A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (55 page)

Addie was already on his feet, his left leg bloody at the shin, his doeskin pants torn through. The dog was on its belly, whimpering as it crawled toward its master. Part of its nostril slid from Addie’s helm. Addie’s chest was rising and falling rapidly. The look he gave Raif was full of rage, but when he spoke his voice was quiet. “She was wi’ lamb.”

Raif nodded. A lactating ewe and her lamb would be worth much in the Rift. Now she’d have to be butchered and hauled back as meat.

In the distance another sheep bleated.

Addie hesitated, his gaze hard on Raif. He looked weary. Blood seeping from the dog bites on his leg was collecting in his boot. Reluctantly, he reached a decision. “Take care of the herdsman and the dog. I have to find the other sheep.”

“Should I butcher the ewe?”

“No. That’s my job.” Addie Gunn turned in the direction from where the lamb’s cry had sounded. “I’ll be back later to open her up.”

Raif dragged a hand across his face. He left the Sull bow on the ground and drew his sword.

The herdsman had fallen on a pine sapling, bending the immature tree in two. The dog had reached its master and was sniffing at the arrow wound. As Raif approached, the dog shrank back onto its haunches, saliva leaking in strings from its ruined jaw. The herdsman’s eyes were open, blue as Dhoone and focused on Raif’s sword.

Raif killed the dog with a single strike through the larynx. Spilling sand. He turned to the herdsman. “Get up.”

The man didn’t move.

Raif kicked his leg. “I said
get up!
”

As the herdsman struggled to his feet, Raif pulled a shammy from his waist pack. He waited until the herdsman had dragged himself to his knees, and then shoved the shammy in the man’s mouth and gagged him. Needing something to tie the man’s wrists, he slid the blunt edge of the sword against the herdsman’s belly and cut his belt. The belt fell away from the man’s gut, sending his horn of powdered guidestone thudding to the earth. The horn was yellow and chipped. Its neck was sealed with a silver cap.

The remains of the quails’ eggs curdled in Raif’s gut. “Where did you get this?”

The man shook his head, unable to answer the question with a gag in his mouth

“Is it Hailstone?”

The herdsman widened his eyes, confused.

Raif grabbed him by the arms and shook him. He couldn’t understand where his anger came from, but he couldn’t stop it either. “Does the horn contain powdered Hailstone?”

Understanding dawned on the herdsman’s face. He gargled a denial through the gag, and then attempted a word that sounded like “ith”.

“Withy?”

The man nodded furiously. Raif let him go, and he slumped back to the ground with a groan of pain.

Not a Hailsman then. Thank gods, not a Hailsman.

Raif closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again he secured the man’s wrists and helped him to his feet. “Go,” he said. The man was wounded, gagged and tied: He could issue no warning or pose any threat. Addie had ordered Raif to take care of him, and Raif told himself it was done. He watched for a while as the herdsman lumbered south through the brush. Then Raif turned to join the raid party.

A cloaked figure was heading away through the trees.

Raif plucked the Sull bow from the loam. How long had Linden Moodie been watching? Had he seen Raif angle his bow
away
from the herdsman’s heart? Had he seen him let the man go? A tremor of fear altered rhythms in Raif’s chest. Had he heard the word
Blackhail
spoken?

Thoughts dark with foreboding, Raif went to join the raid.

TWENTY-SIX

Spire Vanis

T
own Dog was digging for field mice. Crope would have liked to carry on walking until midday, but a mouse was a mouse, and he wasn’t in any position to turn down food. The little dog dug furiously, kicking up dirt. Crope could tell when she found the first mouse, for Town Dog had a special noise that she made, like the squeaking of a bat. It wasn’t a very doggy noise—but then, Town Dog wasn’t a very doggy dog.

Crope sat on a fallen spruce log and waited for Town Dog to bring him the mouse. It was sunny in the foothills, the sky as clear as a diamond, and you could almost believe it was warm. There was a bit of shade under the great firs, and the
kuk-kuk-kuk
of a hairy woodpecker sounded over the rise. Ahead lay the shimmering phantom of a city, all pale walls and high spires, like cities in legends. It was
his
city. The bad place. The site where his lord was being held.

