CHAPTER 1
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,” Addie Gunn called in greeting. The Maimed Man had led
the ewe to the sole hardwood stump in the camp, and the creature
was lipping the reservoir of hardened sap that had pooled on the
flat surface. “Sheep like their sweeties,” Addie said, scratching
the back of the ewe’s neck. “Milk’ll be like honey
tonight.”
Raif made no reply.
Bending at the waist, he shucked off the yearling and let it fall
to the ground. Her fawn spots were nearly gone and the white mating
blaze on her rump was beginning to come in. She’d fallen with her
eyes open—a steel arrowhead piercing the right ventricle of the
heart rarely gave a creature time to do anything save die—and her
gaze rested on a fixed point in the distance. Raif wondered if the
point marked his position as he lifted his finger from the
bowstring. Had she heard the soft twang of the recoil as the arrow
shot toward her heart?
Reaching down, he
closed her eyelids. “We leave at noon.”
Addie’s hand stilled
on the ewe’s neck. He looked carefully at Raif before nodding.
“Aye.”
Raif Sevrance and
Addie Gunn had traveled hundreds of leagues east together through
crippling cold and hostile terrain. There was no need to say more
between them. They were Maimed Men and failed clansmen: both knew
the dangers of becoming too attached to people or places. Addie had
been a cragsman at Wellhouse and consumption had lost him his herd
and clan. His fellow cragsman had carted his failing body north to
the Rift and given him a choice. Jump into the deepest crack in the
earth and die an honorable death, or cross it and join the Maimed
Men. Addie had chosen to live.
Most clansmen would
have jumped. Raif had been born into Blackhail, the oldest and
hardest of clans, and of all the Hailsmen he knew he could not
imagine one of them leaving Blackhail to become a Maimed Man.
Clansmen were proud. They had few good words to say about people
who weren’t clan, and nothing but curses for Maimed Men. They were
robbers, murderers, freaks. No oaths or code of conduct bound them.
They tilled no fields nor practiced any professions. Their living
was made from raids, robbery, extortion, kidnapping for
ransom.
And he, Raif
Sevrance, would be king of them.
Raif glanced at the
position of the sun. A lone bird of prey soared across its swollen
face. Two hours until noon. He had known for the past twenty days
that he would have to leave this place, this hillside south of the
Lake of Red Ice, and return to the Rift and the Maimed Men who
lived there, but he had imagined the decision of when to leave
would be his. Now the lamb brothers had made it for him. They were
departing, and they had not informed him they had planned to go.
Raif told himself it was their privilege to do so, but he still
meant to move out before they did.
Leaving the doe
carcass at the camp perimeter, he made his way to the only standing
tent. As he hiked between the stumps he was aware that one of the
lamb brothers—Tallal judging by his height and the color of the
cloth panel covering his lower face—was attempting to catch his
eye. Raif ignored him. The lamb brothers would have to wait to
collect their remaining tent. Raif needed to sleep. Addie would
make what preparations were needed; quarter and parcel the
yearling, fill waterskins, wax leathers, barter with the lamb
brothers for tea herbs and salt. The Maimed Man enjoyed sound
relations with the lamb brothers: tea and sheep were powerful
forces for goodwill.
As soon as he’d
slipped through the tent flap, Raif bent forward to lessen the
pressure on his chest. Ignoring the pain during the hunt had been
easy enough, but he was paying for it now. Twenty days ago his
heart had stopped. Dead. There’d been a length of time when he,
Raif Sevrance, ceased to exist. He’d been just another corpse on
the ice. Blood had stopped moving and pooled in his veins, muscles
had locked, his lungs had slumped to a close as poisons flooded his
liver and kidneys. How long he’d lain there, empty and decomposing,
was something he never wanted to know. Time served among the dead
was something he hoped to forget. He couldn’t avoid the sudden
weaknesses and failings, though: his body enjoyed reminding him it
had died.
Inside the tent all
was dim and still. The safety lamp had burned out, but the wick was
still smoking. Its pitchy scent smelled like wound dressing, and
mixed uneasily with the stink of old animal skins. The tent walls,
the ground canvas and the bedding were all made from pieced hides.
Expertly clarified skins formed the walls. Raif did not recognize
what animal they came from, but he appreciated the work that had
gone into fatting and leaching the skins until they lost all
natural pigment and let through light. The longbones that formed
the support struts were another thing alien to him. He had handled
one a few days back and was surprised to discover it was as light
as a bird bone. The lamb brothers were not from the North. Home was
the shifting sands and baked earth of the Scorpion Desert. Perhaps
they had birds the size of horses there; Raif did not
know.
