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

It was the fact that she had not said goodbye that hurt the most. She had deceived him, knowing full well what the Far Riders intended and aiding them in their plans to take her. Raif Sevrance had trusted her, and in repayment she had encouraged him to drink while she stayed sober, and then sneaked away in the night like a thief.
“You’re not alone in this, Ash March,” Ash breathed in hard, remembering Raif’s oath. He had sworn to protect her when all others were intent on causing her harm. She would never forget that night in Ille Glaive, when Heritas Cant had revealed to her that she was a Reach. Raif was the only one present who saw her as a person, not a resource to be mined like gold.
“Enough!” he had said to them, sending his chair cracking against the wall. Heritas Cant had been speaking about her future with relish, dwelling on the terrible harm that would befall her if she did not release the power that was building within her. That was when she realized just how deeply Raif’s feelings ran: when she saw he couldn’t bear to hear about the possibility of her death.
All that night he had guarded her, ready to come to her defense. When the time came for Heritas Cant to set wards around her body, Raif had watched him like a hawk. Cant was a stranger, an acquaintance of his uncle Angus Lok, and Raif had not trusted him with her safety. He had refused to leave her side all night.
Oh, Raif, what have I done?
She knew he could not follow her. Ark Veinsplitter had only contempt for clannish tracking. “Clansmen see only what is there. They do not see what has been. Like children they look only at their feet. Does an eagle leave footprints, or a squirrel as it leaps from tree to tree? No. They leave trails that must be smelled and tasted and heard. Clansmen track with one sense, the Sull use five.”
Ash slowed for a moment, weariness suddenly weighing her down. He cannot track me. The thought almost broke her heart. He’d protected her for so long, carried her in his arms when she could no longer walk. Yet all his strength and determination meant nothing in the face of the Sull. They’d fooled him as easily as if he’d been a green boy . . . and they’d make sure he could never find her again.
Ash breathed deeply, controlling the hurt. She just wished she could stop herself looking for him whenever she first awoke.
Noticing that she had slowed her pace, Ark Veinsplitter slowed his own to match. Nothing went unobserved by the Far Rider; she had to remember that and guard herself closely. “How much farther before we make camp?”
Although they had been inside the mountain for a full day, Ark Veinsplitter was still wearing pale milky scale armor beneath his wolverine cloak. The armor gave off light, shimmering in the darkness of the mountain as if it stored light from the moon. Ash had seen the armor up close when the Veinsplitter cleansed himself with stone-heated water; it was warm to the touch and strange rings of fire flickered within each scale. It was bone, that much she guessed, sliced in cross-sections so thin they should have been easy to break. But when Ash had held one piece beneath her fingers she felt steel hardness there.
Ark Veinsplitter turned to look at her, his scale armor rippling like silk. His ice-tanned face picked up little light from the torch Mai Naysayer bore several paces ahead, yet his eyes were plain to see. Something was hidden there. “We journey late this night.”
What time was it? Ash couldn’t be sure. Her only guide was the sense of hours passed walking beneath rock. The mountain muffled time and light. Narrow tunnels twisted through the rock, winding down through granite and glistening ores, past pools of standing water and caverns where small bulb-eyed creatures scattered from the light. They moved down, always down. Sometimes the ways were so low they had to double back to find a path for the horses. Other times the Naysayer had to guide the mounts over stone bridges and crooked stairs. Echoes followed them like shadows. No sound ever left the mountain; instead it circled round, bouncing from wall to wall, growing lower and deeper and splitting into fragments of itself. Once Ash had stopped and listened. She heard her own voice, eerily distorted, saying quite clearly, “I’ll take a piece of the way-bread.” Words she had said half a day earlier, when they had stopped for their midmorning meal.
