"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.
Mistakes have been made. Gods willing I'll make no more. Thinking of Ockish Bull made the Dog Lord smile. His words performed the alchemy of placing contrition right next to defiance.
Vaylo's smile held as he spread his hands wide on the stone balustrade and leaned out into the fresh air. He was looking north over the fort valley and the headlands beyond it. The afternoon sun was blocked by the fortress at his back. This was the best spot in the entire building, this broad, half-roofed battle terrace that extended out from the northern ward. Standing here a man could imagine he was he sail-ing north on a great ship through a strait that passed between two islands. The wind blew in your face no matter what time of day or night you came here and you could not see the earth below your feet.
Nan had commandeered part of the terrace as a playground for the bairns, and pretty much every man in the entire hillfort came out here a couple of times a day to breathe some good air instead of moldy foulness. A couple of men were out here now, sitting on the crates Nan had brought out for the bairns. Mogo Salt and Odwin Two Mar were sitting with their backs against the fortress wall, spearing carrots from a copper bowl with the tips of their swords. At the opposite end of the balcony a man whom Vaylo did not recognize was keeping watch, armed with a beautiful limewood self bow.
Vaylo called across to him. "Where is Drybone?"
The man turft, revealing the high cheekbones and finely sculpted bonemass of the Sull. "Sir, he is in the tower."
He was accoutered with tokens of Bludd-the red leather grip on his sheathed sword, the hollowed-out bone containing his measure of guidestone, the carbuncles of garnet on his cloak brooch-yet Vaylo did not know him.
"What is your name?"
"I'm Kye Hillrunner, once of Trenchland, now of Bludd." His voice was proud but Vaylo detected the nervousness underneath it. He was young, and this was the first time he had met his chief.