“I could’ve sworn he was on our side.”
“I had my doubts,” said Stour, curling his lip at the cage. “When I raised his taxes, he didn’t want to pay. Felt quite angry about it. Made other folk angry.”
“How’s he feeling now, d’you reckon?” asked Greenway.
Clover scratched gently at his scar. “Bit sore, by the look o’ things.”
“My father was always for buying him off,” said Stour. “Him and men like him.”
“Black Calder’s a great one for compromise.”
“I’m not.”
“No,” said Clover. “I see that.”
“Men are greedy, aren’t they? No gratitude. They don’t think about what they’ve already got from you, only about what they can get next.”
“There’s a lot of arseholes about, all right,” said Clover, letting his eyes sweep across Stour’s closest.
“And Hollowhead and his sons and all those shits from the West Valleys, they’re closer to Uffrith than Carleon. Don’t trust ’em.”
“Do you trust ’em more now?”
“At least we all know where we stand.”
“The Nail’s one of his sons, no? Dangerous man, that.”
The warriors ranged about the walls competed to look more dangerous themselves. “You scared?” asked Greenway.
“Constantly,” said Clover, “but that’s probably just my age. What you going to do with Hollowhead?”
Stour glowered at the cage and gave a great sniff. “Still thinking. Let him go so he can pay the taxes or cut the bloody cross in him as an example.”
“He’ll have taught folk a good lesson whichever you choose,” said Greenway.
Clover had his doubts as he watched that cage gently turn. Hollowhead was a popular man. Lot of friends and family all over those valleys on the border with Uffrith. Lot of hard fighters who’d be less than happy about that man being in a cage. Black Calder had spent years stitching the ripped-up North together with threats and whispers and debts and favours. Can’t do it just with fear alone. But it was hardly Clover’s job to say so.
He looked away from Hollowhead and smiled. “Well, I wish you joy of the outcome, whatever you decide.”
“Huh.” Stour’s wet, sly eyes slid back to Clover. “And how about you? Get some joy out o’ the Shanka?”
“Joy is not the word I’d pick, my king, but when your chief gives you a task, as old Threetrees used to say, you get on with it, so we bowed to the inevitable. You know me, I don’t mind bowing. Specially not to the inevitable.”
“Got no pride, eh, Clover?”
“Used to have, my king. Used to have a fucking surfeit. Like a field in spring can draw too many bees. But I found when you’re struggling, there’s not a lot you can buy with the stuff. Pride, that is, not bees. So I shed mine. Don’t miss it in the least.”
Stour narrowed his eyes at Flick. “Who’s this?”
“This is Flick.” And Clover clapped a hand down on the lad’s scrawny shoulder. “He’s my best man.”
“He looks a good one,” said Stour, and his arseholes laughed. More arseholes than there used to be. The North had an infinite supply.
“Man should have friends, I reckon,” said Clover.
“Definitely. Need someone to stab, don’t you?”
More laughter. Took an effort for Clover to smile, but he managed it. He jerked his head sideways at Flick. “Need me to stab him, my king?”
“Nah. Y’already proved what you are, Clover. I’d hate to take your best man away. What’s he got there?”
“Little present for you.” Clover took the bag from Flick and upended it, and the Shanka heads bounced and rolled out across the floor. He wished those had been the first scattered across Skarling’s Hall, but he’d a sorry sense severed heads had been quite a frequent decoration down the years.
Greenway took a step back with his arm across his face. “They fucking stink!”
“Don’t be a cunt, Greenway.” Stour sprang eagerly from his chair and trotted over to look down at ’em, still a trace of a limp when he moved from the Young Lion’s sword-cut. “So you taught the Shanka a lesson, eh?”
“Not sure flatheads really learn lessons,” said Clover.
“Not these ones, anyway.” Stour nudged the half-rotten heads around with one bare foot so he could see their leering faces. “Ugly bastards, eh?”
“I find myself on shaky ground when it comes to criticising others’ looks,” said Clover.
