A Sword From Red Ice (15 page)

Ark had fallen. Two she-wolves had brought him
down as the pack leader sprang for his throat. The battle had lasted
mere seconds after that. The Naysayer finished it. Ash had grown up
in Mask Fortress, and for ten years her sole view was of the
brothers-in-the-watch weapons courts, which lay below her bedroom
window. Not once in all that time had she seen a man wield a sword
like the Naysayer. He ended the battle in just four sword strokes,
and then dropped to his knees by his hass. Ash had no longer been
able to see clearly by then—the current had carried the bridge
close to the river's south bank—but she had understood the
motions performed by the distant shape that was Mal Naysayer.

The Far Rider had executed Dras Morthu. The final
cut. With Ark hemorrhaging from mortal wounds, his strength failing
and the light dimming in his dark brown eyes, the Naysayer had made a
decision. Ark Veinsplitter might have been brought down by unmade
wolves, but it was Mal Naysayer, his fellow Far Rider and hass, who
had ended his life.

The Sull were deeply proud. Never let an enemy
take a life.

Ash raised her face toward the night sky and
inhaled. The wolves were hunting me. That was something she would
have to live with, the absolute certainty that Ark had died
protecting her life.

Exhaling, she closed her eyes. The blackness was
absolute.

Daughter.

Where was the other man who had called her by that
name? Where was the Naysayer? Was he standing grave watch by his
hass's corpse? Had he crossed the Flow? Was he searching for her? Or
had Ark's death altered his path, causing him to focus attention
elsewhere? Perhaps there was family to inform? Or—more
likely—missions of greater urgency to undertake? Mal Naysayer
lived by the sword. He might have judged the task of escorting Ash
March to the Heart Fires too passive.

She had turned her back on him that night on the
Flow. A strong sense of invading his privacy had made her walk the
gelding along the Floating Bridge to its anchorage on the southern
shore. Even in darkness, across the width of a river, she could feel
the weight of his loss. Mal Naysayer was close to seven feet tall,
with densely muscled shoulders and a back as straight as a lodgepole
pine. To see him bend was to see his grief.

I am on Sull territory now, she had told herself
as she stepped from the bridge onto the road of crushed quartz.
Surely I can make it to the Heart Fires on my own? It had made sense
to leave him; that way he would not be burdened with the task of
bringing her to his home. The decision whether or not to follow her
would be his own. Perhaps he might come after her, but she could not
rely on it. The first person to call her daughter had taught her that
men could not be relied upon. So where was Penthero Iss, Surlord of
Spire
Vanis
,
this night? Was he deep within the Blackvault plotting to kill those
who would take his place? Did he miss the daughter he'd found as a
newborn and adopted? Or did he miss controlling the Reach? Ash opened
her eyes. The stars were cold and blue. Crushing layers of pine
needles and old, yellow snow beneath her boot heels, she returned to
the dry camp. The Sull horse watched her with anticipation, his tail
raised, his ears forward, standing on the exact patch of ground where
she'd unsaddled him. Ark and Mal had used him as a packhorse and a
spare, and he had muscular legs and a deep chest. Stony white and
dappled, with shaggy patches on his neck and withers, he wasn't
nearly as elegant as the Far Riders' mounts. Yet all Sull horses were
beautiful. It had something to do with the intelligence biding in the
center of their eyes.

Ash felt a rush of pleasure as he snuffled her
bare palm. It made thinking about her foster father easier. Would he
have really gone through with his plans to imprison her? Surely not.
She was his daughter. All she'd ever wanted to do was please him.

Leaning against the gelding, Ash tried to warm
away the hurt. Iss had never loved her, she had to remember that. He
had adopted her because she satisfied the requirements of a prophecy
foretelling the birth of a Reach: a newborn left to perish in the
snow outside Vaingate. Your little hands were blue, Iss had been fond
of telling her. And when I picked you up and tucked you under my
cloak you barely made a sound.

