A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (3 page)

All around, diggers were attacking Bull Hands and the few free miners who remained in the pipe. Iron Toe had gotten hold of a whip and was forcing the leather butt down a Bull Hand’s throat. The tiny cragsman was speaking to the Bull Hand as he choked him, asking him, quite softly, how it felt to eat the whip. Soft Aggie was sitting propped against a wall, blood sheeting down his chest from a lash wound so deep that Crope could see the bones at the back of Aggie’s throat. Jesiah Mump was kneeling at his side, his mud-caked fingers sliding in his pipebrother’s blood as he struggled to close the wound. Down the line, Sully Straw was frozen in place, unable to move because of the tension in the chain that connected him to Jesiah Mump.

“Giant man!”

Crope swung his head when he heard Scurvy’s call.

A single tooth was embedded in the gore on Scurvy Pine’s ax, and he drove it deep into the spine of a free miner as he screamed, “The chains! Break the damn chains!”

Crope felt heat come to his face.
“Don’t you go forgetting, giant man. When we start attacking the Bull Hands it’s your job to break the chains.”

Putting all his weight behind the drop of his ax, Crope severed the links that connected him to Old Bone.
Half-wit,
the bad voice said.
Can’t even remember to break the chains.
His was the only ax crowned with a blade broad enough to chop metal; and his were the only shoulders capable of delivering such a blow. Scurvy had made him practice on the iron staves that bound the water buckets. “Chop, chop, chop,” he’d say. “Like you did when you cut the leg-irons from Mannie Dun.”

Crope didn’t remember cutting any iron the day that Mannie broke his back. He remembered only that Mannie was hurt and his body was twitching and all the Bull Hands cared about was sealing the lode. It was later, when Scurvy pulled him aside and told him that he, Crope, had broken Mannie’s chains with his ax, that he realized what he had done. “Say nothing, giant man,” Scurvy had warned. “The Hands are so busy pissing themselves over the Red Eyes that they don’t know who did what.”

Crope brought his ax down on another chain, splitting the iron as if it were wood. Mannie was dead now. One of the free miners had given him some of the black. The black was poison, Bitterbean said, and the free miner had given it to Mannie as a mercy, for everyone knew that a digger with a broken back was as good as dead.

Shaking off his leg-irons, Crope crossed to where Jesiah Mump was speaking last words to his pipe-brother. Soft Aggie was already gone—Crope had been around death often enough to read it on any man’s face—but Jesiah spoke to him all the same, telling him how they’d raft up the Innerway in high summer and gorge themselves stupid on raw leeks and fried trout. Crope severed the chains that connected them, though he did not expect them to pull apart.

He knew what it was to love someone wholly.

“Here, giant man! Cut me free!”

Responding to Bitterbean’s voice, the giant digger moved along the ranks, chopping metal. A blackness lay upon the pipe, and men fought in the near-darkness, grunting and cursing, killing in violent spurts, then leaning against the wall to catch their breath and hack up dust. Crope watched as some diggers continued to beat the Bull Hands even after they were dead. He understood little of their need, for dead was dead to him, yet he made no effort to stay them. Men did what men would do, and he’d learned long and hard that nothing good ever came from interference.

Keep your eyes and hands to yourself, half-wit, for looks start fights and touches set women to screaming rape
. The old words could raise the fear in him even now. He was big and he was dangerous, and so he must make himself small and unassuming in other ways.

He was careful as he stepped around the corpses.

As he raised his ax to break Scurvy Pine’s chains, the last glimmers of light faded. The cold deepened, and the air began to move. Crope felt it swelling against his back like icy water. Men ceased fighting. Scurvy rattled his leg and hissed, “Cut the chains,” but Crope could no longer see Scurvy and he feared to drop the ax.

A sound rose from the center of the pipe. Crope had heard the cries of many beasts, of lambs torn apart by dogs and mares split open during foaling, yet he’d never heard a call like this: cold and wanting and alive with pain. The urge came upon him to flee, for he had lived long and seen many things, and knew something of the darkness that lived within the night. Not all things that cast man-shadows were men.

One of the hags screamed. A great
whumf
of air shook the pipe, sending the rope bridges creaking and lifting the hair on Crope’s scalp. Men began running; he couldn’t see them, but he heard the clatter of their chains against the rock.

Scurvy pressed something sharp against Crope’s leg. “Cut me free, giant man. I won’t be taken alive in this pipe.”

