The Castle of the Winds Read online

  ‘Northward?’ protested Kennas, taking off his helmet to scratch his white hair. ‘Why in Hella’s name should they go that way?’

  ‘To throw us off in the dawn light,’ suggested the scout. ‘So they could turn south later. And they’ve been trying to mess up their tracks somehow. Didn’t work, though. They must think we’re thick, these carrot-heads!’

  ‘They’ll still be that far ahead!’ snapped Haldin. ‘After them!’

  As they rode, he saw that Kunrad was dangling something from his fingers, a pierced circlet that twisted on a fine chain. ‘A direction bracelet, lad? When you know the land around well enough?’

  ‘One of mine. I was hoping it would follow my will, and the armour,’ said Kunrad. ‘And there is something – but on horseback it’s hard to be sure.’

  ‘We’ll have their spoor soon enough, Mastersmith,’ chuckled the guard. ‘And by Raven’s burnt beak, they’ll need armour when we catch them up!’

  ‘They’ll all be trying to cram into the one suit!’ crackled Haldin. ‘We’ll just trim off what sticks out!’

  ‘You’d better be careful,’ said Gille.

  There was the usual chorus of sneers at anything he said. ‘No, he’s right,’ said Kunrad. ‘That swift uprising, the care they took not to kill. That’s discipline, not banditry. I think we may be dealing with proper soldiers here.’

  ‘Like enough,’ said Kennas crisply. ‘But so are you, and there’s twenty of us. So if you good citizens will just be content to follow orders and leave it to us, why—’

  ‘Halt!’ One of the scouts was shouting, while another, dismounted, was sniffing around on his knees like a dog. ‘Over here!’

  The column reined in, grumbling and swearing, shivering in the icy air, while Kennas rode up to argue with the scouts. Kunrad took a second to steady the bracelet, on which he had set not only the usual virtues of wayfinding, but of seeking a destination. The armour was his destination, he told himself, wherever it might go in the world. And as he gave word to the thought, he knew it was true.

  The bracelet twirled a little, and then it steadied. He looked along the line of it, and raised his eyes. He was dazzled. The climbing sun glittered cold on the sharp mountain peaks.

  ‘But they can’t have gone that way!’ protested Kennas. Haldin tapped his arm, and pointed to Kunrad’s outstretched hand.

  The captain knew better than to contradict a mastersmith. ‘Ride on, then!’ he barked. ‘Thought they’d put us off, doubtless! Ride!’

  ‘Doing a grand job, aren’t they?’ Gille muttered. Olvar nodded; but Kunrad, tucking away the bracelet, was already riding ahead, and they had to spur their mounts to follow.

  All that day they rode, and the land around them became less familiar, more windswept, more barren, as it rose. Grass gave way to heathers, and the heathers grew harder and scrubbier. The soil was growing thinner, the plants browner despite the clear spring air. They clung to the bones of the barren land as if the wind would carry them away, and it occurred to Kunrad that anything dying here would soon be covered in low grasses, lichens and mosses, and add one more featureless hummock to the bleak vista. In such a place, and in the clear light, the horsemen’s trail stood out clear enough for all to see, and it did not turn. The mountains were looming high above them now, closer than most men had ever seen them, and when they stopped to water the horses at one of the many deep carven streamlets, Kunrad tried his bracelet once again.

  ‘Always north!’ said Haldin, a little too cheerfully. ‘Sure you didn’t use a lodestone by mistake?’

  Kunrad glared at him. ‘All too sure! There – see?’

  Olvar squinted. ‘That’s a pass of sorts, there. Swear to it.’

  Kennas looked around sharply. ‘You mean, through? Be damned to that!’ All men knew what lay beyond those mountains, and a distinct chill lingered in the sunny noon air to remind them of it. But he was a brave man, or was obliged to be. ‘Well, we’ll take up their little bluff!’ he said. ‘Though they must be damnably far ahead, if they’re out of view in this bare country. A killing pace they’re keeping up! Still finding that trail, lads?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the lead scout. ‘Though it’s odd. Very blurred and mucky, in this damp land. But still clear.’

  ‘Well, we haven’t time to look closer!’ He didn’t need to articulate the thought; night, finding them under the shadow of those peaks. ‘One good ride and we should be on their heels. Maybe even have sight of them soon!’

