A Sword From Red Ice (4 page)

Ignoring the footsteps, the man headed down the
central hall toward the kitchen. His mind was working; cataloguing
details, noting absences, testing them against the theory coalescing
in his head. It was the only way to remain sane.

The devil was in the details. The damage to the
doors and exterior walls was far greater than in the interior of the
house. Here, in the kitchen, the stone fireplace was barely damaged.
The fire irons had been stolen, not melted. The facing stones were
black, yet the heat had been insufficient to crack the mortar between
them. On the opposite wall, where the external door was located, the
destruction was far worse. The two windows were black holes. Plaster
surrounding them had warped and cracked. Varnish on the adjoining
floorboards had blistered. Part of the wall above the eastern window
had fallen in taking a chunk of the upper story along with it. The
man looked up and saw sky. When he looked down he noticed that one of
the house's exterior sandstone blocks had tumbled in. Its once dusty
orange face had been smelted into glass.

Xhalia ex nihl. All becomes nothing: words he'd
learned from the Sull. They spoke them in times of grief as a comfort
. . . and in times of joy as a reminder. He'd thought them wise and
fair. He was wrong.

His wife and daughters were dead. His three girls
and the woman he had loved for half his life were gone. Murdered.

The moment he had turned the corner in the road
and seen the burned house he knew. He had lived with risk for so long
that the anticipation of disaster had become a reflex, a string held
at tension waiting to snap. A muscle contracting in his gut had told
him everything. The walk through the house had simply confirmed it.
The blaze had burned from the outside in. Fires had been set at
windows and doors. The occupants had been trapped inside and forced
to fill their lungs with hot, lethal smoke.

The man pushed a fist against the charred plaster
and took a breath.

And then another. His wife and girls had trusted
him with their safety. And he had failed them. He, who knew more than
most about evil and the men and women who practiced it, and knew just
how long they would wait for an opportunity to bring harm. He, who
had dedicated his life to opposing the dark and unfathomable forces
of destruction.

Those forces had come to bear on this house—he
had led them here. How could he have been such a fool? How could he
have imagined that it was possible to outwit them? They were beyond
his comprehension; unbound by earthly forms. What had he been
thinking when he'd made the decision to hide his most precious girls
from them in plain sight?

Eighteen, five and one; those were their ages. Add
them up and you'd get exactly the number of years he'd known his
wife.

The man breathed. Inhaled. Exhaled. Pushed himself
off from the wall.

The back door was there so he took it. Never again
would he enter this house.

He had one job to do, and he did not care how it
was done. Those who had planned and executed this would die. He had
one cold and empty lifetime to take care of it.

Outside, the late-afternoon sun was shining. In
the woods beyond the yard a woodpecker was drilling a softwood for
lice. A brisk wind spun clouds to the south and drove the stale smell
of char back in the house. The man's gaze swept over the remains of
the kitchen garden. A row of unharvested winter kale was yellowing in
a raised bed. Tarp still covered the woodpile. Three distinct earthen
mounds beneath the shade oak caught his attention.

The ground had been too hard to bury them.

The man swayed. His first act of will was to
steady himself, to force his knees to rigidity and suck air into his
lungs. His second was to kill his lifelong instinct to call on the
gods for comfort. The gods were dead, and he was no longer bound by
their commands.

Moving forward, he cut a straight path to the
graves. Only three. The baby must have been buried with her mother. A
different man would have taken comfort in that.

The man without a soul refused it.

All becomes nothing, he murmured as he knelt by
the graves and began to dig.

Want

"Ash."

Raif woke with a start, immediately sitting
upright. His heart was pumping hard in his chest and there was a
rawness in his throat as if he had been screaming. A quick glance at
Bear showed the sturdy little hill pony's ears were twitching.
Probably had been screaming then.

Ash's name.

Raif shook his head, hoping to drive away all
thoughts of her. Nothing could be gained by them. Madness lay in wait
here, in the vast and shifting landscape of the Great Want, and to
worry about Ash March and crave her presence was a sure way to drive
himself insane. She was gone. He could not have her. It was as simple
and as unchangeable as that.

