by J. V. Jones
That was very good. What next?
For a few seconds after that he blanked. He was awake and conscious, aware that he should marshal his thoughts but temporarily incapable of doing so. Think, he ordered himself, pushing a hand through his hair. Think.
The hand came away damp. Inanely, he turned his palm toward his face and looked. Pure darkness stared back. Frowning, anxious about the sword, he tried to formulate a plan. He was in a hole. Did he need to get out or was he better staying put? He could probably walk as long as he didn’t put too much weight on his ankle, whereas climbing one-footed in the dark was a skill he’d never mastered. That was settled then: he had no choice but to stay here until daylight. If it was a ravine he could navigate it using his bow as a stick, and there was always a chance it could lead to something deeper where the mist river flowed.
Raif shivered. The cold down here was different, more penetrating. The breeze kept forcing it against his skin. Reaching behind his shoulder, he unhooked the Sull bow. The familiar glassiness of the lacquered horn calmed him as he untied the string and let the bent stick rest in his hand. Shifting his weight onto his good right ankle, he sent his left foot sliding across the ground. Stones and uneven rock pushed against the side of his boot. It was rough, but seemed walkable.
Come to us.
Raif’s head shot round, tracking the noise. Every hair on his skin swayed as if his body were floating in water. He listened, but could hear nothing except silence buzzing in his ears. “Who’s there?” he challenged. Detecting a break in his voice he didn’t like, he tried again. Harder. “Who goes there?”
Nothing. Seconds turned to minutes as he stood, motionless, in the dark. The breeze, which earlier had seemed cool and reviving, crawled against his skin like silverfish. His teeth started chattering and the noise they made echoed weirdly, batting back and forth against the rock. Quite suddenly he remembered the leaking waterskin and shucked it off his back. It came away dripping, close to two-thirds of its contents drained. Running his hand along the bottom, he probed for leaks. Only part of his mind was on the job, the other part was listening. Afraid.
Unable to detect the leak, he settled for upending the skin so that the remaining water settled against the spout. His hands shook as he strapped the wet skin awkwardly against his back. Perhaps he was still reeling from the fall. Perhaps he’d just imagined the voice.
His left ankle burst into pain with its first step, but Raif gritted his teeth and forced it to take the weight. Swinging the longbow before him, he moved forward. Tap. Tap. Tap. The ear of the bow knocked against rocks, stones, hard earth? He couldn’t say. It revealed a path forward and that was enough. Some critical, logical part of his brain knew that he was no safer on the move than he was staying in one place, but he’d been brought up at Tem’s hearth as a clansman . . . and a clansman always met his enemies head-on. The breeze was blowing at his back now and he could feel it chilling the bare skin of his neck. Oddly enough he seemed to make good time. The ground was flat here and there was a little push to the breeze that kept him moving.
Come, Twelve Kill. We await you.
Raif froze. Instantly the silverfish were back, scuttling over his face and eyeballs. “Who’s there?” he roared.
His words echoed in the darkness, breaking up and growing weaker and weaker until all was left was the word there. It came back sounding like a direction.
There.
Crazily Raif swung around. Forgetting his damaged ankle, he put all his weight on his left foot. Pain made him see light as the ankle buckled and he dropped to his knees.
The echo returned and this time it sounded like an admonishment.
There.
Raif breathed deeply as he searched for the will to stand upright. The breeze was stronger here, a persistent light wind dampening his skin. He wondered what was left of the night. It seemed more than ten hours since the sun had set. Surely the darkness couldn’t go on much longer? Smiling grimly, he reminded himself that this was the Want. The darkness could continue for as long as it liked.
How had the voice known his name? That was what he wanted to know. Twelve Kill was his Rift name, the one given to him by Yustaffa the Dancer. Who else would know that beside the Maimed Men? Suspecting he was better off not thinking too long about the answer, Raif hauled himself to his feet. His left foot felt so loosely connected to his ankle that he wondered if it might fall off. Something perverse in him made him force his weight back onto it and stand, teeth bared, as the pain subsided.