  ‘Let’s hope so!’ said Haldin softly. ‘It would make a difference.’

  But as the afternoon wore on the land ahead remained empty. Only birds flew, wheeling and croaking in the distance, and small beasts scattered from the riding’s path; though not very many of those. And it was as if the soil began to slip from under their hooves, and they found themselves riding across barely covered scree-falls that would give way treacherously now and again. And then, up ahead, they saw the scouts rein in so abruptly their mounts reared and plunged, and the riders sprang to earth. Then they frantically flagged the column down.

  ‘Now what’s amiss?’ roared Kennas.

  ‘A camp!’ called the scouts, wheeling their horses and stooping to peer at the ground.

  ‘What? They haven’t had time to camp – unless … You bloody fools! Have we been following an old trail?’

  ‘It was still half dark when we picked it up!’ wailed the younger scout, as the column closed in around him. ‘All muddied! But there were clear tracks, and fresh!’

  ‘That’s right!’ protested another. ‘At least … that’s what we thought!’

  Kennas, beyond speech, tore off his helmet and dashed it to the ground.

  ‘That’s no way to treat my good work!’ protested Haldin. ‘What’s going on, anyhow?’

  ‘They came this way before the raid!’ snarled the captain. ‘Before the fair, I’ll be bound! Sothrans come to see the sights, that’s all! When, you trollscuts – when?’

  ‘Well – three nights since, by the ashes! But there’re these tracks—’

  Kunrad closed his eyes a moment. ‘The night of the first day? Just after we quarrelled?’

  ‘Fresh trail!’ shouted a scout, who had cantered away down the hill. ‘Fresh beyond doubt! They’re headed eastward and south, along the mountain edge. A lot of them, the whole damned column!’

  ‘So they did retrace their tracks to put us off, eh?’ muttered the captain. ‘Damn-fool trick. Well, they’re making a hell of a pace – those big sothran horses, probably. Not much chance of catching them up, but if we ride—’

  ‘Fresh tracks!’ shouted the young scout, from the other direction. ‘Over here! Only a few, but fresh!’ He was pointing uphill.

  ‘What?’ roared Kennas. ‘You’re blind, boy!’ But he rode over, came back, and dismounted to pick up his helm.

  ‘Beyond me,’ he said, trying to polish the muddy gravel off it with his glove. ‘They split up, it seems. Most turned eastward, but a few more paddled around here somewhere. What a place to!’ He looked around and shuddered. They were at the mouth of a wide valley, its sides rounded and scoured as an old mixing bowl. The soil was thin, more a mix of stones, with occasional long strange heaps like giant wormcasts, and scattered boulders. ‘Hoped to decoy us up into that forsaken hole, evidently.’

  ‘It’d make sense of a sort,’ said Haldin. ‘Just enough of them slink off with the plunder, somewhere easy to give us the slip. That leaves us to chase after a bunch of lilywhites out for a constitutional, and what’s to prove otherwise?’

  ‘Right, Mastersmith! The others have probably slipped back around a corner somewhere and followed after the rest, some other way. Well, the day’s wasting …’

  Kennas stopped, his mouth twitching. The bracelet was pointing resolutely uphill.

  ‘Bugger that thing! With all respect, Mastersmith – Mastersmiths! But there must be something agley here. We can’t go on up there! If the land goes on like this we wouldn’t be able to use our horses. An
d besides …’

  ‘Besides, night’s coming on,’ said Olvar.

  ‘Yes!’ snarled the captain, tugging at his short beard. ‘Yes it bloody well is! And I couldn’t be sure of holding the men here, not the citizens nor my lads either, and do I blame them? In Tiure’s armoured arse I do! Listen, you’re the guildsmen present. Either I can go after the main band, back eastward, though it’s little hope I hold of that – or I turn about and go back. They might be doubling back to attack the town again, after all.’

  ‘Ach, that’s nonsense!’ protested Haldin, but with scant enthusiasm. ‘Small chance of that, and you’ve more than enough men back there to cope.’

  ‘Yes. But not these lads; and the town’s more to them than this hunt, small chance or not. You can doddle around here as you like, Master Kunrad, but the men won’t.’

