A Sword From Red Ice (37 page)

"No," he cried, spinning around, his
heart thumping. "Who's there?"

Raif unsheathed the Forsworn sword, tugging hard
to force the bent blade from the scabbard. Water from the split
waterskin trickled down his back.

Come.

The word was spoken in the softest whisper and it
slid right past his ear.

Raif swung the sword in a circle. "Keep
away," he warned.

That was when he felt the fingers trailing across
his face.

Raif hissed. Shrinking back, he dropped all his
weight onto his left foot. Immediately the ankle buckled and his leg
gave way beneath him. Releasing his grip on the Sull bow, he used his
left hand to break the fall.

There.

Raif sat on the rockbed and drew the sword to his
chest. His heart was beating so rapidly it felt like it might seize
and stop. Cautiously he brought his free hand to his face. A line of
ice was rafting down his cheek. Not gently, he scrubbed it away.

At ground level the breezes were firmer, muscling
against his back and side. He was wet all over he realized; his hair,
sleeves, pant legs.

Oh Gods, he thought, understanding slowly dawning.
This is it, the mist river. And I've been heading downstream.

Less than two days ago Tallal had warned him the
only sense he could rely on was touch. Raif had listened but not
heard. He had imagined the mist river purely in visual terms—a
sort of moving channel of clouds—yet he hadn't once paused to
consider what it would feel like to be in it. Foolishly, he had
disregarded the full meaning of Tallal's words. "Touch alone
will lead you out."

Ha, ha, ha.

Soft laughter echoed along the ravine. Raif
imagined he deserved it. How long had he been traveling with the
current, toward the heart of the Want? Too long, that was the answer.
Every step downstream was a mistake. Raif shivered. He had been
deeply, recklessly stupid. The Want was an unsprung trap with
invisible tripwires humming in all directions. He'd been caught in
one of them and it nearly killed him, and here he was less than
twenty days later walking straight over another wire.

Anger at himself made him hard on his body and he
hauled himself up, not much caring about the pain he inflicted on his
twisted ankle. When he remembered he'd dropped the bow, he scrambled
for it in the jet-black darkness. Relief flooded over him when the
tip of his sword touched horn, and he wondered at what point his
peace of mind had come to depend solely on possessing weapons. Sword
and bow. They had become his armor, his comfort, his fate.

Yet there were things upstream that were immune to
them. The voices did not fear him . . . or at least did not fear his
weapons. He thought about that as he oriented himself against the
flow.

Deciding he would not take the second, stronger
channel but retrace his steps upstream, Raif turned to face the
oncoming mist. Its icy wetness slid between his teeth and down his
throat. He sniffed deeply, making sure that he was heading into the
fresher-smelling of the two streams, and then took his first steps
into the black.

Noooooooooooo . . .

The howl cracked through the ravine like
lightning, but this time Raif did not pause. He felt the mist pushing
against him, felt ragged foggy shackles condense around his ankles
and wrists. Strong steps broke them. They re-formed again and he
broke them again, and the wet sucking noise they made as they snapped
accompanied his every step. An hour passed and then another and still
there was no increase in light. Holding his bow out before him like a
blind man with a cane, Raif walked the mist rivers of the Want.

Occasionally there would be forks in the stream
and he would have to pick a course using nothing more than instinct.
Other currents might be colder or swifter, wider or narrower, they
might smell of glaciers, ozone, raw iron and burned rock, and each
time he bypassed one he wondered if he had made a mistake. He had a
vision of himself as a rat in a water maze, paddling furiously to
stay afloat while trying to find the cheese. Those above could look
down and see everything, see the grand scheme of tunnels and turns,
know instantly the best route, and then laugh amongst themselves as
the rat missed one opportunity after another, propelling himself
deeper into the maze.

"Out," Tallal had said, "that has
to be enough."

Raif walked against the current and hoped that the
lamb brother was right. When he grew thirsty, he drank without
halting, holding the waterskin high above his head. He never grew
hungry and never stopped to relieve himself. He had a fear of
standing still. He did not want to feel those ghost fingers on his
face—or anywhere else—ever again.

