A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) (50 page)

Effie observed him through the canvas flap. His fine silvery hair was floating on the breeze, revealing the flesh at the back of his neck. Engorged veins had turned the skin gray. He must have sensed her attention for he turned toward her briefly and said, “Sit down, girl. Nothing to see but an old man with a bent stick.”

Reluctantly she moved back. The wagon was traveling over a rocky path, and the wooden ribs began to sway wildly from side to side. The lamp clattered noisily against the bale hook, and the chicken crate she normally sat on kept sliding backward and forward like something not battened down on a boat. It made her feel a bit sick. Crouching in the corner, she tried to settle the rolling in her belly.

Minutes passed and there was still no sign of pursuit. Effie thought it strange that clansmen in their own territory had reason to fear city men, but then she knew little about the border clans. Perhaps Bannen was more dangerous than Blackhail.

Suddenly, she heard Druss
Whoa!
the ponies, and the entire wagon lurched massively to the left. Effie was thrown forward as the ponies pulled to a halt. Leather whined, then snapped. One of the lidded baskets broke free from its mooring and fell with a heavy thud by Effie’s head.

“Are you in one piece back there?” came Clewis Reed’s voice through the canvas.

Effie groaned an affirmation. She was lying face down on the bed of the wagon and her left ear was on fire.

“Standing water on the road,” he said. “Nothing more. We’ll be taking a turn for the trees now anyway. I’d say we’ve seen the last of the trappers.” He shouted ahead to Druss, and the wagon jerked into motion once more.

Effie raised a hand to her ear and winced. The basket had clipped her as it fell, and her earlobe felt strange and swollen. As she lifted her head from the floor she noticed a flickering yellow light on the canvas. Blinking slowly, she tried to work out its source. It was beautiful, warm as sunshine. Magical in its brilliance. Perhaps she’d been knocked out and this was a dream. Only ears didn’t throb in dreams, she was pretty sure of that. Turning her head slowly she checked to see if the canvas flap was gaping, letting in light.

That was when she saw it. The lidded basket had burst open, and five rods of metal had slid out.

Gold.

TWENTY-FOUR

A Surlord’s Progress

“W
e can reach the clanholds in twenty-four days, weather permitting. A good scout can Whalve that.”

“Not at this time of year, with the floods.” Penthero Iss halted in his progress of Spire Vanis’s northern wall to look Marafice Eye in the face. The Protector General of Spire Vanis was clothed in the red leather cloak of his office, with the great lead killhound broach at his throat, and his black iron birdhelm crooked in his left arm. His one small eye was squinting against the whiteness of the morning mist and the strange disembodied rays of sunlight that shot through it like enemy fire. Marafice Eye ill liked being contradicted, but they were alone here, upon the limestone, and the Knife was learning to school his responses. Any man who sought to be Surlord had to choose his battles carefully.

Iss watched him drop his shoulders with an effort. “The darkcloaks I sent out at Atonement should be back any day now. I’ll have better intelligence then.”

The word “I” sounded a warning to Iss. It was a tug on the reins of power. Marafice Eye was demonstrating the range of his influence, now grown diverse enough to command companies of notoriously volatile darkcloaks and gather intelligence from sources far beyond the city. But not far enough. With the minutest stretching of his lips, Iss turned smartly on his heels and continued his progress, leaving the Knife no choice but to follow him.
Later he will see just how much farther a surlord must reach.

The Almsgate progress had begun before dawn. From high atop the northern wall it was possible to look out upon the vast tent city erected to accommodate Spire Vanis’s ever-growing army. A ragged patchwork of hide and canvas tents spread wide and unlovely across the Vale of Spires below, turning furrowed fields to lakes of mud and crushing the first new grasses of spring. The stench of horse manure, unwashed bodies and woodsmoke rose like marsh gas from the encampment, and there was at least one grangelord in the progress who held a scented pomander to his nose to void the stink. The progress had been requested by Marafice Eye so he might show his surlord the full breadth of the army he was massing. It had been intended as a small affair—ranking generals, masters-of-arms, and a select few grangelords who were not wholly unsympathetic to the Knife—but word had spread, as word was wont to do, and half the grangelords in the city had turned up.

