by J. V. Jones
Raif counted thirty-five steps in all, and by the time he reached the seventeenth he could see the peak in the distance. The mountain of rock he’d come for. The one painted on the cave wall in the Rift, and drawn in the book of the Forsworn. The fault most likely to give.
Raif rushed up the last steps to see it better. Its shape, the way the rock was twisted and buckled, as if by some terrible calamity, was just how he’d imagined it would be. Two things surprised him, though. He had not been prepared for its size—its massive, towering bulk. Valleys, ridges, and cliffs circled its base, and dry rivers flowed from its peak. Thousands of feet high and thousands wide: it was a monstrous wasteland of stone.
And he had not expected it to be sheathed in ice. As he and Bear took their first steps on the headland toward it, the wind brought its coldness to them. The temperature dropped, and the scent of dry ice, of glaciers turned gray with age and compression, and of frost smoking off freezing lakes made Raif want to turn back. He had not bargained on this. It was another trick thrown up by the Want.
“Bear,” he said. “What are we doing here?”
No more questions you know the answer to, warned Stillborn in his head.
Managing something like a shrug, Raif continued walking.
The land surrounding the mountain was deeply flawed, but it wasn’t until he reached higher ground that Raif realized there was a pattern to the canyons, fault lines and dry riverbeds: they radiated outward from the mountain like the spokes of a wheel. The mountain formed the absolute center of devastation, and even as he thought this the earth shuddered.
Bear shied, biting at her reins in fright. Tiny stones jumped around Raif’s feet. The mountain shivered, and deep within its folds the ice fields ground and squealed. It was over in a handful of seconds. Disturbed ice crystals floated upward, forming a sparkling mist that ringed the peak. Some drifted on the breeze toward Raif and Bear, landing on their shoulders and backs like a fine snow. When one landed on Raif’s lips he put out his tongue and tasted it. Nothing. He couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.
The wind was picking up now, gusting back and forth with no consistent direction. Overhead the clouds had rolled in, almost covering the sky. The Gods Lights lit them from behind, sending out red flares that glowed like embers. Inigar Stoop had once said that whenever a sky turned red somewhere a Stone God was bleeding. Raif found he didn’t care. Let them bleed.
Guiding the pony into a shallow canyon, he set a straight course for the mountain. As they drew closer, he began to doubt himself. The mountain was huge; it would take days just to circle its base. And what was he looking for? A fault line? Hundreds of them cracked the earth here: he and Bear stood in one now. Did it mean they’d have to search every one of them, looking for the deepest? The Rift was the deepest fault in the North, Addie said. But it didn’t mean it would be the first to give. So how could he be sure of picking the right one?
Raif glanced up at the mountain. The ice was gray and old, weathered over centuries so that it reflected no light. From here he could see that its surface was brittle and crevassed. Surely he and Bear didn’t have to climb it? One misplaced step and they’d be dead.
Nothing seemed certain or right. Raif drew on his gloves, wincing as the goat hide tugged against his wounded knuckles. It was getting colder. He took Bear’s blanket from the saddle-bag and laid it over her back. Ahead the land began to rise, and he knew it was time to climb out of the canyon before the walls grew too deep and trapped them.
Another tremor shook the earth as they emerged on the raised plain of the mountain. As he braced himself against the rolling motion, Raif thought of what the outlander had said about the Shatan Maer. One stirs this night—I can feel it.
Grimly, Raif waited for stillness and marched on. It wasn’t long before the ground turned to hard granite beneath them, as the mountain showed its roots. Slowly, they were ascending, and the path began to grow rocky and uneven. Raif scanned the lower slopes, looking for . . . something. He didn’t know what.
The light held as they climbed, the wind funneling along the fault lines toward the mountain. After a few hours they arrived at its base, and Raif stopped to rest the pony and eat. They split the last lardcake and drank melted ice that tasted faintly of salt. Raif restowed the pack for a heavy climb, choosing to leave the cook pot and the pony’s saddle beside a rock. When he was finished he sat on the rock and looked up. Now he was here he wasn’t sure what to do next.
