
“He says a lot. Not all of it’s true. The sheep herder was gagged and tied. He was in no state to give warning.”
The Robber Chief accepted this with a taut nod. “What if he’d been a Hailsman?”
Suddenly Raif needed to sit. Being in Traggis Mole’s presence drained him. He felt as if he’d been awake, guarding against monsters, all night. Without waiting for an invitation Raif sat on the closest camp chair. “I can’t answer that.”
“Well, you’re going to have to. Here, for me.” Traggis Mole pushed himself off from the cave wall. “This is the Rift, not the clanholds, and you’re with the Maimed Men now. The journey is one-way. No one goes back. We can’t. We might wish it, might dream about it every night, tasting the warm buttermilk on our tongues and feeling the spring grasses whip our shins. But we know it’s just a dream. We’re marked, every one of us. And no one’s pining our loss.”
As Traggis finished speaking a tremor passed through the cave. Rock settled deep in the earth’s crust with a long, bass groan. Flames in the longfire and brazier greened as gas escaped through fault lines. Dust smoked from the cave walls in the stillness that followed.
The Robber Chief pulled his wooden a nose a fraction away from his face, letting air travel directly into the bridgeless hole beneath. His eyes dared Raif to look away. When the dust thinned he plugged his wooden nose back into place.
“This may be a rotting wormhole, but I’m king of it. That might not mean much to you, with your fancy cloak and clannish honor, but it’s everything to me. Men stay here at my sufferance. You’re here at my sufferance, and I tell you now, Twelve Kill, I don’t like what I see. Oh, I know you’re handy with that bow of yours and you’ve a talent for coming out on top, but to me you’re a liability—a man whose loyalty still lies with his clan.”
Traggis Mole’s small well-shaped hands twitched, as if they wanted something to do. His gaze pinned Raif. “Many men here hate me. Some think they can take my place. That’s fine with me—I can watch my back. But not everyone can. There are fools here who still trust men, fools like Addie Gunn and Stillborn and a hundred others like them. And perhaps they should never have come here, perhaps they should have stayed in their roundhouses and cities and taken whatever tyranny came their way. But they didn’t, they came here. And that makes them mine.
“And no one harms what is mine, only me.”
Raif looked down; his boots were covered in a film of dust. He understood now what the Robber Chief wanted from him, but he didn’t know if he could give it.
“There’s a choice here,” Traggis said quietly. “Either become one of us or leave. I need to know that when I send you on a raid you’ll put your Rift Brothers first. They’re a mangy ill-bred lot, but they look to me for protection, and that means I have to watch for those who’d do them harm.” His black eyes glittered in the firelight. “Will you do them harm?”
“No.”
“Would you slay a Hailsman to save a Maimed Man’s life?”
Here it was, the question everything had been leading up to . . . and Raif didn’t have an answer. Inigar Stoop had cut his heart from the guidestone: Raif Sevrance was no longer clan. But it was hard not to be clan. How could you turn your back on all you’d known and loved?
Raif ran a hand over his face. He missed Effie. What did she always say to him? You can hug me, but no kiss. Gods, he’d been so lucky and he didn’t even know it.
But this was his luck now. A Maimed Man. Looking Traggis Mole straight in the eye, he said, “I can slay a Hailsman.” Mace Blackhail. For Effie, and Drey, and Tem.
The Robber Chief studied him, pulling air through his wooden nose. Minutes passed. Raif felt his face drawing tight like a mask, but he didn’t drop his gaze. When Traggis Mole spoke he could barely hear him.
“We shall see.”
Raif closed his eyes for a moment, resting them.
“You’ve been taken lessons in swordcraft from Stillborn?”
“Yes. I practice twice a day.”
Traggis Mole seemed to reach a decision. “Follow me,” he said, disappearing into the gloom at the back of the cave.
Raif stood. He was glad Traggis wasn’t watching him, for his legs wobbled as they took his weight. Forcing them into obedience, he headed deep into the Robber Chief’s cave.
The crosscurrents grew stronger as the light dimmed. The soot from the fires hadn’t drifted this far back, and Raif could make out
the paintings on the walls. Some of the pigments must have been made by grinding down the phosphorescence in the rock, for parts of the design glowed. A landscape was rendered onto the stone. Vast grasslands were shown yellowing in the sun. Elk and aurochs grazed rolling plains, and killhounds and birds bigger than killhounds wheeled above them, sighting prey. A river snaked and bow-curved through the lowlands, a line of silvery luminescence that glinted like real water. When the light faded to black Raif could still see its course.
