"Jones, J V - Sword Of Shadows 02 - A Fortress Of Gray Ice V2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones J. V)

“I thank you for that, Dog Lord.” The ranger stood and faced him. His fingertips were white with mortar dust, and Angus saw Vaylo’s gaze upon them. “‘Tis nothing,” he said with a small shrug. “I heard once that a tunnel led from this tomb all the way north to the Copper Hills. It’s said that it was dug so long ago that not even the Dhoonesmen can remember it.”
“Yet you and your brotherhood do.”
The ranger brushed the dust from his fingers. “We remember the old words and the old rhymes, nothing more. In the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes there be, a bolt-hole for those who canna look nor see.” He grimaced. “Poetry was never a Dhoonish art.”
“Nor patience a Bluddish one.”
Angus accepted the reprimand with a bow. “Well, I’d best be on my way. Let no one say Angus Lok outstayed his welcome in the Dhoonehouse.” He offered the Dog Lord his arm, and after a moment Vaylo stepped forward to clasp it. “I shall call back when I have more news. Expect me when the wind blows cold and from the North.”
“That’s near every day in the clanholds.”
Angus grinned. “Then I’ll be sure to pick an especially stormy one.”
Vaylo released his arm. “Aye, I’m sure you will.” He made himself wait until the ranger was long gone before following him out of the tomb.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Beast Beneath the Ice
Raif pushed the sealskins from him and swung his feet onto the floor. The band of ice sealing the door glowed blue and milky in the growing light. The little soapstone lamp was dead, the whale oil in its chamber long congealed to a wedge of fat. A fur of hoarfrost had grown on the ceiling above where he had slept, each rising breath adding crystals to the mass. It was bitterly cold. And he was alone.
Ash was gone.
He waited, but the panic didn’t come. He would go after her, that was all. Wherever she was, wherever they had taken her, he would find her and bring her back.
His head hurt when he moved his eyes, and the skin on his face was tight and numb. Something dry and scaly coated his tongue, and he remembered the oolak the Listener had bid him drink. Strong brew, and like a fool I drank myself into oblivion. I should have known what Ark Veinsplitter wanted. The truth was in his eyes.
Raif pressed his fingers into his face, trying to banish the numbness. They’d had it all planned, the two Far Riders and the Ice Trapper. Make him drink until he’d passed out and then steal away with Ash. From the look of the hoarfrost over the bench, he’d slept longer than one night . . . and that meant that Ash could be leagues away by now. No one could travel farther in white weather than the Sull. But a clansman could always try.
Standing, Raif tested his body for aches. There seemed too many to count, so he ignored them and concentrated on his thirst instead. A small copper pot stood beside the lamp, its rim caked with caribou hairs and frozen soot. Snapping surface ice with his knuckles, he discovered liquid water beneath. The water was so cold it smoked from his mouth as he drank, and he could feel it sliding down to his gut. The horn bowls and the stone warming basin that had contained the oolak were gone. The only evidence that Ash had been here was the footsteps stamped in rime on the floor. How could I have let them take her?
A soft chuffing sound broke his thoughts. The raven. The Listener’s great black bird stood to attention on its bone perch, its wings tucked and folded, its sharp eyes upon Raif. Raif thought he would like to swipe it with his fist, but seriously doubted if he was faster than the bird, and didn’t think it would be dignified to miss. So he turned his back instead. He was sick of ravens and their omens. And he didn’t want to think about his lore. Ash had it, that was enough. The last time he’d seen the hard piece of bird ivory, it had been suspended from twine at her throat.
Suddenly eager to be gone, Raif kicked the driftwood door. The ice seal cracked, and the thick sea-salt-cured planking swung back to reveal a twilight landscape of day-burning stars and ice. The sun was somewhere north of the horizon, unseen, but sending out rays of red light that stretched across the floes toward the sea. The air smelled of a coldness beyond frost. When Raif exhaled his breath whitened so violently it seemed to ignite.
“Sila. Utak.” The small hunched figure of the Listener was heading toward him, leaning heavily on a staff of twisted horn as he made his way across the cleared space at the center of the stone mounds. His words sent a young girl racing off to do his bidding, and made two older hunters who were hacking frozen meat by a cache hole stand alert.
Raif stepped forward to meet him. The man’s finery and tokens of power were gone, replaced by grubby sealskin and stiff furs, yet he appeared no smaller for it . . . and he did not look repentant.
Anger sparked within Raif. “Where have they taken Ash?”
Close now, the Listener shook off Raif’s question as if it were nothing more than snow on his back. Coming to a halt, he repeated the words he had spoken to Raif when first he saw him. “Mor Draka.”
Raif felt the same strange thrill, almost as if he were hearing a god speak his name, yet he would not let himself be distracted. “The girl. Where is she?”
The Listener crooked his mitted fist and turned. Slowly, he walked away, heading for the hills and frost boils that rose sharply to the north of the village. A low wind buffeted the snow and set the sea ice creaking. Raif did not want to follow. He’d been trapped once in this place. How difficult could a second entrapment be? He was a stranger here. An outsider, and without warmth and food and knowledge of the land, he’d be a dead man within a day.
Reluctantly, he grabbed his Orrlsman’s cloak from the ground and followed the Listener north. There were no choices at the edge of the world, and a clansman would do well to remember that. The Stone Gods’ power was stretched thin here; the earth and rock they lived in was buried deep beneath the ice.
The Listener led him north across treacherous ground. Ice fog had frozen the top snow to glass, and it shattered with tiny explosions underfoot. The cold made Raif weary, and the bleak whiteness of the landscape drained the willpower from him. It was hard to imagine journeying alone in this place.
