by J. V. Jones
The Maimed Men and their women came out next and they were not a lovely sight. Dressed in dyed leather shirts and tunics, animal skins with the heads still attached, armored cloaks, spiked helms, rat-fur hoods, scaled breastplates, steel gauntlets, burned dresses, boned bodices, goat-fleece collars and kilts and all manner of straps, belts, packs and chains, they did their name proud. Every one of them was lacking: a missing eye or arm, a clubfoot, a deformed spine, a cleft palate, a claw hand, a wine-stained face, absent flesh, extra flesh. Things not present at birth and others taken away later. Raif became aware of his own missing flesh—the tip of his little finger, cut off at the knuckle—and wondered if he would ever lose enough of himself to feel at home here. He had a brief but intensely strong desire to run, turn and flee back to the canyonlands and Badlands—places were the land was the only thing that was wasted. The cragsman Addie Gunn’s words came back to him. “None of us are whole.” He had not been speaking about flesh.
Raif walked steadily through the growing crowd, matching gazes only when he had to, when faced with the choice of meeting a challenge or backing down. Beneath the ledge of green rimrock, the Rift was trembling. The vast fissure in the earth was as dark and wet as a fresh wound and it gave off the same metallic odor. Last time he was here he remembered watching birds in flight below him, kitty hawks and swallows and turkey vultures. Today the Rift was full of nothing. It was the deepest hole in the earth and no man alive had ever returned from it. Its bottom could not be seen or known. On the clearest day with the sun directly overhead there was a point beyond which the eye could not see. Raif Sevrance had looked down on such a day, his gaze tracking the cracked and uneven cliffwall, past layers of ironstone, sandstone, limestone, hermit shale, granite, green marble, pyrite slate and schist, past the dark recesses of undercut caves, steam vents, and well heads before finally coming to rest at the point where the darkness rolled and swirled like hot tar finding its level. Raif found it hard to watch and soon looked away. It struck him that it was a moat defending a fastness: a layer that could not be penetrated without sanction.
His shoulders jerked in a single, deep shiver. His clothes were wet and he was sick of traveling. For the past two days he had done nothing but walk. Within the hard shell of his leather boots his feet were wrapped in rags and dried grass. His left ankle was still badly swollen, and a blister on the heel oozed watery blood into the makeshift padding. He knew better than to show this, not here in the city of Maimed Men, and walked without limp or stiffness, keeping his back straight and his hand close to the hilt of his bent sword.
Light was beginning to fail as he approached the center of the rimrock. A firepile had been stacked and primed, and the crowd began to gather around it. Raif spotted the dark and unfriendly face of Linden Moodie, the Rift brother who had led the raid on Black Hole. The garrote scar circling his neck was partially covered by a silver and black wool mantle. Raif met Moodie’s gaze, confirming to himself that he was not mistaken. Linden Moodie had deliberately worn his spoils from the raid on Blackhail’s silver mine. I dare you, his brown eyes challenged, to show a reaction to the colors of your once and deserted clan.
Raif did not know what expression was showing on his face, only that it did not change when faced with Moodie. He breathed deeply and allowed only surface thoughts to work upon his brain. He had not expected much coming here. No surprises so far.
“Raif! Over here!”
Tracking the sound of his name, Raif spied the big, powerful form of Stillborn wending his way through a group of Maimed Women. The Rift brother was dressed in a sleeveless buckskin tunic trimmed with rabbit fur. His bare forearms were wrapped in matching bullhorns. Breaking free from the crowd, he brought Raif to a halt by standing in front of him and enveloping him in a giant, smothering bear hug.
“I told the Mole you killed that Hailsman on your way out ’cause he challenged you for the gold,” Stillborn murmured insistently in Raif’s ear while he gripped him. “And that you told me you were off to take care of a spot of personal business and that you’d be back within a month.”
The two men separated, but Stillborn caught Raif’s forearms in his fists and held Raif at arm’s length while he inspected him. The Maimed Man’s hazel eyes were knowing. The puckered flesh that ran along his face and down his neck quivered with strong emotion. “Know two things before this dance starts,” he said, his voice low and husky. “One: I am glad you are back. And two: I am your man.”
