A Sword From Red Ice (82 page)

Oh gods. Raif relaxed the tension in his wrist and
Addie released his grip. He thought he might be sick. "What's
keeping them back there?" Addie shrugged. "They gorge, they
drop off. Old Flawless sticks another one right in place. He's built
up plaster around the wound so they can't crawl away and find a
better spot. Had to cut into your skin to give the plaster something
to bind on to, so I'm telling you now I ain't fetching no mirror."
Addie paused to let the full meaning of this sink in. His gaze was
frank and unflinching. "Here. Drink water. Be glad you're
alive."

Raif took the canteen with his left hand, testing.
The muscles were sore in the same way they would be if he'd chopped
wood all day. And all night. Aware that Addie was waiting for some
response from him, some sign that everything was all right with Raif
Sevrance, he said, "Water's good."

It was enough to satisfy Addie Gunn, and Raif
could see something physically easing in the cragsman, a softening
around the shoulders. "Old Flawless adds a pinch of soda to it.
Who'd a thought to do such a thing?" He appeared genuinely
impressed. "That Trenchlander's full o' tricks."

Addie's accent got thicker when he was distressed
or relieved, Raif realized for the first time. "How long have I
been out?"

"Three days."

Raif understood then the worry he had caused his
friend. "I'm sorry, Addie."

Throwing a hand out, the cragsman rose to
standing. "A man can hardly go apologizing for dropping clean
dead. And even if he did it'd take a hard sort of nutgall to accept
it." Again, the eyes were bright.

From the back of the tent, the Sull horse made a
wicking noise and threw back its beautiful elongated head.

"Easy, lady," Addie said, using his
sheep voice. He walked over and gently knuckled her nose. The animal
pushed against him, calmed. "What happened?" Raif asked.

Addie sighed. "You fell. Just crumpled clean
at the knees right by the drying rack. Me and Gordo upped and ran
straight for you. Neither of us knew what the hell to do. I set my
ear to your chest—you were gone. Clean gone. That's when old
Flawless gets there. Didn't run—he's not the sort—but he
gets to it soon enough, starts pumping your ribs like they were
bellows. All the while he's speaking in Sull, ordering Gordo to fetch
this and that, telling me in Common to stop casting my shadow in his
way. Sit, he tells me. I see to the boy. Next thing I know your legs
start jerking, a noise comes from your throat like you're being
strangled. Gordo's bringing all kind of medicines—leaves and
tiny bottles and potions. Flawless pulls out his hunting knife,
slices off your tunic as if it's a deerhide he fancies mounting for a
trophy, and tells me to boil some water for the herbs. It all
happened so fast I could barely track it. A minute later you're half
naked on a horseblanket, being rolled onto your stomach so Flawless
can have a look at the puncture wound."

Addie patted the horse's head. Noticing her nose
band had ridden up, he automatically pulled it back in place.
"Flawless asked what was up with you and I couldn't see a way
around it so I told him everything: the piece of shadow that was
lodged in your shoulder, the thing Yiselle No Knife said about it
stopping your heart. Too damned shaken to lie. Too afraid that if I
didn't speak the truth you just might die there in front of that
bloody skinned bear."

Recalling the hollowed-out eyes of the bear skull,
Raif shivered. He could feel the leeches sucking on his back, feel
hundreds of tiny teeth clamped to his flesh. "Who is this
Flawless?"

"Some old trapper coot. Been around awhile,
knows some stuff. Flawless isn't his real name, but it's as close as
these old gums can get to it. He doesna seem to mind—specially
after I explained to him what it meant. That will be my new name, he
says. He's quite a one. He'll be in soon to check on your, you know .
. . back."

Raif tried to control his revulsion. They were
moving, that was the thing, their slimy bellies contracting as they
pumped in blood. Motioning to the Sull horse, he asked, "Is that
his?"

Addie understood this question. "Aye.
Flawless has some Sull in him, more than Gordo that's for sure. Don't
think he has much love for them though. I get the feeling the Sull
aren't too happy about him trapping bears." Lowering his voice,
the cragsman returned to Raif's side. "Know that trap I sprung
the other day by the fallen cedar?" Raif nodded. "Gordo
finds it yesterday, tells Flawless, who's convinced it was the Sull
that did it."