Why had her foster father wanted her so badly? If
she hadn't run away from Mask Fortress what would have become of her?
She knew Iss had planned to imprison her, but how had he intended to
use her? What had Heritas Cant told her in Ille Glaive? 'You will be
able to walk the borderlands at will, hear and sense the creatures
that live there, and your flesh will become rakhar dan, reachflesh,
which is held sacred by the Sull.' It made about as much sense now as
it did then. Yet she did not think Cant's words were false. Mistaken
perhaps, but not false. And why had Ark insisted she become Sull? "If
you are not with us you are against us, and as such no living,
breathing Sull will let you live." What did she possess that
filled them with such fear?

Thoughtful, Ash rocked her weight back onto her
feet. She was a Reach, and she did not know what that meant.

Leading the Sull horse by the cheek strap, she
guided him toward the section of riverbank where rye and wild carrot
had seeded between the scree. He deserved a treat. Once he'd eaten
his fill he would head straight back to the camp. He would not stray,
and if he heard anything that alarmed him he would immediately
return to her side. Ash didn't know what she would have done without
him these past six days. He knew the way home. With a loose hand on
his reins he headed east, following a subtle path along the
rivershore that Ash could only occasionally discern. Together they
had passed vast beds of ice-rotted bulrushes humming with black
flies, sulfurous tributaries that dumped mustard-colored ore into the
Flow, hedges of spiny bushes that formed defensive walks around
beachheads, salt ponds ringed with game paths, and long stretches of
shoreline where ghostly forests of needle-thin birches grew from the
frozen mud.

She wasn't sure how far she'd traveled from the
Floating Bridge. Sometimes she rode, but more often she chose to
walk. Awake before the first cock crow each morning, she was on the
trail before dawn. It was easier to keep going than stop. If she had
been traveling alone she would have walked all day, swigging from her
water bladder as she wove between the trees, only halting to catch
her breath and pee. The gelding needed to graze though, and she was
forced to stand and wait for long intervals as he cropped last year's
grass.

Waiting was a kind of torture. It gave her time to
think. Katia, her little wild-haired maid, dead. Ark dead. Raif gone.
All three had risked their lives to help her, and she had not paid
them back. Ash filled her lungs with night air, punishing herself
with its icy sharpness. She lived in a world where she had not paid
them back.

Camp was little more than a circular patch of
kick-cleared ground twenty feet north of the treeline. Out of habit
Ash had raised a guide-post, and now began laying stones for a fire
ring. She had no tent hides and feared lighting a fire in this
strange land, but it gave her something to do. The river stone was
green traprock reefed with fool's gold, and it was cold and sharp.
Ash had lost her gloves along with her supplies so she had to lay it
bare-handed. Darkness rose as she worked, snuffing the wind and
pulling up mist.

Intent on building the fire ring, stacking the
stones in overlapping layers as Ark had taught her, she did not hear
the gelding approach. When it pushed its nose against her back in way
of greeting, she jumped in fright.

"Bad horse," she scolded, feeling
foolish. Suddenly everything seemed foolish: the guide post and the
fire ring, traveling alone—to the Heart of the Sull without
even knowing why.

"What am I doing here?" she asked aloud,
hearing the tremble in her voice and not liking it. "What am I
good for except getting people killed?"

Nothing answered. Along the treeline the cedars
swayed in long, rolling waves. The gelding watched her, its head
cocked, straining to read her mood. Abruptly Ash sat. She was tired
and hungry and quite possibly going insane. Frowning, she glanced at
the near-perfect circle of rocks, thought about it for a moment, and
then leaned forward and knocked it over with her fist. Feeling a bit
better, she spoke a command to the horse.

The gelding moved closer, swinging about to
present its flank. Ash reached into her coat, located her gear belt,
and drew her knife. Two weapons Ark had given her: a sickle blade
with a weighted nine-foot chain attached; and a slender handknife
made of the rare white alloy that was more precious to the Sull than
gold. Platinum. Case-hardened with arsenic and other strange metals,
the blade was so fiercely edged that when it first sliced your skin
you felt no pain. Angus Lok had possessed a similar weapon, also
Sull-wrought, that he lovingly called his "mercy blade."
Ash had never seen him use it, for although it had both the form and
dimensions of a standard handknife it was not the sort of blade that
lent itself to spearing meat or picking dirt from fingernails. It was
too formal and deadly for that.

