by J. V. Jones
The Orrl cloak had been damaged in the Want; he had not given it much thought since then. Seeing that she was waiting, he tugged on the string and unraveled the package. The silky cloth fell to the ground, revealing his black boarhide gloves resting on top of the cloak. She watched him carefully as he tucked the gloves into his gear belt and then inspected the cloak. He could not remember exactly where the varnish had started to chip and grew more anxious as he searched and couldn’t find the spots. He knew she was expecting him to praise her work. After a minute or so he gave up and looked at her, preparing an apology in his head.
She was smiling. “Maybe I have done too good a job.”
Raif felt relief and strong attraction.
“Here.” She took the cloak from him. “Just there by the hem. See? And there in the front.” She moved into him to demonstrate her work. Now that she pointed it out he could see where she had applied something—lacquer, varnish, metallic paint—over the bald spots, carefully overlapping and matching, nearly perfectly, the original finish.
“Thank you,” he said, pleased. She had shiny spots of pigment on her fingers.
“It took me most of the night to match it. I have never seen anything quite like it.”
She was so close he could see the fine golden down on her cheeks and temples, and see how quickly and wonderfully it became deep brown at her hairline. He spoke to distract himself. “It’s made by the clansmen at Orrl. They wear them to hunt in winter.”
“Orrl,” she repeated, as if committing the word to memory.
“It’s the most westerly of the sworn clans.” His voice sounded wooden to his ears but he couldn’t seem to stop speaking. “Its territories border Scarpe and Blackhail, and its warriors hunt as far as the Storm Margin.”
“Storm Margin. I have heard of that.” She smiled again, and he could not tell if she was stating a fact or gently mocking him. Her breasts were full and round beneath the fabric of her dress. Her waist was cinched small enough to be circled by his hands.
Crazily, Raif wanted to grab her and squash her against his chest. Afraid that he might actually do so he stepped back.
She stepped with him. “Your cloak.” As she handed it back to him her fingers touched his wrist.
Raif breathed sharply. He had no experience of women. Was it possible she expected him to touch her back?
Mallia Argola looked at him with green-brown eyes. She was older than he was, perhaps by four or five years. “Give me your hand,” she said to him.
Maneuvering the Orrl cloak over the crook in his left arm seemed to take forever. He was sure she must think him a fool. When he was done, he held out his right hand and was surprised to see it didn’t shake.
She took it firmly, forcing the fingers up and also forcing him to move toward her. Raising his hand to her face, she studied its scars and bow calluses. He could feel her breath wetting his skin. Slowly she pushed his palm to her lips and kissed it.
Wildness threatened him then. He wanted her and could perceive her heart, and somehow the two things got crossed in his head and the only thing he knew for sure was that given long enough he would harm her. He could not tell the difference between desire to kill her and desire. Fearful of losing his mind, he wrenched back his arm.
In that final instant of contact he felt her teeth nip the base of his thumb.
“It is done,” she said to him, calmly. Her eyes glinted with something that might have been triumph—whatever it was, she blinked it away. “Tooth and hand. In my land that means we will be more than friends.”
He turned away from her, stirred and barely sane. Blood was ricocheting around his body. The Orrl cloak was on the floor.
“I must leave,” she said, her voice trailing toward the cave mouth. “My brother sends a message: come see him tonight.”
With that Mallia Argola was gone.
Raif told himself not to look around. He paced to the back of the cave and found himself soon thwarted by the low ceiling, Casting around for something to . . . use . . . his gaze alighted on the rusted spear. Hefting it over his shoulder he took a run at the quintain. The spear’s point was cankered and blunt, and the force required to punch it through iron plate was immense. Raif drove it through Yelma’s chest armor, yanked it out, and then drove it through again.
He was still stabbing the quintain a quarter-hour later when Stillborn sauntered into the cave holding an oil lamp on a pole.
“Gods, lad. What are you doing?” he asked, setting the lamp down on the cave floor.
Raif stopped. He was shaking and drenched with sweat. One of his fingers was bloodied; he had sliced it on a jagged edge of plate.
