A Sword From Red Ice (87 page)

No reason at all.

We are Gray and the Stone Gods fear us and leave
us be. Repeating part of the Gray boast didn't help. So she tried the
Blackhail one instead. We are Blackhail, first amongst clans. And we
do not cower and we do not hide. And we will have our revenge. That
was more like it.

Waker and his father executed a series of sharp
turns that zigzagged the boat around an island of woody rushes and
steered them away from the main channel. Soon the rushes began
closing in. They formed fences on either side of the boat, rising as
tall as ten feet, bristling and pale, flattened in places and crushed
in others. They stank like meat broth turned bad. Effie scrunched up
her shoulders and brought her elbows to meet across her chest. She
did not want them scratching her. Festerers, that's what Drey would
have called them.

Both Waker and his father sat. Waker ceased poling
completely, but his father began a tilling motion with the paddle,
gently keeping the boat in motion. The channel narrowed and the
rushes created a tunnel around the hull. Rush heads scraped against
the gunwales, rustling and scratching, bending and snapping off. A
sting of pain on her cheek told Effie she had been stabbed, and as
she raised her hand to bat the offending stem away she spotted the
dim glow of lights reflecting in the water. The sight of them made
her gulp. They were a deep, unearthly green.

Waker grunted something to his father, and the old
man took his paddle from the water. Effie turned to look at him and
she watched as he cupped his hands around his lips and issued a deep
whooping noise, like a crane. A second passed and then the call was
returned from two separate locations. Waker's father grinned at Effie
as she turned to track them.

"Feed the dog a bone. Girlie's coming home."

Suddenly the reed stands cleared and water opened
up ahead. Effie saw rings of green lights burning just above the
surface. Waker stood again, but before he resumed poling he glanced
over his shoulder at Effie and Chedd. A man checking on his cargo,
Effie thought. She hoped Chedd had stopped feeling the ghosts. Behind
her, Waker's father began rummaging noisily through a sack. Effie
tried to resist thinking about what he was up to but in the end she
could not bear it, and looked round.

It took her a moment to understand what she was
seeing. Waker's father was combing his near-bald head with a pickax,
dragging the scant and greasy hairs back one by one. He had a mean
and victorious look in his eye. Effie began work on her best, most
withering glare—the man truly was insane—and then the
missing piece of the puzzle fell into place. The memory of Waker's
words from a month earlier burned through her brain like drops of
acid. "Tomorrow I put leg irons on you. Once they are on there
is nothing in my possession that can remove them. I carry no ax
strong enough to cut the chains or no pick with the correct bore to
punch out the pins."

She had believed him. She and Chedd had believed
them. She had lost her lore and nearly died because of those chains.
And he had still kept them on her. Foolishly she had thought there
was some honor between them and that after Waker had pulled her from
the water she owed it to him to be a good passenger. She had owed him
nothing. He and his father were kidnappers, and if she and Chedd had
thought there was a possibility of freeing themselves from the chains
they would have tried an escape. Chedd Limehouse and Effie Sevrance
would have given it a go. The master faker and master gamer could
have cooked something up.

Effie felt betrayed. And stupid. And suddenly very
afraid. She and Chedd were going to be fed to the bog.

Waker's father waited for full comprehension to
dawn on Effie's face and then carelessly tossed the pickax in the
water.

Facing front, Effie tried to breathe away the
tightness in her chest. She should have snatched the pickax from him
and put it through his eye. More soberly she wondered if she would
ever tell Chedd. Was there any point? Only if the fish decide not to
eat us.

A fortress of bulrushes encircled the open water
that contained Clan Gray's roundhouse. Dark paths led through the
tangle of hard canes like mouse cracks in a wall. Waker completed
punting the boat through one such crack and they floated into the
shallow lake. Giant rings of green light burned just above the water.
Effie could hear the hiss of marsh gases and smell the methane. The
Gray roundhouse was a black hump in the center of the lake. Massive
torches circled it, their stands twenty feet high, their heads shaped
like giant beehives. The same eerie green flames that flickered above
the water burned at the top of each torch.