Raif breathed and did not think. Later, he told himself. Aware that Stillborn was waiting upon a response, he forced himself to nod. “It’s good to see you, Still,” he said, knowing it was true only as he spoke.
It was little but Stillborn nodded, satisfied. He was a man well-used to little. Releasing his hold on Raif’s ams he said, “I see you bent my sword.”
Raif laughed. Of course, ownership of the Forsworn sword had always been a fluid concept between them. When Raif had first met the Maimed Man in the canyonlands, Stillborn had simply taken the sword as his own. Weeks later, on that dark day in Black Hole, Raif had taken it back. “I’d be grateful if you could lend me another one until I can get it straightened.”
Even before he’d finished the sentence, Stillborn said, “Done.”
“Azziah rin Raif! Well coddle my ravens’ eggs and serve them with vinegar. Who’d thought we’d see your fine, handsome face again this side of damnation.”
Yustaffa. The fat man with the swordbreaker danced lightly around the firepile, his breast and belly rolls jiggling beneath a fantastical outfit of yellow silk spotted with tufts of horsehair and belted, priestlike, with golden rope. He was carrying something in his chubby fist that he took care to hold level.
Raif did not greet him, but this only caused Yustaffa further delight.
“Lost a little weight, I see,” he said, approaching. With a theatrical narrowing of his eyes he reversed himself. “No. I am mistaken. You’ve gained a little something upon the shoulders.” For a moment the eyes were shrewd, and then the veil of spite returned. “What, no kiss? And here was I thinking you’d have missed me.”
Some in the crowd tittered. One low-breasted hag shouted, “Ask him where he’s been.”
Yustaffa threw his free hand in the air and issued a big, showy shrug. “The people have spoken, and who am I to ignore them?” And then for Raif’s ears alone, “Such a pathetic little bunch, don’t you think?”
Raif reached behind his back and released his pack. Swinging it forward, he let it come to rest in front of his feet. He did not know what to say to Yustaffa, and felt something close to dizziness attempting to track the fat man’s words.
Sleet falling on Yustaffa’s yellow tunic created dimples in the fabric. He waited, eyebrows raised, in a pantomime of expectation, before swinging suddenly about and launching the item he’d been holding in his fist at the base of the firepile. A small explosive thuc sounded and hot white flames rolled out across the wood. The crowd aahed in appreciation.
Yustaffa executed a trim bow and then looked Raif straight in the eye. “Now we’re all cozy around the fire you really should tell us where you’ve been.”
Raif gazed out on the faces of the Maimed Men. About four hundred had gathered around the firepile, and they were armed with a motley of weapons; rusted iron spears, beheading cleavers, hooked pikes, scimitars, wooden staffs, clannish hammers, broadswords, list poles, knuckleguards, knives. Most of the women and every boy old enough to walk had daggers or other hilt weapons at their waists. They lived in fear, Raif realized, and he could not fault them for it. It was a hard life on the edge of the abyss. Nothing but tough grass and weed trees would grow here. Children had to be maimed by their parents, else risk strangers taking issue with their wholeness. Whatever was needed was stolen from the clanholds . . . or one another. The cragsman Addie Gunn had once tried to keep sheep on the upper rim, but they were snatched one by one for meat. Stillborn had once called the Maimed Men desperate, and warned Raif that desperate men didn
’t make good friends.
Raif saw that desperation in them now. They were lean and scaly and hollow-cheeked and he knew he had made a mistake by not stopping to hunt in the canyonlands and bring meat. He had come empty-handed. Just one more mouth to feed.
“There you go.” Raif opened his hand and accepted a felt-sheathed sword from Stillborn. He must have run down to his cave to fetch it. “It’s not pretty but it should do you for a while.” With a quick salute he slid away.
As he clipped the sword to his gear belt, Raif searched the faces of the Maimed Men for Traggis Mole. The leader of the Maimed Men was nowhere to be seen, but at the back of the crowd, his face almost hidden by rising flames and black smoke, stood the outlander, Thomas Argola. He did not blink as Raif regarded him, just held his small, olive-skinned face level for inspection. Argola had been the one who had pushed Raif into the Want after the raid on Black Hole. Why? Raif wondered. Why had he readied a horse and supplies? What had he known, or guessed?
