Someone in the crowd murmured something. There was a gentle push of people forward. And then quite crisply, Anwyn Bird's rang out from the back.
"Yes, guide as well as chief. Inigar always did say that."
"Raina and Stannig," came a second voice, very possibly belonging to Corbie Meese. "Raina and Stannig. Raina and Stannig."
Others took up the chant and it spread like its own kind of fire, rolling out across the crowd. Even one of the Scarpemen near the front began to mouth the words
"Raina and Stannig. Raina and Stannig."
Stannig Beade's neck muscles were twitching like scorpions as he turned to look at her.
Raina did him the courtesy of looking back. "Shall we?"
This was her clan and he had misjudged her influence here, but after this moment he would never underestimate her again. She saw this in him and perhaps later it would make her afraid, but for now she felt triumphant.
She just hoped she wouldn't burn.
Beade did not take her offered hand. Instead he punched a fist into the air, silencing the crowd. "Blackhail! You dishonor the gods. This is not a horse race. Yes, I will walk with the representative of our chief, but beware the ire of the gods " He seared the crowd with stare, replacing anticipation with shamef They ill like clansmen thwarting their
"Woman," he commanded Raina, "step in time with me " She was not a fool and knew not to challenge him any further and they began a solemn walk toward the fire. Flames jumped at them.
Once they were down from the platform the heat hit their faces in waves. Raina kept in perfect time with Beade, matching his stride length and swing. She held the torch high between them, following his example of making a show for the crowd.
Dagro's dress would be forever ruined with sweat, she thought sadly, as perspiration poured from her body into the fabric. Perhaps it was just as well. It made her act like someone else when she wore it.
Stannig Beade knew something Raina did not, for when they drew close enough to the flames to smell their hair and clothes crisping, he made a small gesture with his finger and stepped ahead of her.
As he moved forward the flames died and he entered a world of smoke. Confused, Raina followed him. The stench of burned soil was sickening, and the ground she stepped on was hot. Fire had dazzled her eyes and she thought she saw a figure slipping away from the opposite side of the trench.
"Light the Menhir Fire," Beade ordered, his voice ugly now that they were out of earshot of the crowd.
Raina was glad to get away from him and crossed the short distance to the platform. Fire had tarnished the silver, and the platform's walls were almost black. Above them, the hmes covering the Scarpestone were smoking. Bending at the waist, Raina pushed the torch toward the small stack of sticks laying on the platform's edge. With a jolt of surprise she realized the hides did not reach all the way down to the hole. The foot of the Scarpestone was visible and she could clearly see the pale circle of new stone that had been exposed by Stannig Beade's drill. The hole in its center was the blackest thing Raina had ever seen in her life. It was the color of all things forsaken.
Stannig Beade is right, she realized with a chill. This is no game we play. That hole was a passage for the gods, and if they did not like what they saw tonight they would not take it Yes, Stannig Beade had his tricks—someone had flash-doused the flames for him—but this was no trick. And he and she wanted the same thing: the gods to return to Blackhail.
Sobered by her thoughts, Raina lit the Menhir Fire and prayed for the Stone Gods to notice.
TWENTY-THREE Hard Truths at the Dhoonewall
The only remaining hillfort in the Dhoonewall that remained livable was a kidney-shaped mound of dressed stone that had a second roof built on top of its original slate roof. The second roof consisted of massive panels of copper soldered together and bent in place, that were secured, as far as Vaylo Bludd could see, by man-size needles that had been driven through the copper and between the slates— and into the original wooden beams underneath. Had to be about a hundred of those iron rods sticking out of the roof, Vaylo reckoned, and he wouldn't be surprised that if he actually decided to take the roof stair all the way up to the top, walked across the scaly green carpet of verdigris and stood by one of those black needles he would see it was a spear. Fighting men had erected this roof, using whatever resources they had at hand; copper stockpiled from the mines to the south and clumsy spears they did not need. Vaylo could imagine it. Their roof was leaking and they were wet and miserable. They'd applied to their chief and been ignored. Attacks were coming from the north, their equipment was rusting, their clothes black with mold; a supply wagon had failed to arrive— Pissed off, they'd forged this roof, using a fortune of Dhoone's precious copper in its making and sending an angry message to their chief. Behold us, we are sons of Dhoone. The force with which the spears have been thrust into the roof, punching great dents in the metal, told all.
Of course the second roof barely worked better than the first. The soldiers never did seal up the dents, and rain found its way through them and ran down onto the first roof and along well worn paths to the mold-barrel fortress below. Vaylo didn't like to breathe the air. He frowned at the slimy black film on the walls and found it surprisingly easy to imagine it invading his lungs. He had bid Nan do what she could, but she was one woman fighting against a horde of spores and quick as she flung back shutters to let in the wind the little black devils were invading her mop bucket, infiltrating the very agent of their own destruction. Nan laughed about it, and staunchly refused help. Vaylo had a feeling she liked being the only woman amongst a hundred and eighty men.
Well close enough to a hundred and eighty … but he would think about that later, when the sun wasn't shining in squares upon the flagstone floor that were almost warm when you walked on them, and the laugher of the bairns wasn't tumbling down the spiral-cut stairs.
Vaylo passed through the hillfort's central hall and into its northern ward. The building and part of the wall it defended was wedged between two hills. It was a basic structure with three rounded wards at groundlevel, three smaller ones on the floor above, and a warren of cells and store rooms on the upper level. Upwall, about two hundred feet to the east, a broken bit of watchtower with a partially collapsed roof remained standing. Vaylo hadn't gone up there yet, but he intended to do so soon as he had noticed Cluff Drybannock spent much of his time there. Drybone had visited the other five hillforts in the chain and pronounced them larger and better sited, and wholly destroyed. "Tumbled stone and freestanding walls are all that are left," Dry had said. "The roofs are gone and fox pines have seeded in the wards."
The hillforts still made little sense to Vaylo, though he was glad for his own sake that Dhoone had built them. Situated on the northern edge of the Copper Hills, they looked down over the scrubby fellfields, heaths and uplands that lay to the north. They had seen hard fighting in their time, that much he could tell, for there were places in the cur-tainwall where you could see the ghosts of long-past impacts: spider cracks of the kind that were caused by heavy shot, sections of stone that had melted to glass, craters and burn rings. The sight of them gave Vaylo a queer feeling in his chest. He knew the Maimed Men controlled a broken city somewhere to the north, but he wasn't sure if they had ever been capable of such a violent assault.
The Dog Lord chided himself as he passed through the ward door and onto the battle terrace. He should have learned the histories from Molo Bean and Ockish Bull. It would be reassuring to know exactly what the deal was here. It could be that a thousand years ago some bold Blackhail chief had launched a fiendish attack from the north. Maybe, gods bless them, the Lost Clan had been in ascendancy and Dhoone had felt threatened by their closeness. The clanholds were nothing if not stingy with their histories. Withy and Wellhouse kept tally, so the stories went, and there was something about a locked room at Castlemilk that was said to contain precious scrolls. For fifty-odd years now the Dog Lord had-in the deep and longstanding tradition of Bludd chiefs-disdained learning the history of the clanholds, but he was beginning to regret his ignorance.