by J. V. Jones
Or so far they would never reach it in a million years.
Lightning lit up the sky to the east as Raif Sevrance looked down upon the Red Ice. Hills rose steeply from the lake, denying it shoreline on all sides. It was roughly circular and perhaps a league across, and he could not tell exactly where it ended in the north and the wall of mist began. Its surface was covered in a fine crystalline powder of snow, but you could still see the true color of the ice. It was as the lamb brothers had said: a lake of frozen blood.
Seeing it Raif understood Addie Gunn’s impulse to name the old gods. The cragsman had broken no oath and perhaps he had a claim to that comfort. Raif knew he had no such claim himself.
Pushing aside his face mask, he set off down the slope. The woods were not as dense on this side of the valley and it was easy to make a path. The groundsnow was lighter, crisper. If you looked directly overhead you could view the night’s first stars. They seemed familiar, but Raif was on guard against the Want and no longer wholly believed what he saw. Flawless had told him that Bluddsmen rode right past this valley and did not see it. He had been doubtful of that claim. Now he was not.
The nearer he drew to the ice the deeper its color became. Light was failing strangely, staying close to the ground as it drained. Around him he was aware of the storm waging a war upon the north, but here in its eye all was calm.
“Night falls and the shadows gather, and to watch you must grow accustomed to the dark. Bide where I stand, Raif Twelve Kill—alone and armed in the darkness—and ask yourself is this a prize worth winning, or a hole without end that will suck away your life?”
Traggis Mole’s words seemed to steal out of the mist, snaking toward him like the Want. They contained truth without hope. The sword’s name promised more of the same. Loss.
Raif steeled himself against the bleakness of his thoughts. He had come this far. Ahead, somewhere in that dark expanse of Red Ice, lay the chance to fulfill his oath to Traggis Mole. And arm himself against the Endlords.
Grow wide shoulders, Clansman. You’ll need them for all of your burdens.
About a hundred feet above the ice he stopped and pulled off his pack. Addie was closing distance through the cedars and Raif waited for him. The air was well below freezing here and his breath crackled into clouds. How long had this lake been frozen? How many thousands of years?
When the cragsman reached him, he said, “You have been a good friend to me, Addie Gunn.”
Addie knew all that this meant. As he went to stand by Raif’s pack there was sadness in his eyes, but no surprise. “Think I’ll try some of that tea. Good luck to you, lad.”
Their gazes locked. You seconded my oath, Raif wanted to tell him. Like Drey. He remained silent though, and left the cragsman alone on the hill as he headed down to the Red Ice.
All trees stopped thirty feet above the lake and nothing grew on the bare rock. Raif was careful as he descended. Things were happening to his body. Old wounds and new wounds were stretching his skin tight like nails hammered into a canvas. His fingertips were tingling.
He realized the ice was groaning when he neared the shore. When he had first heard the sound he had mistaken it for thunder. Now he could tell it was the low moan of a substance under pressure. Cautiously he slid down the rocks toward it.
The instant he slid his toe upon the Red Ice, the leech dropped from his back. Its slimy, rubbery body landed with a squelch on the surface of the lake. It was the same color as the ice.
Oh gods. Raif moved past it and took his first steps upon the lake. Ice whitened in starbursts where it took his weight. He looked down and could see nothing beyond the iron-dark surface. Stilling himself, he waited for lightning to strike close by. When three bolts hit in quick succession over the eastern hills, he used the flashes of brightness to search the lake’s depths. The ice was opaque, blacky red and partly frosted. Nothing could be seen beneath the surface. Raif let his gaze circle the lake. He reckoned it would take him a quarter hour to cross from one side to the other.
And there was no telling how deep the ice ran. He would never find the sword unless he knew exactly where it lay.
Although he didn’t much want to, he forced himself to consider the vast dam of mist. If he walked toward it at what point would the Want grab him and not let go? He had entered the Want before and the one thing he knew for certain was that you were never aware when you passed the point of no return. It was like death that way. That same short but untrackable distance.