“Come now, Twelvester. Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s churlish to keep people waiting?”
Yustaffa’s piping voice broke through Raif thoughts. As the fat man finished speaking a stone hit the small of Raif’s back. Snapping around, Raif pounced toward the crowd. People shied away from him. One woman, a tired-looking mother with a baby at her teat, cried out in fright. Raif felt muscles in his jaw pumping as he fought the itch to draw his new sword.
Yustaffa tutted with mock disapproval, deeply gratified by Raif’s reaction. “Shame on you, my fellow Rift Brothers. You know the procedure. Story first. Stones later.” He smiled winningly at Raif. “Don’t worry, I’m just saying that to keep them quiet.”
The flames were fierce now, leaping and crackling, firing off sparks. Darkness was rising, and it didn’t take much to imagine it was originating in the Rift. On the edge of the rimrock Raif spied one of the windlasses that were used to lower bodies into the abyss. He swallowed, wished again he had thought to bring meat.
Glancing once at Thomas Argola, he said, “I journeyed into the Great Want and was lost for many days. I nearly died, but a group of men called the lamb brothers found me, healed my wounds, and set me on my way.”
Several things happened as he spoke. When he named the lamb brothers both Thomas Argola’s and Yustaffa’s faces registered a beat of surprise. The outlander concealed his surprise better, but Raif detected a momentary loosening of his jaw. Most of the crowd listened in silence, drawing in breath when Raif had named the Great Want, yet even before he’d finished wonder had been replaced by suspicion.
“No one gets out of the Want,” shrieked the low-breasted hag who’d spoken earlier.
“Aye,” agreed many in the crowd.
Someone else called out, “What was you doing there anyway? Only madmen go the Want.”
“Never heard of no lamb brothers,” pitched in a shaggy bear of a man near the front.
Yustaffa sucked in his cheeks with relish. “Such suspicion. Makes you wonder how they sleep at night.”
“I’ve heard of the lamb brothers.”
All turned to look at the tiny cragsman Addie Gunn who was making his way across the rimrock. Addie had once been a Wellman, and you could still see the clan in him. He wore a pouch around his waist, but it contained salt, not guidestone. The habit of carrying powder was a hard one to break. “The lamb brothers live in the sand deserts of the Far South and they survive on ewe milk and lamb meat and dress themselves in wool and fleeces.”
Addie was fierce about matters pertaining to sheep and no one in the crowd doubted his word. As a cragsman at Wellhouse he had maintained his own herd. Raising a quick hand in greeting to Raif, he addressed himself directly to Yustaffa. “You come from the glass desert due north of the sands. Tell me you haven’t heard of them too.”
As he watched Addie Gunn standing in the firelight, arms folded across his chest, daring Yustaffa to lie to the crowd, a muscle close to Raif’s heart contracted. He had forgotten the goodness here.
For once Yustaffa was lost for words. Coiling the end of his belt rope around his fat middle finger, he hmmed and aahed and tutted. Finally, he let the rope go. “Well now that you mention it,” he said sulkily, “I do have a recollection about them. Course it doesn’t prove that they were in the Want or that Twelve Kill actually met them.”
Men started to jeer. He’d lost the crowd and he knew it.
Addie shook his head slowly, frowning at Yustaffa and the Maimed Men. “The lamb brothers live on the dunes. League upon league of nothing but sand. Every hill looks like the next, and by the time you’ve topped one your footprints have been blown clean away and you can’t even be sure which way you came. I ask you: how much more difficult could the Want be than that?” The cragsman’s gaze darted from man to man, defying anyone to disagree with him. None did. Addie Gunn was well respected here. His know-how brought in goats and sheep. “Good,” he said with a fatherly nod. “That’s sorted then. Now as for the fact of what the lad was doing there in the first place I say this: sometimes a man’s business is his own. He didna harm any Rift Brothers, and before he left I watched with my own two eyes as he fought long and hard in the raid. You don’t have to take my word for it. There’s Linden Moodie and Stillborn and others who’ll tell you just the same. Now granted the lad’s made a mistake not bringing supper for the pot, but I for one will go out with him tomorrow. And between his fancy Sull bow and my own two sheep eyes I have an inkling we’ll bring something back. He’s useful, don’t forget that. Twelve Kill by nature as well as name.” The crowd nodded. Most were quiet. A group of older children broke away from the fire to kick around a leather ball. Stillborn chose that moment to return to the space before the fire. He was carrying a small burlap sack on his back and he shrugged it forward, letting it drop onto the rimrock.