Stillborn came over and took the spear away. Laying a hand on his shoulder, he guided him firmly around. “Come and rest for a while.”
Raif allowed himself to be led to the sleeping mattress. When Stillborn thrust a cup in his fist, he drank. It wasn’t water. He told himself he’d just lie down for a while to calm the pounding in his head. The sun was setting and rich pink light filled the cave.
He dreamed of Ash. She was floating on a plate of ice carved from a glacier. He was standing on the shore, and at first the current moved her toward him, and there was a moment when, if they’d both reached out their hands, they might have touched. He called her name and reached for her, his hand touching space she had just occupied. Yet Ash March no longer looked at him, and the current carried her away.
At first he thought the clanging was part of a new dream. A bell was tolling in the distance and he knew, as you knew things in dreams, that the sound was coming from a place where he did not want to go. He struck a path in the opposite direction, telling himself that the faster he moved the quicker the sound would decrease. He jogged and then sprinted. Someone called his name.
“Raif. Better be up. The Mole’s sounding the alarm.”
Opening his eyes, Raif saw it was full dark. The pole lamp Stillborn had brought earlier was the only illumination in the cave. Stillborn was squatting next to him. The spare tooth embedded in his neck tissue was biting.
“The alarm,” he repeated, his hazel eyes glittering like cut stones. “Something’s out there.”
The noise was barbaric. A great clashing of tempered and untempered metals, beating out of time and driven by fear. Raif had never heard anything like it; the boom of gongs and peal of bells, the rasp of ridged metal being sawn across rock, the bedlam of iron plate smashing against iron plate like cymbals, and the hammer of hundreds of cook pots as the Maimed Women came out upon their ledges and tried to beat back the dark.
Standing upright, Stillborn cinched his gear belt. Two swords, a nail hammer and a knife hung there. “I best get going. Follow when you can.”
Raif swung his feet onto the floor.
Nodding at Yelma as he passed her, Stillborn said, “Looks like she’s got a case of exploding boils.”
“Still,” Raif said. “The sword?”
“Foot o’ the bed, my old friend. Foot o’ the bed.”
The Forsworn sword had been wrapped in a length of cheesecloth and laid at the end of the mattress. Kneeling forward, Raif tore off the fabric and uncovered the blade. The flat had been polished so finely it reflected his face like a mirror. Drawing his thumb along the edge he tested for sharpness. It opened the skin but drew no blood. Good. The point was like a diamond, hard and brilliant, and the only thing he saw that was not perfect was a slight warping in the pattern of the steel where bent metal had been fired and hammered back to true.
Raif removed Stillborn’s borrowed blade from his sealskin scabbard and replaced it with the Forsworn sword. The rock crystal surmounted on the pommel flashed as he moved across the cave. As he clasped the newly repaired Orrl cloak around his throat he felt some shame about what had happened earlier with Mallia Argola. He did not understand himself.
Grabbing the pole light on his way out, Raif Sevrance headed toward the greatest concentration of noise.
The night was clear and lit by stars.
Snow glowed blue. The moon had not yet risen, but Raif calculated it was due. He moved quickly, leaping from Stillborn’s ledge to the one above and then up the rope ladder to one of the longer ledges that ran east. Others were moving too. Maimed Men, their faces blank, their knuckles white where they gripped scythes, stone-bladed axes, sharpened and fire-hardened wooden staves, cruciform halberds, forked spears, swords, knives. The frenzied clangor of the alarm worked on their bodies like a drug, making arms twitch and neck tendons spring out like wires. The clash of metal chopped Raif’s thoughts into slices. He could no longer think of whole things, was incapable of formulating or retaining a plan. Instead he thought in pulses. I must go up this ladder. I must avoid the hoist lifts. Too many people: Get out of my way.
He drew his sword. Two women kneeling on the ledge, beating cauldrons against the rock, cried out his name. Naked, their bodies obscenely shadowed and missing flesh, they hissed as he stared at them. Slowly they began beating out a new rhythm on the rock.
“Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill.”