Ash held the knife as she had been taught; thumb
on the riser, index finger on the dimple, edge out. The handle was
lightly hollowed for balance, and a Crosshatch pattern of overlapping
flight feathers had been etched into its surface to form a grip. The
metal was shockingly cold, and she waited for her body heat to warm
it before she spoke. "Ishl xalla tannan."

I know the value of that which I take. Ark
Veinsplitter had taught her the words: the first of the Sull prayers.

With a swift and practiced movement she ran the
knife's edge across the short hair of the gelding's flank until she
encountered the faint resistance of a surface vein. Tendons jerked in
her wrist as she sliced through the vessel. The horse shuddered
briefly, then stilled as blood jetted from its belly. Kneeling
forward, Ash opened her mouth to catch the flow. Blood gushed between
her teeth, hot and winy and smelling of grass. She swallowed, filled
her mouth and then swallowed again. Massaging the flesh around the
cut to keep the vessel open, she drank until her stomach was full.
Satiated, she clamped her palm against the wound. The gelding stepped
into her, increasing the pressure. They both waited. Once the flow
had decreased, Ash pinched the horseskin together and removed her
hand.

As she sealed the wound with the purified wolf
grease she kept in a pouch at her waist, a twig snapped with force
beyond the treeline. Ash sprang to her feet. The cedars were a trap
for shadows, black and suddenly still. The only thing that moved was
mist venting from their roots. Ash listened, watched, smelled, and
then slowly unhooked the sickle knife from her belt.

When the second sound came it was not from where
she was expecting it. This time it came from the river shore. The wet
plunk of something dropping into water. Without thinking she spun
about to face it, and even before the scythe's chain stopped
swinging, she realized her mistake. Anyone, anywhere could throw a
stone into water.

"Drop your weapon." The order came from
directly behind her. It was spoken mildly, but Ash wasn't fooled. Her
foster father was the Surlord of Spire Vanis: she knew how power
sounded.

Without turning she opened her fist and let the
sickle knife drop to the ground. The silver letting knife was back in
its deerhide sheath attached to her gear belt and she slid her left
hand into her coat opening to draw it. A whirring sound and a shot
of cool air against her ear stopped her dead.

"Place both hands by your sides and turn
around. You do not want me to fire again."

No she did not. Instantly, she dropped both hands.
The arrow had passed so close to her face the stiff feathers of its
fletchings had scratched her cheek. This man is Sull, she decided as
she turned to face him.

Yet when she saw him he was not clad in Sull furs
and Sull horn-mail. He was dressed in simple deerskins collared with
marten, and cross-belted with tanned leather. The belts were buckled
in brass, not silver. His hair, and any ornaments that might proclaim
his race, was concealed beneath a marten-fur cap. Yet how could he
not be Sull? The precision of his voice. His height. The deep shadows
beneath his cheekbones. That shot.

Ridiculously, as she stood there facing him, the
hair on the left side of her head floated upward, suddenly
weightless. The arrow must have charged the strands as it passed.

The stranger inspected her for some time, his
eared longbow resting easy in his grip. A hard-sided arrowcase made
of overlapping disks or horn was suspended, ranger-style, at a cross
angle from his waist. Ash wondered how long he had been spying on her
before he'd made his move. "Who are you and what is your
business on this path?" Again there was that voice: firm,
resonant, its owner sure of his own worth.

Ash raised her chin. "My business is my own
to keep. My name I give you freely. Ash."

It was full dark now and the stranger had his hack
to the moon. She could not see his eyes. "You are not Sull."

Pitched in the dangerous area between question and
statement, the words were a trap. All possible replies damned her.
Deny being Sull and she was a trespasser. Claim it and risk being
tested and fail. Ash took a breath, stealing extra seconds before
answering. She was in Sull territory south of the Flow and southeast
of Bludd. That much she knew. Her foster father had possessed maps of
this place. Onionskin scrolls, brown with age and dry as hay, that
could only be unrolled when it rained. She had seen them once or
twice, peering over Iss' shoulder as he studied them. Blanks, that
was what she mostly remembered. Unfilled spaces that in other maps
would be crisscrossed with mountains, rivers, place names. Even so,
her foster father had found something within them that held his
interest: the oxbow curve of a coastline; a border illustrated with
the footprint pattern of a wolf; a warning spelled out in High Hand,
"Here Be Where Sull Are Most Fierce."