by J. V. Jones
The bitch began to growl, a terrible low whirring that sounded like the moving of gears on a war machine.
“With me,” he told her. To the other two he said, “Guard my granddaughter.” His voice was so fearsome they shrank away from it.
Pasha’s black eyes were bright. Her features moved through several uncertain states as she stepped toward him. “Granda?”
“Stay here!” he roared, his voice harder than it had been with the dogs. “Draw the bolt when I have gone and let only those you know in.”
The girl’s bladder gave way and urine shot down her dress, splashing at her feet. She stood still, and pressed her lips together very tightly. Her jaw and teeth started doing something behind them, like gnawing, but he did not have the time to comfort her.
The black-and-orange bitch pushed her head into his thigh as she followed him from the solar. The last thing he saw as he closed the door was the remaining two dogs moving to flank his granddaughter. He waited until he heard the charge of the bolt before he and the hound made their way downstairs.
It was full dark now and few torches were burning. Vaylo had left his rushlight in the solar and had to step carefully through the shadows. Below him he was aware of noises, of sharp calls and urgent footsteps and chiming metal. The first person he spotted coming down the stairs was red-haired Midge Pool. The young swordsman was running between the east ward and the west. Vaylo hailed him.
Midge had a lot of freckles, some of them on his lips. “Drybone spotted mounted men to the north. He’s raising a party to meet them.”
North? The fear ticked softly in Vaylo’s chest, seemed almost to turn over and reveal itself for what it really was: recognition. Nothing but the Rift lay to the north. No Dhoonesmen or Hailsmen were out there about to knock down the door. A Bluddsman’s true fate lay beyond the simple taking and defending of land and houses. A Bluddsman’s true fate lay on the borders.
We are chosen by the Stone Gods to guard them.
“Wait for me,” Vaylo commanded Midge Pool.
On their way to the stables, Vaylo arranged the securing of the fort. Aaron was located and sent up to Nan’s solar in the company of Mogo Salt. Just as Mogo and Aaron were about to leave the ward, Vaylo stopped them.
“Your father’s hammer.”
Mogo nodded with understanding and returned to his bedroll, where his gear lay. Like all the men in the fort this day Mogo was a swordsman, but his father Cawdo had been handy with a hammer and he had taught Mogo a thing or two about hatchet-wielding. He had also left him his hammer. Vaylo ill-liked commandeering a man’s weapon, but in this case it was not Mogo’s primary armament. The five-foot longsword holstered at his back was the weapon Mogo Salt would draw in a melee.
“I don’t have the cradle or chains,” Mogo said handing the wedge-shaped hammer to his chief.
“Less to rattle,” Vaylo said, winking at his grandson. “I thank you, Mogo Salt, son of Cawdo. Fetch Nan. Watch my grand-children.”
Mogo bowed formally at the neck. “Chief.”
Vaylo left them, and hurried down the stairs to the stables. He’d lost Midge Pool somewhere along the way but the bitch was still at his heels.
Through a throng of men saddling horses, checking cinches, and harnessing swords, Vaylo Bludd met gazes with Cluff Drybannock. The flame blue eyes were always a shock. The intenseness of them, the fuel that burned there.
“What do we face?” Vaylo asked his fostered son as he came toward him. Drybone was wearing the red wool cloak with the owl-feather collar and the lead weights sewn in to the hem. The opal bands that bound his waist-length hair glowed like coronas around the moon. “Nine mounted. They head from the direction of the Field of Graves and Swords.”
Nine. Vaylo looked into the holes at the center of Dry’s eyes and saw his worst fears confirmed. He said, “We ride with thirty. I will not leave this fort undefended.” His name was Vaylo, not Pengo, Bludd.
“Aye.” Cluff Drybannock nodded tersely, went off to make the cull. The wolf dog trotted after him.
Vaylo saddled the black stallion. The beast was skittish and eager; it nipped his hand as he fastened the nose piece. Behind him, he was aware of men disappointed, of grumblings, and hay-kicking. A slammed door.
Do not rush to your own destruction, Vaylo wanted to tell them. If Angus Lok was right they stood at the sunset of the long night. There’d be time enough to get killed in the years of darkness to come.