Feeling the soft give of pain in his shoulder, Raif set out cross the Red Ice. He scanned west and then east and wondered if it might be as simple as locating the lake’s exact center. Four worlds meeting in the middle. It wasn’t a bad idea, but instinct told him it wasn’t right. The Want was in play here. Even if half the lake lay in Bludd territory and the other half in Sull lands there would still be something else.
What was he missing? What was the fourth world?
The moon rose in the clearing above the valley, a lean sickle of silver surrounded by a blue corona. It had grown too dark to make out the details of the clouds, and it was strange to see the stars restricted to the space above his head. Lightning and the distant rumble of thunder were his only indications that the storm was still playing itself out across the northern forests.
Raif went over everything anyone had ever told him about the sword named Loss and the Red Ice. There wasn’t much. Sadaluk of the Ice Trappers had been the first one to mention Loss, though not by name. Did you really think this will be the sword that makes you? Those had been his words as he’d handed Raif the Forsworn blade. He had not mentioned where this better, second sword might be found. Tallal of the lamb brothers had known about the sword also. The Red Ice was sacred to them: a flooded battlefield where thousands of their dead lay frozen.
Raif shivered. Squatting, he placed his gloved hands upon the ice and scrubbed away at the surface. He thought perhaps that if he generated enough friction it might melt the top layer of ice and help to clear it. The lake was too cold though and as he scratched its surface it refroze in pale streaks. What had kept it frozen for so long? Even this far north there were summers. Maygi hide it, that was what Flawless had claimed. Perhaps he was right and some ancient sorcery held it in place.
Or perhaps it had something to do with the Want. For there it was, curling out its mist limbs toward him, beckoning him back.
Step too far and I am lost. Step back and I will never fulfill my oath.
Maybe he could just stay here, squatting on the ice.
Lightning bolted across the sky in a thick, muscular fork. Raif stood. As his legs took his weight he experienced a brief instant of disorientation. Not dizziness, he told himself quickly. Just the normal thing that happens when you rise quickly to your feet.
He could no longer feel the fingers on his left hand.
Ignoring them, he forced his mind elsewhere. What held the Want in place, he wondered. Why didn’t the wall of mist just come tumbling across the lake? One thing he had always assumed about the shifting uncertainty that topped the continent was that it was unbounded, able to stretch and shrink at will. Yet it only stretched partway across the Red Ice. Why?
The tone of his footsteps changed as he neared the center of the lake. There was a hollowness to them now. They rang. On impulse he drove the heel of his boot deep into the ice. It was like kicking a wall.
“To break it you must stand in all four worlds at once.” Argola’s words sounded like a taunt.
Clanholds. Sull. Want. What else?
Raif Sevrance’s heart failed a beat. He perceived it as a moment of prolonged suction, a hardness, followed by softness, followed by the release of another beat. He carried on walking . . . because there was nothing else to do.
Shadow homes to shadow.
Four worlds.
The Want held in place.
Raif looked down at his feet. He thought for a moment he saw something pale and head-shaped lying beneath the ice. Perhaps it wa
s one of the lamb brothers’ lost souls. Perhaps it was his own reflection. It did not matter. Either way the ice would not break.
He needed to find its weak point.
Raif suddenly remembered what Addie had told him, that morning after the first camp out of the city. A small charge of possibility fired along his nerves. Quickening his pace he headed toward the dam of mist. He could feel it now, the freezing fog, switching back and forth between ice and superfine droplets of water, moving between worlds.
The Red Ice spread out before him like an eye full of blood. How many men had died here? How many bodies waited beneath the surface to be released? He believed he saw them now, pale legs and torsos, severed heads and smashed feet, sections of gut with gray and pipelike intestines spilled out, bow-curved hips with the sexual organs frozen into forms that looked like split fruit. All mouths and eyes were open and gaping; black holes in the ice where the terror still lived. The demon hordes of the Unmade had slaughtered thousands. It was easy to close his eyes and see the violent fury, the cracking of spines, the fountaining of blood, the blades that sucked in light hacking limbs. Was it possible that such a battle would need to be fought again?
