A Sword From Red Ice (28 page)

All the time Quill had been in the room, Baralis
had not moved. He moved now though, using his elbows to pull himself
up a fraction on the bed. Crope's instinct was to rush forward to aid
him, but his lord sent a look from the distant past. I will deal with
this.

Thwak. Thwak. Thwak. The sound of a spear butt
thumping a door sounded from the street below. Crope couldn't tell if
it was Quill's door or the one before it. Incomprehensibly, neither
Baralis or Quill seemed to care. Each was looking at the other in a
manner that reminded Crope of the way free miners appraised newfound
diamonds for flaws.

After a moment Baralis spoke, and to Crope's ears
his lord's voice sounded more beautiful than it had eighteen years
earlier. It broke on some of the words and sometimes faded, but its
power was still there. All that had been lost could be heard, yet
that only added to the richness. Crope's heart ached with love and
sadness. The essence of his lord had always lived in his voice.

"Deliver us safely from the watch and you
will be rewarded."

"How so? Your friend here says you have
nothing." Baralis's reply came quickly, but to Crope's ears it
was not as fast at it would have been eighteen years earlier. "My
servant speaks the truth as he knows it. I know where the Surlord's
secret stash lies."

Quill's eyes widened, yet he forced them back down
to two little strips. "Secret stashes? Do you think I was born
yesterday?"

"You were born thirty-one years ago in a town
so small it didn't have a name. You lived in a lean-to built by your
grandfather, who beat you with a fire iron. You left home when you
were nine. No one came after you, but you never stopped hoping."

"Enough." Quill was shaking. "Where
is this stash?" Shouting sounded from down below as Baralis
rocked his mangled body forward on the bed. Sheets fell from him like
shed skin. "I will not reveal the whereabouts of Iss' stash, but
know this: I have moved beyond deception. I want nothing but shelter
for my servant and myself. Hell knows me, and you cannot understand
what that knowing brings. Every hour that passes I become less. The
things that I want are beyond your power to hoard or steal. Help me
and you will receive what I no longer desire."

A moment passed where if Crope was asked he would
have said he felt as if the earth beneath his feet was turning, and
then the thief nodded slowly, without eagerness. "The deal is
done. God help us all."

Crope gathered his lord's possessions together as
Quill went ahead to fetch the dogs.

A Raven's Call

Raif opened his eyes. All was still and dark. The
Want had thickened while he slept, there was no other way to describe
it. Sometimes it felt loose and full of space, a vapor that might
blow in the wind. Now it felt like sediment sinking to the bottom of
a glass.

Without thinking, he raised his hand to his chest.
He had been sleeping on his back, yet something had pushed the raven
lore deep into the V of his throat. As his fingers pried the hard
piece of bird ivory from his skin, his mind became aware of something
his body already knew. Danger. His muscles were already charged, his
sweat glands open and excreting oil. Even before he opened his eyes
his night vision had been engaged.

Unknown territory, that was what his life had
become. Yet what choice did he have but to embrace it?

Rising, he made swift decisions on what he would
need. The dimness of the tent did not slow him, and he located
clothes, boots and weapons, readied himself, and then stepped
outside.

A piercing frost had cracked down on the Want
while he'd slept. No wind could live in such cold and the air was
paralyzed. The cookfire in the center of the tent circle had shrunk
to a dim, red glow. Frozen smoke accumulating around the base was
slowly suffocating the last of the flames. The lamb brother on night
watch was away from his post. Raif tracked his footsteps to the
corral and spotted him calming the milk ewe. The animals knew.

Raif crossed to the fire, closed his fist around
the lamb brother's bone-and-copper spear and tugged it from the
earth. "Here," he said, as the man approached him. "Take
it."

He was the youngest brother, the novice. A single
black dot was centered over the bridge of his nose. The discipline
of his brothers was something he had not yet mastered, and in the
unobserved darkness of his watch he had tied a horse blanket over his
dark brown robes to keep out the cold. He shed this now as he took
the spear. Whatever he read on Raif's face was enough to sober him.
In the seven days he'd stayed in the lamb brothers' camp, Raif had
never heard him speak. Raif couldn't even be sure if he understood
Common, but he spoke to him anyway. Probably to calm himself. "With
me."

The man's gaze flicked to the clarified hide
tents, where his fellow lamb brothers were sleeping.

Raif shook his head. "Leave them."

