by J. V. Jones
But Dagro Blackhail, chief of Clan Blackhail, would never return home.
Drey knelt over his partially frozen corpse. Dagro had taken a massive broadsword stroke from behind. His hands were speckled with blood, and the thick-bladed cleaver he still held in his grip was similarly marked. The blood was neither his nor his attackers’. It came from the skinned and eviscerated bear carcass lying at his feet; Dagro must have been finishing the butchering when he was jumped from behind.
Raif took a quick unsteady breath and sank down by his brother’s side. Something was blocking his throat. Dagro Blackhail’s great bear of a face looked up at him. The clan chief did not look at peace. Fury was frozen in his eyes. Glaciated ice in his beard and mustache framed a mouth pressed hard in anger. Raif thanked the Stone Gods that his brother wasn’t the kind of man to speak needlessly, and the two sat in silence, shoulders touching, as they paid due respect to the man who had led Clan Blackhail for twenty-nine years and was loved and honored by all in the clan.
“He’s a fair man,” Tem had said once about the clan chief in a rare moment when he was inclined to speak about matters other than hunting and dogs. “It may seem like small purchase, and you’ll find others in the clan willing to heap all manner of praise upon Dagro Blackhail’s head, but fairness is the hardest thing for a man to practice day to day. A chief can find himself having to speak up against his sworn brothers and his kin. And that’s not easy for anyone to do.”
It was, Raif thought, one of the longest speeches he’d ever heard his father make.
“It’s not right, Raif.” Drey said only that as he raised himself clear of Dagro Blackhail’s body, but Raif knew what he meant. It wasn’t right.
Mounted men had been here; broadswords and greatswords had been used; clan horses were gone, stolen. Dogs were slaughtered. The camp lay in open ground, Mace Blackhail was standing dogwatch: a raiding party should not have been able to approach unheeded. Mounted men made noise, especially here in the badlands, where the bone-hard tundra dealt harshly with anything traveling upon it. And then there was the lack of blood . . .
Raif pushed back his hood and ran a gloved hand through the tangle of his dark hair. Drey was making his way toward Tem’s tent. Raif wanted to call him back, to tell him that they should check the other tents first, the rendering pits, the stream bank, the far perimeter, anywhere except that tent. Drey, as if sensing some small portion of his younger brother’s thoughts, turned. He made a small beckoning gesture with his hand and then waited. Two bright points of pain prickled directly behind Raif’s eyes. Drey always waited.
Together the sons of Tem Sevrance entered their father’s tent. The body was just a few paces short of the entrance. Tem looked as if he had been on his way out when the broadsword cracked his sternum and clavicle, sending splinters of bone into his windpipe, lungs, and heart. He had fallen with his halfsword in his hand, but as with Jorry Shank, the weapon was unbloodied.
“Broadsword again,” Drey said, his voice high and then rough as he sought to control it. “Bludd favors them.”
Raif didn’t acknowledge the words. It took all he had just to stand and look upon his father’s body. Suddenly there was too much hollow space in his chest. Tem didn’t seem as stiff as the others, and Raif stripped off his right glove and bent to touch what was visible of his father’s cheek. Cold, dead flesh. Not frozen, but utterly cold, absent.
Pulling back as if he had touched something scorching hot rather than just plain cold, Raif rubbed his hand on his buckskins, wiping off whatever he imagined to be upon it.
Tem was gone.
Gone.
Without waiting for Drey, Raif pushed aside the tent flap and struck out into the rapidly darkening camp. His heart was beating in wild, irregular beats, and taking action seemed the only way to stop it.
When Drey found him a quarter later, Raif’s right arm was stripped to the shoulder and blood from three separate cuts was pouring along his forearm and down to his wrist. Drey understood immediately. Tearing at his own sleeve, he joined his brother as he went among the slain men. All had died without blood on their weapons. To a clansman there was no honor in dying with a clean blade, so Raif was taking up their weapons one by one, drawing their blades across his skin, and spilling his own blood as a substitute. It was the one thing the two brothers could give to their clan. When they returned home to the roundhouse and someone asked, as someone always did, if the men had died fighting, Raif and Drey could now reply, “Their weapons ran with blood.”