The night spooled out, growing impossibly long.
Either that or he had lost the capacity to judge time. Sometimes the
voices spoke to him, but he had a sense that they were farther away
now, separated from him by great lengths of mist. As he worked his
way around what seemed to be a U-shaped meander, he became aware of a
change in the current. It was weakening, and for an instant he
thought he smelled damp earth. He picked up his pace, desperately
sniffing the air, but could detect nothing beyond the hailstone odor
of the mist. When the path finally straightened he heard a noise.
Scratching, followed by a short, high-pitched squeak.

Rats. Raif allowed himself to hope. Rats did not
live in the Want. He was moving quickly now, shambling forward,
favoring his right foot over his left. The summer he was eight years
old he and Drey had spent hours belly-down in the underlevels of the
roundhouse searching for rats. It had been an unusually warm spring
and the rats had bred like . . . rats and the entire Hailhouse had
been overrun. Longhead had set traps and poison and even hired a
verminist from Ille Glaive. A month later, with numbers unabated, the
head keep had come up with the bright idea of drafting the clan youth
into the cause. He set a bounty: for every five whole rats brought to
him, dead or alive, he would pay out a copper coin. This was
unheard-of wealth—coin was rarely used in the clanholds—and
Raif and Drey had set about trying to capture enough rats to make
themselves rich. Other boys wasted days showily trying to spear rats
with swords and shoot them with arrows, but he and Drey had decided
on a different approach. "Stealth," Drey had intoned, his
voice deadly serious. "We must live with them and smell like
them and once we've earned their trust we spring our trap." The
trap was a big square of fisherman's netting given to them by their
uncle Angus Lok.

Raif grinned as he remembered the three days he
and Drey had lived in the underlevels, sleeping on the damp, muddy
floor, eating trail meat like proper hunters and strategizing
endlessly about rats. It had been a good time. Raif couldn't recall
earning the rats' trust, but he did remember deploying the net.
Constantly. In the end they caught eight whole rats and an angry
raccoon. When they brought their bounty to the head keep, Longhead
had scratched his head. "I didn't say anything about coons."
Seeing their faces fall he added, "But now I come to think of it
one coon is more of a nuisance than two rats. A rat can't lift the
lids and get into the grain bins. Coon can. A copper for both of
you—and this stays between you and me."

A whole coin each. Raif couldn't remember what he
did with his, maybe swapped it for some rusty piece of weaponry from
Bev Shank. Drey had given his to Da. He had always been the better
man.

Raif let the memory fall away from him, forcing
himself back into the present. Straightaway he realized something was
wrong. The air was still. No mist washed against his face, no breeze
lifted his hair. Without a current to walk against he had no guide.
Halting, he tried to pin down his mistake. When he'd first heard the
rats he was pretty sure the current was still pushing against him.
What had he done then? Thinking about Drey had distracted him. Had he
veered off course? He turned his head, knowing as he did so that to
look behind was useless but unable to break the habit of a lifetime.

Then he realized something strange. He could see
the barest outline, a black-on-black edge about ten feet above him.
Blinking, he waited. One grain of light at a time, the world came
into view. Raif's eyes protested the growing brightness, sending out
weird blooms of color and floating dots. Sky emerged above the edge,
gray and pearly, swamped with clouds. The ravine appeared below it.
Blue sandstone walls rose on two sides, their surfaces riven with
cracks, their ledges collecting grounds for deadwood and loose scree.
Underfoot, the porous stone was venting skeins of mist that quickly
dissipated in the dry air. Ahead, where the ravine wall met the
bedrock, a bony bristle-cone pine lay twisted and on its side, its
needles a pale ashy green.

Raif glanced down the length of the ravine. It was
still dark back there. Turning, he walked toward the bristlecone
pine. It was alive, he could smell it. As he knelt, rubbing the
fragrant needles between his fingertips, the light increased and the
way ahead became clear. Sourwood bushes, rock oak and hornbeam choked
the foot of the ravine where it dovetailed into a large dry riverbed.
No, Raif corrected himself, the river wasn't dry. A line of green
water glinted in its center.