Rising to his feet, Raif forced himself to
evaluate the landscape. Thirst made his tongue feel big in his mouth.
He ignored it. Light was moving through the Want and the last of the
bright stars were fading to the direction that might have been east,
the horizon was flushed with the first suggestion of sun. The
landscape seemed familiar. Scale-covered rock formations rose from
the buckled limestone floor like stalagmites, craggy and jagged,
silently forming minerals as they grew. On the ground, a litter of
lime fragments and calcified insect husk cracked beneath his boots
like chicken bones. Bear was snuffling something that a while back
might have been a plant. As Raif's gaze moved from the distant purple
peaks floating above the mist, to the canyon lines that forked
Want-north across the valley floor, he felt some measure of relief.
It looked pretty much like the place he had set camp in last night.

Anchored, that was the word. The Want had not
drifted while he slept. Grateful for that, Raif crossed over to Bear
and started rubbing down her coat. She head-butted him, sniffing for
water, but it was too early for her morning ration so he pushed her
head back gently and told her, "No."

The puncture wounds caused by the Shatan Maer's
claws had stiffened his left shoulder muscle, and as he worked on
Bear's hooves he felt some pain. When he made a quick movement up her
leg, a cold little tingle traveled toward his heart. Stopping for a
moment, he put a hand on Bear's belly to steady himself. Something
about the pain, a kind of liquid probing, had unsettled him, and he
couldn't seem to get the Shatan Maer out of his head. He could smell
its rankness, see its cunning dead eyes as it came for him.

Shivering, Raif stepped away from the pony. "Do
I look mad to you?" he asked her as he massaged the aching
muscle.

Bear flicked her tail lazily; a pony's equivalent
of a shrug. The gesture was strangely reassuring. Sometimes that was
all it took to drive away your fears: the indifference of another
living thing. The pain was just the last remnants of an infection,
nothing more.

Although he didn't much feel like it, Raif set
about taking stock of his meager supplies. Fresh water had become a
problem. The aurochs' bladder rested slack against a block of
limestone, its contents nearly drained. The little that remained
tasted of rawhide. Raif doubted whether it would last the day. There
was food—sprouted millet for the pony, hard cheese and pemmican
for himself—yet he knew enough not to be tempted by it. He
wanted to be sure where his next drink was coming from before he ate.
Yesterday he'd learned that it wasn't enough just to see water. In
the Want you had to jump in it and watch your clothe get wet before
could be absolutely certain it was there. Yesterday he and Bear had
tracked leagues out of their way to pursue a glassy shimmer in the
valley between two hills. They stood in that valley today. It wasn't
just dry, it was bone-dry, and Raif had been left feeling like a
fool. You'd think he would have learned by now.

Unable to help himself, he flicked the cap off the
waterskin and squirted a small amount into his mouth. The fluid was
gone before he had a chance to swallow it, sucked away by parched
gums. He was tempted to take more, but resisted. His duty to his
animal came first. As he poured a careful measure into the pony's
waxed snufflebag, Raif wondered what heading to take next. As best he
could tell, five days had passed since he'd left the Fortress of Grey
Ice. The first few days were lost to him, gone in a fever dream of
blood poisoning and pain. He did not recall leaving the fortress or
choosing a route to lead them out of the Want. He remembered waking
one morning and looking at his left arm and not being sure that it
belonged to him. The skin floated on top of the muscle as if
separated by a layer of liquid. It leaked when he pressed it, clear
fluid that seeped through a crack Raif supposed must be a wound. The
strange thing was it hadn't hurt. Even stranger, he could not recall
being concerned.

At some point he must have regained his mind,
although there were times when he wasn't sure. The wounds on his neck
were healing. He'd stitched the deepest one without use of a mirror;
so gods only knew what he looked like. As for his arm, it certainly
looked a lot better. And he was definitely sure it was hit. His mind
[garbled] a different story though, a little foggy around the edges
and prone to fancies. The first day that he tried to ride his head
had felt too light, and he'd convinced himself he was better off
walking instead.