To a clansman those words mattered dear.
So the two brothers moved around the camp, discovering bodies in and out of tents, some with pale icicles of urine frozen to their legs, others with hair set in spiky mats where they had been caught bathing, a few with frozen wads of black curds still in their mouths, and one man—Meth Ganlow—with his beefy arms fixed around his favorite dog, protecting the wolfling even in death. A single swordstroke had killed both man and beast.
It was only later, when moonlight formed silver pools in the hard earth, and Tem’s body was lying beside the firepit, close to the others but set apart, that Raif suddenly stopped in his tracks. “We never found Mace Blackhail,” he said.
TWO
Days Darker Than Night
Ash March shot awake. Sitting up in bed, she dragged the heavy silk sheets up over her arms and shoulders and clutched them tight. She had been dreaming of ice again.
Taking deep breaths to calm herself, she looked around her chamber, checking. Of the two amber lamps on the mantel, only one was still burning. Good. That meant Katia had not been in to refuel it. The small ball of Ash’s silver blond hair that she had pulled from her hairbrush before she slept still lay fast against the door. So no one else had entered her chamber, either.
Ash relaxed just a little. Her toes formed two knobby lumps beneath the covers, and as they looked a ridiculously long distance from her body, she wiggled them just to check that they were hers. She smiled when they wiggled right back at her. Toes were funny things.
The smile didn’t quite take. As soon as Ash’s face muscles relaxed, the fact of her dream came back to her. The sheets were twisted around her waist and they were sticky with sweat, and the yeasty smell of fear was upon them. She’d had another bad dream and another bad night, and it was the second in less than a week.
Without thinking Ash brought her hand to her mouth, almost as if she were trying to hold something in. Despite the warmth of the chamber—the charcoal smoking in the brazier beneath a layer of oil-soaked felt, and the hot water pipes so diligently tended by a furnaceman and his team working three stories below—her fingers felt icy cold. Against her will and her very best efforts, images from the dream came back to her. She saw a cavern with walls of black ice. A burned hand reaching toward her, cracks between its fingers oozing blood. Dark eyes watching, waiting . . .
Ash shivered. Swinging her hand down onto the bed, she beat the images back by pummeling the mattress as hard as she could. She wouldn’t think about the dream. Didn’t want to know what those cold eyes wanted.
Thht. Thht. Thht. Three knocks rang lightly against the fossilwood door.
Something deep inside Ash’s chest, a band of muscle connecting her lungs to her heart, stiffened. Although breathless from beating the pillow, she didn’t take a breath or even blink. Silent as settling dust, she told herself as her eyes focused on the door.
Finely grained and hard as nails, the door’s perfect gray surface was marred by three black thumb-size pits: bolt holes. Six months earlier Ash had paid her maidservant, Katia, four halfsilvers to go down to the metalworkers’ market near Almsgate and purchase a bolt and socket for the chamber door. Katia had done her bidding, returning with an iron bar big enough to secure a fort. Ash had fixed the metal plate and socket in place herself. She had blackened a fingernail in the process and broken the backs of two silver brushes, but the bolt pins had gone in and the fastening mechanism had worked smoothly, and for a week Ash had sl
ept more soundly than she could ever remember sleeping.
Until . . .
Thht. Thht. Thht.
Ash stared at the empty bolt holes. She made no motion to answer the second round of knocking.
“Asarhia.” A pause. “Almost-daughter, I will have no games played with me.”
Tilting her body minutely, Ash slid down amid the covers. One hand stole beneath her head to turn the sweat-stained pillow facedown upon mattress, while her other hand smoothed her hair. Just as she closed her eyes, the door creaked open.
Penthero Iss had brought his own lamp, and the fierce blue glow of burning kerosene put Ash’s own resin lamp in the shade. Iss stood in the doorway and looked at Ash. Even with her eyes closed she knew what he was about.
He made her wait before he spoke. “Almost-daughter, don’t you think I know when I’m being deceived?”
Ash kept her eyelids closed, but not tightly—he had caught her on that in the past. In no way did she respond to his words, simply concentrated on keeping her breathing low and metered.