“And we none of us look our best dead,” added Flick, then cleared his throat and looked down at the ground. “My king.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stour, giving him that wet-eyed stare. “I can think of quite a few folk I’d prefer as corpses. I’m heading down to Uffrith, Clover. Like you to come along.”
“To fight?”
“No, no, no.” Which was something of a relief, as Clover couldn’t say he’d much enjoyed their last war with the Union. “Gave my word in the Circle, didn’t I? Swore a solemn oath to the Young Lion! Think I’d break my word?”
“Honestly, my king, I haven’t a fucking clue what you’ll do one moment to the next.”
Stour grinned. “Well, wouldn’t life be dull if you could see everything coming? You know a fellow called Oxel?”
“One o’ the Dogman’s War Chiefs. Wouldn’t trust him to hold the bucket while I pissed.”
“Sometimes a shifty bastard’s what you need, though, eh? Dogman’s on the way out. Old. And sick, I hear. When he’s gone, Uffrith needs to go to someone. Oxel wants it to be me.”
“And what about that solemn oath in the Circle?”
Stour shrugged. “Swore not to take it. Didn’t say a thing about it dropping in my lap. Uffrith wants to be part o’ the North, who am I to argue?”
“And if there’s some don’t want to join?” asked Clover.
Stour nodded towards the cage. “I can get more o’ those. Off you go, now.”
“And take your stinking heads with you,” hissed Greenway.
“Don’t be a cunt!” roared Stour, spraying spit, and all around the hall men jerked up, stepped forward, put hands to their weapons, like dogs might bare teeth at their master’s anger. Greenway backed off, white and trembling, no doubt thinking the Great Leveller had a hand on his shoulder.
Then Stour grinned bigger’n ever. And he squatted down on his haunches, that beautiful wolfskin cloak dragging in the mess the heads had left. He took the biggest one in his hands and set it right-side up, its great spiked helmet still on and its great long bloated tongue hanging from its oversized jaws.
“I want to look at ’em.”
The Demon That Breaks All Chains
“By all the dead,” croaked Rikke as she lifted her head. Her mouth tasted like graves, her empty stomach squelched and bubbled. Felt like there was a mace hanging behind her eyes, bashing painfully against the inside of her skull with every movement. But at least time was going all one way.
She’d been sleeping in a nest of furs but with hard rock underneath, and she dragged a dusty old deerskin around her shoulders, stumbling from the darkness, eyes almost closed against the stabbing light.
It wasn’t raining but there was a chilly damp in the air that turned everything dark. No wind. No sound. Everything still as the land of the dead. Tall trees, black wood and black needles. Jumbles of black rock jutting on the slopes. Tall black mountains in the far-off distance, white-bearded and white-capped like grumpy old warriors. Dark shingle sloped down from the cave-mouth to the dark water, and in its mirror the trees and the rocks and the mountains all reflected, still and perfect and darker than ever. A woman stood there, tattered skirts tucked into her belt, up to her thin, pale, veiny calves in the lake. Stood so still she didn’t make a ripple.
Rikke puffed out her cheeks. When she bent to roll up her trouser legs, her head throbbed so hard she nearly fell. She hitched the bald hide up around her shoulders then tottered towards the water, crunching shingle sharp betw
een her bare toes. It was that cold it surely should’ve frozen. But it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it, as her father occasionally told her, so she sloshed out, wincing and shivering, ripples catching the peaceful trees, and the still mountains, and shattering them into dancing fragments.
“Chilly as winter’s arse,” she gasped as she wobbled up next to the woman. From the side she looked about normal. Old and deep-lined, cool blue eyes fixed on the horizon.
“The cold has a wonderful way of clearing the mind.” Not the witchy croak Rikke had expected. A young voice, smooth and full of music. “It fixes you on what counts. Draws your attention inwards.”
“So… you do it to gather your magic… or something?”
“I do it because fools rarely follow a woman into cold water with their problems.” She turned, and Rikke could only stare, because her face was just the way she’d seen it in her vision.