Marafice Eye was furious. And he’d made the mistake of showing it. Iss was an old hand at these things; knew all about the delicate egos that vied for influence in the city, and knew to expect greater numbers. Any attempt to exclude powerful grangelords from a public procession was doomed from the start to fail. The Knife would have been better served inviting them all along from the beginning—the progress would never have taken on its air of secrecy and exclusivity and hardly anyone would have bothered to turn up—but then, the Knife had much to learn.

Iss was conscious of a falling in his spirits as he headed toward the great iron edifice of Almsgate. The wall was fifteen feet deep here, swelling to accommodate the gate towers. Lead-capped merlons and roofed archers’ roosts protected the walkway, yet Iss himself did not feel fully protected. At his back, at a carefully gauged distance of three feet, walked the Knife, and behind him, out of earshot as custom demanded, walked the eighty or so grangelords and generals who formed the remainder of the progress. Lisereth Hews was in attendance, mother to the Whitehog and the only woman in the party. Iss had spied her earlier, dressed in the white and silver of House Hews, her ermine cloak paler than the limestone she walked on, her ungloved fingers glittering with a dozen surlords’ rings. She had been daughter to the surlord Rannock Hews and now fancied being mother to one too. Many counted her a beauty, with her pale green eyes and unlined skin. Iss counted her dangerous. Her father had been slain before her eyes in Hound’s Mire. She knew what it took to make a surlord.

It was only a matter of time before she sent her assassins out.

Briefly, Iss turned his head and acknowledged her with a small bow. She returned the gesture in kind, her own bow displaying the proper degree of genuflection even though her gaze never dropped once from his. House Hews was ever subtle in its defiance.

“Lady of the Eastern Ranges,” he addressed her on a whim. “Walk with us.” Turning his back, he did not wait to hear her acknowledgment. The brisk swishing of her silks and furs told him how eager she was to be included in the surlord’s party.

Marafice Eye was not gentle around women, and he made no courtly show of welcome, nor did he give up his place for her, forcing the lady to walk around him to draw abreast of the surlord. She was a little breathless when she reached him. The morning light shone directly on her face, showing Iss that while her many admirers were wrong about her unlined complexion, they were right about her eyes. They were green like a cat’s.

“I trust Garric is well?” he said. “I notice he’s not among us this morning.”

Lisereth Hews made a small gesture toward the encampment. “My son has duties with his hideclads. He leads the cavalry drills at dawn.”

Her pride was unmistakable. Iss chose to inflame it. “I’ve heard he’s begun styling himself the Whitehog, after his great-grandfather. It’s gratifying to see a young man honor his ancestors. Let us hope
their
fates do not befall
him
.”

Lisereth Hews stiffened. Diamonds woven into her hair-veil threw sparks. “My ancestors’ fates have never been less than glorious. House Hews has given rise to forty-seven surlords. And you are mistaken, Surlord, if you imagine I would discourage my son from following them.”

Iss raised an eyebrow. Lisereth Hews was a clever woman, but she had the unhappy habit of turning shrill when defending her son, and it was remarkably easy to goad her. “My dear lady. I make no mistakes regarding your ambitions, you can depend upon it.” With a flick of his wrist he dismissed her, walking briskly forward with the Knife so that she stood alone on the limestone until the larger company met her.

Almost it was a relief to have her intentions out in the open.

Ahead lay the first of the northern gate towers, drum-shaped donjons built to house a hundred men. The wall was five storeys high here, but the towers were higher by another three storeys, and they dwarfed the gate they warded. Almsgate was cast from pure clannish iron, and no device had ever been built that could raise it. Manpower was needed. Two hundred brothers-in-the-watch raised it every morning on ropes as thick as a child’s thigh. When it was dropped at night the sound of iron hitting iron could be heard as far away as the Quartercourts. Whores timed their shifts to it, and young men tested their manhood beneath it, standing in the gate trough until the very moment the warden called the drop. A gold coin left in the trough as the gate fell would be flattened to the thinness of parchment and stamped with the impressions of gate bolts. It was legal tender, and highly regarded, and many contracts within the city stipulated payment by Almsgold.

Iss thought the gate ugly and barbaric, ill fitted to the creamy limestone walls it was set within. Still, he had to admit its efficacy. Not once in the thousand years since its forging had an invading army breached it.

