A Sword From Red Ice (59 page)

The Outlanders

"Where does Thomas Argola live?" Raif
asked.

Stillborn did not much like this question. They
were standing on the shell-shaped ledge in front of the Maimed Man's
cave, shoveling snow. A storm had hit in the night and spring had
rolled back into winter. When Raif looked south to the clanholds he
saw a world turned white.

"Don't get close to him," Stillborn
said, his breath making icy clouds from the words. He was dressed in
his normal garb of a sleeveless tunic and a kilt over pants. His
concession to the cold was a glossy black sheepskin draped over his
shoulders and tied in place with string. Reaching the area where his
firestack was buried, he stopped shoveling and began to scrape. He
wasn't about to waste good wood. "The outlander's not one of
us."

That meant he wasn't clan. Raif chucked snow into
the Rift. None of them were clan. "I'll find him for myself."

Stillborn harumped. Straightening his back, he
said, "Come here."

Raif crossed to his side and looked up. Above him
the buckled and uneven layers of cliff rock, caves and ledges rose
for over two hundred feet.

"See that small gray door, near the same
color as the cliff?" Raif nodded. "That's where he lives.
Only man in the Rift to have an actual, hinged, godforsaken door."
Stillborn scowled at it. "And a lock."

Raif broke away from him and went back to
shoveling. Stillborn was disappointed that no plans had yet been made
to seize control of the Maimed Men from Traggis Mole. He did not know
what Raif knew. Raif wasn't even sure what he knew himself. The
Robber Chief had been badly wounded by one of the Unmade, and for
more reason than one Raif needed to find out what that meant.

He could feel it as he put his back into digging
out the snow; the liquid tingle in his left shoulder where the Shatan
Maer's claw had punctured him. Abruptly, he set the shovel against
the cliff wall. "I'll be back later," he said.

Stillborn showed his teeth. "Be sure to
knock." Snow had stopped falling from the clouds but it was
still moving in the air around the Rift. Ice crystals sparkled on the
updrafts and blew off ledges in plumes. Raif stayed close to the
cliffwall and took short steps. Men and women where out shoveling
snow, building fires, visiting one another and taking fresh air. A
group of children on the rimrock were building a ghoul out of snow.
People were in high spirits, glad that the storm had passed by
quickly and the temperature was rising.

The rope ladders were slick and dangerous and Raif
was glad of the rough pads on his boarskin gloves. Rock grit had been
sprinkled over some of the more dangerous spots—narrow ledges,
wooden gangplanks and landings around ladders—and for the first
time Raif realized that the Maimed Men were capable of working
together. He even found he was less disliked: no one glared at him or
threw stones. Despite what Traggis Mole had predicted, Addie and
Stillborn had shared credit for the meat brought back from the
overnight hunt, and all who ate that night knew that Raif Twelve Kill
was owed part of their thanks. The snagcat pelt was different. Set
apart. To bring down a cat was a feat demanding praise and Stillborn
had claimed all laudings for himself.

Raif lost sight of the gray, unfinished wood door
as he worked his way up through the city, but he had a sense of its
general location and headed east on one of the long ledges. As he
neared a rope hoist he slowed down and considered whether to take it.
The hoist bypassed an inset ledge and headed up to the next broad
plateau of rimrock.

"No need to go any further, my dear boy."
Yustaffa stepped out from the shadows of a cave mouth. "As you
can see I'm already here." He looked like a fat snow bear who
had rolled in jewels. "You like?" he said, glancing down at
his outfit. "Should I spin?"

"No," Raif told him. The jewel things
were dazzling. They seemed to be suspended in invisible netting over
the white winter pelts he was wearing. The feather-light fur of ice
hares formed a tunic that looked made of fluff.

"Twelve Kill Joy I should call you," he
said, and then went ahead and spun anyway. "Yustaffa must haffa
spin. Care to talk?"

"No."

The expression on Yustaffa's smooth plump face
hardened. "Wouldn't hurt the future king to play nice."

Raif stared at him, blinking and dazzled, as he
spun again and walked away. Were there no secrets here?