A great pink-grey scar ran down the centre of her buckled forehead, from hairline to mouth, one eye and one brow higher than the other, as though her skull had been entirely split and set back together by a drunken surgeon. There was a crazy zigzag of stitches through the puckered skin. Stitches of golden wire that gleamed in the morning sun.
“I am Caurib,” she said, in that soft, soft voice. “Or I was. A sorceress, from the utmost North. Or I was. Now I am the witch of the forbidden lake.” She turned back to the horizon. “I find that suits me better.”
Rikke had grown up in the North where a man with no scars was no man at all, but she never before saw a scar the like of this. She looked down at the water, already settling around her own sharp shin bones and holding a dark reflection of herself. “What happened to you?”
“An axe happened, as axes do.”
“Didn’t see it coming, then?”
Caurib slowly raised one brow. Looked like it took some effort, skin stretching around the stitches. “I do not need to tell you that the Long Eye comes when it comes. If you are hoping it will keep you safe from all life’s axes, you will be disappointed. But then it is the fate of hope to end in disappointment, as it is the fate of light to end in darkness and life in death. They are still worth something while they last.”
Rikke wiggled her numb toes and watched the ripples spread. “Bit of a bleak message.”
“If you sought optimism from a hermit whose head is stitched together with golden wire then you are a bigger fool even than you look. Which would be quite an achievement.”
Rikke stole a glance sideways, but Caurib was looking ahead again. “I thought what I saw in the visions, the golden wire, might be, you know…”
“I do not know. Try saying the words.”
“A metaphor?”
“For what?”
“I just see the visions, I don’t understand them.”
The witch gave a hiss of disgust. “It is not the seer’s task to understand her visions, girl, any more than it is the potter’s task to understand her clay.”
“I’m guessing…” Rikke winced as she tried to shift her foot on the slippery lake bed and caught her toe on a pointed rock. “We’re not actually talking about pots now? Or are we talking about pots now?”
The witch gave a hiss of disappointment. “It is the potter’s task to impose her will upon the clay. To shape the clay into something useful. Or something beautiful.”
“So… I have to impose my will upon my visions? Shape them into something beautiful?”
“Ah! A ray of sunshine penetrates the long night of your ignorance.” The witch gave a hiss of scorn. She could do a lot with a hiss. “And I only had to waste half my morning explaining it to you.”
“But—”
“I am not your mentor, girl, nor your teacher, nor your wise grandmother. You want me to give you the rules, but there are no rules. You are like those old fools the magi, who want to chain the world with laws. You are like those old fools the Eaters, who want to cage the world with prayers. You are like these new fools who want to bind the world with iron and make it obey. The Long Eye is magic, girl!” She raised her withered arms, screaming it towards the mountains. “It is the devil that cannot be caged! It is the demon that breaks all chains!” She let her arms drop. “If there were rules it would not be magic.”
“Guess I’ll have to find my own answers, then,” said Rikke, mournfully.
Caurib looked down at her feet, hidden in the lake. “Fear is like cold water. A little is a fine thing, it fixes you on what counts. But too much will freeze you. You must make a box inside your mind, and put your fear inside, and lock it.”
“That sounds a lot like something a mentor would say.”
“No doubt I’d be a wonderful one. But I’m not yours.”
Rikke heard crunching footsteps behind, turned with a smile thinking to see Shivers or Isern walking down the shore. Instead she saw a Shanka, coming with a lurching gait as it had one leg longer than the other, clawed foot sending a shower of shingle sideways with each step. It had fish threaded onto a spear, one still twisting and flipping, scales glinting silvery in the morning sun.
“Ah!” Caurib smiled, and the great scar through her top lip stretched about the wire in a way Rikke found most unsettling. “Breakfast.”
“How did you make the Shanka serve you?” asked Rikke as it shoved its fish-laden spear point-down near the water’s edge. Her father always talked of the flatheads as if they were animals. A plague that couldn’t be reasoned with. And here was one snuffling around for sticks to build a fire like any fisherman on the beach. Well, any fisherman with spikes hammered into his head.
“The same way you make anyone serve you,” said Caurib. “By offering them what they want.”
