A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (85 page)

Bear. Raif breathed in deeply, feeling his lungs push against the last traces of tightness in his chest. He’d always wanted the bear lore, like Drey and Da; now he had the bear horse instead.

Morning passed, or perhaps it didn’t. The light changed, turning the sky a shade of blue he’d only ever seen before in deep, algae-covered water. Clouds were in their usual place, around the sun. A day moon showed for a while, and then was snuffed. The problem with walking in a trench was that there was little to look at but the sky. During the day Raif barely caught a glimpse of the headland. Sometimes he saw the needle peaks of basalt spires, or long barrows of mounded rocks. Once he’d seen a fully petrified tree, its main branches all preserved. Mostly, he looked at the river walls.

The trench varied in width and depth, but even at its narrowest point Raif judged it to be a third of a league wide. Its landscape of rock, calcified debris, tumbled stones and frozen earth changed as he walked. Seams of fossils were exposed in some places, revealing the forms of creatures Raif did not know. In other sections he saw where the force of the river had worn hard granite smooth, and elsewhere noticed that softer rock had been broken into sand. At midday he spotted something that made the hairs rise on his neck. Steps, a flight of them cut into the bank. He slowed Bear and they went to investigate.

The steps ended at a point partway down the river terrace, and to reach them they had to climb a wall of trap rock. Bear was sure-footed, but Raif found himself making mistakes and stumbling. This was the first sign of a civilization he had seen since entering the Want. Someone had cut these steps, perhaps so they could wash clothes in the river or bathe. Steps meant a settlement. Close.

As Raif reached the first square-cut ledge, a reflex action made him check the sky—it was how he’d come to measure the Want, to gauge its temper. All changes in the Great Want were foreshadowed by the sky.

Clouds were on the move, rolling toward him in waves, and the colors in the sky were changing. The Gods Lights had begun to burn.

It was time.

Bear sniffed the step at some length before she put a hoof upon it. Raif knew exactly how she felt. After so many days of walking on rough rock, the hewn stone felt strange beneath his feet. The steps were low but wide, each one about ten paces in length. People could have sat upon them, talking whilst they cooled their feet in the river. Raif tried to imagine what the Old Ones had looked like, but his mind was strangely blank. The Listener had told him so little about them, and Heritas Cant even less. Their Age had long passed, he knew that. In a way, these steps were like the fossils he’d seen earlier: a sign of life lost.

Raif counted thirty-five steps in all, and by the time he reached the seventeenth he could see the peak in the distance. The mountain of rock he’d come for. The one painted on the cave wall in the Rift, and drawn in the book of the Forsworn. The fault most likely to give.

Raif rushed up the last steps to see it better. Its shape, the way the rock was twisted and buckled, as if by some terrible calamity, was just how he’d imagined it would be. Two things surprised him, though. He had not been prepared for its size—its massive, towering bulk. Valleys, ridges, and cliffs circled its base, and dry rivers flowed from its peak. Thousands of feet high and thousands wide: it was a monstrous wasteland of stone.

And he had not expected it to be sheathed in ice. As he and Bear took their first steps on the headland toward it, the wind brought its coldness to them. The temperature dropped, and the scent of dry ice, of glaciers turned gray with age and compression, and of frost smoking off freezing lakes made Raif want to turn back. He had not bargained on this. It was another trick thrown up by the Want.

“Bear,” he said. “What are we doing here?”

No more questions you know the answer to
, warned Stillborn in his head.

Managing something like a shrug, Raif continued walking.

The land surrounding the mountain was deeply flawed, but it wasn’t until he reached higher ground that Raif realized there was a pattern to the canyons, fault lines and dry riverbeds: they radiated outward from the mountain like the spokes of a wheel. The mountain formed the absolute center of devastation, and even as he thought this the earth shuddered.

Bear shied, biting at her reins in fright. Tiny stones jumped around Raif’s feet. The mountain shivered, and deep within its folds the ice fields ground and squealed. It was over in a handful of seconds. Disturbed ice crystals floated upward, forming a sparkling mist that ringed the peak. Some drifted on the breeze toward Raif and Bear, landing on their shoulders and backs like a fine snow. When one landed on Raif’s lips he put out his tongue and tasted it. Nothing. He couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.

