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

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Deep down beneath a mountain, in a space carved and blasted two thousand years before, a man awakes. This far below the surface, the cold of the firmament gives way to the warmth of the earth’s core. It is humid, and although the sky is sealed five thousand feet above, the man can remember times when accumulated moisture has dropped like rain on his back. The memory brings delight and pain, as do all his memories. It is a slow, hurtful process, this reclaiming of his life.
Shifting in his iron pit, he seeks comfort that custom has long taught him he will never find. Not here. He smells his own shit. The chains that shackle him chafe his raw flesh, drawing lines of watery blood. He is less well-tended now, and has not been fed in several days. It has been even longer since a hand tended his sores and cleaned his skin.
Sometimes he despairs, as it seems he has traded memory for life. What good is owning a name when you are slowly starved?
Baralis, he mouths, using the word as a charm to drive away the monsters in his thoughts. Once a continent turned upon my deeds. Or did I dream it? Uncertainty plagues him. It is difficult to tell where dreams end and truth begins. Almost he has forgotten how to think. Eighteen years bound and broken. How can I be sure I am sane? Surprisingly the thought makes him smile. He remembers someone once telling him that any man capable of asking himself that question is already saner than most.
The man’s smile fades, and the loneliness returns with such force it is like a dagger in his heart. Hours stretch ahead in the unchanging darkness. Days pass and he does not know it. When will the Light Bearer come and bring him food and touch and light? He sleeps and wakes, then sleeps again. Sometimes caul flies eat their way through his skin, and crawl over his face in search of light. They will not fly in the dark, he has noticed, and soon tire and die. Sometimes he saves his strength by not moving, gathering power to him bit by bit like beads upon a thread. When he has enough he looses himself, letting his mind rise to a place where his body cannot follow.
Once it had been still in those gray places, like mist hanging above a lake. But now dread creatures walk there, stirring the calm. When you are dying it is difficult to be afraid of anything except death, yet still the man feels fear. Those monstrous shadows know his name. Baralis, they call. Heart of Darkness. You are ours and we want you. Wait for our touch.
The man shivers. He had done many terrible things in his life, but cannot decide if that makes him evil. His past hardly seems to belong to him anymore; can he still be judged by it? He recalls a sprawling castle peopled by kings and queens. The touch of a child’s thigh. Poison slipped into red wine. And fire, always fire, catching on the corner of his robe and igniting in front of his face.
Still shivering, the man rests his head against cold iron. How long before the creatures who own the voices come? What will he become if he allows one to touch him? Already they lure him with promises of revenge. Your enemies are our enemies. Burn their hateful flesh. Such words are tempting to a helpless man, and he does not know how long he can resist them. If it hadn’t been for one certainty he might already have given in.
Someone, somewhere is searching for him.
How he knows this he cannot say. Where the knowledge comes from is something he will never learn. He just knows that he is loved and searched for, and it gives him the will to carry on. Slowly his eyes close and sleep takes him, and as he dreams he sends a message to the one who loves him. I am here. Come to me. And the one who loves him hears and comes.


CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Forsworn
Raif looked down through the blasted remains of a dying forest, down to a lake where lines of charcoal had been laid upon the ice, and he knew that he had entered the territory of living men. He had seen lines like that before. Once during the Long Freeze, ten years back, when all running water in the clanholds had frozen, clansmen had laid lines of soot upon the ice. The darkness of the soot concentrated the sun’s meager rays and the ice beneath the black lines had melted over several days, opening precious leads. Raif had not expected to see such a thing here, only five days east of the mountains, and he felt the first stirrings of fear.
No one was supposed to live in these pale twisted forests that bordered the Western Want. Clansmen called them the White Wastes, and said that only elk and caribou dared pass through on their way to the purple heather fields of Dhoone.