After that there was nothing to do but continue walking. The darkness rode on, black and oily, providing no traction for his vision. Underfoot, the rockbed grew smooth and he had an overall sense that he was descending. Slowly, the path’s course began to curve. Raif became aware of a second breeze blowing against his back. It hit at a different angle than the first, and it smelled of frozen kills set by the stove to thaw. Raif knew the smell well, all hunters did: fresh blood, black blood and ice. He turned his head, tracking the scent. Two breezes now and they met here, where he stood.
Aaaaagggghhhh.
Raif jumped at the sound of a faraway scream. It had come from directly ahead, where the two breezes commingled and became one. As he waited, listening, something brushed against his right arm.
“No,” he cried, spinning around, his heart thumping. “Who’s there?”
Raif unsheathed the Forsworn sword, tugging hard to force the bent blade from the scabbard. Water from the split waterskin trickled down his back.
Come.
The word was spoken in the softest whisper and it slid right past his ear.
Raif swung the sword in a circle. “Keep away,” he warned.
That was when he felt the fingers trailing across his face.
Raif hissed. Shrinking back, he dropped all his weight onto his left foot. Immediately the ankle buckled and his leg gave way beneath him. Releasing his grip on the Sull bow, he used his left hand to break the fall.
There.
Raif sat on the rockbed and drew the sword to his chest. His heart was beating so rapidly it felt like it might seize and stop. Cautiously he brought his free hand to his face. A line of ice was rafting down his cheek. Not gently, he scrubbed it away.
At ground level the breezes were firmer, muscling against his back and side. He was wet all over he realized; his hair, sleeves, pant legs.
Oh Gods, he thought, understanding slowly dawning. This is it, the mist river. And I’ve been heading downstream.
Less than two days ago Tallal had warned him the only sense he could rely on was touch. Raif had listened but not heard. He had imagined the mist river purely in visual terms—a sort of moving channel of clouds—yet he hadn’t once paused to consider what it would feel like to be in it. Foolishly, he had disregarded the full meaning of Tallal’s words. “Touch alone will lead you out.”
Ha, ha, ha.
Soft laughter echoed along the ravine. Raif imagined he deserved it. How long had he been traveling with the current, toward the heart of the Want? Too long, that was the answer. Every step downstream was a mistake. Raif shivered. He had been deeply, recklessly stupid. The Want was an unsprung trap with invisible tripwires humming in all directions. He’d been caught in one of them and it nearly killed him, and here he was less than twenty days later walking straight over another wire.
Anger at himself made him hard on his body and he hauled himself up, not much caring about the pain he inflicted on his twisted ankle. When he remembered he’d dropped the bow, he scrambled for it in the jet black darkness. Relief flooded over him when the tip of his sword touched horn, and he wondered at what point his peace of mind had come to depend solely on possessing weapons. Sword and bow. They had become his armor, his comfort, his fate.
Yet there were things upstream that were immune to them. The voices did not fear him . . . or at least did not fear his weapons. He thought about that as he oriented himself against the flow.
Deciding he would not take the second, s
tronger channel but retrace his steps upstream, Raif turned to face the oncoming mist. Its icy wetness slid between his teeth and down his throat. He sniffed deeply, making sure that he was heading into the fresher-smelling of the two streams, and then took his first steps into the black.
Noooooooooooo . . .
The howl cracked through the ravine like lightning, but this time Raif did not pause. He felt the mist pushing against him, felt ragged foggy shackles condense around his ankles and wrists. Strong steps broke them. They re-formed again and he broke them again, and the wet sucking noise they made as they snapped accompanied his every step. An hour passed and then another and still there was no increase in light. Holding his bow out before him like a blindman with a cane, Raif walked the mist rivers of the Want.