Pausing by the entrance to the western donjon, Iss made a show of asking his Knife questions regarding the army arrayed below, allowing Marafice Eye the chance to point and gesture and demonstrate his command. It was part of their deal.
Lead an army for me
, Iss had said at midwinter in the Blackvault.
And in return I’ll name you as my successor.
It was far too early for such a reckless declaration—even Marafice Eye would admit that—yet small things such as this parley led toward it. Eighty of the most powerful men in the city stood watch as the surlord paid deference to his Knife.

Marafice Eye was aware of it, but his mind was a soldier’s mind, and he was soon engrossed in the details of wagon trains and supplies. “We’ll need provisions along the way,” he said, his huge dog hands pushing northward. “The northern granges are wary of our passage. I’ve had Ballon Troak and Mallister Gryphon raising hell over it, threatening to withdraw their hideclads if we pass through either of their granges. Mother of bitches. They fight me at every turn.”

They’re playing a game with you
, Iss thought to say but didn’t.
This is about compensation, nothing more. Gold would solve it; that or the promise of first spoils on some lesser roundhouse like Harkness.
It was an unusual thing, this raising of a surlord, and Iss was unsure how to accomplish it. There were benefits—he could not deny it. Marafice Eye was the most feared man in Spire Vanis, his name spoken with awe on the streets and with outrage in the granges. If a man counted on being Surlord for life he needed such a second at his back. But there were dangers, too. How long would Marafice Eye be content to wait for his prize? Butcher-bred in Hoargate, he had the kind of hard, practical ambition that seldom overlooked chances. He’d move at the first smell of blood. They all would. Lisereth Hews and her son the Whitehog, the Forsworn who’d been expelled from the city since Borhis Horgo’s death, John Rullion and his hard-liners, and the ancient houses of Crieff, Gryphon, Stornoway, Pengaron and Mar.

Iss shuddered, though cloaked in velvet-lined vair the winds from the mountain barely touched him. It moved a man strangely to contemplate his own death. The absurdity of favoring one candidate for murder over another did not diminish the fear.

Nodding to the gate warden, Iss indicated his intent to enter the donjon. From his years of service in the Rive Watch he knew the city’s gate towers well. They were damp and cold, the stairs and ways built narrow to exclude the passage of more than one man. The grangelords would have to pick up their heavy cloaks and travel in single file. Let them wonder as they rounded dark corners if an assassin was waiting in the shadows on the other side. That would be the closest most would get to becoming Surlord, that knowing of a surlord’s fear.

Marafice Eye commanded the gate towers and knew all about their dangers. Without waiting for his surlord’s permission, he stepped to the head of the party, his sword hand descending to the hilt of his red blade, his voice barking a command to the warden. The warden took possession of the Knife’s blackened birdhelm, then ran ahead to arrange the firing of torches.

Shouted calls to order accompanied the surlord’s entrance. Inside the donjon the temperature and light level dropped. The smell of old rankness, of fluids spilled by torture and cog grease long soured, sweated from the stones like groundwater. Iss descended swiftly, the anxious murmurs of grangelords falling soft upon his ears.

When Iss reached ground level Marafice Eye stood waiting by the donjon’s sole entrance, a doorway so narrow that a large man like the Knife had to face side on to enter. A sept of sworn brothers flanked him.

“Surlord,” he said formally, his gaze flicking over Iss’s shoulder to check that they were alone and that the rest of the party still straggled far behind. “I present your personal guard. Good men, picked by my own hand. Sworn to protect you in my absence.”

A personal guard? What mischief is this?
Iss knew better than to show surprise. Coolly, he inspected the sept, taking his time to note their weapons and their faces. They were big men, cloaked in black rather than their dress reds, their killhound brooches set with ruby eyes denoting ten-year service. Iss recognized two of them. Axal Foss was known as the Knighthunter, for the great number of Forsworn he’d slaughtered during—and after—the Expulsions. He was a veteran of twenty years, and had risen to the rank of Captain Protector. The other man was Styven Dalway, blond and handsome and much admired by grange-bred ladies. Iss had recruited him in Almstown sixteen years earlier after seeing him fight singlehanded against the King of Pimps and two of his cronies. Apparently, Dalway’s sister was a seasoned whore who’d failed to pay her cut to Edo Shrike, the self-styled King of Pimps, and the King of Pimps had seen her flogged for it. Dalway had killed him on the Street of the Five Traitors with half of Almstown watching.