Watcher of the Dead by J. V. Jones Page B

killed the dam he’d have to kill the
newborn—it wouldn’t survive a day without milk or
protection—and one man without horse or cart could not bring
back three kills.
    You kill it, you butcher it. Da’s
words concerning hunting were law.
    What would Tem Sevrance make of his son
now? What advice would he give to a man who could heart-kill any
target he set in his sights? What laws governed Raif Twelve Kill,
Watcher of the Dead?
    Resettling the butterflied carcass on
his shoulders, Raif entered the camp. Tents had been raised twenty
days earlier on new-cleared softwood. The stumps were still oozing
pitch. Circles of matted yellow pine needles marked the former
positions of the tents, and potholes of blackened earth told of
longfires, cook fires and smoke pits. One of the lamb brothers was
filling in the latrine. Another was using a long pole to unhook a
slab of bear fat from the safe tree.
    Raif shivered. Waiting in the pines had
chilled him. The air had been still in the early hours before dawn
and the frost smoke had risen: white mist that switched between ice
and vapor and then back again. Five hours later and he could still
feel it cooling his burned skin. The damaged muscle in his chest had
shrunk and stiffened, pulling on the sutures and creating tension
between his ribs. The wound on his left shoulder, where the lamb
brothers had drawn out the splinter of unmade horn, was healing in
unexpected ways. The skin above the exit wound had knitted closed,
but the wormhole underneath remained open. Raif doubted it would ever
heal. He was not and would never be whole.
    All of us are missing something,
Yustaffa had said that four months ago in the Rift. He had been
talking about the Maimed Men and their practice of taking a pound of
flesh from anyone seeking to join them—Raif himself had lost
half a finger in one of their initiation ceremonies. Yet he now
understood Yustaffa’s words went beyond physical damage. Maimed
Men were outcasts, orphans, fugitives, runaways: they had a world of
things to miss beyond flesh.
    Drey. Effie.
    Raif named his brother and sister in
his head and then pushed all thoughts of them away. He had developed
a sense about when it was safe to think of the people he loved, when
it was possible to picture them in his mind without the pain of
losing them. Today was not such a day.
    â€œGot yourself a pretty doe,â€

CHAPTER 2
    A House in the City
    SNOW FELL ON Ille Glaive on the night
known as Gallows Eve. Warmed by the spring sun during the day, the
black mass of the city melted the snow on contact. Paved streets were
slick with grease. Dirt roads were sodden and stinking, slowly
disintegrating into rivers of animal waste and mud. The rats were
out. Thousands of rodents scuttled along ledges and drain ditches, up
crumbling walls, armless statues, soot-blackened trees and lead
roofs. The explosive snap of traps being sprung was the only noise
that broke the silence before dawn.
    The watcher crouching in the shadows
heard but did not heed it. His cloak of boiled wool was topped with a
second layer of waxed pony skin so he felt neither the cold nor damp.
The pony skin had been purchased at Tanners Market seventeen hours
earlier, and the watcher had sat and waited in a nearby alehouse
while the vendor had dyed the skin to his specifications. “Matte
black?â€

CHAPTER 3
    Do and Be Damned
    STANNIG BEADE LEFT the Hailhold in the
same cart he’d arrived in, a six-axle wheelhouse with walls of
poison pine. He was dressed in the same narrow-shouldered robe of
polished pigskin collared with mink and shod in the same nailhead
boots. His hair and beard had been freshly dyed, his nails clipped,
and his skin unctioned with resin harvested from thousand-year pines
that grew in Scarpe’s Armored Grove. His ceremonial chisel was
mounted in his right fist, and it was a testament to Blackhail’s
wire-pullers that you had to look very closely to see the