The lamb brother seemed to understand and fell in
step beside Raif. He handled the nine-foot spear well, Raif observed,
balancing it lightly at his waist. Raif's own weapon felt strange in
his hand. Plunged deep into shadowflesh, the Forsworn sword's weight
had shifted downblade. He knew he should probably knock out the
crystal mounted on the pommel to restore balance, but he couldn't
bring himself to deface the Listener's gift. Besides, he had the Sull
bow. Slung crossways over his back, the six-foot longbow slapped
against his right shoulder blade and buttocks as he walked. The horn
case containing his arrows should have been suspended high on his
left shoulder for ease of draw, but instead hung from the gear belt
at his waist. The shoulder wound still bothered him. He could feel it
now. It was tight.

Heading away from the tent circle, he tried to
make sense of what was happening. The raven lore, given to him at
birth by the old clan guide Beardy Hail, felt like a chunk of fuel
ice at his throat. Here it is, Raif Sevrance. One day you might be
glad of it. Beardy's words echoed in the hollow space between Raif's
thoughts.

Drawn, that was the word. He'd been woken by
something and drawn outside.

Back at the tent circle one of the mules began to
bray. Raif glanced at the lamb brother. Easy, he mouthed. Again,
probably to himself. Cold muscled in to his chest, freezing the
little pockets where air waited to slip inside the blood. Underfoot
the pumice dunes were as soft as flour. Every step raised a puff of
dust.

Starlight blued the Want. Raif looked over a
seabed landscape where shadows did not exist. It occurred to him that
he should be afraid of walking too far from the camp, but his mind
was rationing fear. Odds were he would need it later. If he was
unable to return to the tent circle then so be it. There was no
choice here. The raven lore had called.

At his side, Raif could hear the lamb brother
breathing hard. In cold this intense it took effort to expel the
breath. Raif was glad the man was here, grateful not to be alone in
the twilight world that had become his life. Tallal had said the lamb
brothers search for the lost souls of the dead. Morah, he called
them. The flesh of God. Raif did not know whether that meant tracking
down rotting corpses and defleshed bones, or hunting ghosts. He did
know they were here to do their work. Tallal had told him as much
yesterday as they had walked the perimeter of the camp looking for
driftwood. Raif had asked him why they called themselves the lamb
brothers, and Tallal had replied, "To my people the lamb is a
symbol of hope. Lambing season is a time of celebration. Spring
comes and life is renewed after the long hardship of winter. Without
lambs there would be no milk, no wool, no meat. Our bodies would
perish. We who seek morah honor the lambs. Every morning when we
leave our tents we offer thanks. May the nourishment they provide
give us strength to continue our search."

Raif found it surprisingly easy to imagine why the
lamb brothers were here. The Want seemed as good a place as any to
find lost souls. "Shayo!"

The lamb brother's urgent whisper cut off Raif's
thoughts. The word was unknown to him, but the meaning was clear.
Following the lamb brother's gaze, Raif peered into the eerie blue
landscape of dunes.

Nothing moved. Both men came to a halt. The lamb
brother held his breath. The silence was immense, unlike any other
silence Raif had experienced. Stand and listen long enough and you
might hear the stars burning.

Firming his grip on the sword, Raif scanned the
horizon. At the far edge of his vision the mounded pumice gave way to
rubble and crumbling cinder cones. The cones' shapes reminded him of
frost boils in the Badlands. Tern said boils were formed by frozen
earth pushing up rock. They were hollow in the center, Raif knew that
much. As boys he and Drey would play charge the castle in them, and a
game they'd made up themselves called double death to Dhoone that
involved, as far as Raif could recall, a lot of shouting and throwing
sticks. Raif swallowed the memory before it could hurt him, and
replaced it with something else.

What came to mind was the frost boil Sadaluk, the
Listener of the Ice Trappers, had shown him many months ago in the
west. Sadaluk had made him scrape at the ice that had collected in
the hollow center of the boil. Something dread had died there. A
creature from a time of nightmares, its grotesquely enlarged jaws
sprung open and packed with ice. Raif shook himself. While his mind
was wandering he had not blinked and his eyeballs ached with cold.
Blinking now made them sting.

As his eyesight cleared he spotted a movement at
the base of one of the dunes. A puff of powder rose from the surface.
The skin across Raif's back pulled tight. At his side the lamb
brother flexed his spear. They watched the dust mushroom lazily in
the still air. Raif wished for more light. The Want was as dim as
murky water. Where was the damn moon?