“Asarhia!”
It was hard not to flinch. Mimicking a kind of dazed surprise, she opened her eyes and rubbed them vigorously. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”
Ignoring her show of bafflement, Penthero Iss walked into the room proper, set his lamp on the rootwood prayer ledge next to the offering bowls of dried fruits and pieces of myrrh, brought his long-fingered hands together, and shook his head. “The cushions, almost-daughter.” The index finger on his left hand circled, indicating the foot of the bed. “A sound night’s sleep seldom includes kicking cushions so hard that the impression of one’s foot stays upon them till dawn.”
Ash cursed all the cushions in Mask Fortress. She cursed Katia for piling the silly, fluffy, useless bags of goosedown high on her bed each night.
Penthero Iss crossed over to Ash’s bed. Fine gold chains woven into the fabric of his heavy silk coat chinked softly as he moved. Although not muscular, he carried something hard within him, as if his skeleton were made out of stone. His face had the shape and smoothness of a skinned hare. Holding out a long, carefully manicured, completely hairless hand, he asked, “How much do I love you, almost-daughter?” Untaken, the hand moved away to carve a circle in the air. “Look at all I give you: dresses, silver brushes, perfumed oils—”
“You are my father who loves me more than any real father ever could.” Ash spoke Iss’ own words back to him. She had lost count of how many times he had said them to her over the past sixteen years.
Penthero Iss, Surlord of Spire Vanis, Lord Commander of the Rive Watch, Keeper of Mask Fortress, and Master of the Four Gates, shook his head with disappointment. “You would mock me, almost-daughter?”
Feeling a bite of guilt, Ash slid her hand over his. She owed love and respect to the man who was her foster father and surlord.
Sixteen years ago, before he took the title of surlord for his own, Penthero Iss had found her outside Vaingate. She was a newborn, a foundling abandoned within ten paces of the city gate. All such foundlings were considered Protector’s Trove. Iss had been Protector General at the time, in charge of city security and defenses. He had patrolled the Four Gates, led his red-bladed brothers-in-the-watch, and commanded the forces that manned the walls.
Ever since Thomas Mar had forged the first Rive Sword with the steel and rendered blood of the men who had betrayed him at Hove Hill, no protector general had ever been paid for his work. For centuries protector generals lived off income from their grangeholds, inheritances, and land grants. Today there was no land left to grant, and more and more baseborn men were joining the Watch, and protector generals now gained income by other, less noble means. Contraband goods; swords of illegal length or blade curvature, arrows with barbed tips; prohibited substances such as sulfur, resins, and saltpeter that could be used in making siege powders; unlawfully produced liquor, poisons, sleeping drafts and pain dullers; ill-gotten gains; anything found in the possession of known criminals; and all goods abandoned within the city—whether they be crates of rotting cabbages, fat pigs broken loose from their tethers, or newborns left to die in the snow—were the protector general’s to do with as he saw fit.
Protector’s Trove had made Penthero Iss a rich man.
As if guessing her thoughts, Iss brought his lips close to Ash’s ear. “Never forget, almost-daughter, that during my commission I came upon dozens of foundling babies, yet you were the only one I chose to raise as my own.”
Ash tried, but she couldn’t quite stifle the shiver that worked its way down her spine. He had sold the other babies to the dark-skinned priests in the Bone Temple.
“You are cold, almost-daughter.” Penthero Iss’ hand, with its hairless knuckles that never cracked, glided up Ash’s arm and along her shoulder. His fingers prodded the flesh of Ash’s neck, testing for warmth, blood pulse, and swollen glands.
The urge to shrink away from his touch was overwhelming, but Ash fought it. She didn’t want to provoke Iss in any way. If she needed any proof of that, all she had to do was look at the three blind bolt holes in the fossilwood door.
“Your blood is racing, Asarhia.” Iss’ hand moved lower. “And your heart . . .”
Unable to stand it any longer, Ash jerked back. Iss grabbed hold of her nightgown and twisted the fabric in his fist. “You’ve been having the dream again, haven’t you?” She didn’t answer. Threads of muslin in her nightgown were laddering under the pressure of his grip. “I said haven’t you?”
