by J. V. Jones
Finally the cragsman turned and looked at him. “A gold bar. It was my cut for the raid on Black Hole.”
Of course. Any meaningful kind of betrayal was always paid for in gold.
Raif slid the stormglass from the sleeve and watched as it sucked in the light. The tent actually grew darker. Holding it out toward Addie, he said, “Take it.”
Addie’s head was already shaking. “Nay, lad. What’s done is done. It’s a pretty bauble. Keep it.”
You knew when there was no arguing with Addie Gunn. Raif closed his fist around the icy piece of glass. A gold bar was enough for a man to buy himself a piece of land with a building upon it and a half-dozen sheep. The cragsman had given that up.
Raif swallowed; there was a soreness in his throat. “I will pay you back, Addie. I swear it.”
“I do not accept your oath,” he said softly. “Save your word. Do not waste it on a cragsman like me.”
His gray eyes met Raif’s, and Raif knew something had forever changed between him and Addie Gunn.
Watcher of the Dead. He had nearly forgotten all the things that meant. If the stormglass had been given to Raif Sevrance, son of Tem, Raif knew he would have given it up three days ago when Addie brought out his sock. But the stormglass had been given to Mor Drakka, Watcher of the Dead. And it was not a gift. It was a marker.
Raif slid the piece of glass back into its sleeve and dressed himself in new skins. In one of the sacks he found his daypack, arrows, gear belt, weapon pouch and Traggis Mole’s longknife. In the other he found the simple items Addie had first traded for: the medicine herbs, food and tea. He could barely look at them. Locating the scrap of fabric and length of twine that formed the lid of the leech jar, Raif sealed in the black worms. Leaving the jar on the floor for Addie to pick up, he headed outside.
Flawless was sitting on an upturned log by the fire, rubbing some kind of clear fluid into the Sull bow. Raif immediately saw the bow was brighter, bluer. The silver markings beneath the surface rippled like liquid mercury. “Nice work,” Flawless said when he saw Raif. “Shoot arrows long way.”
Raif wanted to snatch it away from him. Instead he said, “The Red Ice. How far?”
The Trenchlander shrugged. “Couple days. Trade for bow?”
He did take the bow then, yanking it from the old man’s clawlike hands. Inches above Raif’s heart, the coven of leeches stirred.
Flawless whistled as Raif walked away from the camp.
As he waited for Addie by the first stand of big trees, he tried to work out what time of day it was. The sun was hidden from view by banks of slow-moving clouds, but the light still had some force to it. Not long after noon then. Good. It was above freezing, and the ground snow was full of holes. The air smelled of cedar and damp earth. Raif itched to be gone.
The second bear trapper, the one whom Addie had called Gordo, emerged from the woods not far from where Raif was pacing. He was walking a thick-legged stallion that was carrying something dead on its back. When the trapper saw Raif he raised a hand in greeting, and Raif remembered that the man had been friendly in his own way, eager to talk to Addie about herbs. Raif looked at him but did not wave back.
The carcass slung over the horse’s rump was a fine, whitethroated doe. Fresh blood oozed from an arrow wound high on her back, just below her neck. One of her rear legs was crushed and older, blacker blood stained the dun-colored fur. The tale told by the two wounds disgusted Raif. The man hadn’t even allowed the trapped animal the dignity of a swift death with a well-placed blade. He had shot her from distance with his bow.
Quite suddenly Raif could not bear it and headed off into the woods. Addie Gunn would have to catch up with him.
Watcher of the Dead was on the move.
And he wanted to kill something before he reached the Red Ice.
THIRTY-NINE
Spire Vanis
Marafice Eye squinted at the horseman riding at full gallop from his slowly advancing army and thought, If I had any sense I would kill him. Order a mercenary or a one-in-seven to loose a nice thick quarrel at the back of his leather-capped head. Whoever had said “Don’t kill the messenger” was a fool of the highest order. Kill all messengers and stop all messages: that was wisdom to live by.