Frost boils broke through the ground like shrunken volcanoes, their stone rims too sharp and narrow to bear snow. The Listener stepped around them with ease, prodding at drifts and suspect ice with his staff. When the land began to rise he slowed his pace, yet Raif still found it difficult to keep up. He could barely hide his relief when the old man came to a halt by the leeward edge of a frost boil. Raif clambered up the slope to reach him.
“Turn around, Clansman. Tell me what you see.”
It took Raif a moment to realize that the Listener had spoken in Common Tongue. How could this be? What had happened to the old man who had not understood a word he’d said the other night, and needed Ark Veinsplitter as a translator?
Seeing Raif’s surprise, the Listener’s eyes glinted with satisfaction. “Never assume you know your enemy until he is dead.”
Feeling heat come to his face, Raif said, “You can’t learn anything from a corpse.”
“You can learn that only a dead man cannot surprise you.” Something hard and ancient shifted behind the Listener’s eyes, and Raif knew he had been told a truth worth remembering. Yet it didn’t mean he had to like him for it. Turning to face the way they had come, Raif looked out across the Ice Trappers’ territory and the frozen sea. His gaze traveled to the stone grounds of the village, then toward the shore, where a second village, built of wood and whalebone and mounded earth, stood abandoned close to the ice.
“Our summer life,” said the Listener, following his gaze. “Soon it will be eaten by the ice. A storm will move the sea, and the shore ice will break its mooring and come crashing onto the beach. Much will be destroyed. So we gathered our lamps and harnessed our dogs and took refuge in the old places.” His eyes flicked to Raif. “It’s a foolish man who thinks he can stand in the way of fate or moving ice.”
“How can you know this?”
“I listen while others sleep.” The Listener poked a mitted finger at the remains of his left ear. “Gods and things older than gods whisper in the darkness, telling the tale of what has been and what is to come. If you are lucky you cannot hear them. You grow, you hunt, you enter a woman, and the world you live in is a knowable place where a man can make his own way and find his own death.”
“If you are unlucky you learn more. Oh, men will honor you for it, send the women with the best cuts of meat and their daughters with skins beaten till they run through your fingers like grains of sand. And all the while they fear you. And though they need the knowledge you bring them, they do not love you for it. For you have heard whispers from the beginning of the world, and no man can listen to those echoes and remain unchanged.”
The Listener rested his weight on the yellow and twisted ivory of his staff. His face was dark and knowing, lit by the farthest edge of the sun. When he spoke again there was anger in his voice, and his breath crackled in air that was suddenly still. “Days darker than night lie ahead; that is the truth here. That is the answer to your question. The girl has gone and you cannot follow her. How can you track someone in utter darkness? What good would it do to find her, when you can no longer see her face?”
“Where have they taken her?” Raif heard the stubbornness in his voice. He could not let this man’s words distract him. It was a trap, like the oolak. Fine drink. Fine words. He just wished they sounded less like the truth.
“Better ask why, not where, Clansman. Follow me.” The Listener raised his staff to the hummock wall and began the final ascent to the rim. He moved like a spider, light and skittering, stepping sideways more often than forward. Raif envied his technique. The little tribesman was full of surprises.
The frost boil was a crater of raised rock, forced upward by earth that had expanded as it froze. Raif had seen its like in the Badlands. They were good places to set camp by, and Tern said that clansmen used to fight duels in their hollows, as they were reckoned a worthy place to die. When Raif gained the rim he saw that the crater’s basin was filled with snow-crusted ice. Hard black basalt ringed the core.
The Listener wagged his head toward the ice. “Drop down and scrape off the snow.”
Raif had half a mind to tell the Listener to go to one of the nine spiraling hells. He was getting tired of games. And he feared another trap.
“I am an old man,” snapped the Listener, “and the women tell me I must save my strength for winter’s end. So if I had a mind to kill you I’d have done so closer to home.” He bared tiny brown teeth. “Save myself the trouble of hauling back your body for the dogs.”
Raif let out a breath. Why was it that all holy men thought they had a right to taunt him? Inigar Stoop had been no different—but at least he was clan. Laying a mitted hand on the crater’s rim, he vaulted onto the ice. He landed hard, ten paces below the Listener, on a basin of ancient water that was frozen to the core.
“Here. Use this.” The Listener dropped a flat-bladed knife onto the ice. “Ulu. Woman’s knife. Should serve a clansman well.”
Raif stabbed at the snow. The top layer was hard and brittle, but softer grains lay beneath. The little knife, with its center tang, had been designed for scraping skins, and it made good progress toward the ice. Raif decided it wasn’t worth thinking about why he was being made to do this. The Listener reminded him of one of those spiteful little imps who always guarded bridges in crib tales; they’d never let you cross until they’d humbled you first.
Fumes rose from the ice as he worked, smoking blue in the clear air. When he reached the final layer of snow, a chill went through him. Something was casting a shadow on the ice. Turning, he looked up at the Listener and the twilight sky beyond. Neither the sun nor the moon had risen high enough to cast shadows. Yet it was there, a darkness upon the ice.
“Finish what you started, Clansman.” The Listener’s voice was thin and hostile. “You wanted answers; dig for them.”
It occurred to Raif that he could kill the man standing above him. He was armed now, and though the Listener possessed a wily sort of strength, he would be no match for a fitter, younger man. A blow to the heart would finish him. Not sure if he was comforted or unnerved by the thought, Raif turned back to the ice and resumed scraping. The final layer of snow was hard and frozen, stuck fast to the ice by frequent thaws. The knife blade bent as he worked, and he could feel the sweat trickling between his shoulder-blades as he put the force of his body behind each blow. The area he was clearing was roughly circular, the size of a man’s chest. When he’d chipped away enough of the surface crust he set down the blade and brushed off the loosened snow.