We search. What would the Forsworn knights have done here? Had they known something he didn’t? He tried to recall exactly what the dying knight had said. Had he mentioned the Old Ones? A cold thrill prickled the skin on his arms as a memory returned to him.
We search.
For what?
The city of the Old Ones. The Fortress of Grey Ice.
Raif stood. Understanding lay there on the edge of his thoughts. Think. Think.
Fortress. One was mentioned in Addie’s verse. Though a fortress may fall and darkness ride through the gate. Raif frowned. Did it mean that the darkness would emerge in the fortress first? What had the outlander said? Look to their ruins to guide you to the place they most feared. The Old Ones had feared the Rift and built a city there. Had they built a city on this mountain as well? If so, there was no sign of it now—just ice and frozen rock.
Raif let out a long breath, his head aching. People had lived here, he knew that much. Someone had carved those steps. Yet how could he hope to find a city on the mountain? A search could take weeks, even months. And then there was the danger of the ice . . .
The Fortress of Grey Ice. What did the name mean? Was the fortress beneath the ice?
Raif crossed over to the pony and began scratching her ears. The Listener, the knight, Addie, and the outlander had all told him fragments of things, scraps that didn’t add up. He wasn’t a mage or a wiseman. He wasn’t anything any more.
This was all he had, this search, the hope that he might hinder the darkness. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Bitty Shank had.
Steeled by that thought, Raif began to walk the length of the slope, watching the mountain and running through everything again in his head. The answer was here; he just had to dig for it.
His breath whitened in the freezing air as the temperature continued to drop. Something about the ice on the mountain bothered him. It had been so unexpected. The Want was arid. Frozen but dry. Surely that much ice would have melted and evaporated over the years? What held it there? A second thrill goose-pimpled his skin as something suddenly occurred to him.
The bridge over the Rift. The Old Ones had created a force spanning the Rift that still held to this day. The outlander had said as much. Things constructed by their mages live on. Could the ice itself be a construction? Raif raised his hand to his throat and closed his gloved fingers around the hard piece of raven ivory that was his lore. If the ice was a construction, then how to blast it away?
We search.
It seeks.
Raif opened his fist and let his lore drop. Suddenly he knew what he must do.
He walked to the pony and took two things off her back. The Sull bow, and the arrow Divining Rod.
Take this arrow named Divining Rod that has been fletched with the Old Ones’ hair, take it and use it to find what you must. It seeks, what I cannot tell you, for the echoes from things so old are weak.
The Listener was right; the echoes were weak, but he had finally heard them. Stupidly he had imagined he would need the arrow to slay the thing that came through the breach—even though the Listener had warned him it would be wasted if he used it to kill. Raif stripped off his gloves and ran a hand down the arrowshaft. The workmanship humbled him. The skeleton ferrule that bound the head to the shaft must have taken someone days, even weeks, to forge. Each band of metal had to have been painstakingly fired and hammered, and constant adjustments made for fit. The fletchings, bound and glued in spiral form to make the arrow spin in flight, represented further days of work
. Someone had spent as much time and effort making this arrow as it took to make a sword.
And they had named it Divining Rod.
Raif braced the Sull bow and drew the arrow to the plate. As he set his sights on the mountain he let all conscious thoughts fall away. The mountain was a dark form, dead and immense: a tower of icy rock. No heart pumped within it for him to find; it did not matter. The Sull, the Old Ones and Clan stood here. A bow, an arrow, and a man. It was enough. Being here with these things was enough.
Raif picked a target, drew his bow, and waited for the wind.
When the time came he released the string, and the arrow shot from the bow. A sweet humming reached his ears as the arrow began to spin. The Old Ones’ hair channeled the wind, using it to propel the arrow high and true to the center of the ice.