The roundhouse sat on an island of oozing mud
shored with stones, bird skeletons, muskrat bones and a basketwork of
canes. Wooden landings and causeways extended out from the main
structure, supported by pilings for the first few feet and then left
to float upon the lake. Ladders woven from canes and rushes led below
the black water. Rafts and other shallow craft were tied to mooring
poles. Some poles sticking out from the lake had iron baskets lashed
to them; Effie could not see what was inside them.

Gray's roundhouse was not round; it was an octagon
made from rotting cedar planks and marsh mud baked into clinker.
Part of it looked to be sinking. Bands of square windows ran along
its upper stories but all of the shutters were closed. Some had been
boarded up. A few had been sealed with metal bars. Weeds were growing
from softened sections of roof timber and a snarl of chokevines was
threatening to overgrow the clan door. "Buckets of mother-mud!"
Chedd whispered with feeling. Effie had never heard that particular
curse before but it seemed to sum things up.

A man and a woman floating on a basic raft of
lashed logs moved to intercept the boat. The woman had a scrawny coon
hat perched on her head like a bird's nest—she was the one
doing the poling. The man was sitting cross-legged. He was wearing
muskrat furs dyed green, and his skin was mottled like a newt's.

"Way-Ker." he said, turning the name
into two separate words and seeming somehow to disparage it. "What
birdies have you brought us today?"

Waker set down the pole and let the boat drift
toward the raft. "Boy and a girl. Real nice. The boy has the old
animal skills and the girl—"
Waker turned to look at Effie with his oversize bulging eyes. "She's
a smart one. There's no telling all she can do."

Effie spat at him.

Waker's expression didn't change as the spittle
landed on his cheek and in his eye. He blinked, and as he did so he
seemed to be dismissing Effie Sevrance as someone who no longer held
his interest. Raising his fist he wiped his face clean and returned
his attention to the green-fur man.

"She's from Blackhail," Waker told him,
"and the boy's a Bannenman."

The man's gaze settled on Effie. His eyes were the
same black tar as the water. "Haul 'em up. Come see me
tomorrow—I'll mind you get paid."

Waker's father steered the boat so it pulled
alongside the raft. The woman with the coon hat set down her pole and
gripped the boat's gunwales to dock the boat against the raft. Waker
turned to Chedd and said, "Up." He meant both of them, but
he never looked at Effie Sevrance again.

Chedd and Effie stood, their leg chains rattling
in unison. Understanding that they had limited movement, the
green-fur man slid over to the edge of the raft and helped them
alight. Chedd first. Effie next. The man's hands dug deep into
Effie's armpits as she stumbled against him. "Good shot,"
he whispered, as he guided her down onto her backside. He might have
winked at her, but she couldn't be sure.

As soon as she and Chedd were safely on board and
sitting down, the coon hat woman pushed off from the boat. "Girlie,
girlie, girlie, girlie. Never assume you'll be treated fairly."

It was the old man's idea of a farewell. Effie
ignored it. She did not look at him or his son as the woman turned
the raft and poled toward the Grayhouse.

"I reckon you'll both be hungry," said
the green-fur man, tossing Effie and Chedd an apple each. "That
Waker is a tight one with his stores."

Chedd and Effie looked at each other and then the
apples. Was the green-fur man trying to fatten them up?

Suspicious, Effie dropped her apple in the water.
Chedd looked regretfully at his own apple but eventually did the
same.

The green-fur man shrugged. The coon-hat woman
shot out a hand and plucked Chedd's apple from the water.

"We won't go willingly to the bog,"
Effie said loudly and firmly. "We're prepared to fight."

The green-fur man chuckled knowingly. "Believe
me, girl. If I intended to feed you to the bog, the pike would be
eating your eyeballs by now."

Chedd Limehouse and Effie Sevrance exchanged a
long and surprised glance as they floated across the black-water
lake toward the Grayhouse on a raft made entirely of relief.