Crope heard the urgency in Scurvy’s voice. The Bull Hands had ways of killing ringleaders. John Dram had been fed a meal of diamonds—chips and splinters and gray and cloudy stones—and then he’d been thrown alive into the crowd at Frozen Square. They’d torn him apart, Bitterbean said, their hands steaming with blood as they plunged into John Dram’s guts.

Crope dropped the ax on Scurvy’s chains. The digger grunted as he pulled his ankle free. “You bled me, giant man,” he murmured. “Sweet blood, and I’ll hold no grudges for it. Take my arm and let’s begone from this pipe.”

“But—”

“But what? There are others still in chains? Would you stay and free their corpses once they’re dead?” A random gleam of light caught Scurvy’s pale gray eyes. “Nine of us came from the tin pits, that winter when the Drowned Lake froze. Who’s left, giant man? Mannie’s gone. Will’s gone. All gone. All dead, except you and me.”

Crope remembered Will. He knew all the words to the old songs, and could sleep standing up. It was hard to think of him as dead. He said stubbornly, “I’m going to fetch Hadda.”

Scurvy seized Crope’s arm. “Forget her. She’s just a hag. There’s nothing left to save.”

With gentle firmness, Crope broke free of Scurvy’s grip. He didn’t like Hadda, but she had sung, the song that brought the darkness. And without darkness they’d still be in chains.

Scurvy cursed with disgust. He went to turn away, but something stopped him. Reaching into his torn and ragged tunic, he muttered, “Let no man say Scurvy Pine doesn’t pay his debts. Here. Take this.” He held out a small round object. “Show it in any thieves’ den north of the mountains and you’ll find protection in my name.”

Crope’s big fingers closed around a metal band: a ring, light and very fine. Not a man’s ring, not even a woman’s, something made for a child. He looked up to find Scurvy watching him.

“Take care of yourself, giant man. I’ll not forget who broke my chains.” With that Scurvy was gone, slipping through the darkness and the snarl of panicking men, a shadow amongst the shadows, moving swiftly toward the light.

Crope carefully tucked the ring into the seam of his boot, and then went looking for Hadda the Crone.

It was cold and gloomy in the diamond well, and not one human was moving. The rock was sticky underfoot and the smell of blood rose from it. Crope went unchallenged as he walked amongst the bodies. It was hard to tell the hags apart. All their hair had been shaved so they’d have one less place to conceal stones. He wouldn’t have recognized Hadda if it hadn’t been for the diamond in her tooth. Bitterbean said the pipe lord himself had given it to her the day she found a stone as big as a wren.

Hadda was barely breathing, but he picked her up all the same. There were wounds across her legs and belly, lash marks that ran straight and deep. She was so light it was like carrying twigs for the fire, and he was overcome with a sense of shame. Everyone who helped him ended up hurt.
You’re good for nothing, you misshapen monster. Should have been drowned at birth.

Crope shook the bad voice away. Something dark and full of shadow was moving at the corner of his vision, and he knew it was time to leave. He heard the blistering crackle of charged air, the swift
snick
of something with an edge severing limbs. And screams: screams of diggers he knew. It was hard to hear them, and harder still to turn his back. But he had Hadda, and his chains were gone, and it was time to find the man who owned his soul.

Sixteen years without his lord was too long.

Bearing the dying woman up through the pipe, Crope began to plan his search.

The ice on the lake creaked and rumbled as it cooled, its surface growing colder and drier as the quarter-moon passed overhead. There was no wind, yet the ancient hemlocks surrounding the lake moved, their limbs rising and falling in air that was perfectly still. Meeda Longwalker had made camp on a plate of shore-fast ice, three feet thick and hard as iron. It was the coldest night she could remember, so cold the shale oil in her lamp had frozen to thick yellow grease and she had been forced to burn a candle for light. Smoke rising from the candle’s flame cooled so quickly it floated back down to the ice, and Meeda had to keep pushing it away with her gloved and mitted hands so it wouldn’t cumulate and kill the light.

She should have returned to the Heart. It wasn’t a night to be out alone on the ice, yet she had something in her that had always rebelled against good sense. She was a Heartborn Daughter of the Sull, mother to He Who Leads, and it seemed to her that any wisdom she had a claim to had come on nights such as this.