“Bludd!” Vaylo hollered as he swung himself atop the horse. “We are chosen by the Stone Gods to guard their borders. Death is our companion. A life long-lived is our reward.” Raising his hammer high in the air, Vaylo led the charge from the west ward.
Hooves clattered behind him. Men shouted, “Bludd! Bludd! Bludd!” Harness leather creaked and sawed. The cold night air snapped at Vaylo’s skin, bringing hair upright and raising hard white mounds of gooseflesh. Cawdo’s hammer felt a couple of pounds too light and about half a foot too short. Its balance was off-center and the head swung like a seesaw. Vaylo wondered if it hadn’t been designed for throwing.
Gods, but it was raw. The snow underfoot crackled as if it held a charge. Pressure was dropping and the air had that loose changeable feeling that meant something was coming in. Big Borro had probably been right about snow.
Vaylo headed north into the valley, the bitch at his horse’s hoofs. The land was open here, without trees or tall shrubs to break the view. All was blue. Overhead clouds held streaks of light. Dry rode close to his back, his lean and sinewy stallion effortlessly keeping pace. He had not drawn his sword yet, though others in the line had. When Vaylo turned his neck to get a better look at his fostered son he saw someone who looked wholly Sull.
“West of the Field of Graves and Swords,” he said, seeing movements in the dark blueness that Vaylo did not.
Tightening his left rein, Vaylo made the shift in course. The snow hit as they rode out of the north wall of the valley and up to the headland. Flakes the size and shape of fish lures began to fall.
Vaylo spotted the horsemen as he topped the ride. Nine, as Dry had said. They rode horses of black oil whose bodies rippled on the edge between solid and liquid like something seen through thickly distorted glass. The men, if you could call them men, were armed with blades that killed air. Snowflakes were sucked in, and nothing came out. The men’s calls were high and terrible birdlike screeches that raked the nerves like knives. Their bodies existed on a plain where shadow could support weight. Their faces were no longer recognizable as human. Skin and features were black and sucked inward, distorted by dark hungers.
Vaylo set his hammer in motion. Drybone pulled his horse abreast of his chief’s, reached over his left shoulder and in a single breathtaking motion drew his sword. Vaylo imagined that if the horsemen were capable of fear they would have felt it then. Cluff Drybannock wielded a longsword: any enemy with sense should take flight.
The two lines met in a sickening clash. Vaylo’s stallion reared at the last moment, its eye whites huge with fear. These creatures that looked like horses smelled like empty pits filled with frozen air. It was too late to stop the momentum, and both Vaylo and the horse were propelled forward into space held by creatures of another world. The Dog Lord’s instinct as a hammerman was to use the force created, whiplash it into a blow. Cawdo’s hammer moved a fraction ahead of Vaylo himself, arcing through the swirling snow. Steel slammed into shadowflesh. There was an instant of unnatural give, where Vaylo truly realized that he fought something other than flesh-and-blood men, and then the hammerhead found purchase in the thing’s torso. A strange, wet noise sounded. The being that had once been Derek Blunt was thrown sideways in the saddle.
Vaylo’s horse screamed. He did not understand why, but yanked its head back to control it. His hammer popped as it came free of shadowflesh. The metal smoked, blackened as if it had been thrust into acid.
Cluff Drybannock’s longsword cracked like lightning into the space Vaylo had just vacated, entering what
was left of Derek Blunt’s heart. Something hissed. Vaylo felt air move on the back of his neck, sucked toward the hole. Blunt fell. His beast horse continued to charge. Its mouth was open and Vaylo saw a bit of razor spikes between its teeth. More spikes were mounted onto the breast straps and nosepiece, and the Dog Lord realized why the stallion had screamed. It had been stabbed.
Glancing down at the horse’s head he saw blood pumping from a puncture wound on its nostril. It would hurt, but it would live. Digging heels into horseflesh Vaylo drew back his hammer for another blow.
The screeches of the mounted shadows were deafening. Snow whipped in sheets into the faces of the Bluddsmen. Men screamed, charged, placed swords. Vaylo felt blood spray against his face as he fought, saw men delimbed and split open at the shoulders. Horse after horse reared. He had imagined thirty against nine to be a good number. He was wrong.
