J. V. Jones - Sword of Shadows 2 - A Fortress of Grey Ice

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Book Information:

Genre: Epic Fantasy

Author: J.V. Jones

Name: A Fortress of Grey Ice

Series: Sword of Shadows 2

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PROLOGUE

Diamonds and Ice

The diamond pipe was hot and stinking, and when the water hit thewalls the rock exploded, spraying the

diggers with a cloud of dust and steam. Scurvy Pine swore with venom. Hard blisters of sweat rose on

his forehead and he wiped them away with a greasy rag. “Fires have only been out an hour. What do

those bastards think we are? Crabs to be steamed for the pot?”

Crope made no reply. He and Scurvy had been working the pipes together for eight years, andthey’d

been scalded worse in their time.A lot worse. Besides, speaking took up space for remembering, and

Crope had important things to remember today. “Don’t you go forgetting, giantman. You be ready when

I give the word.”

Placing the empty bucket down on the blue mud of the pipe floor, Crope watched the rock wall as it

continued to crack and pop. The fire set by the free miners heated the rock, making it split and break.

Water hauled up from theDrownedLakecooled the walls so quickly, boulders the size of war carts

shattered to dust. “Softening,” the free miners called it, making the pipe ready for the diggers’ picks.

Crope could see nothing soft about it. Mannie Dun had broken his back pickaxing a seam last spring.

Crope remembered carrying the old digger away. Mannie’s legs jerked against his belly as thewasn’t for

safety’s sake; Crope didn’t know much but he knew that. The sealing was to keep the diggers away.

Before Mannie’s spine had twisted and popped, the tip of his ax had lodged in a rock wall speckled with

flecks of red stone. Red Eyes, the miners called them. Red Eyes meant diamonds. ..and diamonds were

the business of free men, not slaves.

“Pick to the wall, giant man. Don’t go giving me good reason to spread my whip.”

Crope knew better than to look at the man who spoke. The guards in the pipe were known as Bull

Hands,on account of their oiled and flame-hardened whips. Scurvy said they could take the hands off a

man before he even heard the sound of bullhide moving through air. Crope dreamed of that sometimes;

of hands not attached to any living man, clutching his neck and face.

Diamond rock split and crumbled to nothing as Crope took his pick to the wall. Water still warm from

contact with the heated stone ran through the cracks at his feet. Above, the pipe twisted up and up, its

walls gashed by stairs and pathways hewn from the live rock. Tunnels and caves pitted the sides, marking

seams long run dry or walls overmined to collapse. The entrances to the older tunnelshad been plugged

with a makeshift mortar of horsehair and clay, for there were some in the pipe who feared shadow things

rising from the depths.

Rope bridges spanned the pipe’s breadth, their wooden treads warped by steam, their fibers ticking as

the wind moved a thousand feet above. The sky seemed far away, and the sun farther still. Even on a

clear day in midwinter, little light found its way into the pipe.

Down below, in the lower tier of the pipe, where a ring of pitch lamps burned with white-hot flames,

the hags were at work with their baskets and claws.Scratch, scratch, scratch, as they raked the

new-broke ground for the hard clear stone that was valued above gold. The hags were slaves too, but

they were old and weak, bent-backed and stiff-fingered, and the Bull Hands did not fear to let them near

the lode.

Crope thought he spiedHadda the Crone, in line with the other clawed and sorted. Haddascared

Crope. She had long, sunken breasts shaped like spades that she bared to any digger who looked her

way. Scurvy, Bitterbean and the rest looked her way often, but Crope did not likeHadda , and he would

not look at her breasts.

When the lashcame he was half expecting it. The sting was cold,cold, and it took the breath from him

like a punch to the gut. The tip of the whip curled around his ear, licking flesh hard with scars. Tears of

blood welled in a line around his neck, and he felt their hot-ness trickle down his shoulders to his back.

The salt burn would come later, when the gray crystals of sea salt that the Bull Hands soaked into their

whips worked their way into the wound.

“It’s not enough that they whip us,” Scurvy always said. “They have to make us burn.”

“I can smell you, giant man.” The Bull Hand pulled back the whip with practiced slowness, drawing

the leather through his half-closed fist. He was a big man, hardmouthed and fair-skinned, with broken

veins in the whites of his eyes and the shineless teeth of a diamond miner. Although Crope had seen him

many times, hecouldn’t remember his name. That was Scurvy’s job, the remembering. Scurvy knew the

names of every man inPipeTown; knew what theywere called and what theywere.

