by J. V. Jones
“Oh, miss! You are wicked.”
Katia’s laugh was just a little too loud to be considered feminine, and Ash loved to hear it. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Katia was a full year younger than she was. Katia was so grown-up, so . . . well . . . rounded, yet whenever she laughed she became a child again.
Abruptly, the smile slid from Ash’s face. “Katia.”
“Yes, miss?”
Ash struggled to find words. “Are you still”—seeing the servant girl’s large dark eyes looking straight into hers, Ash hesitated, wishing she had never started—“friendly with Marafice Eye?”
Katia’s expression changed. “And if I am? ’Taint nothing to do with you.”
Ash took a breath, decided not to say any more, then went right ahead and spoke anyway. “He’s such a big and powerful man. Like an ox. You should be careful, that’s all.”
With a forceful shake of her head, Katia said, “What I do in my own good time is my business. Unlike some around here, I’m a full-grown woman, and those that aren’t and hain’t ever so much as kissed a man should keep their opinions to themselves.”
Blood flushed Ash’s cheeks. She didn’t speak. Stupidly, ridiculously, she felt her eyes stinging.
After a moment Katia’s expression changed right back again, and she crossed the room and put her hand on Ash’s arm. “I’m sorry, miss. Truly I am. You made me speak a stock of nonsense that I surely didn’t mean. You’ll come to your blood any day now, I’m certain of that.” She drew Ash over to the bed as she spoke. “And as soon as that happens you’ll have fine, proper dresses, a ladies’ maid to preen your hair, and suitors lining up from Hoargate to the Red Forge, all begging for the priv’lege of your hand.”
Katia placed a hand on Ash’s shoulder, gently pressing her to sit. A second hand flitted to her brow. “Why, you’re shaking, miss. And hot and cold all in one.”
“I’m fine, Katia, really. Carry on telling me what will happen when my blood comes.” Ash didn’t much care for the idea of suitors lining up from one end of the city to the other, and she knew that any ladies’ maid worth her salt would end up storming off in frustration within a week, muttering to herself about hair that refused to take a curl. Yet she liked to hear about them anyway. When Katia spoke of such things, Ash could almost believe that everything was normal and would continue to be normal, and that the strange, almost hungry look she saw in her foster father’s eyes when he studied her these past few months was nothing more than a trick of the light.
Katia reached for a brush and started working on Ash’s hair. “Well, miss, let me see. There’ll be new shoes, of course, a dozen of them: lamb’s hide for day and embroidered silk and stiff lace for night. You’ll have to have a new riding habit—trimmed with black fox, no matter what His Lordship says—and you’ll need a proper lady’s filly, not that old cob Master Haysticks lets you ride around the quad. His Lordship might even bring in some old cloistress t’elp with your manners and table ’port. Though there’s no need to teach you how to read and write, His Lordship’s done that himself . . .”
Ash nodded, enjoying the sensation of Katia’s capable hands brushing her hair and letting her mind slip away as the little maid chattered on.
Too much had changed this last year. There had been a time when her foster father was different, when he sent for her each day and spent his own time teaching her how to read and write. Any number of priests and scribes could have done the work for him, yet Penthero Iss had chosen to do it himself. And it wasn’t just because he liked to keep her away from anyone who might befriend her— though Ash had recognized that possessiveness in him early on, as time after time maidservants and fortress children whom she became close to were routinely sent away. No. Her foster father had genuinely enjoyed instructing her. Knowledge was one of his joys.
“. . . and of course there’ll be a new chamber, one with proper isinglass windows and—”
Ash blinked back, suddenly interested in what Katia was saying. “A new chamber?”
“Why, yes, miss. That much is certain as ice on the Splinter.”
“I don’t understand. Why?”
Katia put down her brush. Eyes darting in quick glances as if she suspected people could be hiding and listening, she lowered her voice and said, “Oh yes. There’s been talk of it already. Just the other day when I was . . . er . . . visiting with the Knife in the Forge, His Lordship came in and told him that he needs to be ready to move you on his say. ’Course when old Vealskin saw me he stopped dead, gave me one of his looks—you know the sort, all pale and scary like a frosted-over corpse—and sent me running out of the room without so much as a spoken word.” Katia beamed. She loved telling secrets.
