only a day’s journey.” He could hear the uneasiness in her voice, see it in the set of her shoulders and the way she released his hand to fold her arms around herself as she walked. “Much as I hate to agree with anything that man says, he’s right about slunch destroying crops. Unless the harvest is better this year than last, our stores will barely get us through next winter.”
“It was a bad year.” Rudy shifted his grip uneasily on the hand-worn smoothness of his staff. “Last winter was rough, and if Gil was right about the world getting colder, we’re in for a lot more of them.”
Beyond the shaggy curtain of pines, the Snowy Mountains lifted to the west, towering above the narrow valley, the glittering cliff of the Sarda Glacier overhanging the black rock. Far up the valley, St. Prathhes’ Glacier had moved down from the peaks of the spur range called the Ramparts, a tsunami of frozen diamond above the high pastures. Edged wind brought the scent of sterile ice and scraped rock with the spice of the spruce and new grass. It wailed a little in the trees, counterpoint to the squeak of Alde’s sheepskin boots in the mud and the purl of the stream that bordered the fields. The mountains may have been safer from the Dark, Rudy thought, but they sure didn’t make good farmland.
Cows regarding them over the pasture fences moved aside at Rudy’s wave. He clambered over the split rails and helped Alde after, not liking the lightness of her frame within its faded patchwork of quilting and fur. Spring was a time of short rations. Even with last year’s stored grain and the small surplus sent up from the Settlements, everyone in the Keep had been on short commons for months. Crypt after crypt of hydroponics tanks lay in the foundations deep beneath the Keep, but Rudy didn’t have to be a technician to know they weren’t operating as effectively as they could be. In any case, grain and corn had to be grown outdoors, and in the thin soil of the mountain valley, good arable was short.
The withy fences around the slunch in the west pasture had been moved again. The stuff had almost reached the stream. Past the line of the fences the grass was dying; the fences would have to be moved farther still. Three years ago, when slunch first started growing near the Keep, he and Ingold had agreed that neither humans nor animals should be allowed to eat it until they knew exactly what it was.
And that was something neither of them had figured out yet.
Short meadow grasses stirred around his feet, speckled bright with cow-lilies and lupine. There were fewer snakes this year, he noted, and almost no frogs. The herdkids waved to him from the other side of the pasture fence and choused the Settlements’ tribute sheep into the main flock. He spotted Tir’s bright blue cap among them, beside Geppy Nool’s blond curls. Geppy’s promotion to herdkid—with the privilege of sleeping in the byres and smelling permanently of dung—had consumed the smaller boy’s soul with envy, and for several days Tir seriously considered abdicating as High King of Darwath in favor of a career in livestock supervision.
“Damn crazy stuff.” Rudy waved back, then ducked through the hurdles that made up the fence. Alde followed more clumsily, but kept pace with him as he walked the perimeter of the rolling, thick-wrinkled plant—if plant it was. Sometimes Rudy wasn’t sure. He’d never found anything that looked like seeds, spores, roots, or shoots. Slunch didn’t appear to require either water or light to grow. It just spread, some six inches high in the middle of the bed, down to an inch or so at the edges, where wormlike whitish fingers projected into the soil bared by the dying grass.
Rudy knelt and pulled up one of the tendrils, like a very fat ribbon stood on its edge. He hated the touch of it, cold and dry, like a mushroom. By the tracks all around it there were animals that ate it, and so far neither the Guards nor the Keep hunters had reported finding dead critters in the woods …
But Rudy’s instincts shrank from the touch of it. Deep inside he knew the stuff was dangerous. He just didn’t know how. He squeezed it, flinching a little at the rubbery pop it gave before it crumbled, then wiped his hands on his soft deerhide trousers. With great effort Ingold had acquired enough sulfur from a dyer’s works in Gae to manufacture oil of vitriol—sulfuric acid—and had tried pouring that on slunch. It killed it but rendered the ground unfit for further use. And the slunch grew back within three or four weeks. It was scarcely worth the risk and hardship of another trip to the ruins of Gae for that.
“Do you think that thing Maia described to Ingold—the Cylinder he found in the vaults at Penambra—might hold some clue about the slunch?” Alde kept her distance. The dark fur of her collar riffled gently around her face, and the tail of her hair made a thick sable streak in the colors of old gowns, old curtains, and old hangings that had gone into her coat.
“It might.” Rudy came back to her, uneasily dusting the sides of his breeches and boots. “Ingold and Gil haven’t found zip about slunch in any archive they’ve searched so far, but for all we know it may have been common as daisies back before the first rising of the Dark. One day Pugsley’s going to look up at me and say, ‘Oh, we always dumped apple juice on it—shriveled it right up.’ And that’ll be that.”
Alde laughed, and Rudy glanced back at the cold, thick mass behind them, inert and flaccid and yet not dead. He said, “But we better not count on it.”
The sun had slipped behind the three great peaks that loured over Sarda Pass: Anthir, the Mammoth, and the Hammerking. The air above glacier and stone was still filled with light, the clouds streaked crimson, ochre, pink, and amber by the sunset, and the eternal snowfields picked up the glory of it, stained as if with liquid gold. Like a black glass rectangle cut from the crystallized bone of the mountain, the Keep of Dare caught the reflection, burning through the trees: a fortress built to guard the remnant of humankind through the times of darkness, until the sun should shine again.
Looking below it, beyond it, to the scant growth of wheat and corn in the fields along the stream, the white patches of slunch and the thinness of the blossom on the orchard trees, Rudy wondered if those ancient walls would be protection enough.
Just my luck. I make it to the world where I belong, the world where I have magic, the world where the woman I love lives—and we all starve to death.
It figures.
“The range of my tribe lay at the feet of the Haunted Mountain, between the Night River and the groves along the Cursed Lands, and northward to the Ice in the North.” The Icefalcon slipped his scabbarded killing-sword free of his sash, set it where it could be drawn in split instants, and shed vest and coat and long gray scarf in a fashion that never seemed to engage his right hand. “Never in all those lands, in all my years of growing up, did I hear speak of this slunch.”
Only a few glowstones dispersed white light in the Guards’ watchroom. Most of the Guards’ allotment of the milky polyhedrons illuminated the training floor where Gnift put a small group of off-shift warriors—Guards, the men-at-arms of the Houses of Ankres and Sketh, and the teenage sons of Lord Ankres—through a sparring session more strenuous than some wars. Hearthlight winked on dirty steel as the incoming shift unbuckled harness, belts, coats; ogre shadows loomed in darkness, and across the long chamber someone laughed at Captain Melantrys’ wickedly accurate imitation of Fargin Graw feeling sorry for himself.
Rudy sighed and slumped against the bricks of the beehive hearth. “You ever ride north into the lands of the Ice?”
The young warrior elevated a frost-pale brow in mild surprise. “Life among the tribes is difficult enough,” he said. “Why would anyone ask further trouble by going there?”
“People do,” said Seya, an older woman with short-cropped gray hair.
“Not my people.”
“Well,” Rudy said, “slunch is obviously arctic—at least it started to show up when the weather got colder….”
“But never was it seen near the lands of the Ice,” the White Raider pointed out logically. His long ivory-colored braids, weighted with the dried human finger-bones thonged into them, swung forward as he chaffed his hands before the fire. Like all the other Guards, he was bruised, face and arms and hands, from sword practice. It was a constant about them all, like the creak of worn leather