The Bull Hand thrust the whip into his belt. “You stink like the slop pots when your mind’s not on the

wall.”

Crope kept his head down and continued to break rock. He was aware of many eyes upon him, of

Bitterbean and Iron Toe and Soft Aggie down the line.And of Scurvy Pine beyond them, watching the

Bull Hand, yet not seeming to, his eyes so cold and hard they might have been mined in the pipe.

Scurvy’s gaze flicked to the chains at Crope’s feet. Iron they were, black with tar and dead skin, and

they ran from ankle to ankle, from digger to digger, joining every man in the line. “Don’t you go

forgetting, giantman. You be ready when I give the word.”

Crope felt Scurvy’s will working upon him, warning him to keep swinging his ax. Eight yearsago they’d

met, in the tin pits west of Trance Vor. Crope never wanted to go back there again. He hated the low

ceilings of the tin caves, the darkness, the stench of bad eggs, and thedrip, drip, dripof the walls.

Spineless,that’s what everyone had called him, before Scurvy had made them stop. Scurvy had picked

no fight nor raised a weapon; he had simply told the other tin men how it was going to be. “He carved the

eyes out of an ice master who cheated him at dice,” Bitterbean had once told Crope. “Butthat’snot the

reason they ‘prisoned him.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Crope thought he saw Scurvy nod minutely toHadda the Crone.

Time passed. The diggers continued breaking the wall and the hags kept sifting through the dust.

Crope’s lash wound began to burn with the hot sting of salt. Softly, so softly that hewasn’t even sure

when the sound began, Hadda the Crone began to sing. It was like no song Crope had ever heard,high

and wavering and strange to the ear. It made the hairs around his wound stand upright. Other diggers felt

it too. At Crope’s side, Soft Aggie’s chains rattled as he stamped his feet in the mud. Bitterbean and the

others slowed their strikes, and the sound of breaking rock lessened asHadda’s song began to rise.

If she sang in words Crope did not recognize them, yet fear entered him all the same. High and higher,

her song rose, keening and wailing, her voice disappearing for brief moments as she reached pitches that

only dogs could hear. Other hags joined in, chanting low whereHadda soared high, rough where she was

as clear as glass.

Crope felt a queer coldness steal into the pipe. He watched as the shadow cast by .his ax lengthened

and darkened, until the shadow seemed more real than the ax. One of the pitch lamps blew out, and then

another.And then one of the Bull Hands cracked his whip and shouted, “Stop that fucking wailing, bitch.”

Crope risked a glance at Scurvy.Wait, his eyes said.Be ready when I give the word.

Hadda’s song turned shrill. The diamond drilled into her front tooth was the only thing that glinted in

the darkening pipe. Crope felt sweat slide along his fingers as he raised his ax for another strike. A

memory of a time long ago possessed him, a night roaring with flames. People burning alive, precious

stones popping from their jewelry in the heat, smoke curling from their mouths as they screamed. Bad

memories, and Crope did not want to think of them. Driving his ax deep into diamond rock, he sent them

smashing against the wall.

Two Bull Hands jumped down into the lower tier, where the hags squatted as they sifted dust. A

tongue of black leather came down upon a thigh, opening skin stained blue with mud. A woman

screamed. A basket full of rubble dropped to the floor, sending stones the size of rat skulls bouncing into

the hole at the center of the pipe. “That’s where the diamonds come from, that hole,” Scurvy had once

told Crope, “leads right down to the center of the earth. And the gods that live there shit them.”

Fear quieted the hags. Hadda’s song rose alone and defiant, beating against the walls like a sparrow

trapped in the pipe. As the Bull Hand moved toward her, the Crone set down her basket, straightened

her back and looked into the blackness at the bottom of the pipe.

“Rath Maer!” she murmured, and although Crope had no book learning or knowledge of foreign

tongues, he felt the words pull on the fluid in his eyes and groin, and he knew she was calling something

forth. “Rath Maer!

“RATH MAER!”

One byone the pitch lamps blew out. Crope smelled the dark, wet odor of night, caught a glimpse of

something rising from the center of the pipe . . . and then Scurvy Pine gave the word.

“To the wall!”

Men moved in the shadows with a great rattling of chains. Quickly, and with perfect violence, Scurvy

sent the tip of his pickax smashing into the nearest Bull Hand’s face. The guard jerked fiercely as he

dropped to the floor, his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching as he worked on a scream thatwould

never be heard . Bitterbean moved quickly to finish the job off, the pale flesh on his arms and many chins

quivering as he stamped the life from the Bull Hand’s lungs.