Ash swallowed. She was glad she was sitting. “Move me on his say?”
Nodding, Katia crossed to the dresser and popped one of the precious rose cakes in her mouth. Chewing, she spoke. “That’s what was said. If you ask me, it’ll be to one of those fancy upper chambers in the Bight, with all the black marble and dark glass cut into the floors. Might even have a private entrance and a staircase all your own.” Katia took a second rose cake, looked at it, then set it down. “You must swear to take me with you, miss. Wherever you go. I couldn’t stand going back to the kitchens and scrubbing pots again. Couldn’t stand being made to—”
“Hush, Katia.” The servant girl’s chatter was beginning to irritate Ash.
Katia’s mouth closed with a squeak. Skirts whipping air, she moved around the chamber and began checking shutters, stirring the brazier and making preparations for the night.
Ash barely noticed. A move away from the Cask? It was unthinkable. This chamber had been her home for as long as she could remember. Of all the four towers in Mask Fortress, the Cask was the only one she knew. She had broken her arm here, climbing the outer battlements when she was six; when she was eight she had been confined to her room for two months because of blood fever, and her foster father had visited her every day, bringing iced honey and yellow pears; and when she was eleven her caged bird had grown sick in this very chamber and had started pulling out its own flight feathers and chewing on its claws, and to please her Iss had performed a little ceremony by the door before sending it to Caydis for a mercy killing. All her life was here. All of it.
Distressed, Ash drew her feet off the floor and hugged her knees to her chest. No one had mentioned a move to her. Nothing had been planned; no workmen or carpenters called. Surely someone should have told her something? She rubbed her bare shins. The sheets beneath her feet were damp with sweat. Icy.
No. Ash shook her head. She wouldn’t think about the dream. It was nothing. Nothing.
Katia popped the remaining two rose cakes into her amber pouch. “Will you be wanting anything else, miss, ’fore I go?”
“No.” Something about the sight of Katia walking toward the door made Ash change her mind. “I mean yes. One more thing.”
“What?” Katia’s full lips were made more so by an exaggerated pout.
“I know you’re going to see my foster father now—” Seeing Katia ready to protest, Ash held out her hand. “No, don’t deny it. I don’t blame you. It’s what you have to do to keep out of the kitchen. I’d do the same if I were you.” Katia remained sullen, yet Ash carried on. “I don’t mind you telling him that I don’t feel well and don’t look well, and even that the bed is messed. But please don’t tell him that I know he’s planning to move me. Please.”
Katia looked at her mistress. Ash knew that the servant girl was envious of her and coveted all the clothes and pretty things in her chamber like silver brushes and tortoiseshell combs. Yet she also knew that Katia could be kind when it suited her. She had once walked all the way to Almsgate and back to purchase a bolt and plate for the door.
Sighing with exaggerated force, Katia sent her curls dancing. “All right. I’ll do my best—but only for my own sake, mind. If old Vealskin finds I’ve been blabbing about things I overheard and wasn’t supposed to, he
’ll have me downstairs in no time. And it won’t be in the kitchens scrubbing pots.”
“Thank you, Katia.”
Katia harrumphed as she stepped toward the door. “I still have to tell him how you are, though. There’s no getting round that. You know how he is.”
Ash nodded as she snuffed out the lamp. She knew exactly how Iss was.
The caul flies hummed within their netting, black translucent wings beating faster than the eye could see. Four winged, lean bodied, and with the long, double-jointed legs of flesh settlers, the creatures flew slowly despite their efforts, swinging clumsily from side to side. These were females, of course. The shiny green black sacs around their abdomens were bloated with hundreds of eggs. Penthero Iss, Surlord of Spire Vanis, Lord Commander of the Rive Watch, Keeper of Mask Fortress, and Master of the Four Gates, preferred not to hold the netting too close. The caul flies were past due and were desperate to lay, and their serrated chitinous mouthparts were quite capable of breaking through gauze. Especially if the females smelled blood.
