A Sword from Red Ice

by Julia V Jones

  An eye was forming above the center of the guidestone. It was beautiful and terrible, a calmness in the storm of spinning clouds. A noise bass and so full of power set the walls and floor vibrating, boomed out of the stone. Inigar's eyes and nose began to bleed. His pigskin cloak was snatched from his back and sucked into the tow. He was beyond feeling pain now, and barely registered the missiles slamming against his side. He was the guide of Clan Blackhail and he had his chisel in his hand, and witnessing the gods' power was not a bad way to die.

  Suddenly everything stopped. Litter dropped from the air, thudding and tinkling. Mist sank away like water down a drain. The guidestone stood still and silent, as old as the earth itself. Wonder and sadness filled Inigar's heart. Who would guile Blackhail when he wllgone?

  And then the Hailstone exploded into a million bits of shrapnel and the clan guide knew no more.

  The man who had lost his soul approached the house. Timbers framing the doorway were black and shiny. Creosote deposited during the burning gave them the oily iridescence of ravens' wings. The door that had once been suspended between them had fallen on the front stoop. Its metal hinge pins had popped out of their casings like cooked sausage meat. Charred panels in the door crumbled as the man's weight came down on them. In a different life he had stained and waxed the panels, proofing them against the brutal winter storms that hit from the north.

  Protecting this house from harm.

  The man rocked backward, bringing force to bear on the heel of his left boot, crushing the brittle wood, stretching the moment before he entered the house.

  and the snow fallen. The curious and opportunistic. Young boys on dares; thieves in search of locked boxes, silverware, metal for scrapping; officials gathering information along with a fine story to tell their wives over supper. The man understood the pull of such places. Death and ruin dwelt here, and a person could come and view it and be glad it was not his family, his house, his life.

  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.

  When he was ready he stepped into the remains of his hallway. Fire had burned intensely here. The interior walls had been limestone-and-horsehair plaster skimmed onto wood lath. His mistake had been to paint them. Oil in the paint had accelerated the bum, working against the natural retardant of the lime. The smoke produced would have been black and toxic. It would have burned holes in a child's lungs.

  The man did not pause. He could no longer trust himself that far. Walking through the center of the house he passed the stairs and the black skeleton of the stair rail. Snow had found its way in through the partially collapsed roof and open windows, and lay in thin drifts against the risers of each of the nine steps. The man knew snow; knew that what he looked at was dry with age, the granules loosely packed and rolled into pellets by the wind. Footsteps stamped into the drifts hew no interest for him. Men had come later, after the house had cooled.

  ONE Want

  Ash.

  Raif woke with a start, immediately sittng upright His heart was pumping hard in his chest and there was a raw-ness 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 c
hicken bones. Bear was snuffling something that a while back might have been a plant. As Raif's 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. Grate 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 puncure 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 unseffied 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 persue 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 At test he could tell, five days had passed since bed left the Fortress of Grey Ice. The first few days were lost to him, gone in a few 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 belong 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 be must have regained his mind, although there were times when he wasn't sure. The wound 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. Hn mind wet 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 con-viced 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 htm quizzically, and had once gone as far as head-butting the small of his back to encourage htm to ride. She had wanted to help, he knew that, and the one thing the 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 a 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 had enough food and water, tending to her coat skin, and mouth, and keeping her shoe free of stone-kept htm 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 clans— man 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 envi— ronment was close so 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 mattered or explained. Ancient sor-ceries 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 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 bill 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 fat a way it was a kind of relief. The past three days were the most peace 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 rec
alling what the Listener had said when he handed over the sword.

  It should serve you well enough until you find a better one.

  Strange how he hadn't given the words much thought until now. This sword had once been the weapon of a Forsworn knight, its blade forged from the purest steel, its edge honed by a master swordsmith. To most clansmen it would be a prize to be treasured; oiled lovingly every tenday, drawn with silent pride for the inspection of honored guests, passed through the gene-rations from father to son. Yet the Listener had hinted that for Raif there would be more.

  Abruptly Raif resheathed the sword. It was time to move on.

  Today was a good day in the Want. A sun rose, traveling at a constant speed and arc, and banks of low-lying clouds moved in the same direction as prevailing winds. Well, almost. Raif shrugged as he hiked along a limestone bluff. He'd take small discrepancies over big ones any day.

  The bluff was rocky and hard going, riven with cracks and undermined with softer, lighter chalkstone that was crumbling to dust. Gray weeds poked through holes in the rock. They may have been alive; it was hard to tell. In the distance Raif could see a range of low-lying mountains, spinebacks, laid out in a course that fishtailed into the bluff. Realizing he was in for a steady climb, he reached for the water-skin.

  Straightaway he knew it was a mistake. His mouth and stomach were anticipating water, his throat muscles were contracting in readiness to swallow, yet he could not take a drink. The waterskin was as good as empty. Nothing could be spared. Swallowing the saliva that had pooled under his tongue, he tucked the waterskin back into its place behind Bear's saddle. When his stomach sent out a single cramp of protest, he ignored it He had to think.

  Why am 1 going this way? Any other heading would lead him off the bluff and away from the mountains. No climb involved. So why accelerate his thirst? Why not simply head downhill and take the easy route? Chances were the Want would shift on him anyway. A day from now those mountains could have melted into the mist.