He turned his back on them. Maimed Men made way for him as he landed on the lowest of the three great rimrocks that spanned the city. Hiking on top of a boulder, he tried to see the way ahead. Armed men were moving across the snow. A watch fire had been lit by the mouth of the pool cave, but the flames were sluggish and needed pumping. A blind man beating a sheet of scrap metal by the fuel pile had caught the rhythm of the hags above and now fell in time with them. Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill.
Raif shouted to someone, anyone, no one, “Feed the fire.”
People looked at him and did not move. Perhaps their thoughts were like his own, and while they heard his voice, the sense of its meaning would come later.
Raif jumped down. Below him the Rift lay like an absence in time and space, a crack of perfect darkness in a night drawn blue by snow and stars. He felt hearts moving deep within the earth where rock softened and ceased to be; unmade flesh pushing with inexorable force against the barrier that divided worlds.
Tongue wetting with saliva, Raif made his way up to the next ledge.
He heard the fighting before he saw it; heard heavy thuds and sudden inhalations, squealing swords and the compressed murmur of frightened men. His mind picked the sounds out of the clangor like jewels in the sand. Raif shouldered his way through the crowd. His name had traveled before him and the alarm beating on the middle level of rimrock hammered it out for all to hear.
Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill.
A darkness above the heads of the men drew his eye. Something lashed out. A child screamed. Raif laid his hands on people and pushed them out of his way. Linden Moodie, Stillborn, Yustaffa the Dancer, Traggis Mole’s big guards, and other unwhole fighting men formed a loose circle around the shadow beast. It was eleven feet tall and moved like a serpent, snapping and weaving, launching attacks with its head. Unarmed except for talons as thick and black as turkey vultures; it was not the kind of being capable of wielding a sword.
Raif thought of the Shatan Maer, imagined this was one rung down in the level of creation. It moved like liquid shot at force. A crack of its tail sent Linden Moodie to his knees. Plunging its head around, it snapped off both his legs. Blood fountained onto the snow. The crowd stepped back. One of the Mole’s cronies stuck the monster’s hide with his spear. And could not get it out. Thrown off balance by his own thwarted force, he stumbled backward, right hand cupping air. The shadow being leapt forward and thrashed him with its claws, tearing up skin and ribs and genitals.
The guard’s spear was lodged in the back of the creature’s neck where it swung back and forth like a tuning fork. The dark matter of unmade blood smoked from the hole. A series of high squeals shot from the being’s jaw as it spun a half-circle and lashed out at the nearest Maimed Man. A sickening crunch was followed by the sound of vertebrae popping like knuckles as the creature bit off a man’s head.
Raif glanced across the clearing at Stillborn who was slowly moving forward, sweeping his sword in a defensive half-circle with every step. Their gazes met and agreement passed between them. Raif attempted to meet Yustaffa’s gaze, but the Dancer gave a little snort and looked away. His swordbreaker had been abandoned and in its place he wielded a scimitar with a thickly rounded blade.
Stillborn made his move, yanking the nail hammer from his belt and flinging it at the back of the shadow beast’s head. The creature whipped around. Prepared, Stillborn was already moving away. Raif hurled himself at the being’s darkly scaled back, leaping up to sink the Forsworn sword into its heart. Shadowflesh opened with a hiss. There was give, the point slid inward.
And then the blade failed.
The break in the pattern. Raif felt the collapse and tried to muscle through it, but the sword could no longer be driven forward. Just bent. Releasing his grip on the hilt, he kicked a foot into the creature’s hide and sprang back. Almost he made it, but as he flung his body out and around, he felt the air-push of imminent impact followed by a massive, battering ram of a blow. It propelled him forward into the crowd. The creature’s shadow fell upon him and he thought his life was done, but something happened—what, he would not find out until later—and the creature spun around and moved away.
Raif saw people’s feet through a watery haze. He smelled the snow. It stunk like gas. Dimly he was aware of something happening behind him, of shifting weight and shadows.
The pain in his left shoulder had no end.
“Give me your sword.”