Lying on the heaped
skins, he tried to sleep. Closing his eyes might have helped.
Instead he stared at the parasite holes in the ceiling hides.
Needles of sunlight punctured them as the sun moved overhead. When
his eyes began to sting, he dropped his gaze to the six-foot-long
package that rested close to the tent’s rear wall. The package was
raised off the ground by a crude plinth of stripped timber. Ten
days back Addie had judged its content vulnerable to
damp.
“It’s damaged goods,”
Raif had said in response, as the Maimed Man chiseled wood curls
from the plinth. “Cankered, blackened. Why bother?”
Addie had shaken his
head impatiently. He wasn’t a natural wood-worker and the wood
curls grew thicker as he spoke. “We bother because this sword
deserves respect. It was made for kings. The last man who wielded
it died out on that ice, trying to hold back evil so potent that
even the gods fear it. Yes, the sword is damaged, but what if
underneath the rust the edge is still true? We owe this sword, Raif. The clanholds, the Sull, the
Maimed Men. You saw the bodies under the ice—we weren’t winning. We
were being hacked and decapitated. Cut in two. I’ve been on fields
after battle’s end—Mare’s Rock, Falling Bridge. I’ve seen what
close combat with live steel can do to an army. It’s seldom pretty.
The guts. The shit. The blood. Never seen anything like the Red
Ice, though. Thirty thousand bodies reduced to parts. Parts. And maybe, just maybe, this sword and the
man who wielded it turned certain annihilation into a
draw.”
Raif swung his feet
onto the ground canvas. Thinking about Addie’s words stirred him.
The gods fear it, he had said. Not
feared.
Fear.
Abruptly, Raif rose
to standing. He would not sleep. It had been foolish to even try.
And bloody-minded to force the lamb brothers into delaying their
departure by sleeping in their tent. They had shown respect. They
had not broken up the tent in his absence, exposing his possessions
to the cold spring sun. Raif gathered those possessions now. The
recurve longbow, horn arrow case, bedroll, waterskin, gear belt
with all its attendant hooks and weapon-care pouches, shammies,
hand knife, tin spoon, wood cup, small linens, leather traces,
buckskin mitts, Orrl cloak. Stormglass.
Sliding the finger of
glass from its rawhide pouch, Raif tried to sort through his
thoughts. Once in a very long while when
lightning touches sand it turns to glass. The stormglass
felt good and heavy in his hand. Light tumbled within its chambers
even when he held it still. It was rarer than diamonds, a gift from
the lamb brothers. And it had endangered and then saved his
life.
Tht.
Raif glanced up at
the sound of gravel hitting the tent wall. No sand here, in the far
north of the clanholds. The lamb brothers were reduced to throwing
stones to request entree into another’s tent.
Raif returned the
stormglass to its pouch. “Come.”
Brown hands, oiled
and meticulously trimmed, parted the tent flap. Tallal entered.
Custom dictated that host speak before guest, so the lamb brother
waited, head low, gaze down, face panel swinging to vertical. With
a small thrill of unease Raif realized there were now five black
dots tattooed in the space between Tallal’s eyebrows. Yesterday
there had been three.
“Sit,” Raif said,
indicating the piled hides. Aware at this point he was expected to
offer refreshment to his guest, Raif struggled to come up with
something—anything—that could be drunk
or eaten in fellowship. As Tallal knelt effortlessly on the hides,
Raif frowned at the deflated waterskin. It had been on the deerhunt
with him. Ten hours of resting against his rump. This wasn’t going
to be pleasant.
An awkward moment
passed where Raif assumed Tallal would untie his face panel and
reveal his lower face, yet the lamb brother was still. The two new
dots on his forehead looked raw. Clear liquid oozed from the one
closest to his left eye. Finally understanding that Tallal meant to
retain the formality of the veil, Raif pulled the waterskin from
the floor. Uncorked it and squeezed the last shot of water into a
cup. He offered the cup to the lamb brother without a
word.
And without a word it
was accepted. Tallal slipped the cup under his face panel, drank,
and then swallowed. Handing back the cup, he said, “Do not consider
returning the stormglass. I will not accept it.”
Raif blinked. How had
he known? Until three minutes ago, Raif had barely known himself.