“Here,” Traggis Mole called, striking a spark with a flint and lighting a tallow-smeared torch. Ahead, the gallery forked into two passages, and the Robber Chief waited at the mouth of the west fork for Raif to catch up.
At some point while they’d been without light the painting on the walls had changed. The river still flowed, but the landscape it cut through was laid to waste. Hillsides were brown, their grasses dead or dying. Carcasses rotted on the plains and bird skeletons littered the riverbank like empty baskets.
Raif pulled his cloak around his shoulders, suddenly cold.
Traggis led him through the passage and into a small, star-shaped chamber. The elk tallow in the torch burned red and smoky, throwing jittery shadows across the painted rock. The river was here as well, circling the cave, but now its floodplains were dry and frozen. Bare rock and frost were all that remained.
“Hold this.” The Robber Chief handed Raif the torch. Nail-head chests, iron-banded coffers, and chained crates covered most of the cave floor. The chief’s stash, Raif guessed, watching as Traggis slid a key from his metalwork sword belt and knelt by a leather-upholstered chest. The lock turned with ease. Dust slid from the chest’s lid as it was opened.
The Robber Chief took something out, something the size of a hand-knife, wrapped in brown cloth. Without turning to look at Raif, he asked, “How well do you know your clan?”
“As well as most.”
“Have you ever visited the silver mine, Black Hole?”
A spark from the torch touched Raif’s wrist like a warning. “I’ve been there. It’s past the Muzzle, where the balds meet the Copper Hills.”
Traggis swung round to face him. “Oh, I know where it is.” Rising to his feet, he pushed aside the cloth. “What I’d like to know is how long has it been yielding this?”
It was a rod of gold, so bright and yellow it barely seemed real. Traggis held it out for Raif to take, eyeing him carefully.
Raif had handled little gold before: a ring that had belonged to his mother, and a case for carrying powdered guidestone that Orwin Shank used on feast days. It was heavy, he knew that, and coveted by everyone in the North. He took the rod, and knew immediately by its heft it was gold. Nothing, not even iron, was heavier.
He handed it back to the Robber Chief. “It can’t be from Blackhail.”
“Really? And yet it was seized from a cart leaving the mine, along with others still warm from the furnace.”
“There are no furnaces at Black Hole. The raw ore is carted to the roundhouse.”
Traggis Mole raised an eyebrow. “It’s an easy business, setting up a furnace. All you need is a pair of bellows and a pit.”
Raif shook his head. “Gold’s never been found in the clanholds.”
“Well they found it at Black Hole, and they’re keeping it to themselves.”
The Robber Chief wrapped the rod in its cloth and returned it to the chest. As he turned the lock, Raif glanced at the wall painting above his head. The silver river bow-curved past a lone peak. Something about the shape of the mountain, the way it rose from the ground like a drum of twisted rock, made him pause. Where had he seen it before?
“I’ve been having Black Hole watched,” Traggis said, snapping Raif back to the business at hand. “They pour the gold into rods, then stockpile them. Every other month at the dark of the moon they’re carted south.”
Raif said, “Why are you telling me this?”
“I want that gold.” The Robber Chief’s voice was dangerously soft. “And you’re going to help me get it.”
“You don’t need me for this.”
“I think I do. You know the land, the clansmen. And if you’re spotted at the mine shanty no one’s the wiser.”
A slow creeping dread made Raif’s fingertips tingle . . . even the one that was no longer there. “Why don’t you attack the cart? There’s no need to go near the mine.”
Traggis threw his hand toward the chest containing the gold rod. “Where do you think I got that? A bungled raid on the cart, that’s where. They’ll be expecting another strike on the cart. It’ll be guarded, possibly by bowmen. Men could get shot.”
Raif tried to think of a counter argument, his gaze resting on the lone mountain in the wall painting. How could he return to Blackhail as a thief?
“You’ve a sword?”
“Stillborn lends me one.”
“Good.” The Robber Chief crossed to the chamber’s entrance. “Bring it with you tomorrow. The raid party heads west at first light.”
Raif bowed his head.
Traggis turned to look at him. “I’ll be watching you, Twelve Kill. Endanger anything of mine, and you’ll live to regret it.”
He was gone before Raif could raise his head.
THIRTY
Pursuit
Ash rucked up her skirt and rubbed wolf grease into her saddle sores. The grease stung at first, and you could smell the gamy whiff of it, but then it melted into your skin like butter. Ash groaned with relief. According to Mal Naysayer, wolves well-fed enough to render fat were rare—especially in winter—and they were lucky to have found this one in the Want. That made Ash grin. Whenever she’d had cuts and grazes in Mask Fortress her foster father would send Caydis Zerbina to her with a box of myrrh and scented ambergris. She’d come quite a way since then. And she felt about a million years older.