The words did not seem to come from him, yet he must have spoken them, for a big brute of a Maimed Man hauled him to his feet and handed him a weapon. The weight of the blade was shocking. It was forged like an iron bar. The man had a malformed spine; extra bone bulged from the back of his neck. “God’s speed to you,” he said with feeling.
Raif had no reply for him. He had turned toward the clearing and saw a killing field of snapped and disemboweled bodies and blood. The snow was stained black. A dozen spears stuck from the creature’s shadowed hide and the holes they created vented smoke. Raif’s gaze darted to the few men left at the other side of the clearing, searching for Stillborn. When he spied the swish of a tan leather kilt, he allowed himself to breathe . . . and move forward.
Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill. A thousand pieces of metal and rock tolled his name.
The being was screeching. The end of its tail was gone, loped off by a sharp blade. Its eyes burned cold with hate.
Raif and Stillborn performed the dance. Each knew the other’s mind without having to meet glances. When he was ready Stillborn rushed the creature from behind and stuck his sword deep into its tail stump. An unearthly scream split the night. Raif’s eardrums crackled. The being snapped around like a whip. Raif rushed in, his gaze searching, searching, as his body flew through air. He landed like a demon on the being’s back, and guided the ugly, borrowed, good-for-nothing-but-bashing sword into the puncture hole created by the Forsworn blade. Hide and muscle had already been penetrated. The borrowed sword was solid. All he had to do was ram it through the heart.
The blade slid into muscle. Raif thrust deeper, driving his fist through the hole in the creature’s hide. The creature jerked. Raif twisted the blade with all his might, coring its heart like an apple. The breath was sucked from his lungs as the vacuum produced by the collapsing heart created the opposite of a shock wave. Raif pulled his fist free from the hide. It was coated with oily blackness. Leaving the sword in place, he sprang back and ran.
The being failed, Raif didn’t think any other word could quite describe it. One moment it was upright, vital and craving, and the next it sank to the rimrock. Gone.
Bloody snowflakes thrown up by its fall seesawed through the air as Raif made his way to Stillborn. The big Maimed Man rushed forward and caught him in a massive hug. Raif let himself be supported. His ears were ringing. Pain rolled across his shoulder in waves. Stupidly, his teeth were chattering.
The creature’s dead bod
y twitched and hissed, diminishing.
At last there was silence. The alarm petered out and then stopped. Maimed Men seemed little relieved. None approached the being’s carcass, but people started gathering around something small and ragged lying on the rimrock. A body? Whispers and urgent calls sounded through the crowd.
“He saved your life,” Stillborn said in Raif’s ear.
Raif stepped away from him. He needed space to breathe. “Who?”
“The Mole.”
Raif steadied himself for a moment and then glanced toward the body. The ragged black shape looked too slight to be a man. Oh gods.
Stillborn wiped the sweat from his temples through his hair. “As soon as you fell backwards the creature was on you. There was nothing anyone could do. I came forward . . . ” He shook his head. “Wasn’t fast enough.”
“But Traggis Mole was.”
“Aye. Came out of nowhere, like lightning. It was a fine sight. Took off the creature’s tail with his knife, shifted its attention from you to himself. It was as if he had no mind for his own safety. You couldn’t get that close to the creature and not get . . . ” Stillborn shuddered. “Torn.”
Raif left him and made his way toward the body. He could smell the blood as he moved through the crowd. It was possible that some of it was his own. People opened a space for him and he moved into it. He was shaking intensely, but he no longer felt any pain.
Traggis Mole lay in a drift of snow close to the cliff wall. He was not yet dead. What was left of his body was wet and twitching; Raif could not look at it. Wisps of dark shadow fed upon the exposed organs. The Robber Chief’s face was untouched. His eyes were open and watching Raif.
Raif knelt. He understood much that was dread and good. The truth of Traggis Mole was there to see, and Raif wondered why he hadn’t recognized it sooner. He and Traggis Mole were alike. The Maimed Men were all the Mole had. They were his clan, and keeping them safe from harm had been his life. Something close to pure love touched Raif then, and he knew the things this man would ask for were owed.