It was the unlowered face panel that had decided it for
him.
The lamb brother’s
brown eyes with their strange bluish whites assessed Raif. “Drink,”
he said, “and we will speak.”
Raif drank. The water
tasted exactly as he imagined: stale, meaty, warm. Returning the
cup to his pack he noticed dried deer blood wedged beneath his
fingernails. Outside, the wind had strengthened and gusts were
whumpfing against the tent. Raif sat by
one of the struts. Spine against bone.
Tallal waited for a
lull in the wind before speaking, his eyes were focused on a
distance beyond the tent canvas, and the face panel sucked against
his lips with each inhaled breath. “In my land there are three
seasons. Summer, Rain, and Scourge. If we are blessed the Scourge
lasts sixty days. The winds blow and do not stop and the air
becomes desert as the sand is torn off the dunes. A man exposed
overnight will be skinned. The sand is sharp. It moves faster than
an arrow shot from a bow and strips all hides in its path. We dig
ourselves deep into the earth and pray. We speak the Petition For
Good Fortune, which is a cycle of eight prayers. The prayers ask
for grace, forgiveness, deliverance from the Scourge, water for our
animals, milk and dates for our children, patience for ourselves.
The final prayer in the cycle asks for something more. It is the
Prayer of the Fortunate Stranger. Please
God, we ask, bring us new friends in
our time of need.”
Tallal paused. The
face panel hung still as he delayed his next breath.
“My people have a
saying, Mul’ah ri ashanna. We must meet
prayer halfway. One of the ways we do this is by giving gifts. We
believe it is not enough to hope that a stranger will dig us out if
our cave beneath the sand collapses, so we increase the odds. Turn
strangers into friends. We offer food and shelter and what small
tokens we can. It is the custom of the dunes.
“That is why you
received the stormglass. Not because we knew you would lead us to
the Red Ice, but because we thought: Here is a stranger who could
dig us from a cave.”
Raif thought and did
not speak. Somewhere in the heavy rawhide packs being loaded onto
the mules by the two other lamb brothers were thousands of leather
pouches. Each pouch represented the reclaimed soul of one of their
dead. The battlefield beneath the Red Ice had rendered tens of
thousand of frozen corpses, many of them belonging to the people of
the Scorpion Desert. By recovering the sword named Loss, Raif had
also recovered the long lost remains of their ancestors. He’d
helped the lamb brothers plenty. Question was, had they helped
him?
The sword was now
his. There it lay, wrapped in deer velvet, sitting on a throne of
wood. Names came at a price, Raif knew that. How much was Loss
going to cost him to bear?
He glanced at Tallal.
The lamb brother waited, his head perfectly level and his long
fingers resting on the sable wool bridging his lap. He had appealed
for an amicable parting. Raif searched for a way to give him
one.
I am two now, he realized. Raif Sevrance, son of
Tem, brother to Effie and Drey. And Mor
Drakka, Twelve Kill. The lamb brothers had not helped Raif
Sevrance—they had sent him on a journey that had ended with him
dead on the ice—but they had helped Mor
Drakka, Watcher of the Dead.
They had armed
him.
Who had armed Raven
Lord? Raif wondered. The last man to wield Loss must have been
someone’s son, brother, friend. Had he felt the same way that Raif
did now: that the sword’s first cut would be to
himself?
“Tallal,” he said,
“you and your brothers saved my life. For that I thank
you.”
Tallal was no fool.
His response to the carefully framed thanks was to let his gaze
alight on the plinth.
Raif blinked and saw
Raven Lord’s headless body beneath the ice; the black and spiny
armor entombing the frozen torso, three gray and bloated fingers
still clasping Loss’ hilt. “Ask me in ten years if I thank you for
the sword.”
If I live that long.
The lamb brother
shrugged, not lightly. “When the Sand Men head north I will remind
them to ask you.”
A gust of wind shook
the tent, rattling its bones. Raif heard air whistling in cavities
once filled with marrow. “Why will the Sand Men head
north?”
Tallal smiled: Raif
could see it in the crease of the face panel. But not the eyes.
“Sand Men will head north when they hear what this lamb brother has
to tell them.”
“And that
is?”
“That lightning has
struck twice. First to create the stormglass and second to anoint
it.” Tallal paused, letting silence do his work for him. Here was
something dipped in the deep and biding stillness of prophecy. Men
had been waiting for this moment. Raif waited right along with
them.