Raif shouldered his pack, shifting the weight so it was borne evenly on his back. It had taken him many days to cross the mountains—even with the help of Sadaluk, who had directed him toward a pass. He counted himself lucky that the weather had held, and that the only storm he’d been forced to sit out was one that hit at an altitude just east of Trapper’s Pass. The wind had been his greatest problem, for it blew continuously, stripping him of warmth and strength. It blew now, rolling the edges of his Orrl cloak and raising the hair from his scalp. The Listener had given him many precious gifts of dressed skins, and three layers of seal hides protected his chest from the cold, yet the biting deadness of the Want still got through.
It lay out there, to the north, stretching farther than any clansman had ever seen, stretching as far as time itself, unknowable, uncrossable: the Great Want. Raif shivered. Of all the maps Tern had ever drawn for his children, not one had contained any details about the Want. It was a place of ghosts, clan said, dead and freezing and dry as a desert, and not even the gods knew what walked there.
From his position above the lake, Raif turned his gaze north. Since he had left the mountains he had noticed the peculiar clarity of the landscape. There was no dust or warmth to warp the air. Faraway trees and rocks looked close enough to reach in half a day. But they weren’t. Distance was distorted here, and Raif was beginning to realize that landmarks on the horizon might take weeks, even months, to reach. When he’d first spotted the lake from a position high in the pass, he thought he’d gain the shore by sunset. It had taken nine days; six to clear the mountain’s skirts and a further three to cross the tree line.
Now he was here he felt no satisfaction of a goal reached. The Great Want disturbed him. It was too close, and too vast. League upon league of nothingness, broken only by tortured rock formations, glacier tracks and calderas.
And now there was evidence of strangers, lately been here, settled enough to spread charcoal on lake ice for access to fresh water. Raif studied the lake, scanning the shore and surrounding woods for further signs of life. No smoke rose from the trees. No piers or boats were frozen into the ice. He was too far away to spot footprints. Should he descend the slope and search for them? Or should he turn south and move on?
Uncertainty made him hesitate. He was beyond his bounds now, he knew it plainly by the look of the trees. Nothing so dry and twisted could live in the clanholds. One spark and they’d go up in flames. So who was down there? Not Maimed Men; they lived closer to the clanholds, in the Badlands northeast of Dhoone. Raif peered into the tree cover, deciding. It was growing late and he could feel the willpower draining from his limbs. He had not rested since midmorning, and his knee joints ached with the constant strain of descent. Drey had once told him that descending hills was more tiring than climbing them, and he hadn’t believed it until now. Drey . . .
Abruptly, Raif started down the slope.
He told himself there was a good chance that whoever was down there had already spotted him—a lone traveler on the rise above the lake—and he drew his mitted hand inside his cloak, feeling for the makeshift sealskin scabbard that held his sword. He’d scraped the rust from it as best he could, using the dull gray emery stone that could be found freely in the high mountains. Without a millstone he could do no better. And he found a grim kind of pleasure in imagining that whilst the blade might enter a man well enough, it wouldn’t so easily come out.
Resting his hand upon the grip, he wound his way down through the trees. Pine needles and ice crystals crackled underfoot, and somewhere to the south an owl called out at the approaching night. Darkness rose as slowly as mist, hovering close to the ground while the sky still glowed red with the fading sun. Stars winked into existence. First a few dozen, then thousands . . . more than Raif had ever seen in his life. The wind dropped, and then suddenly it was quiet enough to hear the lake ice groaning. Raif grew cautious, deciding against walking the open land at the lake’s shore.
Silent now, he skirted the lake, keeping to the cover of the trees. He was dimly aware of his hunger, sucking his insides tight. The air was perfectly still. No tree limb moved. When he stepped on something warm he nearly cried out. Fox, he told himself, rolling the carcass over with his foot. Dead less than a day. Wetting dry lips, he walked on. When he reached the foot of an ancient dragon pine, he spied two dead crows lying in the litter beneath its twisted lower limbs. And then he saw the footsteps. Many pairs, some fresh from the look of them, stamping a trail that led to and from the lake.