“Should I?” Tat Mackelroy asked, tapping the small and wicked-looking crossbow that he had taken to wearing in a sling at his waist.
Marafice grunted the word “No.” At this point they were so damn close to the city that if they set out to kill everyone who intended to dash ahead of them with news and details of their arrival it would take a considerable toll on the population. Not to mention be a waste of good crossbolts.
News had to have arrived by now. An army with foot soldiers, carts and walking wounded moved at a snail’s pace. Any codger with a cane could outrun it. Word had probably arrived days back, passing from village to village, tavern to tavern, relayed by teams of professional messengers who’d likely have fresh horses ready at each post. Information like this could earn good money in the Spire. Off the top of his head Marafice could think of at least six people who would pay gold for it. Exact position, numbers, makeup, condition: every detail was worth its own separate purse.
Marafice had ordered the killing of dozens of suspicious-looking men on horses, but the closer they got to the city the more suspicious everyone looked and the more futile the whole endeavor became. Even doing it for sport had become boring.
Runners were another thing entirely. Anyone who slunk away from his army meaning to trade inside information for personal gain was a dead man. Marafice killed them himself. It was a phenomenon which had genuinely surprised him. No one from Rive Company had attempted it yet, but these past few nights they’d had their hands full with deserting mercenaries. Steffan Grimes, who led the mercenary contingent, had told Marafice that such derelictions were not uncommon when an army was this close to home and that a good portion of these men wanted nothing more than to get back to wives and children. Marafice had listened politely—he was getting good at that—and then killed the deserters anyway. In his experience reasons just clouded things. What you did, not why you did it, was what counted.
It had caused some dissension, but no one, including Steffan Grimes, had said anything to his face. Andrew Perish, the former master-at-arms of the Rive Watch, had backed him up like a rock. “We’ve been abandoned on the field, won a roundhouse then lost it to a fresh army, been stranded on the wrong side of the Wolf, and sat through one of the worst storms God in his Garden ever created. If a mercenary can’t wait a few more days to get home then I don’t see why we should wait to discover his motives.” Disloyalty of any kind was intolerable to Perish. He was a man of God, but also a man of fighting men.
Marafice didn’t know what he himself was anymore. Protector General of the Rive Watch? Surlord-in-waiting? Commander of a ragtag army of mercenaries, old-timers, religious fanatics, machinists without machines and walking—and lying—wounded? One thing was certain though. He was a man finished with the clanholds. It was a dog-eat-dog world full of wild-eyed warriors and cunning chiefs, and the day he’d crossed the Wolf and left it was the day he vowed to himself he’d never go back.
“Will you call a halt?” Tat asked, breaking through his thoughts.
It was a good question and one Marafice had minded all day. Did he stop north of the city and approach Spire Vanis in the morning, refreshed, or march on and arrive by night? They were approaching the town of Oxbow in the Vale of Spires and it was growing late. Men who had been on their feet since dawn were weary. Marafice was weary, but it was not the kind of weariness that would let him sleep. The nearer they drew to the city the more tense he became. He did not know what he would meet at the gate, couldn’t even be sure if they would let him in.
The journey south from the Wolf had been hard and slow. Ille Glaive had to be avoided, which had meant a detour through the Bitter Hills. Hill country was cold and barren, policed by sharp winds and thick snowfalls. Food had been h
ard to come by and they’d had to mount raids. Sheep were not afield, and farms had to be struck. It had not been pretty. There might have been rapings; Marafice did not get involved in what went on. He had three thousand men, a thousand horses, and two hundred pack mules to feed: pretty was seldom possible.
The hardest thing to bear had been the weather. Storms had hit in succession; great whiteouts where they had been forced to overtake barns and farm buildings and bed down in the manure and hay. The worst storm had hit after they’d left hill country and entered the great floodplains of the Black Spill. It had acted strangely, that storm, everyone had agreed so later; the way it had seemed to pass overhead and then thought better of it, and turned right back for a second swipe. Its length and ferocity had caught them off-guard, and when the whiteout came it was so sudden and complete that it had left them stranded. These were grasslands and there were no woods to look to for protection. No farms either, at least none that could be found in a hurry. The winds were so high they couldn’t erect the tents, and they’d had to dig themselves into snowbanks, an experience so miserable and backbreaking that men had died with shovels in their hands.