The pleasure he had taken in the day gone, Raif
stepped into the hoist basket and pulled on the thick rope. Snow had
not affected the pulley's motion and he ascended quickly, placing
fist over fist. The basket had been woven from tough wicker and it
creaked and sawed but held firm.

Alighting on the rimrock, he looked for the gray
door. Almost certain it was on the inset ledge just below him, he
searched for a place to make the jump down. Once he'd found a
suitable cut in the rimrock, he squatted to inspect it, then made
the leap. On landing he felt a jolt of pain in his still-tender ankle
and had to stand a moment to relieve it. As he pivoted his foot left
and then right to test it, he became aware that someone was watching
him. Turning his head he saw a young woman standing by a cave mouth
holding a handful of snow.

She was wearing a moss-green dress of felted wool
with a black bodice laced snug against her waist. Her skin was
deeply, almost greenly, golden and her dark hair, which was caught
loosely in an amber band at her neck, fell in waves to the small of
her back. Seeing Raif look at her she rotated her wrist and let the
snow fall from her hand.

Raif looked away, put his weight on his throbbing
ankle, and then looked back. She was still watching at him. He could
not decipher her expression, nor could he think of anything to say.
Here was the last place on earth he would have thought to find
beauty.

Knowing he would have to walk past her to search
for the gray door, he became acutely aware of his movements. He
cursed his ankle, for even as he took his first step he knew it would
make him limp. Glancing ahead, he spied two other cave mouths, one
closed off with a bamboo screen and one that stood unguarded. He
continued walking. To attempt to swing back up to the rimrock while
the woman watched seemed an action loaded with potential for
embarrassment. As he neared her he couldn't decide where to look, and
his gaze jumped from her face to the way ahead and then,
inexplicably, to her feet. She was standing in a half-moon of roughly
cleared snow.

He missed the fact that she was also standing in
front of an open door. The door opened inward and had swung into the
shadows of the timber-framed cave mouth. Only when he passed the
woman and stole a quick glance back did he see it. Faced with a
choice between stopping, turning and speaking to her, or continuing
to walk along the ledge, he was uncertain. The fact that the ledge
came to an end just beyond the unguarded cave helped clear his mind.
He had to go back. She watched him as he came toward her a second
time. The cuff of her green dress was wet where she had held the
snow.

"Does Thomas Argola live here?" he
asked, satisfied that his voice sounded normal.

"He does." She looked at him with eyes
that were darkly, greenly, brown.

Raif waited, but she offered no more. "Is he
here? Can I see him?"

"He is here. I will ask if he will see you."
She did not immediately move like others would. Instead she created a
deliberate pause and did nothing to fill it.

Just when Raif thought he should speak again, she
whirled around and headed for the door. As he waited he searched for,
and found, the pile of snow she had dropped. The imprint of her
fingers were still upon it.

"Raif." The slight and loose form of
Thomas Argola appeared in the doorway. "Come."

Raif followed him into the cave. Two copper lamps
set on recesses in the wall were glowing with smokeless light. The
cave was small and nearly round. Its ceiling was strikingly uneven,
the rock dipping low in concertina-like folds and then muscling into
high vaults. A natural flue had formed at the apex of the tallest
vault and Raif could feel its draw. At least two other chambers led
from the cave where the rock wall bored down into the cliff. Their
entrances were screened with lengths of faded gold and green brocade.
One of them was moving. The girl was gone.

"Sit." Thomas Argola spread a
long-fingered, olive-skinned hand toward the cushions and rugs
arranged around a small brass brazier set at knee height.

Raif resisted the direction, preferring to move
about the space, looking at glazed boxes, straw baskets, frayed silk
rugs and tarnished metal bowls piled with rolled parchments, hollow
eggs, cards of silk thread and dried yarrow heads that lay on the
cave floor. He was too keyed up to sit.

Realizing that Thomas Argola was waiting for him
to speak, Raif searched for a way to start a conversation. The girl
had thrown him off center. "We're lucky the storm didn't stay
longer."

Thomas Argola executed a movement that looked like
a controlled drop, collapsing his body onto one of the silk cushions.
"Our luck is someone else's misfortune." He spoke the words
with a pointed lightness that Raif suspected was intended to convey
meaning. He waited, and the outlander spoke again. "The storm
was disturbed, its course deflected south."

