Watcher of the Dead

Watcher of the Dead

Sword of Shadows – Book 4

J.V. Jones

To Jim Frenkel,
Who makes the books better

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to Alan Rubsam, the good people at Tor
who turned this manuscript into a book, cover and all, and to Paul
for keeping the home fires burning.

WHEN HE WAS seventeen, Raif Sevrance of
Clan Blackhail developed the ability to heart-kill game. One morning
while he was hunting in the Badlands with his brother Drey, his
father and chief were slain back at camp. When he and his brother
returned to Blackhail they found that Mace Blackhail, the chief’s
foster son, had declared himself head of the clan. Mace blamed the
murders on Vaylo Bludd, chief of a rival clan. When Bludd sacked the
Dhoonehouse of rival clan Dhoone a week later, Mace’s story of
Bludd aggression gained credibility. Raif found himself isolated. He
alone believed that Mace Blackhail was a liar and a chief-killer.

War against clan Bludd followed, as
Hailsmen sought to avenge their chief’s death. When Mace
received word that a caravan of Bluddsmen were on the road, heading
west to occupy the Dhoonehouse, he ordered an attack. Raif rode with
the ambush party. When he discovered the caravan contained women and
children, not warriors, he refused to participate in the slaughter.
For disobeying an order on the field and deserting his fellow
clansmen in battle, Raif was branded a traitor to his clan. Four days
later, Raif left Blackhail in the company of his uncle Angus Lok. His
oath to protect Blackhail was now broken, even while he had sought to
act with faith and loyalty.

The two men headed south. Upon arrival
at Duff’s stovehouse, they learned news of the massacre on the
Bluddroad had preceded them. When challenged by a group of Bludd
warriors, Raif admitted to being present during the slaughter. He
told no one that he took no part in the massacre; loyalty to his clan
prevented him from defending himself at their expense. With this
admission, however, Raif forever damned himself in the eyes of
Bluddsmen. He was the only Hailsmen they knew for a certainty who was
present during the slaughter.

When Angus and Raif arrived at the city
Spire Vanis they rescued a young woman named Ash March who was being
hunted down by the city’s Protector General, Marafice Eye.
Angus had a strong reaction when he saw the girl and immediately put
himself in danger to save her. Raif’s skill with a bow proved
invaluable. He single-handedly rescued the girl by shooting arrows
through her pursuers’ hearts.

As Raif, Ash and Angus headed north to
the city of Ille Glaive, Raif learned that Ash was the foster
daughter of the Surlord of Spire Vanis. She had run away when she
learned that her foster father intended to imprison her in the city’s
citadel, the Inverted Spire. Heritas Cant, a friend of Angus Lok’s,
provided the explanation for the Surlord’s behavior. Cant told
Ash she was the first Reach to be born in a thousand years. She alone
possessed the ability to unlock the Blind, the prison without a key
that contained the destructive might of the immortal Endlords. Cant
warned Ash she must discharge her Reach-power or die.

Raif and Angus agreed to accompany Ash
to the Cavern of Black Ice, the one place where she could discharge
her power without tearing a hole in the Blindwall that holds back the
Endlords. As soon as their small party reentered the clanholds they
were captured by Bluddsmen. The Bludd chief had lost seventeen
grandchildren on the Bluddroad, and he was determined to make Raif
Sevrance pay for those losses. After days of torture, Raif developed
a fever and began to fail. Yet when Death came to take him she
changed her mind. “Perhaps I won’t take you yet,â€

White Bear

EVEN THOUGH THE temperature had not
risen above freezing in nine months, the bear carcass was not frozen.
When Sadaluk, the Listener of the Ice Trappers, poked it with the
narwhal tusk he used as a walking stick, the flesh rippled beneath
the coarse white pelt. It was a full-grown male, past its prime, with
battle scars denting its snout and a ragged strip of cartilage in
place of its left ear. Dead for at least thirty days, Sadaluk
decided, squatting by the creature’s head. The eyes and soft
tissue around the muzzle had mummified in the dry air, and drift snow
had compacted in the Y of its splayed rear legs.

You did not need to be a listener to
know it for an ill omen.

It was Nolo who had found the bear.
Nolo’s dogs had sniffed out the carcass—most unluckily
for Nolo as they were leashed to his sled at the time. In their
excitement, the dogs capsized the sled and scattered Nolo’s
load of willow cords and blocks of frozen whale oil. Nolo was thrown
from the runner, landing hard on the river ice. By the time he got to
his feet, the dogs and the empty sled had reached the carcass a
quarter league downstream. Straightaway Nolo knew something was
wrong. Hungry dogs didn’t stand three feet away from a
potential meal and howl like half-crazed wolves. Hungry dogs ate.
Nolo was young and still distracted by the pleasures of his new wife,
but even he knew that.

Glancing at the rising sun, Sadaluk
drew himself upright. His elbow joints creaked—a recent
development that both bothered and delighted him. Age was his
stock-in-trade, and it did not hurt a listener to have a body that
snapped as it moved. Reminding the young of their youth was one of
his tasks. Still, it did not mean that he liked lying within his
sleeping skins every morning, waiting for his body to start acting
like something that might actually take his weight.

Sadaluk drilled his stick into the
snow, cleaning. Behind him he was aware that Nolo and the other five
hunters were waiting for him to speak. As was proper, they stood in a
half circle facing into the sun. All knew better than to cast a
shadow on a dead bear.