Occasionally there would be forks in the stream and he would have to pick a course using nothing more than instinct. Other currents might be colder or swifter, wider or narrower, they might smell of glaciers, ozone, raw iron and burned rock, and each time he bypassed one he wondered if he had made a mistake. He had a vision of himself as a rat in a water maze, paddling furiously to stay afloat while trying to find the cheese. Those above could look down and see everything, see the grand scheme of tunnels and turns, know instantly the best route, and then laugh amongst themselves as the rat missed one opportunity after another, propelling himself deeper into the maze.
“Out,” Tallal had said, “that has to be enough.”
Raif walked against the current and hoped that the lamb brother was right. When he grew thirsty, he drank without halting, holding the waterskin high above his head. He never grew hungry and never stopped to relieve himself. He had a fear of standing still. He did not want to feel those ghost fingers on his face—or anywhere else—ever again.
The night spooled out, growing impossibly long. Either that or he had lost the capacity to judge time. Sometimes the voices spoke to him, but he had a sense that they were farther away now, separated from him by great lengths of mist. As he worked his way around what seemed to be a U-shaped meander, he became aware of a change in the current. It was weakening, and for an instant he thought he smelled damp earth. He picked up his pace, desperately sniffing the air, but could detect nothing beyond the hailstone odor of the mist. When the path finally straightened he heard a noise. Scratching, followed by a short, high-pitched squeak.
Rats. Raif allowed himself to hope. Rats did not live in the Want. He was moving quickly now, shambling forward, favoring his right foot over his left. The summer he was eight years old he and Drey had spent hours belly-down in the underlevels of the roundhouse searching for rats. It had been an unusually warm spring and the rats had bred like . . . rats and the entire Hailhouse had been overrun. Longhead had set traps and poison and even hired a verminist from Ille Glaive. A month later, with numbers unabated, the head keep had come up with the bright idea of drafting the clan youth into the cause. He set a bounty: for every five whole rats brought to him, dead or alive, he would pay out a copper coin. This was unheard-of wealth—coin was rarely used in the clanholds—and Raif and Drey had set about trying to capture enough rats to make themselves rich. Other boys wasted days showily trying to spear rats with swords and shoot them with arrows, but he and Drey had decided on a different approach. “Stealth,” Drey had intoned, his voice deadly serious. “We must live with them and smell like them and once we’ve earned their trust we spring our trap.” The trap was a big square of fisherman’s netting given to them by their uncle Angus Lok.
Raif grinned as he remembered the three days he and Drey had lived in the underlevels, sleeping on the damp, muddy floor, eating trail meat like proper hunters and strategizing endlessly about rats. It had been a good time. Raif couldn’t recall earning the rats’ trust, but he did remember deploying the net. Constantly. In the end they caught eight whole rats and an angry raccoon. When they brought their bounty to the head keep, Longhead had scratched his head. “I didn’t say anything about coons.” Seeing their faces fall he added, “But now I come to think of it one coon is more of a nuisance than two rats. A rat can’t lift the lids and get into the grain bins. Coon can. A copper for both of you—and this stays between you and me.”
A whole coin each. Raif couldn’t remember what he did with his, maybe swapped it for some rusty piece of weaponry from Bev Shank. Drey had given his to Da. He had always been the better man.
Raif let the memory fall away from him, forcing himself back into the present. Straightaway he realized something was wrong. The air was still. No mist washed against his face, no breeze lifted his hair. Without a current to walk against he had no guide. Halting, he tried to pin down his mistake. When he’d first heard the rats he was pretty sure the current was still pushing against him. What had he done then? Thinking about Drey had distracted him. Had he veered off course? He turned his head, knowing as he did so that to look behind was useless but unable to break the habit of a lifetime.
Then he realized something strange. He could see the barest outline, a black-on-black edge about ten feet above him. Blinking, he waited. One grain of light at a time, the world came into view. Raif’s eyes protested the growing brightness, sending out weird blooms of color and floating dots. Sky emerged above the edge, gray and pearly, swamped with clouds. The ravine appeared below it. Blue sandstone walls rose on two sides, their surfaces riven with cracks, their ledges collecting grounds for deadwood and loose scree. Underfoot, the porous stone was venting skeins of mist that quickly dissipated in the dry air. Ahead, where the ravine wall met the bedrock, a bony bristlecone pine lay twisted and on its side, its needles a pale ashy green.
