by J. V. Jones
Crope continued shaking his head. Baralis had been a powerful man once, in the land south of the mountains. Kings had waited upon his word. But the old kings were dead now and those who had taken their place had ill-liked Baralis and his methods. All had been lost. It hardly seemed real. A castle had burned to the ground and Baralis had burned along with it, and while everyone else was fleeing the flames, Crope had run toward them. It was the smoke, he remembered, thick and hot like boiling wool. The first time he breathed it in, his gums had shrank away from his teeth. Eighteen years later and they still hadn’t sprung back.
Nothing had sprung back. Crope had pulled Baralis from the flames but even though his body had been saved the losses were still being counted. Crope believed he would never know all the ways in which his lord had shrunk. Land and titles could be counted, a body seared by flames and then broken could be seen and reckoned, but the other things—the mind, the will, the power of his lord—were beyond his ability to comprehend. Some of his lord was still there, lying behind the slow-tracking gaze, but how much was impossible to know.
Even though Crope knew it was a mistake to think of the bad man, the one with pale eyes who Quill called the Surlord, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. That man had destroyed his lord. Ridden them down, he had, coolly keeping his distance while his armsmen had drawn swords. Wittle-wattle. Wittle-wattle. Chicken jowls for brains. Crope flushed with shame as he remembered his lord’s capture. It was all his fault. After he’d rescued his lord he could have gone anywhere in the Known Lands. Flee, that was the important thing. Escape from the walled city and the men who were enemies of his lord. North, south, east, west: it hardly mattered which way. So why had he chosen to head north into the mountains? Because he was stupid, that was why. Any other direction and they would have been high and dry. Wet and low was what they got though. Eighteen years of wet and low.
The pale-eyed man’s capture of his lord had just been the beginning. While Baralis was hauled off to the pointy tower, Crope had been left for dead in a dry gully. Arrows, four of them, had punctured his giant man’s hide. Crope could not say how long they rendered him unconscious, but what he did know was that his first and only thought upon waking was Now I must rescue my lord. The hijack had been sprung in foothills northwest of Hound’s Mire and Crope knew with certainty that his lord had been taken west. So west he went, toward the city with the gray limestone walls he stood within this very night. Within less than a day he’d run afoul of the slavers. Years later, Crope learned that slaving companies regularly patrolled the lawless country known as the Mirelands. According to Scurvy Pine, anyone crossing the mountains on their own or in small, undefended companies was judged fair game. Hobbled, blindfolded, and harnessed to the back of a wagon, Crope had been hauled east to Trance Vor. The Vor was an outlaw city financed with diamonds, tin, mercury and gold—anything that could be dug from the earth. Scurvy Pine said that slaving was illegal there, just like in most other cities in the North, but the Vor lords turned a blind eye to it. Slaves were needed to break the stone.
Crope had been sold to the tin mines. Eight years later when the seam had run dry, he’d been traded along with his chain brothers to the diamond pipe north of Drowned Lake. Rumor had it that mining diamonds was easier than mining tin, but Crope soon learned those rumors were false. Eighteen hours a day you broke rock. An hour to eat and piss, and five to sleep. After nearly a decade of living underground, working in the open pit of the diamond pipe had first seemed a blessing. Then autumn’s cool sunshine fled and half a year of winter began. Ice storms, blizzards, northern winds and freezing fog: rock had to be broken through it all. Crope had watched men’s hands turn bright pink and then white, and known that within a week they would rot and have to be amputated with the pipe surgeon’s bone saw. Bitterbean called it the miner’s farewell, for everyone who went under that green-toothed saw died.
In the eight years he mined the pipe, Crope had seen all the ways a man could die. He knew he was lucky to be here, lucky to have a hide so thick it defied freezing, lucky to have a back so strong that after eighteen hours of breaking rock, it would straighten like a bivouacked birch. He’d been lucky to have Scurvy Pine, the King of Thieves, as his protector, and lucky to know that one day he would escape and find his lord.