When he was sure his
point had been made, Tallal nodded at Raif’s hand. “That is a piece
of my homeland. Dunes burned into glass. Only once in ten thousand
strikes will lightning fuse sand. This lamb brother has not studied
with the mathematicians of Hanatta and so cannot reckon the odds of
lightning striking those same grains of sand once
more.”
Raif squeezed his
fist around the stormglass. He could feel it straining to pop out
of its pouch like seeds in a pressed grape. His uncle Angus Lok had
explained the laws of chance to him two springs back as they’d
tracked and then cornered a rare white moose in the stink bogs
north of Cold Lake.
“Have you seen one
before?” Raif remembered asking, excitement making his voice
high.
Angus had shaken his
head. “Nay, lad. A wee beastie like this is a once in a lifetimer.
Take it down and skin it and you’ll have yourself the only white
moose pelt in Blackhail, and only the second of two in the entire
clanholds.”
Raif had been quiet
for a while, thinking. As always with his uncle there was a lot of
information packed between the words. You’ll
have. Not we. You. Angus had ceded killing rights to Raif.
And also, Raif realized gradually, the decision whether or not to
make the kill.
“If I let him go will
he mate and make more white moose?” Raif had asked as they stood,
ankle deep in tannic-brown seep water.
“Nay. Odds are
against him winning a rut. He’s an aberration, poor little bugger.
He won’t smell right, his eyesight’s dodgy, he’s liable to get
burned in the sun. Parasites’ll love him. Decrepit one-eyed wolves
will be able to track him. He’d be lucky to get a whiff of a cow.
He’s already beaten a mess of odds by reaching maturity. You’d have
to times those odds by themselves to reckon the likelihood of him
mating and producing another little ghostie like
himself.”
As he resettled his
spine against the tent strut, Raif considered the odds of lightning
striking the stormglass twice. It was some kind of big number, one
bigger than the odds of the white moose reproducing.
“The Sand Men are
singular amongst our people,” Tallal said. “They live apart. They
ready themselves for battle. They wait.”
Raif met gazes with
the lamb brother and Tallal nodded imperceptibly. He didn’t need
to. Raif understood what they waited for. It made him afraid;
afraid of losing himself, of becoming something brighter and less
human than Raif Sevrance, something that men and armies would
follow. A battle standard. A war cry. A myth.
He recalled the
moment when his broadhead punctured the white moose’s hide. It was
a good shot, for a boy of fifteen. Hitting high on the neck, just
below the roof of the jaw, the arrow had carried sufficient force
to travel through an inch of dense, skull-supporting muscle before
slicing open the jugular. Blood shot out at force, spraying the
sedge mats and willow tangles and cratering the bog water. The
blood had been a shock. It was warm and red and stinking, and it
had made him feel sick about the kill. Stupidly he had thought that
the ghostly white pelt and the high and fancy odds added up to the
creature not being real. A ghost. A myth.
Raif stood. The lamb
brother had more to say to him but Raif decided he didn’t want to
hear it. If he and Addie headed out now they had a chance of
reaching the Bludd forests before nightfall. Good cover there.
Cover suddenly seemed important. The white moose should have stayed
above the snowline or amongst stands of silver birches. Damn
creature had just made itself a target in the bog.
Tallal rose a moment
after Raif. His robe pitched like water finding its level in a
glass. Two darkening ovals on his face panel showed the damp weight
of his breath.
“You have the wrong
man,” Raif warned him before he had a chance to speak. “If the Sand
Men find me I will send them back.”
Tallal said nothing.
Raif had the sense that the lamb brother was controlling the
impulse to call him a self-deluding fool. Time passed as they faced
each other. Raif saw himself inverted—a speck in Tallal’s
eye.
“I wish you water to
weep,” the lamb brother said finally.
The double-edged
blessing of the Scorpion Desert. Raif accepted it like a blow.
Already the lamb brother was withdrawing his attention: His gaze
slid to the tent flap and his long brown fingers formed the hooks
required to lift the canvas.
As he stepped away,
Raif said to him, “The bodies that were under the ice. What
happened to them?”
Tallal did not turn
as he answered. “We laid their remains to rest.”
“All of them? The
northern armies? The city men? The Sull?”
The back of the lamb
brother’s head shook as he raised the tent flap. “We ministered
solely to the people of the desert.”
And then he was
gone.