Raif thought about this. "We're in Sull
territory?"

"Just about. Apparently the borders are a
little hazy around the top of Bludd."

"Help me up," Raif said, planting his
palms on the tent floor.

"You can't get up," Addie protested,
stepping back. "You need to lie there and rest."

"I need," Raif said, gritting his teeth
as he leveraged his weight forward, "to find the Red Ice."

"Traggis Mole is dead. What does it matter
when you find the damn sword?"

Pain shot along Raif's left arm as he pushed
himself to standing. The tent spun and he stumbled as he tried to
orientate himself. Light floated sideways and blurred. Addie's hand
clamped on to his right arm. "Steady now."

Braced against Addie's weight, Raif waited for the
tent to stop spinning. He felt a small loosening on his back.
Something moved. A leech dropped to the floor. Addie kicked it away
with the side of his boot, but not before Raif had seen something
brown and bloody, like a piece of liver.

"Addie, I have to go. I need to find the
sword." Swear to me you will fetch the sword that can stop them.
Swear it. "I spoke an oath. I intend to keep it."

He had meant to say more, to tell Addie that he
had broken his word so many times that there was now nothing solid
beneath anything he said, that his fate was to wield the sword named
Loss and slay the creatures that could be destroyed only with such a
blade, and that every day he spent in territory claimed by the Sull
he risked both his own life and Addie's. Yet he stopped himself. At
the end of everything it was the oath to Traggis Mole that counted.

Addie had trained to be a Wellhouse warrior and
then deserted his clan in favor of a life herding sheep. When Raif
had asked him about it all those months ago in the Rift, the cragsman
had said only one thing in his defense. I never took the oath. Those
words defined Addie Gunn's life.

The cragsman guided Raif to one of the tent's
vertical support poles. "Sit here," he said, handing him
off to the unstripped birch log. "I'll fetch Flawless."

Raif held on to the pole as he watched the little
fair-haired cragsman slip between the tent flaps. He didn't think he
had ever met a better man.

The mule wandered over to inspect the blankets
Raif had been lying on. A piece of onion was stuck against its nose.
The Sull horse moved forward a few steps and then stopped. Raif
wondered if she had watched him while he slept.

"Sick man go back to bed," came a voice
from the far side of the tent wall. A moment later two small brown
hands parted the canvas and the man named Flawless stepped through.

It looked as if he had been hammered from bronze.
He was tiny and his skin was darkly burnished. His cheekbones were
high and angular and the rest of his face seemed to hang from them.
His eyes were startlingly blue. "Bed now," he said jabbing
his finger accusingly at Raif. "A pox upon the heart."

Shaking his head, Raif hung on grimly to the pole,
"How long will it work for, the poultice?"

The little man put his hands on his hips. He was
dressed in hunter's greens with [garbled] bells and pouches strapped
and slung around his waist and chest. A silver bar as thick as a
child's finger pierced the cartilage of his right upper ear. "No
leeches. No work. Bed."

Raif realized he didn't even know what time of day
it was. The light seeping in through the canvas had been diffused by
thick cloud. Stubbornly he said, "I'm leaving today. So do
whatever you need to"—he jerked his head backward—"with
that to keep me going a while."

Flawless hissed a few soft words in Sull. It
sounded like he was cursing. Pulling a glass jar from the large
rawhide pouch at his waist, he said, "Need another leech. Need
at least twelve a day." As he unwrapped the twine holding the
cloth lid in place, Raif saw the jaw was full of black squirming
worms. Leeches. "Have thirty left."

Raif made the calculation.

"Turn," Flawless commanded, plucking a
long wet leech from the jar. The creature's three-lobed mouth was
open and it wriggled in the old man's grip, trying to attach itself
to his thumb.

Raif turned. Forehead pressing against the tent
canvas he waited. Flawless started whistling. Raif felt a light touch
close to the center of his back, and then the suckers bit into his
skin.

"Bad back there," the Trenchlander said.
"Keep clean."

Raif unclenched his jaw. Deciding it was time he
got dressed, he released his grip on the pole. His legs felt like wet
sticks, and he willed his knees to firmness as he stepped toward the
blankets.

Flawless folded his arms and watched him. He was
still holding the open jar in his fist.