He was not aware of drawing his sword. It was there, in his fist, its blade running silver in the starlight. Ahead, the trail widened into a makeshift path, and there were signs of men and horses upon it: a thrown hoof-iron, a mound of frozen dung, a piece of trail meat crooked like a finger. Raif suddenly wished he weren’t so tired. Weeks of hard travel had taken their toll, and it seemed as if his thoughts and his reflexes were moving a beat too slow. He thought he smelled something, a coldness filled with potential, like air charging before a storm.
The edge of a building loomed ahead. As he drew closer, Raif made out the eerily pale form of a palisade raised from timber and then sprayed with water to form a protective wall of ice. He’d seen such winter-built strongwalls in the city holds, and admired their simplicity—the ice repelled fire and rendered the wall almost unscalable—yet he had never known clan to build one.
Abruptly, the path rose, and he saw what lay beyond the palisade. A rock-and-timber redoubt, square-shaped with a roof of hammered logs and the rough beginnings of a battlement ringing its northern wall. No light showed through the narrow, defensive windows. A lone shutter had come loose from its mooring, and it creaked back and forth on rusted hinges. Raif smelled old fires and cook oil. And then he saw the first body, lying facedown in a trench where the palisade parted to make way for a gate.
Fear dried his mouth. Cautiously he approached the body. Already he could see that the man was well armored, in a backplate of painted steel. Some design had been beautifully worked in purple and gold. An eye. And then suddenly Raif realized what he was looking at: a Forsworn knight, with the Eye of God upon him.
The man had been slain in a single strike, run through with such force and such an edge that both breastplate and backplate had cracked open. Turning the body over, Raif saw where the jagged edges of the punctured breastplate had been driven deep into the meat of the knight’s heart. He had never seen such an entry wound before, not even that day . . . that day in the Badlands with Tern. The flesh was black and seared, as if it had been cooked, and something black oozed from the wounds.
Raif turned away. He thought he might be sick. The purge fluid stank of the same alien odor he’d smelled earlier. The knight had been lying facedown, and yet fluid had not drained off. It hung in his mouth like smoke. Instinctively, Raif reached to touch the tine at his waist . . . and felt emptiness instead. He would give his sword to have it now, the comfort of gods and clan.
Traitors aren’t allowed to bear the stone. Bitterness welled up in him, and he was glad because it shrank his fear.
Even without a measure of powdered guidestone, he knew he could not leave the man before him unblessed. He was a Forsworn knight and so an enemy to clan and clannish gods, but he had died alone and untended. Like Tern. Closing his eyes and touching both lids, Raif murmured, “May your god take your soul and keep it near him always.”
It was all he could do. Bending low, he tugged on the knight’s purple cloak, freeing it from beneath the man’s shoulders and covering the face. The knight’s eyes were open and the irises had rolled back in his head, showing nothing but white. It was a relief not to look at them any longer.
Straightening, Raif inspected the gate. Unstripped logs, tarred and bound, mounted on an X-shaped frame. The outpost had not been established long. Everything about it had the look of something hastily erected. No clansman would raise a defensive structure with raw timber. So why had these knights?
Raif considered what he knew about the Forsworn. They were wealthy, it was said, with fortress-temples known as Shrineholds scattered throughout the North. They called themselves the Eye of God and made war against heretics in his name. The Listener said they made pilgrimages to the Lake of Lost Men, but Raif did not know why. He didn’t know much, he realized. Clan had few dealings with outsiders, and Blackhail fewer than most. Growing up clan meant learning little of other men.
Raif dropped his pack and walked through the gate into the narrow, packed-earth bailey beyond. His breath was doing strange things in his windpipe, hurting his back as he breathed. He felt like a child carrying a grown-up sword, and found he could not remember a single form Shor Gormalin had taught him. The Listener was right; I need to learn how to use this. But not tonight. Gods, not tonight.