Raif stared at the
tent flap as it smacked back into place. They had left them to rot.
The lamb brothers, with all their talk of God and holy purpose, had
rummaged through the bodies, hauled away their own and ignored the
rest. Raven Lord’s headless corpse was still out there, rotting as
quickly as only thawed meat could, teeming with maggots and coffin
flies, unregarded and unblessed.
Raif thought about
that, did what he needed to do, and then left the
tent.
“Addie, we’re off,”
he called as he pulled on his sealskin mitts and squinted into the
shrunken noonday sun. A bird of prey gliding parallel to the
northern horizon was the only thing moving in the greenly blue
sky.
Addie was kneeling on
one of the yellow tent circles wrapping severed deer hooves in
waxed linen. The little curly-haired ewe did not like the smell of
fresh blood, but she did like Addie and was nervously cropping
weeds a few feet upwind of him. At the camp’s southern perimeter
the three lamb brothers were packing the mules. Girdle straps and
neck harnesses were padded and adjusted.
Twisting the last of
the packages closed, Addie stood upright. He was a small man,
bowlegged and, as he was fond of telling everyone, boweared. Raif
could not guess his age. Addie’s entire life had been lived
outdoors. His skin was baked against his bones. He’d heard enough
in Raif’s voice to spur him to swift action and he scooped up his
packs and bedroll and slung them across his back. He glanced toward
the lamb brothers and then Raif, who told him everything he needed
to know by starting west.
I’m done here.
Addie spat
thoughtfully, patted the ewe’s delicate head and then followed Raif
out of the camp.
The descent was easy.
A deer trail wound through low-growing pines and blackthorns,
edging creeks that were wet but barely running and looping around
gnawed yews and dogwoods. The ground cover was thawing, and weeds
and leaf litter squelched greasily underfoot.
The lamb brothers
watched them leave. Raif didn’t turn around to confirm it but he
knew they did. He also knew that as soon as he and Addie descended
sufficient distance to pass out of sight, they would collapse the
remaining tent. In their eagerness to be gone from a land they had
no love for the brothers would work in haste: rolling two or more
skins at once, balling the ground canvas and binding it tightly
with rope. Chances were they would miss it. Chances were it would
get bounced into a crease and lie there, undetected, until the tent
was next unpacked. And the tent wouldn’t be unpacked until the lamb
brothers returned to the Scorpion Desert. It was the fifth tent,
the spare. Four other tents existed—one for each brother and one
for God—they wouldn’t need it on the journey home. Only when they
reached their destination and all their official duties had been
discharged would they turn their attention to the business of
checking and repairing their gear. That was when they would find
it: the stormglass in its dun-colored leather pouch, tucked away in
the folds of the fifth tent canvas, a message received months after
it was sent. Raif Sevrance would wear no beacon for the Sand Men.
No amount of lightning would reveal his whereabouts in a storm. He
was dead to the people of the Scorpion Desert, as dead as the raven
lord’s headless corpse.
Addie seemed to
understand much about Raif’s parting with the lamb brothers. The
Maimed Man was silent for the first hour, quietly and efficiently
steering them from trail to trail. When he unrolled a pat of
sheep’s cheese to eat afoot, he did not offer any to Raif. A few
minutes later when he moved on to deer jerky, he tapped Raif on the
arm and passed him a stick of the black and leathery meat. No words
passed between them but Raif understood that while the cheese had
come from the lamb brothers the jerky had been cured by Addie
himself.
The chewed in
silence, their jaw muscles aching as they worked long cycles on
each bite. After Addie swallowed his final mouthful, he nodded at
the northern sky. “Hawk’s been up there since noon. You’d think it
would have bagged itself a squirrel by now.”
Raif frowned at the
last of his jerky—Addie must have cured it with cement. Tucking it
into his gear belt, he said, “It’s a gyrfalcon and it’s been aloft
since dawn.”
Addie mulled over
this information for the better part of an hour. As they reached
the valley floor and started south through the red pines toward the
Bludd border, the eweman said, “It’s hers then, Yiselle No
Knife’s.”
Raif nodded as he
moved ahead of Addie to take the lead. He was being watched by the
Sull and there was nothing he could do about it. The lamb brothers
would send the Sand Men north even after they discovered the
stormglass, and there was nothing he could do about that either.
The sword named Loss bounced against Raif’s back as he leapt across
a shallow creek. He was known now, marked, judged.
Followed.