He didn’t hear the impact. The humming filled his thoughts, pulling at memories and things beyond memories that no clansman should ever have. Suddenly he knew the age of the arrow, and the age of the mountain, and then the age of the earth itself. Seconds passed where knowledge was revealed to him; ancient histories and battles, the pain of birth and loss. He looked into faces that were neither human nor Sull . . . and he found beauty and understanding there. He strained to see more, to know more, but the humming ceased abruptly. A moment of absolute stillness followed, when the wind died and the Gods Lights raged like a fire in sky.
And then the mountain began to move. The ground trembled. Rock sawed against rock. Snow so ancient and dry it had become a substance beyond ice shook free from the highest slopes. As the first cold glitters landed in Raif’s hair, the ice itself began to crack. Like lightning, a flaw flashed into existence and forked into many more. The fissures split and split again, until the entire face of the mountain was a web of darkly glowing flaws. Raif had long lost sight of his arrow, but he knew it was there, in the heart of the ice, still spinning, drilling deep, destroying all it touched. He felt no wonder, only a sense of a task completed. He and Bear had come here; now there was one less thing for them to do.
The crack of sundered worlds split the air. Raif’s eardrums pulsed, and he felt a sharp, sickening pain. His grip tightened on the bow as the ice face shattered and began sliding toward the earth.
The pale ghost of a city emerged from the chaos. Massive slabs of ice fell away like rotting tiles, revealing rock shaped by a living hand. Vast bulwarks of gray granite were hewn from the mountain wall, rising as sheer as any cliff to support the fortress that stood above.
Kahl Barranon—he knew its name now. The City of the Old Ones. A Fortress of Grey Ice.
Raif’s breath cooled in his lungs. Almost he could taste the rock the fortress was built on. It was cold and raw and bitter as the winter itself. The ice face might have fallen away but another kind of ice lived beneath. Spires of gray quartz reached for the sky, slender and transparent as icicles. Great halls lay below them, their high arching roofs clad in frost-colored lead. And below them lay the curtain wall, where quartz fused with granite to form the ramparts. Everything shone gray and silver, and Raif imagined that if a city could be carved from the heart of a glacier then it would look much like the Fortress of Grey Ice.
What did they fear? Raif wondered, and then: How could the race who built this be lost?
He had no answers. He wasn’t sure he wanted them.
Calling softly to the pony, Raif began the climb. He’d already seen a path.
FORTY-SEVEN
A Bolt-Hole
At sundown the Dog Lord gave up his watch. Glen Carvo had not arrived back. Not today. As Vaylo turned Dog Horse on the great northern graze of Dhoone, he kept his jaw and shoulders high. Behind him stood a small company of men, and he could not let them know his fear. Cluff Drybannock, his fostered son and the best longswordsman in the clanholds, had not returned with his hundred and eighty men.
“Back to Dhoone!” Vaylo hailed his company, kicking a starting gallop from his old, ornery stallion. “First man to the Horns wins a keg of Dhooneshine!”
Vaylo heard them whoop and holler as he left them in the dust. Gods! But it was good to run! The wind in his face, the black soil of Dhoone beneath his horse’s hooves, and the sky as clear as a lake above him: What chief could want for more? At full gallop Dog Horse gave just about the worst ride a man could endure, but that troubled Vaylo not at all. It was a winning gallop, that’s what counted.
Behind him, he heard his company gaining, as men bent low over the horses’ necks and hooves dug divots from the turf. They were shouting back and forth to each other, goading their comrades on with good humor and placing their own bets. Hammie Faa waged one of his mother’s highly dubious love potions against Nevel Drango’s city-embroidered smallclothes.
Vaylo listened and felt joy. In a way, being here in the Dhoonehold with only forty warriors at his command was like being young again, at Bludd. It was few against many, and to hell with the odds. Oddo Bull felt it, too. He was the only one of the forty who had ridden with Vaylo that day, nearly thirty-six years ago now, when he’d stolen the Dhoonestone from Dhoone. Oddo knew what it was to ride in a small company and love every man within it like a brother. Armies were good for many things, but you could not know the strengths and weaknesses of every warrior, and you could not be brother to them all.
Hearing someone gaining on him, Vaylo swerved into the rider’s path and beat some more speed from Dog Horse. He would win this race, dammit. He might be old and a fool, but he could still outride anyone in the clan.