Rikke watched that flathead grunt and slurp to itself, tongue wedged in its great teeth as it carefully stacked twigs on a patch of shingle blackened by years of fires. “They’re like people, then?”
“Oh no.” And Rikke felt Caurib’s hand on her shoulder, light but firm, and her soft voice in her ear. “They can be trusted. It is them I have to thank for my life.”
“What, the Shanka?”
“Yes. If thanks are appropriate for what hardly seems a life.”
Rikke watched the flathead fumbling with a flint and tinder and juggling it all over the beach. “Wouldn’t think they had the fingers for pretty stitching.”
“Does this look pretty to you?”
Rikke cleared her throat and thought it best to say nothing.
“The Shanka don’t like baths and they’ve no sense of humour at all, but they understand the meeting betwixt flesh and metal. They learned that much from the Master Maker.” And the Shanka bent down, crooked lips pursed, and coaxed a flame into life with its breath.
“What happened to the others?” asked Rikke.
“The man with the steel eye and the woman with the iron temper? They sat a while beside you, each pretending to be less worried than the other, but after a few days they tired of fish. Neither would trust the other to hunt so they went off together.”
“Hold on,” said Rikke. “Days?”
“Four days you slept. They are good companions. A woman who is to be taken seriously as a seer should have some colourful folk about her.”
“I didn’t pick ’em for their colour.”
“No, they picked you, which speaks to your quality and theirs.”
“Speaks of good quality, or poor?”
Caurib didn’t answer. Just turned her bright blue eyes on Rikke and said nothing. Rikke didn’t much care for being looked at in that way, specially not by a witch, and specially not one with wire through her face.
“Reckon I’ll eat if you don’t mind sharing your breakfast.” The Shanka had his fish over the fire now and was making quite the mouth-watering smell. First time Rikke felt hungry in weeks, and she rubbed at her aching belly. Not much to rub these days. Her clothes were hanging off her like rags off a scarecrow. “When my colourful friends get back we’d best start home. Long way down to Uffrith.”<
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“Going so soon?”
Gave Rikke a worried feeling, the way Caurib said it. Like there was an unpleasant surprise coming. Pleasant surprises seemed to get rarer as you got older. “Aye, well… I feel better now.” Rikke put her palm a little nervously to her left eye. Cool and clammy, just like the other. Just like anyone’s. “Whatever you did worked.”
“I have painted runes about your Long Eye. Runes to keep it caged.”
“Caged, eh? Grand.” Since she woke, she’d seen no visions of things past and no ghosts of things to come. The world looked more ordinary than any time since the duel, when she’d forced the Long Eye open. Aside from standing in a magic lake with a woman sent back from the land of the dead while flatheads cooked breakfast, that was. Rikke took a long breath, puffed up her chest and blew it out. “I’m all good.”
“For now.”
Rikke felt her shoulders sag. “It’ll get worse again?”
“The runes will fade, and it will get worse again, then worse still. We must paint the runes so they will not fade. We must tattoo them into your skin with a crow-bone needle and chain the Long Eye for as long as you live.”
Rikke stared at her. “I thought it was the demon that breaks all chains?”
“Yet we must chain it. With eleven wards and eleven wards reversed, and eleven times eleven. A lock strong enough to hold shut the gates of hell themselves.”
“That… doesn’t sound like something you want on your face.”
“You should eat. Then you should rest. You should drink plenty of water.”
“What’s the water for?”
“One should always drink plenty of water. The tattooing will take several days. It will be draining for you and even more so for me.”
Rikke brushed her cheek with her fingertips as she watched the smoke from the cook-fire drift across the lake. She thought of the hillmen, and the hillwomen, and those bastards from past the Crinna she’d seen sometimes with their blue painted faces. She gave one of those sorry sighs made her lips flap. “There’s just no going back from tattoos on your face, is there?”
“There has never been any going back for you.” Caurib shrugged. “Though you could always leave it, and let the visions get madder and madder until you are sucked into the darkness and your mind bursts apart into a million screaming fragments. That would save me some work.”
The Trouble with Peace Page 14