  Kunrad heaved a sigh. ‘I think you should turn back, captain. What the bracelet shows me is mine alone.’

  ‘You’re not going to stay?’ spluttered Gille. ‘That was one dint too many!’

  ‘The lad’s right, Mastersmith!’ exclaimed Kennas, horrified. ‘I was prating only, I didn’t mean—’

  Kunrad nodded. ‘There were only three or four tracks, you said? Then a few more of us should be enough.’

  ‘If they’re all we meet, maybe,’ muttered the captain. ‘Hoi! We’re turning back, lads. Volunteers to stay on with the mastersmiths?’

  ‘Well, I see I’m one,’ grunted Haldin. ‘Me and my promises!’

  Nobody else spoke. ‘All right!’ said the captain. ‘Sergeant, take command! Piss off out of it, and watch out for that main band! Masters, we’d best be riding now or not at all – and yes, I do bloody well have to come, if you do!’

  ‘Thank you, captain,’ said Kunrad awkwardly, as they watched their force wheel about and go scattering and stumbling down the hill, rather too fast. Men were looking back; but none of them were stopping. ‘I won’t forget this.’

  ‘Believe me, neither will I!’

  ‘Nobody thanks us, you notice,’ muttered Gille to Olvar. ‘I don’t remember volunteering either, do you?’

  ‘Comes with the guild colours,’ said Olvar, though there was a faint fleck of concern in his voice. ‘All part of the job. Boy! Sharpen that chisel! Boy, walk into a daggertooth’s den! Life’s rich tapestry.’

  ‘I think I’m coming unravelled,’ was all Gille said. But the others had already turned their mounts uphill, and he was acutely aware of being alone. All he could do was follow.

  It was another world the valley led them into, a world where life clung grimly on to the edge of uncompromising stone, in case the whining wind should sweep it away. There was no warm life in earth or sky. There were only a few patches of trees, scrubby firs huddled against either flank, their gnarled roots climbing over jagged boulders like fingers clutching their last handful of sustaining soil. Higher up they shrank to low creeping shrubs, gnarled and tangled and as coated with brownish lichens and mosses as the stones around; so that when they finally gave way, lost ground and vanished, it was hard to notice. But as the searchers approached the crest of the valley slope, only the rocks remained, tolerating the lichen and the few leafy things that shivered in their shelter. The rocks themselves seemed to change at the crest, quite suddenly, in the compass of a step, from a shovelled jumble of scree to a more shapely weathered roundness, but one which gave no shelter or respite to life of any sort. The trail was still clear, but only in pebbles scarred or tossed aside; there was no bare earth to take imprints. They felt, all of them, as if they were crossing some kind of subtle border into a region where they had no place, a country of stones.

  It had a bizarre beauty in its fashion, crowned by the majestic mountain flanks, blackened and glossy, with their jagged snowcrowns glistening against the grey clouds. A passing raincloud trailed its veils across the summits, and the raindrops glittered in the low light, as if turning to ice even as they fell. The mountain walls dropped away with breathtaking steepness to this smooth-sided cleft and its barren floor, a wide expanse of wind-raked gravel as flat as any made by man. Sprawled across it lay stones of weird shapes, boulders rolled round as polished gemstones mingled with great jagged things, raw and stressed, that suggested the debris of a battle between immense forces. ‘So it is, I’ve heard,’ Haldin whispered. They all whispered instinctively, for the valley’s voice was the wind. Not even a bird cried out. ‘The … the Ice pushes the great boulders as it moves, grinding them to gravel and silt eventually as a river does. But at bleakest winter, its meltwater freezes to the very surface of the rock, and tears great chunks loose, like a beast with its fangs. So it rips at the very fabric of the earth itself. It did here once, before it withdrew.’

  Rivers ran between the stones, slow, narrow channels that crossed and recrossed like veins in an ancient hand, gnarled and strong. They were green, a thick pallid green like oily paint, but not even with the small scummy life of pond and ditch. When Kunrad let it drip through his fingers a coarse sediment clung, heavier than wine-lees; and when they sipped a little, the strong mineral taste made them spit. That was all the colour, ground from the green granite beneath. The horses would not touch it. Ahead of them, at a bend in the valley, stretched a wide pool of the same dismal shade, so heavy that even the wind seemed unable to ruffle its pale surface. From here, like an artery, all the streams ran; but as they advanced they saw others, smaller, cascading down into it, a web of tiny rills and waterfalls scouring down a steeper slope of tumbled stone.