He almost passed the second body, so deep were the shadows that surrounded it. The redoubt had been built on a groundsill of rubble and timber to keep it raised above the frozen tundra and protected from sinkage during spring thaw. The first floor of the structure overhung the foundation pile, creating a trap for shadows and moss. The body lay in two pieces beneath the overhang, sheared through the gut so that only strings of sinew and intestines joined the two halves. Raif retched. Be thankful for the shadows, he told himself, spitting to clean his mouth. Without them I’d see worse.
There was nothing to do but speak the same blessing over the dead knight and cover his face.
Slowly, Raif mounted the quartered-log stairs leading to the redoubt’s main door. Time and effort had been spent on the door, the timbers dressed and sealed, the joints shod in lead. The Eye of God had been painted above the arch, and someone had even brought gold leaf to burnish the pupil so it looked as if God were gazing upon a golden field. Raif felt the Eye upon him as he put a hand to the door and pushed.
Darkness and stillness waited on the other side. The stench of accelerated rot and strangely charged air made him doubt that anyone within had been left alive. Seconds passed as he stood on the threshold, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the blackness. He appeared to be in a small defensive ward, fashioned with louvered floorwork to slow an enemy’s charge. One wrong step and a man’s foot would slip through the boards to the groundsill below, halting and trapping him, and possibly breaking his leg. Who did they fear?
The Eye was here too, painted huge upon the walls. Only now it was not something watchful and benevolent, it was an angry eye, fearsome, shot with red veins. Raif found himself discomforted beneath it, and felt a pang of guilt at being so easily awed by a foreign god.
Carefully, mindful of his steps, he crossed the ward and entered the main chamber of the fort. The inner door had been torn from its hinges and two dead knights lay to either side of it, swords drawn and visors down: They’d had more warning than those outside. But it had not saved them. Beautifully worked scale armor made one man’s corpse glitter like a faceted jewel. He bore the spiked collar of a penitent, and all his metalwork had been greased with reddish-brown bone oil. The weapon that had killed him had struck so deeply Raif could see the floorboards beneath his chest; they had been ripped up and splintered as the weapon was pulled free. Raif shuddered. What creature could break down a strong door and do this to a man? Bullhammer, the most powerful man Raif had ever known, had never torn the middle from an enemy in a single strike.
Raif spoke blessings to both men and moved on. The main hall of the redoubt made him sad, for he recognized the pain these knights had taken to honor their One God. The only local resources were timber and rock, and they had used both to raise a massive altar block that had been draped with cloth of purple. Here the Eye was not a crude wall painting but a crystal set into an almond-shaped mounting of pure gold. Seeing it, Raif felt the sword move in his hand. Of course, a knight’s blade. The rock crystal surmounted on the pommel seemed to pulse in time with the Eye.
Light poured in from a window high in the hammer-vaulted roof as the moon rose overhead. Raif saw crudely carved chairs and box pallets, prayer mats woven from coltgrass, oak coffers lining the far wall, a rope ladder leading to the external battlements, and an ancient book laid open on a dragon-pine stand. They had not been here long, these men, and he could not understand what had brought them to this place.
More knights had fallen in the farthest reach of the hall, defending, it seemed to Raif, the small Eye-carved portal beyond. Seven men dead. Seven blessings given. All of the knights’ eyes were open and rolled back, and all had the same black fluids oozing from their skull cavities and wounds.
Breathing thinly, Raif made his way through the Eye portal and into the small chamber beyond. In the same way that the Hailstone was heart of clan, this chamber was the heart of the fort. Raif felt its power. The timber walls had been stained white, and in their center a font hewn from speckled granite held a pool of water in an eye-shaped bowl. Instinctively, Raif kept his gaze from alighting too long upon the water. Something told him he didn’t want to see his own face reflected there.
A soft noise made him start. Spinning, he raised his sword.