"Need go Hell's Town," he said in his
sharp, biting voice. "See healers in Maggot Quarter. Cut it
out."

Raif nodded. He could not see his clothes, and
remembered that Addie had said his tunic was cut into strips. The
stormglass.

"Friend has belongings," the
Trenchlander said, batting the mule away as it came to investigate
the jar. "You know where you go?"

"Maggot Quarter."

"No. Red Ice. Friend tell you where?"

Raif kept his face calm. He did not blink. "You
tell me."

"Red Ice not far north. Many bears. Maygi
hide it. Do not know where, going won't find it. Bluddsmen ride past,
never see. On border. Half Sull. Half Bludd. North."

The man's ice-blue eyes burned intensely as he
spoke and Raif realized there were things here he did not fully
understand. Histories and betrayals, hurts and resentments.
Trenchlander versus Sull; and all that went along with being second
best. Raif thought about Yiselle No Knife and the Spinebreaker and
before them Ark Veinsplitter and Mal Naysayer: Prideful people not
easy to like.

Something cold in Raif thought, My gain. And he
switched his thoughts elsewhere. "What is the Sull word for
cloud?"

The little man did not appear surprised by the
question. "Mish."

Raif had thought it was. The two stood facing each
other as the leeches tried to squirm their way out of the jar,
wriggling on top of each other and arching their bellies into hoops.

"Take," Flawless said eventually,
holding the jar out to Raif. "Friend knows what to do."

Raif did not thank him. They were beyond such
things now. A jar of leeches. A betrayal of one's people. A pox upon
the heart.

The little man left, the skin on the back of his
neck flashing like sheet metal as he ducked between the tent flaps.
Flawless the Bear Trapper was nearly pure Sull. And he had spilled
Sull secrets to a man who could destroy his people.

Raif set down the jar of leeches, dragged a
blanket from the tent floor, and covered his bare chest. The woolen
fabric dragged against the thing on his back and he realized he would
have to be careful with clothing from now on. Holes would need to be
cut. That made him smile. Grimly.

For some reason then he thought of Mallia Argola.
Perhaps it was something to do with the careful way she had mended
his Orrl cloak. He imagined the curve between her waist and hips, and
the way the fabric of both her dresses had strained across her
breasts. Shaking himself, he took a drink from the canteen and then
went over to take a look at the Sull horse.

No partition separated the animal space from the
human space, though the ground here had been spread with pine boughs.
Raif imagined that when the animals soiled, the trappers merely
brushed out the branches and spread new ones. A makeshift trough had
been dug out of a halved log. The Sull horse kept her head level as
he approached but her tail was high and twitching. Raif raised a hand
so she could smell it and watched as her black-and-pink nostrils
twitched. "Easy, girl." She did not make any move toward
him, and he did not force it. After a moment he let his hand drop.

It was time to go.

Addie came a few minutes later, bringing several
folded items and two small sacks. Raif found his boots and Orrl cloak
in good order, but his tunic, pants and undershirt were not there.

"Weren't worth the mending," Addie said
smartly, about to take no fuss. "Here. These were Gordo's. Good
skins. Just a bit stiff, is all."

Raif barely looked at them. "Where's the
small brown pouch that was in my tunic?"

"You mean this?" Addie said, fishing
into his underarm pack. He pulled out the sleeve containing the
stormglass and handed it to Raif. "I didna look to see what was
inside."

Raif had not thought for one moment he would. An
odd silence followed and Raif tried to understand what, if anything,
was happening. The cragsman left the sacks on the ground and went to
look at something on the other side of the tent. He might have been
checking on blankets.

Suddenly it dawned on Raif. "What do I owe
you, Addie?" All the medicines and attention, the shelter,
leeches, clothes. The price of Flawless' betrayal of the Sull.

The cragsman stared hard at the blankets piled
against the support pole. "You owe me nothing, lad."

"I don't believe that." Raif was
surprised by the emotion in his voice. Surprised by how quickly this
had become serious between them. Addie had thought Raif had nothing
of value, but now he knew the object in the pouch was worth
something. And it upset him. Raif remembered back to the negotiation
by the campfire, the meager clink of coins in Addie's sock. "How
did you pay for all this?"