In the lower tier of thepipe all was chaos. The Bull Hands were lashing the hags, sending up sprays of

blood and pipe water to spatter against the wall. Hadda was still standing, but as Crope looked on, a

hard leather edge snapped against her temple, pulling off her cap, and revealing her scarred and shaven

scalp. A second edge found her robe, and another found her legs, and the Bull Hands stripped her bare,

and lashed her sagging flesh.

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 pipe brother’s blood as he struggled to close the wound. Down

the line, Sully Strawwas 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 toothwas 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, giantman. When we start attacking the Bull

Hands it’s your job to brea’t 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’teven remember to brea’t 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.“

Cropedidn’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

hisax, 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 knewthat a digger with a broken back

was as good as dead.

Shaking off his leg-irons, Crope crossed to where Jesiah Mump was speaking some 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 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, andhe’d learned long

and hard that nothing good ever came from interference.

Keep your eyes and hands to yourself, half-wit, for loo’ts 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 lest he bite

into Scurvy’s leg.

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, yethe’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 greatwhumfof air shook the pipe, sending the rope bridges creaking and

lifting the hair on Crope’s scalp. Men began running; hecouldn’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 thenhe’d

been thrown alive into the crowd atFrozen Square.They’d torn him apart, Bitterbean said, their hands

steaming with blood as they plunged into John Dram’s guts.

Crope listened for thechin’tof Scurvy’s chains before dropping the ax. The digger grunted as he pulled

his ankle free. “You bled me, giant man,” he murmured. “Sweetblood, 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 gleam of light caught Scurvy’s pale gray eyes. “Nine of us came from the tin pits, that winter when the

DrownedLakefroze.Who’s left, giant man?Mannie’s gone.Will’s gone.All gone. All dead, except you and

me.”

Crope remembered Will. He was one who 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 in 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 dark in the diamond well, and no 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.

Bitter-bean 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, theswiftsnicf{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 shorefast ice, three foot 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 accumulate 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 darkfires, 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 pull tight. 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!

Meeda’s 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 this night, her hands had trouble forming the shape needed to hold a hammer.

As her finger 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 foot 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

hismordreth, 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 age

for fifty more before a master bowyer would dare cut a stave from thedann, the latewood 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 chosen to live, 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 spit them onto the ice. The sky was dark, darker than it ought to be

when a 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 sheseeanything? Her hard old lenses 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. Some

times she dreamed she saidyes.

Frost smoke steamed above the ice margin, churning 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 notright. 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.

Meeda feared to call to it. She knew the look of wolf- and lynx-made wounds. She knew what

wolverines could do to creatures twice their size and what a coven of moon snakes was capable of when

they hadn’t fed in a week. Yet this didn’t smell like wolf or cat or snake. This smelled like night.

The dog had caught its mistress’s scent, and it dragged its lower torso across the ice to reach her,

trailing blood and viscera from its great black wound. Meeda barely breathed as she waited for the

creature to heel. She did not think, knew better than to think, just raised her stick to the height she

needed, waited to feel the push of the dog’s snout against her leg, then drove the butt through its heart.

“Good dog,” she said quietly, as she pulled the stick free of its ribs.

Blood and bits of bone were already freezing to the wood by the time she turned to face the shore.

“Come for me, shadows,” she said, “for I stand ready in the light of the moon.” The words were old and

she did not know where they came from, yet they were Sull words and she felt something fill her as she

spoke them. She thought at first it was courage, for her heart quickened and her grip tightened, and

something hard and excited came alive in her chest.

Then the ice around the shore began to crack. White splinters shot along the surface in a footstep

pattern toward where she stood.Crack}. Crack}. Crack}. The air rippled like water, and suddenly it

was cold enough to turn her breath to grains of ice. Meeda’s hands ached as she adjusted her grip on her

stick. Her eyes burned as she tried tosee. Something glinted. Moonlight caught an edge and ran along its

length. A man-shape shimmered into existence, dark and silvered, like no man at all. Its eyes were two

holes that held no soul. Its hand gripped a blade that drank the light. Meeda watched as the cutting edge

came up and up, saw how moonlight outlined the thing’s arm and mailed fist, yet found no purchase in the

black and voided steel. It was like looking at a distilled piece of night.