The wind was picking up now, gusting back and forth with no consistent direction. Overhead the clouds had rolled in, almost covering the sky. The Gods Lights lit them from behind, sending out red flares that glowed like embers. Inigar Stoop had once said that whenever a sky turned red somewhere a Stone God was bleeding. Raif found he didn’t care.
Let them bleed.

Guiding the pony into a shallow canyon, he set a straight course for the mountain. As they drew closer, he began to doubt himself. The mountain was huge; it would take days just to circle its base. And what was he looking for? A fault line? Hundreds of them cracked the earth here: he and Bear stood in one now. Did it mean they’d have to search every one of them, looking for the deepest? The Rift was the deepest fault in the North, Addie said. But it didn’t mean it would be the first to give. So how could he be sure of picking the right one?

Raif glanced up at the mountain. The ice was gray and old, weathered over centuries so that it reflected no light. From here he could see that its surface was brittle and crevassed. Surely he and Bear didn’t have to climb it? One misplaced step and they’d be dead.

Nothing seemed certain or right. Raif drew on his gloves, wincing as the goat hide tugged against his wounded knuckles. It was getting colder. He took Bear’s blanket from the saddle-bag and laid it over her back. Ahead the land began to rise, and he knew it was time to climb out of the canyon before the walls grew too deep and trapped them.

Another tremor shook the earth as they emerged on the raised plain of the mountain. As he braced himself against the rolling motion, Raif thought of what the outlander had said about the Shatan Maer.
One stirs this night—I can feel it.

Grimly, Raif waited for stillness and marched on. It wasn’t long before the ground turned to hard granite beneath them, as the mountain showed its roots. Slowly, they were ascending, and the path began to grow rocky and uneven. Raif scanned the lower slopes, looking for . . .
something
. He didn’t know what.

The light held as they climbed, the wind funneling along the fault lines toward the mountain. After a few hours they arrived at its base, and Raif stopped to rest the pony and eat. They split the last lardcake and drank melted ice that tasted faintly of salt. Raif restowed the pack for a heavy climb, choosing to leave the cook pot and the pony’s saddle beside a rock. When he was finished he sat on the rock and looked up. Now he was here he wasn’t sure what to do next.

We search.
What would the Forsworn knights have done here? Had they known something he didn’t? He tried to recall exactly what the dying knight had said. Had he mentioned the Old Ones? A cold thrill prickled the skin on his arms as a memory returned to him.

We search.

For what?

The city of the Old Ones. The Fortress of Grey Ice.

Raif stood. Understanding lay there on the edge of his thoughts. Think.
Think.

Fortress. One was mentioned in Addie’s verse.
Though a fortress may fall and darkness ride through the gate.
Raif frowned. Did it mean that the darkness would emerge in the fortress first? What had the outlander said?
Look to their ruins to guide you to the place they most feared.
The Old Ones had feared the Rift and built a city there. Had they built a city on this mountain as well? If so, there was no sign of it now—just ice and frozen rock.

Raif let out a long breath, his head aching. People
had
lived here, he knew that much. Someone had carved those steps. Yet how could he hope to find a city on the mountain? A search could take weeks, even months. And then there was the danger of the ice . . .

The Fortress of Grey Ice. What did the name mean? Was the fortress
beneath
the ice?

Raif crossed over to the pony and began scratching her ears. The Listener, the knight, Addie, and the outlander had all told him fragments of things, scraps that didn’t add up. He wasn’t a mage or a wiseman. He wasn’t anything any more.

This was all he had, this search, the hope that he might hinder the darkness. It wasn’t much, but it was more than Bitty Shank had.

Steeled by that thought, Raif began to walk the length of the slope, watching the mountain and running through everything again in his head. The answer was here; he just had to dig for it.

His breath whitened in the freezing air as the temperature continued to drop. Something about the ice on the mountain bothered him. It had been so unexpected. The Want was arid. Frozen but dry. Surely that much ice would have melted and evaporated over the years? What held it there? A second thrill goose-pimpled his skin as something suddenly occurred to him.