Dutifully, Crope took the mouse from Town Dog’s jaw, and shook it clean of dirt. The little dog looked expectantly at her master, her tail thumping the mat of spruce needles that carpeted the slope. Crope looked at the dog and the dog looked back. With an elaborate sigh, Crope threw the dazed mouse into the trees, sending Town Dog tearing after it with tail-wagging joy. It was easier stealing eggs, he reckoned. By the time Town Dog was through with the mouse there’d be little but the head left. And mouse brains were passing small.

Still, he couldn’t help grinning as he watched the little dog dive into a bush. It was good to have a companion, and mostly it felt better being hungry than alone.

Crope stretched out his legs and groaned. His feet were hurting, and he was tempted to pull off his boots and thrust his toes into the cool loam of fir needles and melted snow. He’d never get his boots back on again, though—experience had taught him that—and he had to get to the city by sundown. He could not fail his lord.

Come to me.
The words echoed in Crope’s dreams, softer now, losing their strength a little each day. His lord’s voice was more beautiful than he remembered: softer, more complex. There had always been wisdom and command within it, but now you could hear other things as well. Crope knew he wasn’t good at words, but the one he kept returning to was
loss
.

Abruptly, Crope stood. Some things he could not bear thinking about. Like when the slavers had cornered him on a slope like this one, how they had driven him hard against the rocks and cast a rope net over him, and how his feet had tangled in the lines and the slavers had laughed as he stumbled and fell. His ankles still bore the marks of their ropes. They had driven him east in their wagon train, getting drunk on pure grain alcohol and congratulating themselves over their catch.
He’s as big as three men
, they had said of him.
He’ll fetch a fine price in the mines.

Crope’s chest began to heave.
You entered the mine, the mine entered you.
He spat out the black phlegm, and felt better after a while.

Town Dog had returned with the mouse and now sat patiently at Crope’s feet. Crope bent slowly at the waist and pocketed the limp brown rodent. Town Dog nosed his hand, and Crope scratched her ears and tussled with her until he was ready to carry on.

After the incident at the alehouse, Crope had kept far away from settled land. When he spied a village he walked leagues out of his path to avoid it, and when he smelled the woodsmoke of mountain men he quietly altered his course. The journey went easier, having Town Dog. Longer, but easier. Worrying about Town Dog stopped him worrying about himself. Town Dog wasn’t a very accomplished hunter. The one time she’d flushed something worthwhile from the brush, she’d been so startled that she’d let the raccoon hotfoot up a tree and get away. Crope tried to be fair about it—it
was
an unusually big coon—but visions of sweet roasted meat made him eye Town Dog accusingly for several days.

The storms were the worst. The mountains bred them, whipping up winds and clouds, sending sleet driving into Crope’s face and blinding him with swirling snow. He’d lost some days to fever, holed up in a depression banked with snow south of Hound’s Mire. The only way he knew later that time had passed was by the number and assortment of small rodents that Town Dog had brought to him while he slept.

Things were bad for a while after that. His chest was weak—Bitterbean said that diggers had lungs like sea sponges soaked in tar—and the going was slow for many days. He and Town Dog had descended from the mountains into the foothills. It was riskier here—bad men and slavers might find you—but at least it was easier to breathe. One morning he’d walked past a birch sapling as straight as a spear and cut himself a staff. It was good having something to lean on, and even when he regained his health and strength he decided not to lay it aside. Travelers in illustrated books carried staffs. He knew this because his lord had once possessed many tomes. A staff gave a man something to do, Crope discovered; good for prodding snow to test its depth and ice to test its fastness. And he had never learned to love blades. It was comforting to have a weapon on hand that relied on strength instead of edge.

Crope felt his heartbeat quicken as he and Town Dog wound down the slope. Part of him wished that he and his dog could just carry on walking, watching the season warm into spring and listening to the mayflies buzz around his face. Back in the diamond pipe, he’d dreamed of owning the perfect length of land. Just enough for a man to cross on foot in the hours between sunrise and sunset on a summer day. He’d grow wheat and radishes, and seed a meadow for sheep, and perhaps later lay a hard standing for milch cows. Sometimes the details changed . . . but the length of land never did. Long enough for a man to walk in a day.

