“Sweet Elysia, Mother of Mercy,” he said.
Sludig had reined up beside Isgrimnur; he looked as though he had bitten into an apple and discovered half a squirming worm. “This is an evil place.”
Another voice said, “Evil is in what mortals—and immortals—do. The place itself is but a place.” Ayaminu the Sitha-woman rode up beside them on her own horse, which despite its fine-boned slenderness seemed to have less trouble with the cold and the steep climbs than the Rimmersmen’s mounts, bred in cold northern lands. “Once it was a point upon the teeming earth like any other.”
“Does this abomination have a name?” asked Isgrimnur.
“That?” She made one of the barely perceptible gestures that passed for a shrug among her kind. “It is called Three Ravens Tower. You see the beaks, of course. They allowed the defenders to drop stones, or hot oil, or other even less pleasant things upon anyone trying to take the wall.”
Isgrimnur had not come to like the Sitha-woman’s company any better during the sennight they had pursued the Norns from Tangleroot Castle. He had found all the Sithi he met difficult to understand and even more difficult to parley with, and he found their reluctance to engage with their murderous cousins even more frustrating; but if the immortals Jiriki and Aditu had been frustrating, and their mother Likimeya close to maddening, Ayaminu made those three seem easy company. Despite accompanying the duke’s troop and offering an occasional bit of information, Ayaminu seemed otherwise unconcerned by the doings of the mortals or even their deaths, and did not seem to care at all whether they ever caught the Norns who had brought so much ruin to her own people as well as Isgrimnur’s. Many times he had wondered whether they harbored some kind of spy in their midst, though the men he had set to watch her had seen no evidence of any treachery.
“Do you think the Norns are guarding it?” he asked now. “Or are they hurrying back to Stormspike Mountain?”
“They will defend this pass,” she said. “They have no choice. Do you see what has happened to the wall on the right side of the tower?”
Isgrimnur squinted, but in the fading twilight it was hard to make out much beyond the high wall’s shadowy, massive presence. “No. My eyes are not like a Sithi’s. Speak plainly.”
“A very few years ago, just before the beginning of the Storm King’s war, the earth shook here—a great writhing of the ground that threw down many parts of the wall around Nakkiga-That-Was, including that section beside the tower. If you look closely, you can see that the tower itself tilts slightly to one side.”
“I see no sign of the wall having collapsed.”
“Because repairs were done—but they were hasty. My people sent a number of our families to help them. This was before the Hikeda’ya moved openly against us, but Queen Utuk’ku still refused our offer. We know, though, that the repairs were over-swift, most likely because the queen’s eye was turned southward to the lands of men.”
“Over-swift? What do you mean?” This was Brindur, who had joined the impromptu council. “I may not have your damnable fairy eyes, but they look solid enough to me.”
As always, Ayaminu seemed unperturbed by insults. “Yes, the stones were piled up once more with as much skill as could be rendered, but not all the rituals were observed or the proper things done. The queen was keeping her holy Singers busy then, preparing the way for the Storm King’s return. We can all be grateful they failed at that, but also that they were so gravely occupied by it, because the Words of Binding and other necessary cantrips were not sung here. The wall is weak. It can be breached with nothing but force.”
“What else would we use?” Brindur demanded. “Trickery, like your accursed breed?”
Isgrimnur spurred his mount between the furious Rimmersman and Ayaminu. An argument with their one source of knowledge was a bad idea, and the Sitha-woman had seldom offered this much help before. “Please, explain,” Isgrimnur said to her. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. You have force. You have implements of war and siegecraft like your great battering ram. The wall is weak there, and the rituals that would have made it all but impervious have not been performed. The tower itself was damaged by the shaking earth and the wall was badly weakened.” She looked up the pass to the spiky shape of Three Ravens Tower. “You will lose men. The Hikeda’ya will fight fiercely. But if you wish to pass the walls of their lands, this is the place it can be done.”
“And why should we trust you?” Brindur snarled. “You have not seen fit to offer such useful advice before. Why now? And why could you not have told us that another Norn army was coming down upon us at the ruins?”
Ayaminu only looked at him blandly. “I knew nothing of that army. The Hikeda’ya are aware of my presence, I promise you, Northman. They take pains to keep their plans hidden.”
Isgrimnur was not to be distracted from the matter at hand. “But are you certain now? Could they be keeping something else from you?”
“Of course. But what I tell you is true—you could ride along this wall until the season changed and not find a more vulnerable spot.”
“You see my dilemma, don’t you?” Isgrimnur frowned. “I have the safety of several thousand men in my hands. Can you promise me success?”
Now the Sitha showed emotion for the first time, a faint twisting of the lips. “I can promise you nothing, Duke Isgrimnur. Many men will die. So will many Hikeda’ya. Any one of us may suffer that fate at any time, and a battle between desperate enemies will not make the chances less. But if you wish to pass the wall and enter the lands around Nakkiga—if you truly mean to take the city itself—then you can find no better spot. That is all I have to say. The decision is yours.”
“Look, we have reached the camp. Endri, did you hear me? We are here.” The younger soldier had not been badly hurt during the Norns’ escape, but like Porto himself he had been overwhelmed with a terrible, pressing weariness afterward and had spent most of his time on the back of Porto’s horse sliding in and out of troubled sleep. “Endri?”
“Can we stop now?”
“Yes, that’s what I said. See, the fires are lit—in fact, I smell food cooking.” The sun, unnaturally late in the sky this far north, had only just disappeared, although midnight was surely not far away. The camps, set up well out of range of even the strongest bowshot from the looming walls, nestled in the shelter of the thick, snow-mantled pines on either side of the steep canyon. As Porto reined up he took a brief look at the beaked tower, which squatted against the purple-blue sky like some horrid heathen idol from the primeval days before the Ransomer was sent to Mankind. “Come on, lad,” he told his companion, deliberately turning his back on the tower. “We don’t want to miss whatever supper is left—I am famished.” For the last stretch of the climb Porto had been forced to watch the tower loom larger with each moment, and despite his words to Endri, he found that the thing he wanted just now more than food or even drink was to find a spot where he could not see the tower at all until night finally hid it from view completely. It seemed to be watching them. He could almost imagine that their puniness, their mortal insignificance, actually amused it.
When they had found a fire, and were scooping the last congealing bits of stew out of the cooking pot, Endri suddenly looked up. “Porto?”
“What, lad?”
“I can’t remember the way home.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t remember the roads we took, or how we got here. I couldn’t find my way back again. Don’t leave me.”
Porto looked at the other men around the fire, mercenaries from Nabban and Perdruin and a scrawny, hard-muscled veteran of Josua’s Erkynlandish army, wondering what they would make of the young man’s neediness. Not one of them even looked up from their bowls. “What do you mean?” Porto asked him quietly. “I’m not going to leave you, lad. I promise.”