Perish had made a killing that night. Men scared that if they fell asleep in the snow they would not wake up, were ripe for religious conversion. He had them chanting the pieties like ten-year-old boys. Marafice would have none of it—his balls might be freezing to hailstones but he wasn’t crazy. Yet he could see that in this instance it had worth. Men were comforted in a place where there had been no comfort. It was something to be grateful for, Perish’s makeshift church in the snow.
Two days had been lost. The greatest number of deaths were amongst the horses. Marafice had detected some relation between the fanciness of a horse—the length and skinniness of its legs and the shininess of its coat—to its ability to withstand cold. Fancy died faster. Men and mules fared better, though pretty much everyone and everything had ended up with chilblains, frostbite, dead skin, shed hair and snow blindness. Marafice’s left foot, which had been badly frostbitten once before, had been paining him ever since. He would not put weight on it and spent all his days in the saddle, atop his decidedly unfancy stallion.
His eye socket had had to be stuffed with balled horse mane and sword grease. After the first few hours in the snowbank it had begun to smell. Men would not look at him, he’d noticed. Marafice One Eye, at the best of times, was rarely an appealing sight. Strange how you could forget all about how you looked. Spend months on end imagining that your appearance did not matter and that you were being judged solely on your actions, only to be reminded with a shock that it wasn’t true. A man with an ugly face was set apart. A man with only one eye in that ugly face was judged a monster.
Marafice told himself it was of no consequence, and mostly it was not, yet there were times, such as in the snowbank, where he felt filled with layers of hard-to-place resentment. Those men chanting their crazy pieties with Andrew Perish could all go to hell.
“We’ll call a halt when we reach the rocks,” Marafice said to Tat Mackelroy, guiding his horse around a pothole filled with frozen mud. “There’s open ground. We’ll make camp there.”
Tat nodded slowly, thoughtful. They were riding eight abreast along a wide, unpaved road that led through closely spaced goose and pig farms. It was late afternoon, and the air was cool and clear and reeked of animal foulness. “Some in the company won’t like it.”
Marafice grinned unpleasantly. “Anyone with objections, send ’em to me.”
The rocks were the strange circle of freestanding granite spires that gave both the Vale of Spires and Spire Vanis its name. Some superstition surrounded their nature, and various legends, both sacred and profane, claimed to explain their existence. Marafice didn’t give two bird farts about that. The things that counted to him were the facts that the rocks were set on open ground well away from the roads, farms, towns and villages that crowded the region northeast of the city. And that the land they stood upon had long been claimed by Mask Fortress on behalf of the people of Spire Vanis. And did not fall within any grange. This was Whitehog territory they walked through now, land held and protected by House Hews. The granite spires not only were no-man’s-land, but also marked the southern boundary of the vast Eastern and Long Grass Granges. Once Marafice and his army were there they’d be off Garric Hews’ land for good.
Well it was Lisereth Hews’ land to be exact, but mother and son were much the same beast. The Lady of the Eastern Granges and her son the Whitehog were united in a single ambition: to place Garric Hews as the one hundred and forty-second Surlord of Spire Vanis.
And that put them in direct opposition to Marafice Eye.
It was a risk, albeit a small one, to march on the western border of their lands, using a Hews-patrolled road to head south into the city. An attack could be mounted, though judging from the latest intelligence Marafice had received from the darkcloaks this seemed unlikely.
Apparently the surlordship of Spire Vanis was still open to contention. Roland Stornoway, his own father-in-law, held Mask Fortress. This fact so amazed Marafice that when he’d first heard it six days back he had laughed in Greenslade’s face. “Who have you been talking to? The blind drunk or the insane?”