That knowledge had sustained him better than warm blankets and lamb stew. When Scurvy Pine had come up with the escape plan, Crope had agreed to everything he’d asked. His job had been to break the leg irons that bound the slaves into a line. “Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. You be ready when I give the word.” When the word came Crope had been ready. He and Scurvy had escaped, and while the King of Thieves fled north, Crope had headed west.
Come to me, his lord had commanded. Now Crope was here and his lord was free, and things were still wet and low. Stupidly, he had imagined that once he and his lord were reunited their problems would disappear.
Crope looked at his boots—yet another thing he owed to Quillan Moxley. The thief had deemed his original diamond boots “lacking in mediocrity” and had purchased a superior, more forgettable pair.
“Lord has nothing. Crope has nothing,” Crope said, feeling deeply wretched. “Can break rocks and fix things” He struggled for more. “Once acted in a mummers’ show as a bear.”
Quill appeared genuinely puzzled at this and paused for a moment to consider it. With a shake of his head he continued. “His lordship must have friends in high places. Stashes? Influences? Favors waiting to be cashed? You don’t end up with a surlord as your personal jailer unless you’re valuable, or dangerous. Or both.” A thoughtful look charged Quill’s features. “You’re going to have to leave this house tonight, my friend. I’m not your protector. I’m a thief, and I don’t want to hang.”
Suddenly things had become deadly serious. It was almost dark in the room now. Oil lanterns burning in the street lit the ceiling with a flickering orange glow. The north face of Mount Slain was breathing, moving banks of mist across the city. Crope felt their chill, and his instinct was to light the little brass stove in the corner. That had just become an impossibility though. You couldn’t fault Quill for looking out for himself. If it wasn’t for his lord, Crope imagined he would have done the same. Still, it was hard to know what to do. Why was there never enough thinking room in his head?
Quill let the silence be, his long thief’s fingers twitching.
Suddenly the sound of horse hoofs rang out in the street below. The Rive Watch. Few in the Rat’s Nest owned horses—nags to pull barrows, donkeys for hauling soft goods and drunks. It had to be the red cloaks.
Crope’s gaze jumped from the blacked-out window to Quill. A delicate adjustment of neck muscle was all it took for the thief to send his face into shadow.
Here it was then. Quill had called in his marker, and Crope had no means to pay. Nodding softly, Crope said, “Go now. Take lord out back.” Who knew where they would go? Not north, that was the only thing he was sure of. No good had ever come to anyone from heading north.
Quill bowed his head gravely. “May your nights always be long and moonless.”
Crope tried to respond with matching dignity, but the panic was building. His lord was too sick to travel. What would they do? Leave the city? Stay? Quill said everyone in Spire Vanis was searching for them. How could they even walk to the nearest gate without being seen? Crope tried, but he imagined the plea “Help me!” was writ clear upon his face.
If it was the thief didn’t acknowledge it. With a swift movement Quill crossed to the door. The bolts were pulled with expert skill. Even the one that needed oiling made no sound. Light from the hall poured into the room. “I’ll send the dog up,” Quill said in parting. “Best be quick.”
Just as the thief’s shadow slid across the threshold a word sounded.
“Wait.”
It was a command, issued quietly but filled with force, and it halted the thief in his tracks. Baralis had spoken.
Quill reacted so quickly, spinning a
round and stepping back across the threshold, that for a moment Crope wondered if he hadn’t anticipated such a response all along. Pushing the door closed behind him, the thief fixed his gaze on the bed. “I’m listening.”
All the time Quill had been in the room, Baralis had not moved. He moved now though, using his elbows to pull himself up a fraction on the bed. Crope’s instinct was to rush forward to aid him, but his lord sent a look from the distant past. I will deal with this.
Thwak. Thwak. Thwak. The sound of a spear butt thumping a door sounded from the street below. Crope couldn’t tell if it was Quill’s door or the one before it. Incomprehensibly, neither Baralis or Quill seemed to care. Each was looking at the other in a manner that reminded Crope of the way free miners appraised newfound diamonds for flaws.