  And then, as they raised their eyes, they saw above it the source of all this, towering high against the mountain-slopes, filling the upper valley with a mighty wall. Not a straight barrier; its ramparts were jagged, its face irregular, inward sloping, deeply undercut. The sun had eaten at it, the wind weathered, the earth besmirched. Holes and channels riddled it like suppurating sores, running green streams of infected meltwater. Blocks and cascades fallen from it strewed the bleak ground, and shrank slowly to feed the artery streams. Cracks and chasms opened where the earth beneath thrust up in resistance, or sank away beneath its tyrannical burden. Yet all of these attacks it scorned in its sheer enormity, grinding down weakness and strength alike, renewing what was torn from it with an infinity of resource, like a fortress which was all wall, with no hollow heart.

  It lay there in timeless stillness; and yet the terrible tension in it, the crouching, contained menace, struck straight into their minds. In the face of the giant glacier they saw a torrent barely held in check, the vanguard of a vast army ready to sweep down over all in its path. The sheer scale and power of it would have been awesome enough to them, even without the knowledge of the dark implacable wills that lay behind it, that turned its jagged rim to an outstretched hand with reaching, clawing fingers. Like a monstrous pale arm indeed it crooked around the mountain face, scaled and scarred with crevasses and encrusted moraines. But they knew also, in this their first sight of it, that it was only one limb of an uncountable number, and not the largest. That it was less than a fingertip of the vast cold hands that closed around the world, and sought to clasp, to crush it tight and eternal within the chilly grasp of the Great Ice.

  It was Gille who managed to break the silence. Without wholly realising it, they had reined in and drawn together, like infants clutching hands in the face of the menacing unknown. ‘Why – why on earth would they ever have come here?’

  The captain audibly struggled for control of his voice. “Cause we wouldn’t, laddie. And there’s been no trail leading out, has there? So either there’s another way and I don’t mind admitting I’d be glad to find it. Or they’re still holed up here somewhere.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you here!’ said Kunrad shakily. ‘No hunt was worth this.’

  ‘But you don’t say you wouldn’t have come yourself, you obstinate bugger!’ grumbled Haldin. ‘Don’t worry. I feel the same way. I want their hides, and not least for dragging me here. It’s my business too.’

  ‘My tow
n,’ added Kennas. ‘Same goes. But it feels like – Powers, I don’t know the words!’

  ‘That now you’ve seen this,’ suggested Gille softly, ‘the world’s never going to look quite the same, ever again?’

  The captain turned in surprise. ‘You too, lad? Well, all of us, maybe. But there’s more folk than us to consider. There’s still a trail to follow. Let’s be about it!’

  ‘Have we long enough before dark?’ Kunrad wondered.

  ‘There’s a good three hours left in the sun!’ said Haldin. He unlashed the great beard-axe he carried at his saddlebow, and laid it across his knee. He seemed to draw strength from that. ‘Long enough to get up to … that, if we need to. And back! Let’s go!’

  But by the time they reached the margins of the lake, Haldin’s guess had proved a bad one. The shadows under the high peaks grew deep much sooner than usual as the sun fell, and the wind that scoured down the valley brought racing tatters of grey, spitting cold drizzle. They were becoming thicker, and the drizzle hung like curtains beneath them, pitting the still green surface of the great pool. The trail led right to its margins.

  ‘They didn’t ride through that, surely?’ grunted Olvar.

  Haldin shook his head. ‘The horses don’t like it. But maybe sothran ones – or could they have dumped their booty in here, to hide it? To come back later?’

  The captain shuddered. ‘Back here?’ He kicked free of his stirrups, took his long lance from its socket and poked around with the butt in the shallows. Strange bubbles rushed up, and an unpleasant smell tinged the air; but there was no sign of anything except pebbles. ‘The centre’s much deeper,’ he reported. ‘You’ll not go riding across that. Better we go afoot and look for some other spoor.’