Wrong about the hammer too. For he could bash the shadow men with it but could not stop them. One fell from its horse and continued fighting afoot, its blade of voided steel mercilessly hacking horseflesh. Vaylo dropped the hammer. “Dry,” he called out to the man who had never left his side during the battle. “Fetch me that sword.”
It was a sword dropped by a young Bluddsmen who would never again use it. A good plain weapon that had not once found shadowflesh; the blade was perfectly silver.
“My lord and father,” Dry said, presenting his mighty six feet longsword to Vaylo Bludd.
“No,” Vaylo said softly. Cluff Drybannock was holding the blunt of the blade in his fist, offering the crosshilts. As a beast horse charged them, Dry thrust the sword into his father’s hand.
Vaylo took it and wrested it into jerking motion. He had forgotten all it took—the balance, the space, the wrist and arm coordination—to wield such a blade. Gamely, he drove his horse forward. Dry must be shielded while he found himself a weapon.
It was hell. The oily black forms of the horses. The screeches. The snarling of the wolf dog and the bitch as they danced around the only two people they cared about in the melee, tearing shadowflesh, launching themselves at throats, shaking their heads like the insane. Snow was everywhere, in Vaylo’s eyes, on his sword blade, jammed in the cavities between his bared teeth.
When one of the dark riders made a lunge for Drybone, Vaylo punched his sword forward and twisted it into shadowflesh. It was possibly the ugliest move ever made with a longsword, more suited to knife brawls than swordcraft, but somehow the tip entered at exactly the right angle to slide the blade into the heart.
“Chosen!” Vaylo screamed, suddenly filled with mad joy. “We are Bludd.”
Dry came to his side, now armed with a sword a foot and a half shorter than his old one, and the two men swapped glances through the chaos and the snow. Cluff Drybannock rarely smiled, and he did not smile now, but later when Vaylo recalled this moment he believed he saw something close to contentment on his fostered son’s face. This was what he wanted most in life. Not just to fight shadows, but to fight them at his father’s side.
The old soft pain sounded in Vaylo’s heart. He loved Dry so much and so completely he thought it might break. Already his decision was made.
Vaylo never knew how long the battle lasted. Time ceased to pass at normal rate, rhythms were found, a longsword mastered, men died, hearts imploded, voided steel burned sword-shapes in the ground snow. Finally there was a time when the dark riders were dead and Drybone was the only man still fighting. Chasing down the last of the beast horses, he slew it in the Field of Graves and Swords.
Vaylo dismounted. His legs were shaking like leaves. The bitch came over and pushed against him, mewling and anxious, her tail down. The wolf dog was with Dry in the field. Unclasping his sable cloak, the Dog Lord went to aid the Bluddsman who had fallen. Others helped him in this, but it fell to the Bludd chief to take those whose injuries were fatal. He kissed the men on the foreheads, brushed snow from their cheeks, named them Bluddsmen and sons. Cluff Drybannock’s sword was a blessing, its perfect sharpness. Vaylo’s eyes were dry, his chest tight.
When he was done he cleaned his sword in the snow and waited for Drybone to join him. When he drew close, Cluff Drybannock dismounted. He would never sit a horse while his chief stood. Snowflakes whirled between them. The wolf dog began to howl.
It knew.
And then Drybone knew. Nothing changed in his stance or face, but Vaylo knew his son.
“Dry,” he said. “I leave for Bludd tomorrow. Come with me.”
A moment passed where Vaylo was filled with reckless hope, and then Cluff Drybannock shook his head. “I cannot, my father. I am Bludd and I am Sull. This is where I choose to make my stand.”
The wolf dog keened in the darkness. Its sound broke Vaylo’s heart.
FORTY-FIVE
The Red Ice
It was the eye of the storm and they were heading toward it, the peace at the center of a vast and unsettled underworld of clouds. Hail blasted their faces, coming at them head-on. Wind howled, ripping off tree limbs weakened by days of frost and sending them flying through the air. They walked bent forward against the onslaught, face masks pulled up to their eyes, mitted hands snatching their cloaks taut across their bodies. If the wind got under them it could tear the cloth off their backs. The flap of Raif’s daypack made a sound like a whumpfing of a large bird taking flight.