Greenslade was a small foxlike man, outfitted to look like a trapper. He had the red and flaky skin of someone who was out in the woods all day skinning weasels and foxes, but his eyes were city-cold and sharp. “I pass along nothing that has not been confirmed by two sources. Three days after Iss went missing, whilst workers were still digging through the rubble for his remains, Roland Stornoway entered the fortress with a small force of hideclads and seized control of it.”
“Are you sure it was not his son?” Roland Stornoway was an old dry stick of a man who walked with the aid of two canes. Marafice had marked his father-in-law as both shrewd and greedy. He had not marked him as a man capable of such a bold and surprising move.
“Roland Stornoway’s son, also named Roland, stands within the fortress with him. But it was the father, not the son, who entered first.”
Marafice thought a long while on this information, and could not for the life of him decide if it was good or bad. “Is my wife within the fortress?” he asked finally. The phrase “my wife” did not come easy from his lips; it made him spit.
Greenslade pretended not to notice. “She is with her father and brother, and has delivered a healthy boy.”
Dear God of Mercy it just got stranger. Married under three months and the happy couple now had a baby. Tactfully, the darkcloak had avoided using the word son. Marafice reckoned he’d be hard-pressed to find a single soul in the north who believed the boy to be his. It had been a marriage of convenience. She was a rich slut who had bedded some starving scholar—a bookbinder’s son if he wasn’t mistaken—and he, Marafice Eye, was the man who had agreed to wed her once she’d reached the point where she could no longer conceal her pregnancy from prying eyes.
Liona, her name was. Marafice feared she wasn’t right in the head. The one night they’d spent together as man and wife had been challenging to say the least. Legally he had to fuck her. So legally he did. The hair she’d ripped off his legs still hadn’t grown back. Now she was standing by in Mask Fortress with her newborn son, who was lawfully and in the eyes of God an Eye. Marafice could not begin to comprehend what it meant.
He and Greenslade had been standing at the back of the supply tent, the usual place for such assignations. It was long after midnight and the darkcloak’s breath smelled of cheap, overhopped beer. He had been in the alehouse of a village the army would pass tomorrow at noon; a lone trapper looking for company and some free warmth from the stove. Marafice could imagine what the man did, how cleverly he engaged local farmers and road-weary travelers in conversation. Armed with silver pieces from Marafice’s own purse he could afford to grease throats and buy goodwill.
Marafice had not intended to use the darkcloaks again, but the nearer he drew to the city the more pressin
g his need for information. At first he had thought he could just enter such a tavern himself and demand people tell him things. He was Marafice Eye, Protector General, the Knife. He had not counted on the very real fear his motley army and his motley self generated in such places. Entire villages would board themselves up as he passed. When he and Tat Mackelroy had ridden ahead of the front line at Natural Bridge and entered the town a good two hours before the army, they had found the people who lived there in a state of panic. A cattle auction had been due to take place in the market square, and drovers and farmers were beating bony steers with sticks to get them to move along the streets in haste. The smith was barricading his shop with metal bars and an alekeep was burying two wooden barrels in the snow outside his alehouse. Marafice had ordered Tat to rough up the man and slash both barrels with his sword. The alekeep’s behavior was an insult to men who had gone to war.
On their way out they had taken a steer. It was an odd thing, but Marafice could not recall such ill regard on the journey north. They had pursued a more direct route, one that took them predominately over fields and pasture, but even so the farmers had not trembled to see them. Had the presence of the grand and shiny grangelords been such a reassuring sight? Or was it just that everyone was leaner and hungrier after two additional months of winter?
One thing was certain: no one in these places was going to talk to him. Town and village folk assumed, correctly, that Marafice Eye and his army were going to rob them.
That was where Greenslade and his fellows came in. They had swift horses, and little problem with riding through the night to gain a crucial half-day advantage on the army. Sometimes they fell back. Other times they spotted the smoke of farms or cabins in the distance and simply took off over fields. They were good at their work and discovered information to the army’s advantage. It was Greenslade’s advice that had led to Marafice’s decision to pursue a more easterly route. The roads were better and there had been few reports of trouble upon them.