Suddenly chill, Ash drew her cloak about her. Ahead, Mai Naysayer led the horses through a natural archway stippled with quartz. The giant Sull warrior hadn’t spoken in hours. It fell to him to find whatever path Ark Veinsplitter sought, and to bear the torch that lit the way. His broad back was split in two by the diagonal slash of his longsword, holstered across his shoulders owing to its extraordinary length. He was cloaked in furs pieced differently from his hass, but the armor beneath was the same shimmering scale. On his left hand he bore a great leather mitt, like a falconer’s glove, that saved his fingers and wrist from the spitting tar of the torch. As if aware Ash’s gaze was upon him, the Naysayer turned. Always his ice-blue eyes were a shock. They pierced you. Knowledge and knowing burned within them, and Ash wondered what tragedies had happened in his past.
“Is the path open?” Ark asked, moving forward to where the Naysayer stood in the archway.
The great Sull warrior shook his head. “Nay. The rock ceiling lowers, and there is uncertain ground ahead.”
Ark nodded, but not lightly. He regarded his hass with eyes that were almost black. Ash could see him thinking. Five days ago they had left Ice Trapper territory, traveling through ice storms and whiteouts, across black hackled ice and snowbound foothills, and in all that time she had seen nothing but certainty on his face. Now there was something else.
“Settle the horses. We go on alone.”
As the Naysayer pulled rope from one of the packs, Ash forced her way through the arch and regarded the territory ahead. Shadows were deep, and concealed much. A stair had been cut into the rock, but she could not see where it led, only that it spiraled down into the mountain’s depths. A breeze lifted the hair from her face, and she caught the unnerving scent of copper ore. Like blood. Suddenly uneasy, she returned to Ark Veinsplitter’s side.
The Far Rider was studying markings tattooed into the archway’s vault. Ash recognized Sull signs; full moons and half-moons and diagrams of night skies. Everywhere that is deep and lightless they have claimed. Ash shivered. She knew so little about the Sull. How could she ever hope to become one?
Ark must have seen the uncertainty on her face, for he drew close enough so that she could see the letting scars on his cheekbones and ears and jaw, and said, “The night’s journey will soon be done.”
“We’re not going to camp, are we?”
“No.”
Something warned her not to ask the next question. She studied the Far Rider closely. He had the ability to be perfectly still, to stand unmoving and unblinking, biding his time between breaths. Since they had left the Ice Trappers’ territory little had been said between them. Talk had been of food and weather and other small matters between travelers. Nothing had been mentioned about the reason for the journey. Ark Veinsplitter had been biding his time.
She surprised herself by saying, “The skin on your neck, below your jaw, why are there no letting scars there?”
Muscles in Ark’s face shifted, and when his voice came it was so low she had to strain to hear it. “Dras Morthu. The Last Cut.” He touched the unblemished flesh. “When it is time for me to depart for the Far Shore I will cut the last great vein.”
“And if your life is taken by another?”
“Then my hass will not rest until he has found me and made the Last Cut himself.”
Ash looked down. Something too private was showing in the Far Rider’s eyes.
“The horses have been fed and watered. Let us go.” Mai Naysayer pulled the torch from its mooring between two rocks. The Sull stallions and the packhorse stood their ground. Tall and proud, they needed no hobbles to prevent them from fleeing.
Ash knew without question they would wait for their riders’ return. As she passed through the archway she scratched the gray’s nose. “Good boy,” she whispered. “One day I’m going to find out your name.”
The going was slow and treacherous, the stairs wildly uneven and slick with graphite. Ash slipped many times, and many times the Naysayer put out a hand to steady her. The great Sull giant saw things that she could not—fissures and slicks of oil and crumbling rock. She wondered if he needed the torch. The rock was dark and grotesquely folded, and every chance it could it ate the light. Shadows flickered and lengthened, and soon Ash could see no farther than a few paces ahead. Yet the Naysayer never slowed.
His desire to return home was clear. Every night both Far Riders looked to the east as the moon rose, murmuring strange prayers in Sull. Ash hadn’t learned much of their language but she knew that their prayers began and ended with the word mis. Home.
So why had they brought her to this place? The two men were bearing light packs. A few days’ food, blankets and medicine, she guessed. At first she thought they meant to pass through the mountain, a shortcut that would protect them from the ice. Now she knew they had a specific location in mind, a place nestled beneath a mountain of rock.
