A Sword from Red Ice

Part of him had known all along that the tunnels under Dhoone had not been built by clan. A chief might dig a hole in the earth as a last-ditch escape route, but no leader of clansmen would risk the scorn of his warriors by constructing a network of mole holes so extensive that a man could pass from one end of a clanhold to the other while never seeing the good light of day. Such measures ran too close to caution for that. No. These tunnels had been dug by minds that thought differently than clan. Minds that valued survival above all else. These tunnels had been dug by the Sull.

The exit had been braced with an oxeye of blue marble deeply veined with eggshell quartz. Unlike most of the other stone bracings the tunnels this one had not crumbled or rotted. The marble had resisted the restless trembling of the earth and the stresses of hard frosts an sudden thaws. Its surface was lightly pocked with corrosion and lichen had begun to sink its root anchors into the stone, yet all of its massive quarter-circle segments had held their alignment so truly that the ring they formed was as perfect as the sun. Or the moon. For there it was, etched deep into the hard blue stone, the moon in all its phases. Crescent, gibbous, full, and the new moon, which was no moon at all, simply a dark uncarved space marking the beginning of the cycle. That space haunted Vaylo even now, three days later. It said something about the Sull, he'd decided, something about their absolute foreignness to clan. He wasn't a man given to sudden fancies but that space, that stark absence in the design, spoke of hell and places unknown, and the darkness Ockish Bull had said existed before time.

The Dog Lord felt a shiver coming and shook it off with a sharp snap of his head. Damn Robbie Dun Dhoone and his high-stepping blue cloaks. Their roundhouse was stuffed with ghosts. Vaylo blew two lungs' worth of air through his lips. Who was he fooling? The entire Northern Territories were stuffed with ghosts. You couldn't build a doghouse or an outhouse without feeling the hard chunk of cut stone hitting your shovel the minute you began to dig out the ground. The Sull had been there first. They had built atop every mountain, hill and headland, upon every lakeshore, riverbank and creek bed, and in every mossy hollow, barren canyon and dank cave.

Vaylo remembered his favorite fishing hole in the Bluddhold, a green pond no wider than a man could spit. It was set so deep amongst the basswoods and sword ferns that if you didn't keep your eyes lively you'd miss it. He'd stumbled upon it after old Gullit Bludd had given him a beating for some misdemeanor or other, and cautioned his bastard son not to show his face in the roundhouse for a week. By the fourth day, Vaylo recalled, he was so hungry he was spearing wood frogs with his boy's sword and tearing tree oysters from rotten stumps.

That was when he found it, the fishing hole. He was looking up at the canopy, tracking some scrawny squirrel that he hadn't a snail's chance in a salt barrel of ever catching, when he walked straight into the water. Icy cold and clear as emeralds, it was so beautiful that even a boy of nine couldn't help but catch his breath and admire it.

Of course, he did what every nine-year-old would do when faced with a body of still water; he found some pebbles and skimmed them. As the pebbles skipped over the surface they created ripples that attracted silver minnows in search of flies. "Fish!" Vaylo had shouted triumphantly, and promptly set about whittling a fallen branch into a rod. As he worked he invented fancies about the fishing hole in his head. He was the first living man to ever stand here, the first to blaze a trail through the impenetrable tangle of Direwood, the first to pull a two-stone trout from the hole's icy depths. When he got to the tricky part where he had to notch the stick to run a line, Vaylo was so absorbed in his daydreams that he lost his grip on the knife.

He'd been sitting on some bit of rock close to the water's edge, and the blade plonked into the silt at his feet. As he dug fingers into the sand to grasp the hilt, his gaze slid between his legs and onto the face of rock. Something was engraved in the stone. A crescent moon, cut so deep that a lizard had laid her milky eggs in the hollow, stood above a single line of script. Vaylo was no scholar, and he wouldn't learn to read until many years later, but he'd seen enough clannish writings to know that the script wasn't clan.

The quarter-moon was a sign of the Sull.

Vaylo recalled feeling many things at that moment: excitement that he had stumbled upon a site once held by the Sull; fear that some kind of danger still lurked in this place; and disappointment that he had not been the great discoverer after all. The Sull had been here first.

It had been a lesson that had stayed with him for close on fifty years. Clan had gained land at the expense of the Sull, and a chiefs job was to insure they didn't get it back.