by J. V. Jones
Stillborn slowed as he neared the light. His face twitched as he took in the scene; the body, the blood, the gold. When his voice came it was almost soft. “You all right, lad?”
Raif shook his head. Bitty was dead. Rory’s brother was dead. Raif Sevrance was all wrong.
He raised the lamp high. “I want my sword, Stillborn.”
Stillborn nodded, reading the intent on Raif’s face. “Fucking me again, are you, lad?” He spoke with more resignation than anger.
“And the miner,” Raif said. “Let him live.”
Something like hurt shone in Stillborn’s hazel eyes. “You do me a disservice, lad.”
“I have to be sure.”
Stillborn grunted. Crouching down, he sent the Forsworn sword skittering over the mine floor to Raif.
Without taking his gaze from the Maimed Man, Raif moved forward to claim it. When he had it in his scabbard he set down the lamp. Oil sloshed heavily in the reservoir.
“Will you come back?” Stillborn asked.
Raif had no answer. Away, his mind was screaming. Away.
Stillborn made a small gesture that took in the lamp and the sword. “This here. This is just between me and you.”
Raif nodded—he had to. Stillborn was exercising a clansman’s grace. “How do you live with it?” he heard himself ask. “Being clan . . . and . . .”
“You find a way, Raif. You find a way.”
Tears sparkled in both men’s eyes as Raif turned toward the surface and headed out of Black Hole.
FORTY
Fighting One-Handed
Penthero Iss walked across the quad, followed by two members of his personal guard, Axal Foss and Styven Dalway. Iss had taken to calling them Eye Men, and for more reasons than one. They were Marafice Eye’s cohorts, elite members of the Rive Watch charged with their surlord’s protection. Their job was to keep Iss alive, but Iss felt less than gratified by their attention. They watched him for Marafice Eye, they shielded him for Marafice Eye: given keys and locks and a bucket for the slops, they really could have passed as jailers.
And that made Mask Fortress a kind of prison. Crossing from the north gallery toward the Cask, Iss contemplated making a detour to the stables. It was a fine day on the mountain, one of those rarities where the cloud had drawn back to reveal the peak, still white with snow, and within an hour he could be beyond the tree line and climbing toward it. He wouldn’t reach it, of course, but he might make it as far as the Cloud Shrine before sunset, and then he could turn his horse in the darkness and look down upon the city he owned. Iss took shallow breaths as he contemplated this. The path he and his horse stood on would be another thing entirely. The most easterly of Mount Slain’s passes and the paths leading toward them would soon be in possession of the Knife.
That rankled. The wealth Marafice Eye had married into was mind-boggling. He was a butcher’s son now become a landholder and man of means. When he returned from the clanholds all it would take would be the slightest outreaching to make himself a grangelord. Only two men stood between the Knife and his elevation to the nobility and on the day of his wedding the Knife had named them father and brother. Roland Stornoway and his son, also named Roland. Two murders amongst so many were nothing to the Knife. He had slain a surlord—what were the deaths of others after that?
Iss quickened his pace; behind him the two brothers-in-the-watch quickened theirs. The flagstones of the quad were greening as moss sunk its taps into the frost-corroded stone and muck from the horses fed them. The massive chunk of obsidian known as Traitor’s Doom that dominated the central court of Mask Fortress stood gleaming and unbroken, save for the nicks cut out of its upper face due to the falling of the executioner’s sword. Male jackrabbits were using it as a platform to box with their rivals, and they bounded away as the surlord and his Eye Men drew close. Styven Dalway drew his sword and speared one, and a little jet of blood was flung over the flagstones as Dalway shook the creature from his sword. It was a pastime for brothers-in-the-watch, spearing the rabbits that lived in the quad; a casual test of speed.
“Leave me,” Iss commanded Dalway and Foss as they neared the entrance to the Cask. The two men waited for an explanation but he gave none, and they stood uncomfortably for a moment, shifting their weight from foot to foot until Axal Foss conceded with a nod.
Blond and handsome, Dalway leant against the curved wall of the Cask as if he meant to stay there a while. “We await you, Surlord,” he said.
