A Flight of Ravens by John Conroe (thriller books to read TXT) 📗

Jella said.  “I am a battlemaster and this one here was, for a time, my apprentice.  But he is long past that.  Now days, I hang around to see what mayhem he dreams up next.  He has something of a gift for it.”

“He knows that,” Kassa said suddenly.  “In fact, he knew the captain on sight because he was expecting him here, sooner or later.”

The stout block of muscle and bone turned his head on a nonexistent neck and looked at our pretty young eslling with a grimace of shocked horror.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I am,” she said to his unasked question.  “He hoped you would show up later, after things here had devolved more.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The conflict that’s created… it’s intended to motivate you somehow,” Kassa said, frowning and tilting her head as she stared at Andru.  He, on the other hand, was staring at the ground, his lips moving silently.

“Did you want Montshire to take a hand against Berkette—or perhaps Mandrigo?” I asked.

His eyes twitched but he refused to look at me and I started to hear his voice as his muttering got a little louder.

“The second one,” Kassa said.  “Mandrigo.”

“Why?” Cort asked, baffled.

“Well, let’s see,” I started to muse out loud. “Mandrigo is bigger than any other country, at least in territory.  Like Drodacia and Montshire, it borders the ice fields.”

“But unlike them, it has access to the ocean coast,” Jella said.

“Ah, resources—seafood, perhaps?” I said.

“That scored a hit,” Kassa said.

“So the Nuks want land with access to unfrozen ocean?” I asked her.

“Food. It keeps coming back to food,” she said.

Andru suddenly lifted his shaggy head and glared at her.  “Of course it does, you overfed cow!  Do you have any idea of how hard it is to feed children on the ice?”

“Your elders have always been very careful about the birth rate to avoid that kind of problem,” Jella commented.

He whipped around to stare at her.  “Control the birth rate?  Do you even know what that means?  Do you understand that some babies get to live while others are left on the ice for the white bears to take?”

“He was such a child, but his father hid him.  Sent his mother, who was Mandrigan, back with him instead of sacrificing him to the ice.”

“Get. Out. Of. My. Head—you witch!” he bellowed loud enough to bring some dust down from the beams overhead.

“Easily accomplished,” I said to him.  “Just tell us the damned story already.”

He was breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows, his chunky chest rising and falling as he stared at me with his jet-black eyes. We waited.  Finally, his breathing calmed and the obstinance left his eyes.

“She’s already told you the gist of it. I grew up in Mandrigo, but never belonged.  People knew I wasn’t born there and knew I was of mixed blood.  They made fun of me, ostracized me, locked me out of their society.  When I was a teenager, I headed north, crossing the Great River.  Found my way back to my father’s caves, to the ice lairs of my birth.  I wasn’t truly welcomed there either, at least not at first.  Except by my father.  But over time, he had me tell some of the others in that lair of the sheer amount of food I had grown up amongst.  Even as outsiders in Mandrigo, my mother and I always had plenty to eat.  No one starves in Mandrigo—no one.”

He took a breath.  “All of those my father introduced me to had given children to the ice.  All of them were angry about it.  They talked and talked but could only dream of having that much fish, shellfish, crab, and lobster.  Of growing actual vegetables in dirt under the rays of the sun instead of farming mushrooms and fungi in the dark.  Then one day, a group who had been sent to attempt fishing through the river ice that can be three spans thick found the tailor.  And it was I who discovered what he really was, what he could do.”

“And the chips?” I asked.

He studied me for a moment.  “There is a place, a city of the Punished that had extensive tunnels already in place when the Punishment happened.  The city was buried under ice, smothered completely, the Punished in that city dying of cold within a short period of time.  We found people sitting at their tables, frozen solid in the act of eating.  A few managed to live for a time in the tunnels until their food ran out.  The tunnels were a marketplace, mostly of textiles and amazing items of a technology we couldn’t understand.  We found several merchants’ stores packed with small devices.  Inside each of these handheld machines was a single tiny chip.  We destroyed the machines, but the chips were gold.  We thought to trade them to Drodacia for food.  But as soon as we returned to the lairs, we discovered they had barely any precious metal on them at all.  Then the tailor handled one and Impressed it to calm a starving child.”

“The Nuk have always managed before. What changed?” Jella asked.

“The weather.  Every year, the ice gets colder, thicker, deadlier.  The few animals that can live there either migrated away or died off.  Even the white bears are few, at least near my father’s lair.”

“It did that during the Punishment too,” Jella said to him.  That caught my attention.  The Drodacians had better records of the Punishment than any of the other nations.  But she had always refused to talk to me about it.

“True.  But it was short termed, according to our Memories. They speak of just a few short years of sudden unrelenting cold.  And that was well into the time of Punishment.”

“Time of Punishment?” Cort asked before I could.

“The Punishment didn’t happen overnight,” Andru said with a dark frown as if we were idiots.  “It took more than a decade for the collapse to accelerate and finally end in all-out war. The war that sundered the land and left Nengled