Besides, she had her dogs; they would warn her of any danger. Warn, but not protect. Meeda Longwalker was no fool. She wasn’t like some trappers who drank themselves stupid on green elk milk turned sour and then passed out around their dark-fires, sure in the knowledge that their dogs would save them if . . .

If what? Meeda pulled her lynx cloak closer, wishing for a moment she had bare hands so she could feel the sweet softness of the fur beneath her fingers. Almost it was like touching a living thing, and Meeda Longwalker knew some men who claimed it was better. Trappers knew little of women and a lot about whores, and a scraped and combed lynx fur had a warmth to it that couldn’t be bought in Hell’s Town for any amount of gold.

As she watched the fur ripple beneath her horsehair mitts a cry sounded in the forest beyond the ice. Low and hollow, like the wind moving down a well shaft, it made the skin on Meeda’s shoulders pucker and shrink. The flame above the candle dimmed from yellow to red, and then twitched upon its wick as the sound passed into the ice. Meeda felt its vibrations in her old and rotted bones . . . and knew then that the creature who made it was no living thing.

“
Raaks!
” she called. Dogs!

A hand shot onto the ice to feel for her stick as she waited for her terriers to heel. Damn dogs. She should never have let them go after that elk cow. Yet they had smelled age and weakness and the festering of a wolf-made wound, and such scents were irresistible to any animal trained to hunt. It was either let them go or drive a stake into the ice and leash them to it. And much though Meeda Longwalker hated to admit it, her hands had trouble forming the shape needed to hold a hammer this night.

As her fingers groped for her stick a new sound rose from the edge of the ice. Fifty years she had coursed these headlands, fifty years of setting traps, snapping necks and peeling skin, and not a day without a dog at her heels. She had heard her terriers moan and yelp in childbirth and pain, heard them scrap amongst themselves over the weeping remains of a skinned fox. Yet never until now had she heard them scream.

High it was, high and terrible and so close to human that it might have been children instead. Meeda’s fist closed around the three feet of icewood that had been her walking stick for a hundred seasons. The wood was pale as milk, and so smooth it ran with moonlight like live steel. Icewood, from the heart of the tree; no earthly cold could warp it, and none but master Sull craftsmen could shape it to their will. It dulled saws, people said. Made bows so powerful that they defied air and wind. Only the Sull King and his
mordreth
, the twelve sworn men who guarded him and were known as the Walking Dead, were allowed to carry bows of its making. A single tree had to grow for a thousand years and its timber aged for fifty more before a master bowyer would dare cut a stave from the
dann
, the late-wood that was laid down in the sacred months of summer and late spring.

Meeda hefted the stick across her chest, taking comfort from its familiar weight and hand. It was a hard life she had lived and chosen, and she had not reached such an age by being easily cowed. The night was alive with noises, with black lynx and horned owls, moon snakes and old ghosts, and she had long since realized that none of them liked the smell of living men. Rising to her feet, she called once more to her dogs.

As she waited for them to respond, something crunched softly on the frozen snow beyond the shoreline. Water swelled beneath the ice. The dogs fell silent one by one.

Meeda bit off her outer mitts, and spat them onto the ice. The sky was dark, darker than it ought to be when quarter of the moon hung there for all to see. There were no stars, or if there were they shone black like volcanic glass. Moon and night sky. No Sull prayer was complete without those words, and Meeda found herself mouthing them as she stepped toward the shore.

Damn her eyes! Why couldn’t she
see
anything? Her hard old corneas were slow to focus in the biting air, and she felt the anger come to her as quick as if it had been hiding beneath her fear all along. She hated her old woman’s body with its humps and slack pouches and dry bloodless bones. Some nights she dreamed Thay Blackdragon, the Night King, came to her, offering youth in return for her soul. Sometimes she dreamed she said
yes
.

Frost smoke steamed above the ice margin, switching colors from blue to gray. Meeda felt its coldness in her mouth, stinging her gums and numbing her tongue until it felt like a piece of meat against her teeth. Underfoot the ice was black and transparent, swept clean of snow by northern winds. It ticked as Meeda’s weight came down upon it. As she stepped beyond the candle’s light, something red broke through the trees, something broken and limping and not
right
. Meeda braced her stick with both hands, and then recognized the bloody shape of one of her dogs. Marrow. Its rear left leg was gone, and the skin on its rump and belly had been torn away, revealing glistening muscle and coils of gut.