Something glinted. A beam of starlight ran along a
straight line and disappeared. The lamb brother spoke the name of his
maker and began to move forward. Raif made his best guess of the
distance between himself and the puff of dust. A hundred and sixty
paces.

He remembered the Shatan Maer. Sword or bow? The
Listener had advised him to learn how to kill with a sword, look his
victims in the eyes as he took their lives. Raif had learned. He
could list the men he had killed with his sword. Chokko of Clan
Bludd. The Forsworn knight. Bitty Shank. Deep in his core Raif knew
the Listener had been right. It was too easy for him to kill with a
bow. It was swift and uninvolved and he could do it from a distance
of a hundred and sixty paces. Yet the Listener had been speaking of
men. Raif had slain the Shatan Maer with his sword. It had been
sickening and exhausting, and it had not made him a better man.
Heritas Cant had told him the Unmade were already dead. They might
look like men, but they were not men. Their flesh had been claimed by
the Endlords, and changed in ways Raif did not understand. They had
hearts, he had learned that for himself, but those hearts did not
pump blood.

A tingle of pain sounded in the muscle of Raif's
shoulder. Ignoring it, he sheathed his sword. As he reached for the
Sull bow he glanced briefly at that lamb brother walking woozily
across the dunes. The man had his spear lightly balanced above his
shoulder, but his mind was on his footing and he'd allowed the point
to droop. Better to stay put, Raif decided. Let whatever was out
there come to you.

"To me!" he called out, running numb
fingers over the finely waxed twine that braced the bow. When the
lamb brother's course failed to change, Raif yelled, "Get back."
The lamb brother heard him this time, acknowledging the noise with a
slight sideways motion of his veiled head, but he did not stop. He'd
halved the distance between his original position and the puff of the
dust, and was accelerating down a dune. Raif guessed the lamb brother
had understood the instruction well enough, and had chosen not to
heed it.

He did not know then; had no experience to warn
him what might be out there. Raif thought starkly, Who has?

Unable to warm the wax with his fingers, he
settled for smoothing the twine. The Sull bow felt as light as a
stalk of grass. Out of habit he flexed the belly before drawing.
Nights as cold as this killed bows. Bent bows, those made from a
single stave of wood, could simply snap. Built ones would curl and
come unglued. The Sull bow was a built recurve, constructed from
layers of horn laid down in alternating strips. If it were a
clan-made bow it would have felt stiff and brittle and a clansman
might think twice about using it. The Sull bow bent as easily as a
dancer's spine, ticking once as the recurve popped out. Made for
nights like this, it was ready.

Raif slid an arrow from the case, laid it against
the riser. The action calmed him, and he found himself remembering
his father's voice. "So, will you be a hammerman like your
brother Drey?"

"No, Da. I choose the bow."

Hooking the twine with his three middle fingers,
he pulled back the Sull recurve. Straightaway his focus shifted.
Background blurred. Individual stars bled into stripes. The outlines
of the dunes sharpened. Raif searched for and found the foot-size
mound of settled pumice that seconds earlier had been dust in the
air. Fist on level with his right shoulder, he held a full draw as he
tracked the surrounding space. The lamb brother was approaching the
mound, caution slowing his pace. Hard breaths made the cloth panel
covering his mouth move like bellows. Raif briefly sighted the man's
heart. Its rhythm was unfamiliar to him, but he could still read the
fear. With a small mental tug, he pulled away.

Raising his sights he scanned the cinder cones
beyond the dunes. He did not expect to spot anything amongst the
ancient, deteriorating vents. That wasn't the point. Something was
waiting in the dunes. Until it moved it could not be spotted . . .
and it would not move until it could strike. The cones were still.
The peculiar quality of starlight made it impossible to accurately
gauge their height or distance. To Raif they were evidence of the
doom that had been laid on the Want. The earth's crust was not stable
here. Fissures undermined it, molten rock charged it and things had a
nasty habit of forcing their way out. Kahl Barranon, the Fortress of
Grey Ice, had been built on flawed mountain rock. It could be a
thousand leagues from here, or maybe less than ten. Slowly, Raif was
coming to understand that distance didn't matter in this place. What
mattered was the Want was wounded. Its skin was riddled with cracks
and the Shatan Maer had tried to push itself through the largest.
Raif had sealed that breach, but looking out across the cones he
guessed it was not the only one.