At first she could not quite believe it was getting warmer. Time passed as they made their descent, and Ash became aware of a prickly film of sweat above her lip. She brushed it away, and it came back. Soon she had to remove her cloak and haul it over her back. And it wasn’t just growing warmer, she realized, glancing at a rock beaded with moisture; it was getting damper too. The two Sull warriors appeared impervious to the changes, yet they had to see the tendrils of mist creeping up the stair to meet them. And they had to hear the sound of dripping water.
Down they went, their footsteps muffled now, their echoes nearly silent. The mist stayed low, washing around their ankles like foam. Every so often Ash would see signs etched in the rock. Once she thought she saw a raven, and didn’t know whether to be comforted or afraid. Exhaustion made her stumble, and the Naysayer offered his arm for support. Leaning on him she reached the bottom of the stairs and entered the mountain chamber.
The chamber was dark and alive with shadows and it stretched farther than she could see. A pool of green water lay in its center, the source of the smell and the mist. Great piers of glistening rock rose around its banks, their bases barnacled with deposits of copper ore.
“Hass, light more torches.” Ark Veinsplitter did not sound like a man happy to reach his destination. For some reason she thought that he might open a vein and pay a toll, but he did not. Instead he walked heavily toward the pool. The Naysayer made sure Ash was steady on her feet and then went about the task of lighting sticks. Ash had little choice but to follow Ark to the water.
By the time she reached the pool’s bank, the Far Rider had already laid down a blanket for her. “Sit,” he said. “Rest.”
Ash did just that. This close to the pool the mist was stifling, and she realized for the first time that she was sitting by a natural hot spring. Suddenly she was taken with the desire to wade, fully clothed, into the water and let its warm waters soothe her aches. They haven’t brought me here for a bath, she reminded herself, snuffing the small piece of joy.
“Ash March, foundling. Drink this.” Ark Veinsplitter was holding out a ram’s horn filled with clear liquid. When she didn’t immediately reach out to take it, he said, “It will not make you sleep.”
They were both thinking of the night in the Listener’s ground, of the oolak that had rendered Raif senseless. She said, “Will it harm me?”
“No. It will lend you strength.”
She took it but did not drink. The Naysayer was moving in a circle around the pool, planting torches between rocks. This simple act woke fear in Ash: Why did they need so much light? Because she was afraid she spoke. “Will we have a fire? I could roast the last of the goat.”
Ark shook his head slowly, and for a moment she saw sadness in his eyes. “We do not eat this night, Ash March. Tonight you become Sull.”
The words echoed once around the chamber, and then stopped. Ash felt as if they entered her, like a knife. She found she was trembling. Liquid from the horn splashed her leg, and she forced herself to be steady.
Ark Veinsplitter continued in his softly powerful voice. “We cannot bring you to the Heart unless you are Sull. You are rakhar dan and you are needed for the long night to come. We are the only ones left who fight the darkness. Whilst clansmen and city men feud amongst themselves over land once claimed by the Sull, we will ride out and battle with the Endlords and their taken. Make no mistake, Ash March, I offer you little in return for you soul. Maer Horn lies ahead, the Age of Darkness. It is not a good day to become Sull. If we are lucky we will fight until we die; if we are not we will be taken and our souls will walk lost into the grayness.”
“Much I cannot say to you now. Such things that I know cannot be spoken to an outlander and a stranger to our ways. Our secrets come at too great a cost, like our blood, and whenever we speak them out loud we risk much.”
“Know this, though. If you become Sull we will protect you and honor you, and give our lives to spare you from harm. You are as precious to us as a newborn, and like a newborn you bring us new hope.”
Ash let the Far Rider’s words work upon her. Seven torches flickered around the pool, turning the water orange and green like the Gods’ Lights in the northern sky. She could hear the torch resin crackling . . . and the measured breaths of two men. Stirred, but unwilling to reveal it, she said, “So you offer me a choice?”
If the Sull warrior noticed the shakiness in her voice he did not show it, merely nodded.