But that was a dream for another life. In this one he belonged to his lord.

Crope could no longer count how many years he’d known Baralis, but he’d never forgotten that first meeting, a continent away in the Far South. It was burned in his memory the way his slave brand was burned into his flesh.

Baralis had spied him on Green Spinster Street in Silbur, being stick-whipped by a gang of youths. A stallholder had accused him of stealing a bolt of wool, and had raised a hue and cry. A mob formed quickly, as mobs did when he was about, and he was chased through the market and into the street. He was hurting badly when Baralis approached, his nose broken and bleeding and his right eye swollen shut. Jail was a certainty, for he could never find the words to defend himself. Baralis was walking along the street, dressed in scholar’s black, a tall young man with an arrogant face. Crope called out to him, though he could not say why, and instead of passing by Baralis stopped. And that was when the miracle happened. Somehow the man who would become Crope’s lord brought an end to the beating—with nothing more than words. He never raised his voice, never drew a weapon, yet he turned Crope’s attackers cold.

All his life, until that very point, Crope had never known anyone to defend him. He’d been attacked and jailed, hunted down and tormented, made scapegoat for a dozen different crimes. He’d been thrown into the baiting pits of Lynch Town and made to fight bears. He’d been used as a pack animal to carry baskets of damp salt from the Dead Shores. He’d dug graves, logged forests, performed as a curiosity with a troop of black-skinned mummers, and laid down on surgeons’ mats whilst physicians tapped his blood. He’d slept in holes, caves and locked cells, lived on rats and chicken bones and the ticks off his own skin.

When Baralis turned to him on Green Spinster Street and murmured,
Come, follow me home
, the black-clad young man became Crope’s savior, his protector—his lord.

Baralis was owed Crope’s soul.

Crope dug his staff into the earth and rested his weight a moment. Town Dog was ranging far ahead, and her skinny tail was the only part of her visible above the scrub.

The city was mere leagues away now. Crope could see the gray haze of smoke and mist it created, and the way it sprang from the base of the mountain like a newborn peak. To the north lay rolling grassy plains, dotted with villages and crossed with roads. Close to the city’s north wall he could just make out the flapping brown edges of a camp town. Here in the east, entire hillsides had been clearcut for timber. Somewhere not far below him, Crope could hear the
whir
of pit saws, and he remembered how it was to be the man standing below in the pit, how the sawdust rained on your face and shoulders every time you pulled down the saw.

Bitterbean said a man’s past was like a ghost, and it would haunt you if you let it. Crope had thought about that a lot on his journey, and sometimes he thought Bitterbean was right, yet mostly he hoped he was wrong. Once, one summer when the pumps had failed, Crope had been hauled up from the pipe to unclog them. As he disassembled the crank on the lakeshore, a bass fisherman nearby launched his boat. Crope remembered glancing at the boat as he went about his work, watching as it slowly pulled away.
That
was what he hoped the past was like . . . a boat sailing away as you stood upon the shore.

Suddenly anxious to be moving, Crope called Town Dog to him, and together they headed down toward the land of men.

They passed the logging camp at midday, and by late afternoon they had joined the road leading west to the city’s walls. Farmers, drovers and wagon trains jostled for space on the road. Occasionally, horns would ring out and everyone would clear the center while troops of men-at-arms rode through. Crope fell in behind a high-sided wagon ricked with hay, content to let the height and breadth of the load conceal him. Bits of straw and hayseeds floating down from the bales made him sneeze from time to time, but he didn’t really mind it. Town Dog grew tired as they neared the gate, so he picked her up and tucked her under his cloak.

The gate seemed a very fine thing to Crope, tall enough for five men standing on each others’ shoulders to pass through. It was carved from giant blocks of granite, the kind that Scurvy Pine said he’d quarried before they set him to tin.

There was a great stirring in the city, Crope learned, as he waited in the crush of people petitioning for entry. Someone high and mighty had been wed that very day, and now there was to be a feast and dancing in some important fortress. The driver of the hay wagon was made much of, for his load was due to be delivered to the stables of that very place. Crope listened for a while, but he couldn’t keep up with all the unfamiliar accents and long names.