Lightning shot though the darkness in massive gridlike forks. The entire north smelled like something just ignited. The membranes in Raif’s ears began popping as air pressure switched back and forth and thunder rumbled.
He wondered if one of the definitions of insanity could be “anyone who talks to leeches.” That was what he was doing, muttering words that were not intended for either Addie or himself. Give me another hour, another hour, another night. The leech was with him, a good strong biter on his back. A parasite feeding on his blood.
The attack by the Unmade at the stand of red pines had altered the position of the claw next to his heart. Shadow homed to shadow. Something felt different; there was the smallest possible delay in the completion of a beat of his heart. It was muscle, he knew that. He of all people knew that. And it contracted in rhythm and that rhythm had been changed.
You did not know when you died. Perhaps that was a blessing, that short but untrackable distance between life and death. If he fell dead on this hillside all oaths would be null and void. Yet he did not want to die. He did not want to leave the world where Drey Sevrance, Effie Sevrance and Ash March existed. Drey, who had taken his swearstone that morning on the greatcourt, was the center of all things. Raif could still remember his brother’s last touch on the rivershore west of Ganmiddich. We part here. For always. Take my portion of guidestone . . . I would not see you unprotected.
Raif Sevrance would not see Drey unprotected either. If he found the sword. If he lived. Any unmade man or beast he slew with it would be one less evil in the world, one less threat to his family, and his clan.
The circle of clear sky was close now. Mish’al Nij. The hillside leading toward it was steep. Long spines of red rock pushed through the ground and snow. White pines and cedars crowded the spaces in between them. The wind was bending the trees, revealing the silvery underside of their boughs. Addie had given up on a path. A ditchlike springbed cut deep into the slope was the best he could manage. The spring was dry of water, but scree and pinecones bounced downstream. When they reached the springhead—a lens of thick blue ice that was leaking rust—they were forced back into the trees.
Raif lost sight of the sky. Cedar branches swiped his cloak and face mask and all he could see were green terraces of pine. Addie had the lead and Raif followed his small and lightly stamped footprints in the frozen snow. Lightning struck. Hailstones sizzled into puffs of steam.
“I see the ridge ahead,” Addie shouted.
Raif concentrated on his feet. The sandstone was cracked and loose here and days of thaws followed by frost had left every surface slick. He wouldn’t think about the Red Ice
until he saw it with his own two eyes.
The cragsman disappeared into the green. Raif found himself remembering the night on the rimrock when the Forsworn sword had given way. Was that the moment his future had been lost, the instant the blade had bent? If the sword had stayed true would he be here today? Traggis Mole would not have been torn open by the Unmade serpent, and a new oath would not have been spoken. A dying man’s request. Behind his hareskin face mask, Raif cracked a dark smile. Request was hardly the word for it. Traggis Mole had demanded.
Swear it.
Noticing the trees had begun to clear, Raif picked up his pace. The wound he’d taken back at the camp pulled at the skin on his gut as he straightened upright. He’d been bent against the wind for so long it had begun to heal. Ahead, Raif saw Addie standing on the ridgeline. The cragsman had released his hold on his cloak and the brown wool billowed out like a boat. Five minutes earlier it would have been ripped from his throat. Yet the wind wasn’t dying; Raif could hear it below him in the trees. It was as if the storm could not reach beyond Addie Gunn. He stood on a barrier it could not pass.
The cragsman did not turn as Raif drew abreast of him. He had removed his face mask and gray stormlight lit the side of his face. His jaw was moving. He was naming the Stone Gods.
“Ganolith, Hammada, Ione, Loss, Uthred, Oban, Larannyde, Malweg, Behathmus.”
Loss.
The fourth Stone God. And the name of the sword.
Raif looked down into a valley framed by steep and wooded hills on three sides and by a dam of mist on the fourth. The mist wall spanned the space between hills to the north, a towering rampart of white and shifting haze that plumed and curled, switching between states. The mist rivers of the Want lay behind there, Raif realized. This was the border between worlds.
Raif thought of the lamb brothers, and touched the piece of stormglass tucked between the trapper skins at his chest. They had not been as far from their goal as he, and possibly they, had imagined. If he was right and the Want lay beyond that dam they could be just a short walk away on the other side.