Still Ash made no reply, but she knew, she just knew, that her face gave her away. Her skin flushed with every lie.
“What did you see? Was it the gray land? The cavern? Where were you? Think. Think.”
Shaking her head, Ash cried, “I don’t know. I don’t know. There was a cavern lined with ice . . . it could be anywhere.”
“Did you see what lay beyond?” The words left Iss’ mouth like frost smoke, sparkling blue and utterly cold. They hung in the air, cooling the space between Ash and her foster father, making it difficult for Ash to breathe. Ash saw Iss’ lower jaw come to rest. She heard saliva smack inside his mouth.
“Father, I don’t understand what you mean. The dream was over so quickly; I hardly remember what I saw.”
Penthero Iss blinked at Ash’s use of the word Father. Sadness flitted across his face so quickly, she doubted she’d seen it at all. Slowly, intentionally, he showed his gray-cast teeth. “So it has come to this? Lies from the foundling I raised as my own.”
Rare were the times when Iss show his teeth. They were small and positioned well above his lip line. Rumor had it that a sorcerous healing practiced upon him when he was just a boy had burned the enamel from them. Whatever the cause, Iss made it his habit to speak, smile, eat, and drink without ever drawing back his lips.
With one quick movement Iss found and pressed the curve of Ash’s left breast. He weighed the small globe of flesh and then pinched it. “You can’t stay a child forever, Asarhia. The old blood will show soon enough.”
Ash felt her cheeks burn. She didn’t understand what he meant.
Iss regarded Ash for a long moment, his green silk robe switching colors in the fierce light of burning kerosene, before releasing his hold on her nightgown and standing. “Tidy yourself up, child. Do not force me to lay hands on you again.”
Ash kept her breath steady and tried not to let her fear show. Questions piled on her tongue, but she knew better than to ask them. Iss had a way with answers. He gave them, they sounded perfectly logical, but then later when you were alone and had time to think, you realized he had told you nothing at all.
As Iss moved away, Ash got a whiff of the smell that sometimes clung to her foster father. The smell of old, old things locked away so tightly that they dried to brittle husks. Something shifted at the edge of Ash’s vision. All the hairs on her body bristled, and against her will she was drawn back to her dream . . .
Reaching, she was reaching in the darkness.
“Asarhia?”
Ash snapped back. Penthero Iss was looking at her, his long, skinned-man’s face showing the faintest sheen of excitement. Light from his lamp sent his shadow flickering across the watered-silk panels on the walls. Ash could still remember the soft marten and sable furs that had once hung in their stead. Iss had sent a brother-in-the-watch to tear them down and replace them with smooth, bloodless silk. Furs and animal hides were distasteful to him; he called them barbaric and would have none hung in any chamber he might chance to enter in the massive, sprawling, four-towered fortress that formed the heart of Spire Vanis.
Ash missed the furs. Her chamber seemed cold and bare without them.
“You are not well, almost-daughter.” As Iss spoke, his hands came together in a smooth knot of knuckle and flesh that was peculiar to him alone. “I will sit with you through the last hour of night.”
“Please. I need to rest.” Ash rubbed her forehead, struggling to keep her mind in the now. What was wrong with her? Raising her voice, she said, “Go. Just go. I have to use the chamber pot. I drank too much wine at dinner.”
Iss remained calm. “Yes, wine . . . and to think Katia informed me that you refused both the pewter containing the red and the silver she brought later with the white.” A dull metal tap sounded: Iss kicking the empty chamber pot that lay at the foot of Ash’s bed in the center of a hill of cushions. “And somehow you managed to wait until now to relieve yourself.”
Katia. Always Katia. Ash scowled. Her head ached, and her body felt as tired and shaky as if she’d spent the night running uphill rather than sleeping in her bed. She desperately wanted to be alone.
Surprisingly, Iss crossed over to the door. Fingers slipping into the vacant bolt holes, he turned to face Ash and said, “I will have my Knife stay outside your door tonight. You are not well, almost-daughter. I worry.”