Raid Sevrance could not say No.
The mist dam spread before him, soaring hundreds of feet into the air. Lobes of cloud broke off and floated south across the lake. They peeled and divided, rotating into ever-thinning veils before vanishing. Sucked dry. Raif had assumed that if he walked close enough to the mist he would be lost, but now he was not so sure. Something held the Want back. And he was beginning to think he knew what that was.
He was far into the ice now and the hills were nothing but dark mounds in the distance. When lightning flashed, he judged the distance between the east and west shore and and altered his course to center himself between the two. Sull and clanholds. Satisfied, he concentrated upon the ice beneath his feet as he walked toward the Great Want.
His left hand was numb to the wrist now and tingles jumped along his arm toward his heart. Stay, he told something. He wasn’t sure what.
The crack in the ice was as fine as a drawn wire, a line of perfect blackness cutting through the Red Ice. The Want’s mists would not, could not, pass it. It was the great flaw in the continent.
The Rift.
It never closes, not wholly. North of Bludd it narrows so that men can cross it, but it’s always there, a black crack running through the forests between here and the Night Sea.
Raif fell to his knees before it. Stupid tears were coming to his eyes. Relief and longing welled up in his failing heart. This was the fourth world, the darkness that lay in wait beneath the earth. The passageway to the Blind.
Ice fog coated his face and clothing as he drew Traggis Mole’s longknife. The Want existed less than a foot away, on the north side of the Rift, and Raif breathed it in as he stripped off his gloves and molded his left hand around the haft. Using his right hand to fasten the numb fingers in place, he raised the knife above his head.
For Drey. Always and everything for Drey.
For the oath he had seconded. And Raif had failed.
A tower of lightning lit up the north as Raif Sevrance drove his blade into the Red Ice. A whoosh of air shot across the lake. The ice groaned as steel went deep into the hairline fissure of the Rift, down into the frozen blood. Cracks ran along the ice like burning fuses. Explosive charges followed them, firing up fist-size bursts of frozen matter and shattering the lake’s surface like glass. As destruction fled outward from the blade, the surrounding clouds closed in. Whatever sorcery had held them at bay had snapped the instant the ice was breached, and the storm now rolled in.
The knife went deep. When the crosshilts slammed into the ice the knife continued sinking. Raif’s fists slid down after them, and he leaned forward driving the steel as far as it could go. Around him the lake was fracturing and whitening, riding up in great plates and splintering into fragments. Corpses encased in ice were flung into the air. He could smell the battle now, the blood and fear, the horse shit and unmade flesh.
Thunder concussed the valley as Traggis Mole’s knife ground to a halt. Freezing dust shimmered like falling snow. Raif looked at the shattered plates in front of his knees and saw the shadow of a man lying beneath the debris. As he dislodged the knife he was aware of a tightness in his chest. It seemed important that he did not die before he found the sword so he moved quickly, using his hands as shovels to dig and push aside the broken ice.
He saw the hand first, the flesh so bloated that each finger had exploded, leaving peels of skin around the bones. The ghostly remains of the hand still grasped something. The black and cankered haft of a sword. Raif picked at the ice with his knife, wedged his fingers under the plates and pried them out. He could see the blade now, its edge shining as dimly as an old coin, its crosshilts overgrown with rusticles. It lay upon a torso that was twisted sideways and had no head. Dark metallic armor ridged in spines still protected what little was left of the man who had worn it. Raven lord, Tallal had called him. Raif had never seen such thick and brutal plate before; it looked like an armored sarcophagus.
Who was he, this warrior who had ridden into a battle and single-handedly changed its course? The lamb brothers had not known his name.
Raif thought about that. He owned many names now, but fewer and fewer people knew his real name, the one he shared with Effie and Drey. Was that how it had happened for the raven lord? Had he started out as a young man with a normal name and normal prospects, and as his life altered and darkened had people called him by other names? And had those new names created him?