He hadn't been on Bear since then, and he'd spent
the last three days stubbornly walking. Occasionally Bear looked at
him quizzically, and had once gone as far as head-butting the small
of his back to encourage him to ride. She had wanted to help, he knew
that, and the one thing the mare had to offer was her ability to bear
his weight.

Raif licked his lips. They were as dry as tree
bark. Reaching inside the grain bag, he scooped up a handful of
millet. Bear, whose thoughts were never far from food, trotted over
to investigate. She ate from his hand, lipping hard to get at the
grains that were jammed between his fingers. She didn't understand
that in many ways she was the one who was caring for him. Her company
alone was worth more than a month's worth of supplies. Bear's stoic
acceptance of her situation lightened his heart. Caring for her
needs—making sure the mare had enough food and water, tending
to her coat skin, and mouth, and keeping her shoe free of stone—kept
him from focusing on himself. And then there was her Want sense. The
little hill pony borrowed from the Maimed Men had an instinct for
moving through the Great Want. Instead of fighting the insubstantial
nature of the landscape, she gave herself up to it, became a leaf
floating downstream. As a clansman trained to navigate dense forest,
follow the whisper-light trails left by ice hares and foxes, and hold
his bearings on frozen tundra in a whiteout, Raif found traveling
through the Want frustrating. The sun might rise in the morning, but
then again it might not. Entire mountain ranges could sail on the
horizon like ships. Clouds formed rings that hung in the sky,
unaffected by prevailing winds, for days. At night a wheel of stars
would turn in the heavens, but you could never be sure what
constellations it would contain. Sometimes the wheel reversed itself
and moved counter to every wisdom concerning the stars that Raif had
ever been taught. Orienting oneself in such an environment was close
to impossible. As soon as you had established the direction of due
north, decided on a course to lead you out, the Want began to slip
through your fingers like snowmelt. Nothing was fixed here.
Everything—the sky, the land, the sun and the moon—drifted
to the movement of some unknowable tide.

The Great Want could not be [garbled] or
explained. Ancient sorceries had scarred it, time had worn away its
boundaries, and cataclysmic disasters had scoured it clean of life.
The Want was no longer bound by physical laws. To attempt to traverse
it was folly. The best you could hope for was a rite of passage.
Somehow Bear knew this, knew that relinquishing—not
asserting—control would carry one farther in this place.

Every night since they had left the fortress the
pony had stumbled upon a suitable place to set camp. She found
islands elevated above the vast mist rivers that flowed across the
Want at sunset, sniffed out caves sunk deep into cliff faces, and
hollows protected from the harsh morning winds. She'd even located a
riverbed where ancient bushes had been sucked so dry of life juice
that they burned as smokeless as the purest fuel. The hill pony
hadn't found drinkable water yet, but Raif knew that out of the two
of them she had the best chance of discovering it.

That, and the way out.

Frowning, Raif scanned the horizon. A constant
bitter wind blew against his face, scouring his cheeks with ice
crystals and filling his nose with the smell of ozone and lead; the
scent of faraway storms. Part of him was content simply to drift. As
long as he was here, at the Want's mercy, he need make no decisions
about the future. Questions about whether to return to the Maimed Men
or head south in search of Ash had little meaning. In a way it was a
kind of relief. The past three days were the most peaceful he had
known since that morning in the Badlands when his da and Dagro
Blackhail had died.

That sense of peace would not last for long. Mor
Drakka, Watcher of the Dead, Oathbreaker, Twelve Kill: a man
possessing such names could not expect to live a peaceful life.

Kneeling on his bedroll, Raif reached for the
sword given to him by the Listener of the Ice Trappers. The once
perfectly tempered blade was warped and blackened, its edges blunted
and untrue. Plunged into shadowflesh up to its crossguard, the sword
had been irrevocably changed. It would never be more than a
knock-around now, the kind of blade a father let his son train with
until the boy developed a proper degree of skill. Raif began to grind
the blade regardless, using a soft shammy and a makeshift paste of
limestone grit and horse lard. The rock crystal mounted on the pommel
flashed brilliantly in the rising sun, and Raif found himself
recalling what the Listener had said when he handed over the sword.