Meeda knew then that what she felt wasn’t courage. The fear was in her, twisting her bowels,

speaking to her in a voice that sounded like her own, warning her to run for the thin ice at the lake’s

center and find for herself an easy painless death. Yet something older stopped her.

Not courage, she told herself; she would not lie about that. Remembrance. The old memories were

coming back.

Ice shattered and exploded as the thing came for her. Fracture lines raced across the lake’s surface

like lightning branching in a storm. Meeda saw shadows and gleaming edges of light, smelled the dark

odor of another world. Eyes that held nothing met her own. She braced her stick to meet that cold black

blade. And then, as the sword hummed toward her, burning a mark in the air that hung there long after

the blade had passed, she noticed the shadow man’s chest. Rising and falling like a living thing.

A heart lay somewhere within the darkly weighted substance of its flesh. It was beating. And it made

Meeda’s mouth water like a meal of ham and wine.

Icewood and voided steel met with acrac’tthat sounded the beginning of an age. White pain shot up

Meeda’s arms, and it took all she had to hold her ground. Three foot of ice bowed under the mass of the

shadowed thing. Yet still she did not loose her footing. She was Sull. Every hair on her body and drop of

blood in her veins demanded that she fight.

CHAPTER

The Ice Fog Rises

They found blood on the trail on the seventh day, five spots, red against the grey of old snow. It

wasn’t new-spilt, but it might look like it to someone who was unfamiliar with killing game in midwinter.

Blood began darkening to black the moment it left the body, thickening and distilling until there was

nothing but copper and iron left. It was different when the air crackled with ice. Blood could freeze in

perfect red drops in the time it took to drip from an elk’s collarbone to the taiga below. Raif remembered

how he and Drey would scoop up frozen beads of elk blood after a kill and let them melt upon their

tongues; sweet as fresh grass and salty as sweat. The taste of winter and clan.

But this wasn’t elk’s blood before them.

Raif glanced ahead to the top of the rise, where towers of white smoke rose straight in the still air. The

trail had been rising all day and they still hadn’t found the source of the smoke. The ground was hard and

brittle here, formed from basalt and black chert. Cliffs soared to the east, high and straight as fortress

walls, guarding knife-edged mountains beyond. To the west lay the farthest tip of the Storm Margin, its

rocky draws and moraines disguised as rolling hills by a thick layer of snow. Beyond there lay the sea ice,

and beyond that lay the sea. Stormheads gathering on the westernmost horizon had begun to silver the

floes.

“What happened here?” asked Ash, who was standing above Raif as he crouched over the blood. Her

voice was clear, but there was too much space between her words. “One of the Sull breathed a vein.”

“How can you be sure?”

Raif faked a shrug. “Even a clean kill leaves more blood.” He fingered the red spots, remembering

frozen carcasses, ice-bent blades, Tern Sevrance laughing at his sons as they strained to push an elk kill

down a slope only to have it crash into the lake ice at the bottom and sink. When Raif continued

speaking his voice was low. “And the blood wasn’t sprayed. It dripped.”

“How do you know it’s human?”

Abruptly, Raif stood. He felt an irrational anger toward Ash and her questions. They both knew the

answer here. Why did she force him to speak it? “Listen,” he said.

Standing side by side on the headland, their breath whitening in the freezing air, Raif Sevrance and Ash

March listened to the sound they had been heading toward all day: a crackling hiss, as if lightning touched

down upon water.

Raif counted the columns of smoke as he said, “They were here, Mai Naysayer and Ark Veinsplitter,

they heard what we hear. They saw the smoke.” And knew it was something to be feared, so they let

blood to still their gods.

Ash nodded, as if she had heard what he had not spoken. “Should we make payment too?“

Raif shook his head and started forward. “This is not our land and not our business. There are no

debts here for us to pay.”

He hoped it was the truth.

They had been following the Sull warriors’ trail for nine days. It had led them north and west from the

Hollow River, across land Raif would never have dared to cross if it hadn’t been for the telltale markings

in the snow. Horse casts buried shallow, human hair snagged on the bark of a dead pine, a footprint

stamped on new ice. The Sull had left “Such a trail as can be followed by a clansman”Raif’s shoulders

stiffened as he walked, aware of the insult in Ark Veinsplitter’s words. “We travel without leaving any

trail”they boasted, “but will make effort to leave one for you.” Even as Raif had resented the Sull’s

J. V. Jones - Sword of Shadows 2 - A Fortress of Grey Ice

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