Mor Drakka. Watcher of the Dead. Twelve Kill.
Raif thrust his hand through chunks of crumbling ice and grasped the hilt of the sword. The raven lord’s frozen fingers cleaved to his and for a moment they were joined. In that instant Raif knew things. He saw the Endlords, massive forces compressed into forms that could be comprehended by man. He felt their perfect and unearthly coldness, and the absolute singularity of their purpose. They were coming to destroy the world.
Soon. They promised, their bleak and glittering gazes meeting Raif’s through the dead man’s flesh.
Soon.
Raif Sevrance drew the sword named Loss from the Red Ice. It was heavier than he imagined, long and ugly. Black. As he brought his left arm up to support the weight, a spasm shot up his shoulder to his heart.
Shadowflesh moved.
Homed.
Raif’s heart stopped beating. An eyeblink. An untrackable journey. A flash of lightning. And he was gone.
FORTY-SIX
Aftermath
Raif let Addie Gunn help him out of the tent. “Go,” he said to the cragsman once they were a short distance from the camp. “I need to piss.”
Addie frowned like he didn’t much believe this. Given the subject matter he could hardly object. “Here,” he said, holding out the simple oak staff he used for walking. “Take the stick.”
Raif took the stick.
“Don’t piss too long,” Addie warned before leaving.
Pushing the butt of the stick into the snow and pine needles of the forest floor, Raif waited for him to be gone. It was warm again today and the snow was loose and full of holes. You could smell the earth, the minerals and tannins and rotting leaves. Black flies and mosquitoes were hatching. Something buzzed close to his ear, but he couldn’t trust himself to swat it away. He needed the stick more than he had realized. Half of his weight had sunk upon it. It was a good piece of wood, smoothly sanded and sturdy. It vibrated only because the person who held it was shaking; it had been designed to transfer force.
When he saw Addie return to the tent he felt free to breathe and slump further into the stick. Addie was a good man and a good friend, but Raif needed a break from his watching. He needed to think.
Spying a rock in the shade of the cedars he decided it looked like a fine place to sit and rest. The hardest part of getting there was yanking the stick out of the ground. He moved slowly,
aware of the heaviness of his body and his legs’ inability to bear it. The pain in his chest, the depth of it, was something he would not think about. Enough worry had been spent there. No more today.
It took him a long time to reach the rock. The sun moved while he was shambling from foot to foot, rising high in the pale and clear sky and stealing away the shade. Raif found the rock’s appeal undiminished. It was a big spur of sandstone, flaking and chalky, and so deeply undercut it looked like a boulder. Maybe it was a boulder. Raif wondered what was happening to his mind.
Sitting down was a more challenging discipline than walking and he found himself awkward at it. Several tiring moments followed where he attempted to lever his weight with the stick. That didn’t work, and the best he could manage was a barely controlled drop.
Won’t be getting up any time soon, he realized, settling down on the cool and slightly damp stone. His heart was beating swiftly, accelerated and under strain, and his legs were shaking in fierce jumps. He could not make them stop.
Below he saw the camp and counted all five clarified hide tents and the animal corral. It was strange to see them in this place, this hillside of giant cedars and white pines. They must have cleared some timber to make the campsite; saplings and yearlings from the looks of things. Addie carried a hand adze, but its small rounded head was insufficient for logging. That meant one of the lamb brothers possessed a decent ax. It was disconcerting to think of them chopping up timber. They were strong men, he understood that, but they were Sand People. None of Tallal’s stories had ever mentioned trees.
It looked as if none of the brothers were around. With Addie standing watch over the fire and the camp, they were free to do their work. Raif would be forever grateful to the cragsman for insisting that the camp be raised out of sight of the lake.
“Told ’em, I did,” Addie had explained to him last night. “Said if you ever did wake up the last thing you’d want to see is that damned Red Ice. But here there is a natural clearing, says the tall one, pointing at some fool place above the shore. Let’s go unnatural, I says back.”