Raif glanced down the length of the ravine. It was still dark back there. Turning, he walked toward the bristlecone pine. It was alive, he could smell it. As he knelt, rubbing the fragrant needles between his fingertips, the light increased and the way ahead became clear. Sourwood bushes, rock oak and hornbeam choked the foot of the ravine where it dovetailed into a large dry riverbed. No, Raif corrected himself, the river wasn’t dry. A line of green water glinted in its center.
It was canyon country, west of the Rift. He had been here twice before. He knew the lay of the land, its faults and undercuts, its shrunken willows and yellow sedge. It was probably less than two days’ walk to the city on the edge of the abyss.
As Raif stepped from the ravine and into the dry riverbed, a final cry echoed from the dark place behind him.
Keep away from the Red Ice.
He did not look back.
SIXTEEN
Crouching in the Underworld
Raina Blackhail crouched in dank and fetid underlevels of the roundhouse and prayed her light wouldn’t go out. It was one of those horn-covered safelamps that was supposedly impervious to the wind. The lamp’s bulb-shaped brass reservoir was pleasingly full and felt good in her hand, but there was no getting round it: the flame was jumping.
Darn thing. And what on earth was she doing down here anyway, when she could be upstairs enjoying a fine midday meal with Anwyn Bird in the good light—and fresh air—of day? Instead the smells of rotten leaves, night soils and dead mice were assaulting her senses as she paddled through a half-foot of standing water. The underlevels of the Hailhouse stank like an old man. They were shrinking like one too. According to Longhead, who was one of the very few people in the clan who cared about such things, the Hailhouse sank a little each year. “It’s the weight of the stone,” he’d explained to her many years ago. “When the spring thaws come the earth softens and the walls begin to sink. Not much, but certainly enough.” He had wanted to show her the marker he had scribed on the base of the roundhouse in order to monitor the rate of sinkage. Raina had declined. She’d been twenty-two at the time and madly in love, and she wouldn’t have cared if the entire Hailhold had sunk ten feet in a single day.
Well it’s sinking now. And the irony was that she, Raina Blackhail, had turned into Longhead: a person with a marker, monitoring the decline. Raina smiled at the thought. It made wha
t she did seem less grim.
Noticing a flattening-out of an overhead ceiling groin, she straightened her spine and rested a moment. Her back was aching with the strain of carrying her lode and she wondered if she should have asked Jebb Onnacre to help. No, she shook her head. Jebb was a good man and she trusted him, but this risk must be hers alone.
Pushing herself off from the wall she concentrated on remembering the way ahead. The standing water was deeper than when she’d been here last and she was glad she’d had the sense to put on her knee-high leather riding boots. As she moved, the pack strapped to her shoulders kept sliding out of place and she had to constantly reach back to recenter the weight. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could carry it. Sweat was trickling past her ears, and two dark stains were spreading across the armpits of her dress. The sopping wool felt like itchy mush.
Shunting the weight sideways, she slipped between two stone columns and entered the dark airless labyrinth of the foundation space, the bottommost level in the roundhouse. It was surprisingly warm and some kind of rain was falling—the ceiling must be saturated with groundwater. The safelamp began to hiss and Raina brought it close to her body for protection. Bending at the waist, she cleared the entrance tunnel and followed the passage as it led down.
It wasn’t long before oily water started flooding over the tops of her boots. Awkwardly, she hiked up her sodden skirts and tucked them under her belt. As she worked, the safelamp swung lazily in her free hand, sending an egg-shaped beam of light rocking across the walls.
A fuzz of blue-black mold covered the stone. In the corner where the sandstone walls braced the ceiling, moths had laid their eggs. Thousand of white maggots fed on the mold. Some had pupated into pod-shaped cocoons that hung suspended from the ceiling by dusty threads of silk. When a breeze came they clicked together, making a noise like rustling leaves. Raina averted her eyes and resumed walking.