After a moment Baralis spoke, and to Crope’s ears his lord’s voice sounded more beautiful than it had eighteen years earlier. It broke on some of the words and sometimes faded, but its power was still there. All that had been lost could be heard, yet that only added to the richness. Crope’s heart ached with love and sadness. The essence of his lord had always lived in his voice.
“Deliver us safely from the watch and you will be rewarded.”
“How so? Your friend here says you have nothing.”
Baralis’s reply came quickly, but to Crope’s ears it was not as fast at it would have been eighteen years earlier. “My servant speaks the truth as he knows it. I know where the Surlord’s secret stash lies.”
Quill’s eyes widened, yet he forced them back down to two little strips. “Secret stashes? Do you think I was born yesterday?”
“You were born thirty-one years ago in a town so small it didn’t have a name. You lived in a lean-to built by your grand-father, who beat you with a fire iron. You left home when you were nine. No one came after you, but you never stopped hoping.”
“Enough.” Quill was shaking. “Where is this stash?”
Shouting sounded from down below as Baralis rocked his mangled body forward on the bed. Sheets fell from him like shed skin. “I will not reveal the whereabouts of Iss’ stash, but know this: I have moved beyond deception. I want nothing but shelter for my servant and myself. Hell knows me, and you cannot understand what that knowing brings. Every hour that passes I become less. The things that I want are beyond your power to hoard or steal. Help me and you will receive what I no longer desire.”
A moment passed where if Crope was asked he would have said he felt as if the earth beneath his feet was turning, and then the thief nodded slowly, without eagerness. “The deal is done. God help us all.”
Crope gathered his lord’s possessions together as Quill went ahead to fetch the dogs.
ELEVEN
A Raven’s Call
Raif opened his eyes. All was still and dark. The Want had thickened while he slept, there was no other way to describe it. Sometimes it felt loose and full of space, a vapor that might blow in the wind. Now it felt like sediment sinking to the bottom of a glass.
Without thinking, he raised his hand to his chest. He had been sleeping on his back, yet something had pushed the raven lore deep into the V of his throat. As his fingers pried the hard piece of bird ivory from his skin, his mind became aware of something his body already knew. Danger. His muscles were already charged, his sweat glands open and excreting oil. Even before he opened his eyes his night vision had been engaged.
Unknown territory, that was what his life had become. Yet what choice did he have but to embrace it?
Rising, he made swift decisions on what he would need. The dimness of the tent did not slow him, and he located clothes, boots and weapons, readied himself, and then stepped outside.
A piercing frost had cracked down on the Want while he’d slept. No wind could live in such cold and the air was paralyzed. The cookfire in the center of the tent circle had shrunk to a dim, red glow. Frozen smoke accumulating around the base was slowly suffocating the last of the flames. The lamb brother on night watch was away from his post. Raif tracked his footsteps to the corral and spotted him calming the milk ewe.
The animals knew.
Raif crossed to the fire, closed his fist around the lamb brother’s bone-and-copper spear and tugged it from the earth. “Here,” he said, as the man approached him. “Take it.”
He was the youngest brother, the novice. A single black dot was centered over the bridge of his nose. The discipline of his brothers was something he had not yet mastered, and in the unobserved darkness of his watch he had tied a horse blanket over his dark brown robes to keep out the cold. He shed this now as he took the spear. Whatever he read on Raif’s face was enough to sober him. In the seven days he’d stayed in the lamb brothers’ camp, Raif had never heard him speak. Raif couldn’t even be sure if he understood Common, but he spoke to him anyway. Probably to calm himself.
“With me.”
The man’s gaze flicked to the clarified hide tents, where his fellow lamb brothers were sleeping.
Raif shook his head. “Leave them.”
The lamb brother seemed to understand and fell in step beside Raif. He handled the nine-foot spear well, Raif observed, balancing it lightly at his waist. Raif’s own weapon felt strange in his hand. Plunged deep into shadowflesh, the Forsworn sword’s weight had shifted downblade. He knew he should probably knock out the crystal mounted on the pommel to restore balance, but he couldn’t bring himself to deface the Listener’s gift. Besides, he had the Sull bow. Slung crossways over his back, the six-foot longbow slapped against his right shoulder blade and buttocks as he walked. The horn case containing his arrows should have been suspended high on his left shoulder for ease of draw, but instead hung from the gear belt at his waist. The shoulder wound still bothered him. He could feel it now. It was tight.