Raif halted by the brocade screen that had been
moving when he entered. A design of dragons and pear trees was woven
into the cloth. "How is that possible?"

"It very nearly isn't." Thomas Argola
bit each word as he said it.

Feeling his skin cool, Raif turned to face the
outlander. Argola's expression was flat and challenging. A speck of
blood was caught between his cornea and the white of his eye. Seeing
it Raif abandoned the hope they were talking about natural forces.

"We live in dangerous times," Argola
said in confirmation. "Sit and I will pour us some broth."

Raif sat. It was hard to comprehend what he had
just heard, and he took the small bone cup offered by the outlander
without acknowledgment. A storm could be made to alter its course?
Surely not.

"To our health," Argola said, raising
his own cup, "and sanity."

They seemed good things to toast just then. Cups
struck, Raif and the outlander drank deeply. The broth was well made,
salty and rich with marrow and thyme. The outlander seemed pleased to
pour Raif a second cup.

"Mallia makes it, though she must do without
the ginger from our homeland. Thyme serves as its substitute."

Raif drank and did not speak. He told himself he
wasn't waiting, but he didn't think he fooled Argola.

"My sister," the outlander revealed
eventually.

Now he had said it, Raif saw the resemblance; the
coloring, the hair. But not the eyes. They were different. Needing to
change the subject, he asked, "What do you know of Traggis
Mole's . . . health?"

Argola set down the cup by his foot and watched as
the liquid it contained steamed. Seconds passed, and then he said,
"He has shown you the wound?"

"No."

"Be glad of it," Argola retorted
quickly. "I have treated it and continue to dress it, and it is
not a sight I would wish on anyone."

Shuddering, Raif felt a twinge of pain in his
shoulder. A little icy jab. "How bad is it?"

"Answer that and I give you the keys to this
city."

Raif worked his way through the outlander's words,
caught off-guard by their slyness. Remember the mist, he told
himself. The man sitting before him had pulled fog from a lake on a
still dry night at Black Hole. While everyone else in the raid party
was fighting to gain entry to the mine, Thomas Argola had been
packing Bear's saddlebags with enough supplies to carry Raif into the
Want. It's a hard journey north, he had said, knowing that for every
hundred who went there only two or three ever returned.

And here he was now, breaking the confidence of
his chief and arming his rival with information. Raif stopped himself
and forced a correction. The outlander was not clan and Traggis Mole
was no clan chief; the expectation of loyalty did not exist.

The cushion Raif sat on had tassels on its corners
and he caught one in his fist. So Traggis Mole was in a bad way.
"What happened?"

Argola made a movement with his hand. "The
thing that got onto the rimrock that night was never human. Even when
it lived in flesh it had been some kind of monstrosity. More dog than
man. It barely knew how to wield a blade, but it was strong—and
fast. No one could get near it. Eventually the Dancer caught its
blade in his sword-breaker, and as Linden Moodie came in to attack
its unarmed flank, Traggis Mole took the side bearing the sword.
Something happened. The creature's blade slid free of the breaker and
it whipped around and tore through the Mole's side. Moodie cut off
its arm. But it was too late. The damage had been done."

Raif nodded softly to himself as he compared
Addie's account of the attack to Argola's. "The Mole kept the
severity of his injuries hidden."

"Wouldn't you?"

The flatness in Argola's voice irritated Raif. He
stood. "What happens when someone is injured by the Unmade?"
As he spoke he heard the false note in his voice—the forced
casualness of the question—and he imagined Argola would hear it
too. The outlander looked at him carefully. "It depends on the
extent of the injury. The Mole took a hit to the chest with voided
steel. The blade missed his heart but passed through some of his
lung. It didn't kill him . . . but it will. Not from infection, not
as you and I know it. The wound is clean, if you can call it that.
It's what the voided steel left behind . . . some of itself. It's a
blackness eating away at him, incinerating his flesh like acid. I
can only suture the wound so far. It needs to . . ." he
hesitated, "vent."