Now all I have to be is wiser.
She glanced over at the camp, where Mal Naysayer and Ark Veinsplitter where sitting close to the smoking fire, quietly breaking their fast. Ark looked tired. He had taken the late watch while she and the Naysayer slept. The Sull were stronger than men, with a greater capacity for endurance, and it worried Ash to see them weary. Slapping down her skirt, she went to join them.
It was a Sull warrior’s idea of dawn—dark as night, but with a band of something that could not yet be called light showing gray on the eastern horizon. Any city man waking at such a time would take one look and go straight back to sleep. Ash had felt the same way at first, but slowly she was beginning to change.
She wondered about that sometimes, the changing, wondered if it were just a case of settling into new habits. Or did it go deeper . . . to her blood?
I won’t think about that now, she told herself, kneeling by one of the saddlebags and taking out a pouch of stock that had frozen overnight into a ball of yellow ice. Normally they would only drink stock after they’d set camp for the night, once the body heat from the horses had melted it. But looking at the deep lines on Ark’s face and the gray circles under his eyes, she wanted to do something to cheer him.
Using a chunk of rock pried from the permafrost, Ash hammered the stock into pieces and then dumped it into the pot. As it spat and sizzled, stubbornly refusing to melt, she sat between the two Sull Far Riders and waited for the dawn to come.
They’d made camp on the edge of the Want—holding its border, as Ark said. Ash had lost count of the days they’d been traveling this strange nowhere land. One day was the same as the next. The land was mostly flat, sometimes rocky or scored by long-retreated glaciers, but always dead. The only thing that changed was the sky. Clouds did peculiar things here, she’d noticed. They massed on the horizon, mimicking mountains, or boiled upwards in vast towers, or settled into elongated tracts, like plow lines. They never shed their moisture, and the days were cold and dry, stirred by sharp winds that smelled of ice.
The Want wore you down. Walking across it was like walking through water. The sameness of the landscape provided
no relief for the spirit, and it seemed each step took you nowhere. The frozen earth punished your body, stealing strength, raising calluses and tearing muscle.
Ash felt bruised and battered. Walking, riding: it was hard to decide which hurt the most. At least she got to sleep at night, unlike the Far Riders who took turns standing watch. She’d wanted to do her share. It had taken her several days to work up the courage to ask if she could take her turn standing watch. She’d feared Ark’s laughter or, worse, his contempt. But she needn’t have. Ark Veinsplitter was no Penthero Iss. His face was serious as he listened to her, and he nodded once or twice. He wouldn’t let her do it, of course, but his reasons were ones she could accept: she must first master both her weapons, and learn more about the Way of the Flame.
Mas Rhal. The prefect state of fearlessness. Mal Naysayer had not brought out the silver lamp that burned with a blue flame since that first evening in the mountains, but every day he and Ark set her small tasks toward it. She had learned to visualize the flame, see it burning against a black ground. Mal urged her to picture it glowing in the center of her mind, in the place where her thoughts first seeded. It was hard, though. A single flame seemed too small a thing to burn away the fear.
There had been tests, and she had failed many of them. Five days back they had come across a stone cairn at the head of a barren plain. The two Far Riders dismounted, and she watched as they bared their forearms to let blood. It was a place of loss, Ark explained. Sull had died here many centuries earlier in a fierce battle against the night. Ark and the Naysayer had stood for several minutes, silent and grave, their hearts pumping blood onto the frozen battlefield, paying their toll to the dead. Only later, after they’d set camp for the night, did she realize she should have joined them and breathed a vein.
And that had not been her only failure. On most days the Naysayer rode ahead, blazing the trail. Ark tracked him. One day Ark had pulled back the gray and given the lead to Ash. She had learned much about the path lores—where to look for the Naysayer’s marks and how to read them, how to identify Sull markers sunk into the permafrost like stones, how to tell if the path had been recently traveled, and if the surrounding landscape had been disturbed—and she was confident she could do the task. The morning went well. She developed a headache from leaning over her horse’s neck and squinting for long hours at the ground . . . but she didn’t lose the trail. Then, about midday, she came across some markings that confused her. The Naysayer’s mark indicated that they should bear south out of the Want, yet his own trail continued east. Quickly, she looked to Ark for help, yet he wouldn’t meet her eye. It was a test, she realized, and she decided to play it safe and head south out of the Want.