The bridge over the Rift. The Old Ones had created a force spanning the Rift that still held to this day. The outlander had said as much.
Things constructed by their mages live on
. Could the ice itself be a construction? Raif raised his hand to his throat and closed his gloved fingers around the hard piece of raven ivory that was his lore. If the ice
was
a construction, then how to blast it away?

We search.

It seeks.

Raif opened his fist and let his lore drop. Suddenly he knew what he must do.

He walked to the pony and took two things off her back. The Sull bow, and the arrow Divining Rod.

Take this arrow named Divining Rod that has been fletched with the Old Ones’ hair, take it and use it to find what you must. It seeks, what I cannot tell you, for the echoes from things so old are weak.

The Listener was right; the echoes
were
weak, but he had finally heard them. Stupidly he had imagined he would need the arrow to slay the thing that came through the breach—even though the Listener had warned him it would be wasted if he used it to kill. Raif stripped off his gloves and ran a hand down the arrowshaft. The workmanship humbled him. The skeleton ferrule that bound the head to the shaft must have taken someone days, even weeks, to forge. Each band of metal had to have been painstakingly fired and hammered, and constant adjustments made for fit. The fletchings, bound and glued in spiral form to make the arrow spin in flight, represented further days of work. Someone had spent as much time and effort making this arrow as it took to make a sword.

And they had named it Divining Rod.

Raif braced the Sull bow and drew the arrow to the plate. As he set his sights on the mountain he let all conscious thoughts fall away. The mountain was a dark form, dead and immense: a tower of icy rock. No heart pumped within it for him to find; it did not matter. The Sull, the Old Ones and Clan stood here. A bow, an arrow, and a man. It was enough. Being here with these things was enough.

Raif picked a target, drew his bow, and waited for the wind.

When the time came he released the string, and the arrow shot from the bow. A sweet humming reached his ears as the arrow began to spin. The Old Ones’ hair channeled the wind, using it to propel the arrow high and true to the center of the ice.

He didn’t hear the impact. The humming filled his thoughts, pulling at memories and things beyond memories that no clansman should ever have. Suddenly he knew the age of the arrow, and the age of the mountain, and then the age of the earth itself. Seconds passed where knowledge was revealed to him; ancient histories and battles, the pain of birth and loss. He looked into faces that were neither human nor Sull . . . and he found beauty and understanding there. He strained to see more, to know more, but the humming ceased abruptly. A moment of absolute stillness followed, when the wind died and the Gods Lights raged like a fire in sky.

And then the mountain began to move. The ground trembled. Rock sawed against rock. Snow so ancient and dry it had become a substance beyond ice shook free from the highest slopes. As the first cold glitters landed in Raif’s hair, the ice itself began to crack. Like lightning, a flaw flashed into existence and forked into many more. The fissures split and split again, until the entire face of the mountain was a web of darkly glowing flaws. Raif had long lost sight of his arrow, but he knew it was there, in the heart of the ice, still spinning, drilling deep, destroying all it touched. He felt no wonder, only a sense of a task completed. He and Bear had come here; now there was one less thing for them to do.

The crack of sundered worlds split the air. Raif’s eardrums pulsed, and he felt a sharp, sickening pain. His grip tightened on the bow as the ice face shattered and began sliding toward the earth.

The pale ghost of a city emerged from the chaos. Massive slabs of ice fell away like rotting tiles, revealing rock shaped by a living hand. Vast bulwarks of gray granite were hewn from the mountain wall, rising as sheer as any cliff to support the fortress that stood above.

Kahl Barranon
—he knew its name now. The City of the Old Ones. A Fortress of Grey Ice.

Raif’s breath cooled in his lungs. Almost he could taste the rock the fortress was built on. It was cold and raw and bitter as the winter itself. The ice face might have fallen away but another kind of ice lived beneath. Spires of gray quartz reached for the sky, slender and transparent as icicles. Great halls lay below them, their high arching roofs clad in frost-colored lead. And below them lay the curtain wall, where quartz fused with granite to form the ramparts. Everything shone gray and silver, and Raif imagined that if a city could be carved from the heart of a glacier then it would look much like the Fortress of Grey Ice.