When he was ready Sadaluk turned to
look at them. The river’s slip-stream riffled their caribou
pelts and auk feathers, and blew their exhaled breath against their
faces. All were winter-lean and strong-bodied. Kill notches on their
spears told of varying degrees of bravery and luck. Nolo was the
youngest, but none of the six were over thirty. Their faces were
still, but Sadaluk could see through the holes in their eyes to the
fear that slid between their thoughts.

“Nolo. Retrieve your dog whip.â€

Departures

RAIF SEVRANCE RETURNED from the
deerhunt to find the lamb brothers breaking up camp. A sharp wind
cutting from the east pushed the men’s dark robes against their
longbones. The rising sun shone along the same path as the wind,
creating shadows that blew from the brothers like sand off dunes.

Four of the five tents had already been
reduced to skeletons. Hides and guideropes had been stowed. The
corral was still standing, but the mules and the ewe had been strung
on nooselines and led to graze. Frost had grown overnight on the
tough winter rye, yet the lamb brothers’ animals knew enough
about hardship to take their meals where they found them. Warmer
temperatures during the day had melted most of the surrounding ground
snow, but lenses of ice were still fixed between the rocks.

Raif approached camp from the forested
headland to the east. He’d opened and drained the deer carcass,
but he could still smell its blood. It was a yearling. In a moonless
hour past midnight he’d found her stealing milk from her dam.
Her mother had just given birth and by rights the milk was for the
newborn. The yearling had other ideas, and kept butting aside her
younger brother to get to the udder and the rich green milk leaking
from the teats. It had been a difficult kill. Three hearts beating in
close proximity. Raif had known straight away which animal he
wanted—the newborn and the dam were not for him—and he
had been forced to wait under cover of a stand of hemlock until his
target moved clear of the group. He had thought about taking the shot
when the yearling stood directly in front of the dam. Part of him had
wanted to test himself. See if he could skewer two hearts with one
arrow. Yet if he killed the dam he’d have to kill the
newborn—it wouldn’t survive a day without milk or
protection—and one man without horse or cart could not bring
back three kills.

You kill it, you butcher it. Da’s
words concerning hunting were law.

What would Tem Sevrance make of his son
now? What advice would he give to a man who could heart-kill any
target he set in his sights? What laws governed Raif Twelve Kill,
Watcher of the Dead?

Resettling the butterflied carcass on
his shoulders, Raif entered the camp. Tents had been raised twenty
days earlier on new-cleared softwood. The stumps were still oozing
pitch. Circles of matted yellow pine needles marked the former
positions of the tents, and potholes of blackened earth told of
longfires, cook fires and smoke pits. One of the lamb brothers was
filling in the latrine. Another was using a long pole to unhook a
slab of bear fat from the safe tree.

Raif shivered. Waiting in the pines had
chilled him. The air had been still in the early hours before dawn
and the frost smoke had risen: white mist that switched between ice
and vapor and then back again. Five hours later and he could still
feel it cooling his burned skin. The damaged muscle in his chest had
shrunk and stiffened, pulling on the sutures and creating tension
between his ribs. The wound on his left shoulder, where the lamb
brothers had drawn out the splinter of unmade horn, was healing in
unexpected ways. The skin above the exit wound had knitted closed,
but the wormhole underneath remained open. Raif doubted it would ever
heal. He was not and would never be whole.

All of us are missing something,
Yustaffa had said that four months ago in the Rift. He had been
talking about the Maimed Men and their practice of taking a pound of
flesh from anyone seeking to join them—Raif himself had lost
half a finger in one of their initiation ceremonies. Yet he now
understood Yustaffa’s words went beyond physical damage. Maimed
Men were outcasts, orphans, fugitives, runaways: they had a world of
things to miss beyond flesh.

Drey. Effie.

Raif named his brother and sister in
his head and then pushed all thoughts of them away. He had developed
a sense about when it was safe to think of the people he loved, when
it was possible to picture them in his mind without the pain of
losing them. Today was not such a day.

“Got yourself a pretty doe,â€

A House in the City

SNOW FELL ON Ille Glaive on the night
known as Gallows Eve. Warmed by the spring sun during the day, the
black mass of the city melted the snow on contact. Paved streets were
slick with grease. Dirt roads were sodden and stinking, slowly
disintegrating into rivers of animal waste and mud. The rats were
out. Thousands of rodents scuttled along ledges and drain ditches, up
crumbling walls, armless statues, soot-blackened trees and lead
roofs. The explosive snap of traps being sprung was the only noise
that broke the silence before dawn.

The watcher crouching in the shadows
heard but did not heed it. His cloak of boiled wool was topped with a
second layer of waxed pony skin so he felt neither the cold nor damp.
The pony skin had been purchased at Tanners Market seventeen hours
earlier, and the watcher had sat and waited in a nearby alehouse
while the vendor had dyed the skin to his specifications. “Matte
black?â€

Do and Be Damned

STANNIG BEADE LEFT the Hailhold in the
same cart he’d arrived in, a six-axle wheelhouse with walls of
poison pine. He was dressed in the same narrow-shouldered robe of
polished pigskin collared with mink and shod in the same nailhead
boots. His hair and beard had been freshly dyed, his nails clipped,
and his skin unctioned with resin harvested from thousand-year pines
that grew in Scarpe’s Armored Grove. His ceremonial chisel was
mounted in his right fist, and it was a testament to Blackhail’s
wire-pullers that you had to look very closely to see the steel
thread holding the fingers in place. No such subtlety marked the
stitching of his wounds. Thick black sutures tracked the length of
his throat, disappearing beneath the glossy mink collar, cinching
hardened crusts of skin.