Iss watched with fascination as one female flew to where his pale hand gripped the netting. The skin was clean and unbroken, not what the creature wanted at all, but Iss had seen some caul flies capable of causing the wounds they needed. This one, however, would not get that chance. With his free hand, Iss pulled a cloth of blue felt from around his waist and laid it over the top portion of the netting. He would arrive at his destination within the quarter, and a short period of darkness would not make the females drowsy. Iss had made a study of their weaknesses. It was the cold, not the dark, that slowed them.
As he walked through the deserted east gallery toward the Splinter, Iss counted days. Six. He kept records, of course, but he trusted the thoroughness of his own mind more than any scribbles on a page. He didn’t want to risk weakening the Bound One too soon after the previous drawing. Thoroughness in all things, most especially the use of power.
Six was enough, though. Six was well and good.
Winter came early to the mountains and the city of Spire Vanis, and the temperature in the east gallery was currently just below freezing. Iss fought the desire to shiver. He had grown up hating the cold. Cold meant too little wood on the fire and not enough blankets for the bed, and Iss knew all about that. As a child he had dreamed of glowing hearths and crackling flames and layer upon layer of goosedown piled high upon his chest. Forty years later he had all that, yet he could not say it was enough.
He was surlord, not king, and although he might rule for twenty years or more, a violent death would be his in the end. It was the way of things in Spire Vanis. Historians might speak the names of Uron the Pure and Rhees Gryphon and a handful of other men who had ruled the city and died in their sleep. Yet Iss had stood in the shadows and watched as five sworn brothers cut Borhis Horgo to strips. Old he was, dry and shriveled; Iss could hardly believe how much he bled. Sometimes he saw the blood in his dreams. Sometimes the blood was his.
So many surlords. Borhis Horgo, Rannock Hews, Theric Hews, Connad Hews, Lewick Crieff, who was called the Halfking, Garath Lors, Stornoway the Bold . . . and so the list went on, back and back, to Theron Pengaron, who was slain by his nephew’s hideclads on ground where the Splinter lay today. All had died a surlord’s death: knifed in the back, shot at distance, poisoned, bludgeoned, betrayed. The only law of succession in Spire Vanis was the law of superior might. Once a rival smelled weakness, he drew his conspirators about him and plotted his surlord’s death. Iss knew his likely fate. He knew and refused to accept it.
It wasn’t enough to be surlord. He must make himself something else.
Cold air settled in Iss’ lungs as he neared the Splinter. Limestone as pale and smooth as lake ice stole the warmth from the soles of his feet. Heavy things swung from his belt, nestling against the double-woven silk of his robes. The little stone lamp so ingeniously crafted by the barbarians who lived in the north along the coast, with its baleen guards and shaved horn covering, gave off heat and light more safely than any other lamp. It could be knocked over, and still the flame would stay inside the central chamber. Even now, bumping lightly against his thigh, it was a benign and pleasing warmth to enjoy. As for the other two packages that hung from the belt, Mistress Wence had better hope she’d wrapped them securely. Pan-heated honey and mashed then strained yellowbeans could both leak juices that a man wearing silk had no use for.
Iss had found the caul flies liked to feed after they had laid their eggs. It was a common misconception that mature females fed off blood. Iss had observed them and knew they did not. Honey was what they liked best, preferably warm. The flies had been fortress bred in the cold climes of the Northern Territories, yet they still retained memories of the Far South where they belonged.
As for the yellowbeans, they were to feed the Bound One. Iss had asked Mistress Wence to enrich them with butter and egg yolks and salt them as mildly as she would food for a child.
Holding the partially covered netting out before him, Iss approached the Splinter. As always, the temperature dropped the nearer one drew to the door. In just the past few days water weeping from the stonework had quickened to form a skin of blue ice above the arch. Iss took out the key. Impaled beasts with many heads and the thick muscular tails of serpents watched the lock turn from their position at the spire’s base. The oil lamp flickered, making the relief carvings dance upon their poles. Iss adjusted the lamp, the light dimmed, and the creatures stilled to stone.
