Drawing a hand over the stubbie on his chin, Vaylo looked through the hole in the roof at the sky. It was the color of deep mountain lakes. Underwater, that was how he felt, plunged from a world that allowed him to stand upright and see ahead, into one that was murky and had no place to rest his feet. Nine men lost, and if Cluff Drybannock's fears were true they weren't even dead. Did that mean they would never rest in the Stone Halls of the gods?

"Yet they died fighting," Vaylo said quietly, barely aware he was speaking out loud.

You could not be a clansman and fail to comprehend the full horror of those words. Dry nodded softly. "The Stone Gods have long memories. If the men are ever freed from the thrall of the Endlords the manner of their deaths will not go unrewarded."

The Dog Lord found he had to think about this statement for a moment. Light was leaving the tower quickly now, making way for the chill of night. "How can my men be freed?"

Straightaway he could see this was a question that Cluff Drybannock had hoped not to answer-perhaps not even to himself. He turned to look out the window and fill his lungs with fresh air. "Once a man or woman is unmade they join the ranks of the Endlords. They too will wield Kil Ji and unlike those who are imprisoned, they have no need to force their way out. They are here, amongst us, and they walk by night. To reclaim them for the Stone Gods we must slay them through the heart."

"Mother of Gods" Vaylo murmured.

They both fell silent after that Vaylo could see Dry's profile, see him blinking as he worked the air in and out of his chest. After a while Vaylo asked him, "How do you know so much? A boy eavesdropping in a tavern would not have learned all this."

Dry turned so he could look directly at his chief. "Ihe ranger Angus Lok told me much of this last winter, when we held him in the pit cell below Dhoone."

Of course. Vaylo should have guessed. He knew the ranger well. When they'd met all those months ago in the Tomb of the Dhoone Princes, Angus Lok had tried to tell him some of the very same things. He had certainly warned him. "Return to Bludd and marshal your forces and wait for the Long Night to come. Forget about Dhoone and this roundhouse and your fancy of naming yourself Lord of the Clans. Days darker than night lie ahead." Vaylo had barely marked the words at the time, so intent was he on holding onto the Dhoonehouse. Yet Angus Lok had found someone else nearby who was willing to listen, someone whose blood pulled him toward the Sull and their causes, someone who was hungry to know.

Vaylo searched for how he felt. Almost you could not blame the ranger—bring a snake into your house and you will end up bitten— but he was less certain about Dry's role. Should he have listened so eagerly? How could you stop a man from wanting to know the history of his people? You could not, and to do so would deprive him of his freedom. That was that, then. There was no disloyalty on Dry's part, only listening. Yet it still hurt.

Dry stood waiting and Vaylo knew him well enough to know that he was anxious about his chiefs reaction. Vaylo made an effort. "Angus Lok's information is usually sound, though he is particular in how and where he metes it out." It was the best he could do for now, and Dry sensed it.

Dry could have pointed out that Angus Lok only told him what he would have eventually discovered for himself, yet he did not. Instead, he said, "A half-moon is rising."

It was a truce. Cluff Drybannock was part Sull and he could not deny it—did not want to deny it—and Vaylo knew he had little choice but to accept it. Neither man wanted to dwell on what it meant for the future: Sull goals and clan goals would not remain the same. For now they were both united in defending the hillfort: leave it at that. "Let us walk in the moonlight back to the fort," Vaylo said. Cluff Drybannock crosseojfche chamber and took his chiefs arm, and they were both comforted by the touch for a while.

TWENTY-FOUR The Weasel's Den

The march was grueling on both men and horses and Marafice was glad they had thought to bring the carts that the grangelords, in their haste to return to Spire Vanis and enter the contest for surlord that was surely taking place there, had left behind in the camp. The grangelords had left behind a lot of things without value—servants included—and it all added to the general motley of Marafice Eye's crew.

The carts now, they were a good thing. Saved the badly wounded having to be thrown over the backs of horses, or even worse—God forbid—being dragged behind them on sleds. The first thing he'd done after the rout was to set those fancy grangelord servants hitching the carts. It all had to be executed in haste of course for it had not been clear then whether or not the Bludd army would mount a full pursuit. Luckily they had not, preferring instead to chop down most of the remaining Hailsmen, chase the city men off the Crabhold and occupy and secure the gate. It was a miscalculation, Marafice reckoned. For any war chief with experience could have taken one look at the tired and bloody city men army and known it for easy pickings. The Bludd warrior in command was lazy, Marafice concluded. He had the swaggering looks of his father, the Dog Lord, but he was not half the man.

Marafice shuddered as he forced his great black warhorse down into the rocky stream. That moment after the horn sounded and the front line of the strange new army broke free from the woods behind the roundhouse, the Knife had known fear so concentrated it had stopped his heart. Clan Bludd. He had recognized their colors and their trappings straightaway and he knew instantly that he must call a retreat He had met the Dog Lord man-to-man, looked into his eyes, and heard the timbre of his voice. Marafice Eye, with twenty years spent in the Rive Watch protecting three successive surlords, had never met anyone who had impressed him like Vaylo Bludd.

He had assumed that the Dog Lord would he leading the Bludd army. He was wrong. That wrongness was why his army of three thousand men was alive today. If he hadn't felt such fear of the Dog Lord he might have been ambivalent about retreat Certainly Andrew Perish and his God-fearing nine hundred had wanted to stay and fight. They held the gate. Almost. It may have been possible to secure it They had the number. Even with those bastard grangelords stealing away with half the army, superior manpower was theirs.Two factors were not in their favor though. One, they were unfamiliar with the Crabhouse, and it would have taken time and trial to secure it. And two, they had been fighting from noon to sundown and were flat-out spent. Even Andrew Perish, whose zeal gave new meaning to the phrase 'second wind' had been forced to admit that his men were flagging. That last hard fight with Hailsmen for the gate had been devastating. Many of Perish's faithful had fallen.

At least it had doused their God fires, and made it less of a fight to call a retreat.

It was hard to know how many had died in the rout. Numbers had been fluid, bodies already strewn across the roundhouse steps and its river hill. Marafice could not take such matters lightly, and he had played the retreat over and over again in his head. It was a hard thing for a warlord, a retreat. Did you command the front or bring up the rear?

He had brought up the rear, because that seemed like the way he had lived his life. When you were bom a butcher's son in Spire Vanis you started at the back.

Still, even if the retreat had not gone as well as it might, Marafice believed the men who marched with him this day would live longer lives because of it. Bludd, Blackhail, Dhoone: all three northern giants had their eyes on Ganmiddich. It would have turned into a killing field. Three thousand city men holed up in the the most bitterly contested clanhold in the north? How long before the real might of Blackhail turned up? And what about the self-crowned Thorn King, Robbie Dhoone?