Raina Blackhail

Anwyn Bird was laid to rest in the manner of
honored clansmen. Laida Moon, the clan healer, and Merritt Ganlow,
the head widow, prepared the body over several days. Anwyn's brain
was scraped out with a bladed spoon, and her torso was split open and
the organ tree removed. Her skin was washed with milk of mercury and
left overnight to dry. A soft putty of gray clay, silver filings,
powdered guidestone and mercury salts was packed into her body cavity
and skull. Her eyelids and mouth were drawn closed and sealed with
clear resin. Laida fastened the torso with sutures of silver wire.
Merritt brushed and braided the three-foot-long hair, securing it
with a silver-and-jet clasp given by Raina Blackhail. The body was
covered in a winding sheet of black linen and rested on a
stone-and-timber plinth in the destroyed eastern hall.

As the women prepared the body the men rode out to
the Oldwood to select and fell a basswood. A hundred-and-twenty-year
tree was chosen and a loose line of over three hundred men formed,
each waiting to take his turn with the ax. The felled log was limbed
and dragged back to Blackhail by a team of horses. As the weather was
judged uncertain it was brought into the house. Longhead hollowed it
out with a carpenter's chisel, and the roughly finished log was left
to cure for two days.

It had not been long enough, for the sap was still
oozing and the sulfur wash that had been brushed on the inside walls
now dripped on Anwyn's naked body. The clan matron had been entombed
in the hollow of the tree. Raina shivered as she saw the yellow
splotches on the mottled blue skin of the corpse. She stood on the
greatcourt and watched the men lift the basswood onto a flat-bedded
cart, their movements synchronized by terse orders from Orwin Shank.
The great weight of the twelve-foot log made some of the older
clansmen shake, but pride kept them shouldering their share of the
burden.

Hundreds of clansmen and clanswomen stood in
silence as Orwin Shank clicked the team of horses into motion and
drove Anwyn Bird's body east toward the Wedge. It had been a small
victory for Raina, that insistence that Anwyn not be laid to rest in
the Oldwood as was planned and considered proper. She had won it not
by reasonable argument or by wielding whatever small power she had
left as chief's wife. She had won it by a near-hysterical fit thrown
in the presence of many people in the greathearth. "No,"
she had cried when she learned where Stannig Beade intended to place
the body. "No. No. NO!"

After the outburst Stannig Beade had seemed
pleased to let Raina have her way. It had been dark days for her then
and she looked back now and realized she had lost some essential
portion of control. And she was not sure she had it back.

Certainly she knew enough to play her role as
grieving friend and chief's wife on the greatcourt this gray and
cloudy morning. She kept her silence and nodded acknowledgments at
people, her bearing grave. But beyond that she felt wild and
not-properly-hinged; an insane person playing at being sane.

People were treating her as if she were a damaged
piece of pottery likely to break. They were careful with her,
watchful, attempting to buffer her from shocks. Raina despised such
treatment and would not normally have stood for it, but she could not
rally the will to bring it to an end. It had its comforts, the
buffering, the cautious care. She was fed and clucked over, shielded
from the messages that arrived nearly daily from Ganmiddich and
Bannen, and relieved of the duty of running this vast and creaking
house.

Merritt had stepped into her place, emerging from
the widows' hearth like an ancient warrior called by a sacred horn.
Raina did not mind it much. At least Merritt was a Hailsman.

"Are you not coming?" Merritt said to
her now as the cart lurched from the solid stone of the court onto
the softer, lower surface of the road. "I'll walk with you."

The head widow's hand fluttered toward Raina's arm
but Raina stepped away from it. She wanted no one touching her. "I
am not going."

Merritt opened her mouth to protest this latest
strangeness, but then thought better of it. Lips pressed into a tense
line, she nodded curtly, and left to join the procession that was
forming behind the cart.

Raina stood still against the flow of people.
Corbie Meese, holding his delicate wife Sarolyn firmly by the waist,
nodded to her as he passed. No man or woman would ride a horse to the
laying-down of Anwyn Bird. They would walk the league and a half to
the Wedge, where Stannig Beade would be waiting for them by a site he
had deemed suitable to one of such high status. It would be a wooded
glade cleared of snow or a stone bank above a stream, or perhaps she
would be laid close to one of the paths so all that used the Wedge in
the coming months would see her slowly blackening corpse and pay the
respects that were its due.