The door opened with a small hiss. Frost smoke writhed through the opening, like the tissue of a newly risen ghost. Within the netting, the caul flies drew in their wings and dropped to the bottom of the makeshift bag.
First frost was always the worst in the Splinter. The outer stonework ran with moisture year-round, and every arch, ledge, and cornerstone let in rain. The interior walls bled. Rivulets ran in thin lines, following the curves of bias-cut stone and the edges of steps. Drips gained mass on overhangs, pools collected in ruts and trenches, and entire walls glistened with damp. First frost turned it all to freezing mist. As the weeks passed and the days shortened and rime ice formed on the exterior walls, the water would cool, then freeze. Expanding as it quickened, the ice split rock as surely as a mason with a mallet. Each mild spell and subsequent thawing pushed the Splinter one step closer to collapse. The entire structure was flawed, crumbling, broken. The only thing that kept it standing was the precision cut and placement of each stone.
And the foundations, of course, Iss thought with a quick humor-less smile. No building in the Northern Territories had foundations to compare with the Splinter.
The light from the stone lamp did little but reflect back in Iss’ face as he stepped through the smoke into the tower’s lower rotunda. Cracked tiles rocked beneath his feet as he moved. Whole sections of the original flooring were missing, either torn up by greedy workmen or destroyed by frosts and falling stones. Iss didn’t care. The Splinter’s staircase spiraled through the tower’s heart, stopping off at thirty-nine successive stories before reaching its apex in the spire that pierced storms, yet Iss had little but a passing interest in any of it. Aboveground the Splinter’s stone was as dead and worthless as a foot black with frostbite. It was belowground, in the Inverted Spire, that the stone became a vital, living thing.
Iss crossed to the base of the spiral stair, to the dark shadows and awkwardly shaped space that lay beneath the first flight of steps. Bending his back as needed, he followed the crook of the stairs until his body was tucked against the endwall.
Tensing his jaw and his fists, he spoke a word. It weakened him more severely than he anticipated, and drops of urine splashed against his thigh. The pain was sharp but fleeting, and a powerful contraction of his stomach wall flooded his mouth with the taste of salt.
Even before he could spit it away, the stairwell rumbled and began to swing inward like a gate. The grinding of iron wheels and chains was muffled by walls three feet thick. Above Iss’ head, the great stone staircase shuddered, i
ts blocks shifting minutely in their beds of rotten mortar. Limestone dust sifted onto his shoulders as the wall completed its movement, revealing a cavity not much larger than the size of a crouching man.
This was the part Iss hated. Still shaken from the drawing, his knee joints as weak as green timber, and urine still wet upon his thigh, he forced himself through the breach. No frost smoke rose from the void to greet him. The coldness here had a different, more permanent quality, and all mist had long since settled and froze. Deep down at the apex of the Inverted Spire the air was different, warmer, but ice seams remained year-round at the rim.
Like the cold, the darkness was also more concentrated, and Iss was forced to unhook the stone lamp from his belt and adjust the baleen fibers to let in greater amounts of air. He didn’t care much for darkness, though he was willing to allow it had its uses. Things kept within it usually broke down given time.
Spitting to clean the last traces of metal from his mouth, he edged forward in small, toe-size movements until his feet found the lip of the first stair. Unlike the tower above, the Inverted Spire did not boast a central staircase; rather the steps ran along the outer wall, gradually spiraling downward in a great winding arc. A gaping many-storied trough lay in its center. Black as night, colder than pack ice, fed by self-generating winds, and subject to each shift and roll of the mountain it bored down through, the Inverted Spire was a force unto itself. As deep as the Splinter was tall, narrowing to a nail-hard point, it pierced the bedrock of Mount Slain like a stake in its heart.
Its frost-riven walls glittered in the light of Iss’ lamp. The farther the Surlord descended, the clearer and harder the ice became. Ground to lenses by the weight and compression of Mount Slain, the ice found colors in the lamplight that no eye could see. Not for the first time, Iss resisted the urge to reach out and touch it. Once, nearly eight years ago now, he had lost the skin on his middle finger that way.