Heading away from the tent circle, he tried to make sense of what was happening. The raven lore, given to him at birth by the old clan guide Beardy Hail, felt like a chunk of fuel ice at his throat. Here it is, Raif Sevrance. One day you might be glad of it. Beardy’s words echoed in the hollow space between Raif’s thoughts.
Drawn, that was the word. He’d been woken by something and drawn outside.
Back at the tent circle one of the mules began to bray. Raif glanced at the lamb brother. Easy, he mouthed. Again, probably to himself. Cold muscled in to his chest, freezing the little pockets where air waited to slip inside the blood. Underfoot the pumice dunes were as soft as flour. Every step raised a puff of dust.
Starlight blued the Want. Raif looked over a seabed landscape where shadows did not exist. It occurred to him that he should be afraid of walking too far from the camp, but his mind was rationing fear. Odds were he would need it later. If he was unable to return to the tent circle then so be it. There was no choice here. The raven lore had called.
At his side, Raif could hear the lamb brother breathing hard. In cold this intense it took effort to expel the breath. Raif was glad the man was here, grateful not to be alone in the twilight world that had become his life. Tallal had said the lamb brothers search for the lost souls of the dead. Morah, he called them. The flesh of God. Raif did not know whether that meant tracking down rotting corpses and defleshed bones, or hunting ghosts. He did know they were here to do their work. Tallal had told him as much yesterday as they had walked the perimeter of the camp looking for driftwood. Raif had asked him why they called themselves the lamb brothers, and Tallal had replied, “To my people the lamb is a symbol of hope. Lambing season is a time of celebration. Spring comes and life is renewed after the long hardship of winter. Without lambs there would be no milk, no wool, no meat. Our bodies would perish. We who seek morah honor the lambs. Every morning when we leave our tents we offer thanks. May the nourishment they provide give us strength to continue our search.”
Raif found it surprisingly easy to imagine why the lamb brothers were here. The Want seemed as good a place as any to find lost souls.
“Shayo!”
The lamb brother’s urgent whi
sper cut off Raif’s thoughts. The word was unknown to him, but the meaning was clear. Following the lamb brother’s gaze, Raif peered into the eerie blue landscape of dunes.
Nothing moved. Both men came to a halt. The lamb brother held his breath. The silence was immense, unlike any other silence Raif had experienced. Stand and listen long enough and you might hear the stars burning.
Firming his grip on the sword, Raif scanned the horizon. At the far edge of his vision the mounded pumice gave way to rubble and crumbling cinder cones. The cones’ shapes reminded him of frost boils in the Badlands. Tem said boils were formed by frozen earth pushing up rock. They were hollow in the center, Raif knew that much. As boys he and Drey would play charge the castle in them, and a game they’d made up themselves called double death to Dhoone that involved, as far as Raif could recall, a lot of shouting and throwing sticks. Raif swallowed the memory before it could hurt him, and replaced it with something else.
What came to mind was the frost boil Sadaluk, the Listener of the Ice Trappers, had shown him many months ago in the west. Sadaluk had made him scrape at the ice that had collected in the hollow center of the boil. Something dread had died there. A creature from a time of nightmares, its grotesquely enlarged jaws sprung open and packed with ice.
Raif shook himself. While his mind was wandering he had not blinked and his eyeballs ached with cold. Blinking now made them sting.
As his eyesight cleared he spotted a movement at the base of one of the dunes. A puff of powder rose from the surface. The skin across Raif’s back pulled tight. At his side the lamb brother flexed his spear. They watched the dust mushroom lazily in the still air. Raif wished for more light. The Want was as dim as murky water. Where was the damn moon?
Something glinted. A beam of starlight ran along a straight line and disappeared. The lamb brother spoke the name of his maker and began to move forward. Raif made his best guess of the distance between himself and the puff of dust. A hundred and sixty paces.