Iss flung back the gate and then pushed the heavy red oak door into motion. “Why don’t you run along and clean the rabbit’s blood from your sword instead?”
He didn’t bother to wait for a response. Dalway had been one of his recruits, and Axal Foss one of his captain’s when he’d held the position of Protector General. Iss knew these men. They were loyal solely to the Watch and the man who commanded it. Once that man had been Penthero Iss, now it was Marafice Eye. Iss knew better than to take their insolence personally. He knew, but didn’t like it.
Inside the great rotunda of the Cask more of their kind patrolled the entrances to the principal chambers. South lay the way to his private quarters and the Bastard Walk lined with stone statues of the Founding Quarterlords, but for now Iss chose to head toward the Blackvault. A wide flight of stairs led down, each step perfectly graded to be a fraction darker than the last. The Cask was built from light-colored limestone, and rather than shock the senses with an abrupt transition from white to black, the stonemasons had chosen to pave the way with all the shades of gray in between. Iss’s soft-soled boots hit dove and slate and charcoal before touching the raven marble the vault was named for. Legend had it that Harlaw Pengaron had burned his brother alive here, and later ordered the charred walls painted. Limewash and then strong lead pigments had been used to mask the burn, yet nothing ever quite succeeded. A month would pass and then the soot would suddenly start to reappear, rising up from the base stone like damp. Harlaw Pengaron had eventually ordered the vault’s complete refitting with black marble, but he never lived to see the results.
Someone probably killed him, Iss thought as he entered the Blackvault. It was the way most surlords’ stories ended.
The chamber was chilly and dim. Earlier that morning he’d bade Caydis Zerbina light a fire beneath the closest mantle and set candles burning about it, but black marble was ever a challenge to heat and light. The Blackvault stretched long beneath the fortress, its roof braced at its center by a line of arches that ran the entire two-hundred-foot length of the room. The High Examiner was supposed to walk the archways before investing a new surlord with the Killhound Seal, but no one had bothered with that for ninety years.
Iss crossed to the fire. He had expected to feel some kind of relief at being finally alone, but he was strangely agitated. Events had started, a world was turning, and here he was, boxed in by walls and men.
The armies of the Spire were moving north. Last he’d heard, they were raising camp on the east shore of the Spill. His darkcloaks sent birds to mark their progress, loosing a rook from the back of the wagon train each night. The progress had been beset by delays. The storm, the thick muds of spring thaw, and rivers in spate. Only thirteen days out and already there was illness in the ranks. The flux, doubtless brought on by men shit-ting where they ate. Not an illness likely to take grangelords and commanders, more’s the pity. Iss managed a wry smile. He envied none of them, he must remember that. A surlord who valued his life sent armies, not led them.
“Master.”
Iss turned from the fire to see Caydis Zerbina standing at the chamber’s entrance. Caydis had been his personal servant for seventeen years, and Iss had long grown accustomed to the fact that one never heard him approach. Caydis was tall and striking, his skin the color and texture of polished cherrywood. His neck was long enough for two men, and he could do things with it, bend the bones in a certain way, rotate it a degree past normal, that reminded Iss of a gazelle. He wore plain, undyed linens, and sheathed his arms i
n bone bracelets that announced to all who looked that he worshipped with the priests in the Bone Temple.
“Guest is here,” he announced softly.
“Bring him to me. Help him down the steps if he needs it.”
The elder Roland Stornoway entered the Blackvault accompanied by a dry tapping of his cane, and a wheeze that conveyed both the level of his exertions and his annoyance. He had refused Caydis’s offer of assistance, but Caydis knew a dodderer when he saw one, and stayed close in case of sudden need.
“An ill place for a meet, Surlord,” Stornoway barked from the entrance, ever determined to have the first and last word. “You insult me with the setting.”
“It is marble,” Iss said evenly.
“Pah!” Stornoway raised his cane and took a swipe at the air. “I won’t play your games, Surlord. Find me a seat and speak.”