Nearing the northern wall of the roundhouse, Vaylo cut west, knowing the others would take the easier eastern path. The west way had jumps—ditches and dog cotes and water pumps—but it was shorter. The others would have to ride clear of the stable block. Dog Horse hadn’t jumped in a while and was nasty about it, but was too proud an animal to refuse. He battered Vaylo’s bones . . . but he jumped.
By the time they rounded the final quarter of the roundhouse and caught sight of the Horns, Vaylo was aching in all the places a man hated most to ache. He could barely breathe, either, but the Horns were his. Reaching them an instant before Nevel Drango, he laughed at the sheer bloody-minded exhilaration of it all. Once he started, everyone joined in, and soon there were eight men at the gate, all sitting tenderly in their saddles and laughing like fools.
Nan Culldayis brought them to order. “Clansmen,” she said, striding toward them. “Much though I hate to break up your sewing circle, Samlo’s waiting to seal the gate.”
They sobered after that. It was full dark now and the moon hadn’t risen. Blue Dhoone Lake was black, and the wind made it slap against the shore. “Who watches this night?” Vaylo asked Nevel Drango.
Nevel commanded the twenty swordsmen Cluff Drybannock had stationed at the Dhoonehouse. He had some of the wild blood of Clan Gray in him, and he fought with an executioner’s blade. Nevel named seven men, and Vaylo nodded. “Put one on the roof.”
It has come to this, Vaylo thought as he dismounted. Forty men were not enough to secure a roundhouse, let alone an entire hold. None could be spared for border patrols. All must be at the house.
Resting an arm around Nan’s waist, he walked inside. When a girl came to take away his riding cloak, he bade her send a keg of Dhooneshine to those at the gate. He doubted they would drink it, but that wasn’t really the point.
Nan had supper waiting for him in the chief’s chamber, and they sat by the hearth and shared a simple meal of bread and melted cheese. Afterwards, Nan blew out the candles and came to him by the fire. She knew he was worried—he could not hide such things from her—and laid kisses on his neck and temples as she gently kneaded his shoulders. Her long, silky braid tickled him where it brushed against his arm, and he pulled out its ties and worked the hair loose with his fingers. She laughed then, a gently throaty laugh that he had come to love. When he kissed her she tasted of honey, and her need was the same as his own. It was a blessing, this love come so late, and Vaylo thanked the Stone Gods every day for it.
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Later, when they were finished, Nan sat up and combed her hair and Vaylo watched her, content. She was beautiful in the firelight, proud and serene, her hair falling down to her buttocks.
The alarm sounded as he was pulling on the last of his clothes. Two great blasts of the warhorn. Dudaaaa! Dudaaaa! Vaylo fastened his swordbelt around him and looked to Nan. “Get the bairns. Bring them here and bar the door. Open to no one but me.”
She nodded. He loved that she showed no fear.
They’d said all they needed to by the fire, and Vaylo left her knowing she would take good care of herself and his grandchildren. It was enough to settle his mind.
Dudaaaa! Dudaaaa! The horn sounded again as he rushed toward the gate. Hammie and Samlo Faa, Odda Bull, Nevel Drango and others were already gathered in the entrance hall, strapping on their armor and weapons chains. Vaylo beckoned a boy to fasten his back and chest plates about him as he drew on armored gloves with leather palms. Already he could hear them.
Dun Dhoone! Dun Dhoone! DUN DHOONE!
“How many?” he asked a spearman running down from the East Horn.
“Hundreds. They’re swarming around the lake.”
“I’ve three men out there,” Nevel Drango said. “And one on the roof.”
Vaylo nodded, grim. They could not raise the gate. “They gave us warning,” he said.
An explosion rocked the gate. An eerie white light flashed in the hall and then was gone. Hellfire. Vaylo hadn’t seen it used in forty years. Naphtha, lead and antimony: it burned hot and long, and only sand could snuff it. He turned to Samlo. “Will the gate hold?”