“Trail meat,” he said with some wistfulness, still looking at the sack. “Cured it myself last autumn. Spiced it real good too. If there’s babbies around with milk teeth it’ll knock ’em clean out.” Unable to actually come out with the words Trail meat all round he walked away from the sack.
The Maimed Women pushed forward first. One woman, a blond-haired maid with a cleanly excised left ear, shoved Yustaffa in the backside to get to her share of meat. The fat man spun around and smacked her face and she smacked him right back.
Raif, Stillborn and Addie Gun moved to the side. Glancing over his shoulder, Raif looked to the place where he’d last seen Thomas Argola. The outlander was gone.
“Addie,” Raif said. “Thanks. You saved my head.”
The cragsman smacked his lips. “’C’mon now, lad. It was nothing.”
Raif nodded solemnly. “Nothing.”
Addie seemed pleased by this. “You’d better get some sleep. We’ll have to be up and out afore dawn. We’ll have to cover a lot of ground. Bad time of year to go looking for game.”
“Worse time to come back with nothing.” Stillborn also seemed pleased. “Guess I might come with you. Someone’ll have to wheel back the cart.”
Addie looked at Stillborn as if he was exactly the kind of person you didn’t want on a stealth hunt. Which was probably true. “If you’re not at the east rim an hour afore sunup I’m not waiting” was all the cragsman said in reply.
“Where’s Traggis Mole?” Raif asked, instantly killing the easy camaraderie between them.
Stillborn’s large deformed face, with its seam of flesh and black bristles running from the temple down to the neck, sobered. “He’s about all right, though I’ve seen him less of late. He’ll have been told you’re here, but you know the Mole. Chooses his own time.”
Raif nodded. It was probably a mistake to feel relief at that statement, but he couldn’t help himself. Right now he wanted to pull his aching feet from his boots, and sleep.
Perhaps seeing this, Stillborn said, “C’mon, lad. Let’s get you set for the night. You’d best stay with me. Addie. You didn’t do half a bad job up there. I never knew you had the gift of
the gab.”
“Nor did I,” Addie replied lightly before slipping away.
Stillborn picked up Raif’s pack as if it weighed exactly nothing. Silently, he led Raif down the series of rope ladders and stairs that led to his cliff cave. Raif was grateful not to be probed or forced to think. He was dead tired and had stood so long in the sleet that his hands and face were tingling.
The Rift music started as they arrived on the lower terrace. Grass lamps had been lit and the city was aglow with orange lights. The Rift music made the flames flicker. Bass murmurs, low whistles and door-hinge creaks rose from the hole in the earth, punctuated by long silences and sudden rock tremors. Raif could no longer see the Rift, and was glad.
Stillborn’s cave was accessed by a narrow ledge that was separated from the rimrock by a drop of three feet. The Maimed Man jumped down, careless of the hell that lay below him. Raif couldn’t manage such recklessness just then. He moved with care, favoring his right foot, fearful of the drop and of his own ability to manage the simple maneuver. Stillborn went ahead to light lamps.
“Raif,” he said a few minutes later as Raif stood in the mouth of the cave. “Sleep. There’s blankets and a bowl of water for your feet. I’ll be out on the ledge, scratching up a bit of a fire. I’ll see you in the morning.” Moving briskly, the Maimed Man passed Raif and left him to the dim quiet of the cliff cave.
Raif sat on the pile of blankets and pulled off his boots. Not looking too carefully, he sank his feet into the shallow bowl of cool water. Bits of rags that had stuck to the blisters slowly soaked free.
You are safe tonight, Stillborn had said in his own way. I will stand watch while you sleep.