Iss gestured to Caydis, who brought forth a gilded, rack-backed chair with a red cushion on the seat, and then left. The Lord of the High Granges, Lord of the Highland Passes, and Lord of the Rape Seed Granges looked at the cushion as if it were a serpent, shoved it onto the floor with the butt of his cane, and then sat. “I’ll give you no more backing for the war,” he said with some spirit, as if Iss had just pleaded with him to do that very thing.
A hard old nutgall, that was what Borhis Horgo had called him. He was massively rich, but never took any joy from it—unless you counted the entertaining he did with scandalously young whores—and just grew more joyless and worse dressed with age.
“I could raise a Battle Levy if I needed to,” Iss pointed out.
“Raise all you like—I won’t pay it.”
Iss accepted this with apparent equanimity. Money was always a problem, but that was not why he had brought the grangelord here today. Guiding the subject toward his objective, he said, “Am I to take it you have no interest in your son-in-law’s success?”
“Ha!” Stornoway snapped. “I knew it. The Knife’s up your arse and twisting.”
Iss hid his distaste. “I’d be more worried if I were you, old man,” he said lightly, coldly. “Marafice Eye needs a grange before he can take my place.”
Roland Stornoway in no way acknowledged this as a fact, but he had to know it. “My granges go to my son.”
“You know I passed an Act of Ascendancy?”
Stornoway nodded harshly. “A more fool thing I have never seen in all my sixty years.”
He was right, of course, but Stornoway wasn’t the only one who could refuse to yield. “Well, it is done. Watch your back.”
“And while I do I’m watching yours as well, eh?” Stornoway’s shrunken little eyes were almost gleeful. “You tell me nothing new, Surlord. Do you take me for a complete fool? I know Marafice Eye would like me dead. My own son and half my enemies would like me dead. Yet I’m not dead, I’m here, and I’ve a fancy to stay.”
Iss felt some measure of relief. Marafice Eye had miscalculated here if he thought Roland Stornoway would lie easy under his knife. Iss said, because he was genuinely interested, “It was your choice to marry him to your daughter.”
Stornoway actually chuckled, a thin, hiccuping wheeze that sounded as if it might kill him more readily than Marafice Eye. “Well, I’ll have the last laugh there.”
“What do you mean?”
“The girl’s four months gone with child. By the time the Knife’s back from the wars she will have presented him with her bastard.”
It explained so much. The scandal involving the bookbinder’s son was damaging but not ruinous. A bastard out of wedlock was. “And he doesn’t know it?”
“He will when he sees the babbie. The bookbinder and his son both have six fingers on each hand.” Stornoway slapped his thigh with the sheer deliciousness of the deceit he had practiced upon the Knife. “Who will they say is the fool then?”
Probably still you, Iss thought, but didn’t say it. He wouldn’t want to be in the room when the Knife discovered what the old bastard had pulled on him.
“I’ll let you go now,” Iss said, somehow unsatisfied with the meeting despite the fact it had lifted some fear. He really didn’t care for Roland Stornoway; his harshness was arrogance in disguise. All the grangelords had it, that arrogance. Iss had been dealing with it most of his life.
“So I’m dismissed, am I?” Stornoway grumbled, shifting weakly in his chair. “Well, help me up, then.”
Iss ignored him and left the chamber.
He passed his servant on the stairs, and bade him fetch some warm honey from the kitchen. Caydis Zerbina looked pointedly toward the Blackvault. “Leave him,” Iss said. “Fetch the honey and meet me by the Killdoor.”
Passing patrols of brothers-in-the-watch, Iss headed in the direction of his private quarters. As always the Bastard Walk, with its hugely curving walls and grotesquely hewn statues, calmed him. This was his domain, and his alone. Only he and the fortress servants ever walked here. Drawing to a halt by the steel-plated door that led to the unused east gallery, he unhooked one of the three keys he kept in a pouch sewn to the inside of his silk robe.
As he waited for Caydis to arrive with the honey he studied the door. The Killhound standing rampant above the Splinter had been stamped into all eight of its metal plates. It had been some time since he’d last opened it—weeks, perhaps even months. What was the use of entering an empty storeroom? The Bound One was failing, useless. If it hadn’t been for the occasional ministrations of Caydis Zerbina he would already be dead.
Still. Still. Iss was loath to give him up. A bound sorcerer was not something one disposed of lightly. Their value was high . . . and there were risks.
Iss turned the key. With Sarga Veys gone—the devil knew where—and the Bound One unresponsive, Iss had lost various options. Sorcery wasn’t power in itself, but it did provide the means to achieve it. Iss likened it to one of the light and deadly sickle-knives used by Caydis Zerbina’s people. The blades were specially constructed to be used in the left hand. You could fight without one, using just your sword, but you lost the ability to surprise your opponent. And why wield one blade when you could wield two?
Sorcery had always been the weapon in Iss’s left hand, yet for months now he had been fighting one-handed. Oh, there were the darkcloaks—the surlord’s special force, his spies—but they hadn’t consciously drawn sorcery in centuries, and though they used the remnants of it they did so without acknowledging the source. They threw birds into the sky, waited in alley-ways and listened outside doors, poisoned, bribed, procured, fought with live steel when they had to, and silenced loose tongues with knives: All the while throwing the suggestion of shadows around themselves—a fluttering, an inconsistency of light that could not withstand a hard stare from an onlooker. It was how they got their name: Darkcloaks. They had magic, but it was as insubstantial as the shadows they drew around themselves to enhance their stealth. It was a pretty trick, no more.
Skills such as Sarga Veys and the Bound One possessed were something else entirely. They had the power to hold back nature. There were a dozen things they could do with mist. They could compel wild animals to spy for them, looking out through the uncomprehending eyes of a rabbit or a fox; they could steal into a man’s body and snap his ureter so his urine drained into his pelvic girdle, not his bladder; they could throw a false landscape across hills and plains to confuse a traveler; they could aid or obstruct healing, command shadows, defend themselves with a single thought, and track others of their kind like hounds. Necromancers could hold a man’s soul in his corpse while it rotted. Spellbinders could cast a spell on an object that lasted for thousands of years. Archmages could cloak fortresses, men, and armies. And the Sull maygi could stir time.
This was what Iss wanted. All of it. Yet though many men and women were born with traces of the Old Skills—Iss could name at least ten people in the fortress who had them in some small measure, Corwick Mools and Caydis Zerbina amongst them—very few were born with enough to make them sorcerers.
And I
ss knew he was not one of them. That was why he’d bound one to him, a chained sorcerer who would do his bidding.
For nearly two decades he had enjoyed the advantages access to such power brought. Nearly fourteen years ago, when the day came to storm the fortress and overthrow the aging and sickly Borhis Horgo, the Bound One had thrown a shadow over the entire city. And later, during the ten bloody days of the Expulsions, it had been the Bound One who had tracked down the Forsworn knights in their lairs so Iss could send red cloaks to slay them. And so it had continued on over the years: compulsions, far-speaking, ensorcellments. Iss was in little doubt that he would have made surlord without the Bound One’s aid, but it had hastened his rise, and fortified his position in a hundred different ways.
The Bound One had ever been Iss’s sickle-knife, but now the left-handed blade had grown dull.
Iss sighed as he watched Caydis Zerbina approach, holding a cloth tit of honey, a pewter flask and a tiny guarded lamp. “Wrap them for me,” Iss commanded, and waited while his servant detached a length of fabric from his linen kilt and fashioned his surlord a makeshift pouch.
Caydis’s hands were finely shaped, the fingers elongated and capped with startlingly white nails. When he was done, Iss said, “The Eye Men, the ones who follow me day and night. I would prefer to see less of them.”
“Master.” Caydis bent his long gazelle neck.
“A little illness in the ranks would be sufficient.” Iss considered his options. “The flux, perhaps.”
Again, there was another bending of the neck. It would be done.
Iss took the linen pack and the lamp, and passed beyond the steel-plated door and into the unused east gallery. It was dark here, the windows boarded, the torches unlit for over ten years. Pigeons warbled in the roof groins. A fine dust of dried bird droppings and crumbled masonry crackled beneath Iss’s feet. Once the air had held a charge that grew stronger as one approached the interior doorway of the Splinter, but it had weakened to almost nothing over the past six months. Now all Iss felt was a sense of settling, of things drawing to a close.