It was canyon country, west of the Rift. He had
been here twice before. He knew the lay of the land, its faults and
undercuts, its shrunken willows and yellow sedge. It was probably
less than two days' walk to the city on the edge of the abyss.

As Raif stepped from the ravine and into the dry
riverbed, a final cry echoed from the dark place behind him.

Keep away from the Red Ice.

He did not look back.

Crouching in the Underworld

Raina Blackhail crouched in dank and fetid
underlevels of the roundhouse and prayed her light wouldn't go out.
It was one of those horn-covered safelamps that was supposedly
impervious to the wind. The lamp's bulb-shaped brass reservoir was
pleasingly full and felt good in her hand, but there was no getting
round it: the flame was jumping.

Darn thing. And what on earth was she doing down
here anyway, when she could be upstairs enjoying a fine midday meal
with Anwyn Bird in the good light—and fresh air—of day?
Instead the smells of rotten leaves, night soils and dead mice were
assaulting her senses as she paddled through a half-foot of standing
water. The underlevels of the Hailhouse stank like an old man. They
were shrinking like one too. According to Longhead, who was one of
the very few people in the clan who cared about such things, the
Hailhouse sank a little each year. "It's the weight of the
stone," he'd explained to her many years ago. "When the
spring thaws come the earth softens and the walls begin to sink. Not
much, but certainly enough." He had wanted to show her the
marker he had scribed on the base of the roundhouse in order to
monitor the rate of sinkage. Raina had declined. She'd been
twenty-two at the time and madly in love, and she wouldn't have cared
if the entire Hailhold had sunk ten feet in a single day.

Well it's sinking now. And the irony was that she,
Raina Blackhail, had turned into Longhead: a person with a marker,
monitoring the decline. Raina smiled at the thought. It made what she
did seem less grim.

Noticing a flattening-out of an overhead ceiling
groin, she straightened her spine and rested a moment. Her back was
aching with the strain of carrying her lode and she wondered if she
should have asked Jebb Onnacre to help. No, she shook her head. Jebb
was a good man and she trusted him, but this risk must be hers alone.

Pushing herself off from the wall she concentrated
on remembering the way ahead. The standing water was deeper than when
she'd been here last and she was glad she'd had the sense to put on
her knee-high leather riding boots. As she moved, the pack strapped
to her shoulders kept sliding out of place and she had to constantly
reach back to re-center the weight. She wasn't sure how much longer
she could carry it. Sweat was trickling past her ears, and two dark
stains were spreading across the armpits of her dress. The sopping
wool felt like itchy mush.

Shunting the weight sideways, she slipped between
two stone columns and entered the dark airless labyrinth of the
foundation space, the bottommost level in the roundhouse. It was
surprisingly warm and some kind of rain was falling—the ceiling
must be saturated with groundwater. The safelamp began to hiss and
Raina brought it close to her body for protection. Bending at the
waist, she cleared the entrance tunnel and followed the passage as it
led down.

It wasn't long before oily water started flooding
over the tops of her boots. Awkwardly, she hiked up her sodden skirts
and tucked them under her belt. As she worked, the safelamp swung
lazily in her free hand, sending an egg-shaped beam of light rocking
across the walls.

A fuzz of blue-black mold covered the stone. In
the corner where the sandstone walls braced the ceiling, moths had
laid their eggs. Thousands of white maggots fed on the mold. Some had
pupated into pod-shaped cocoons that hung suspended from the ceiling
by dusty threads of silk. When a breeze came they clicked together,
making a noise like rustling leaves. Raina averted her eyes and
resumed walking.

Built solely as a buffer between the roundhouse
and the cold earth, the foundation space had not been designed for
walking. Raina reckoned the ceiling height was under five feet, and
looking ahead she could see it was dropping. The strange thing was
she wasn't as afraid of this place as she had been in the past. Old
fears were falling away. Fear of rats and other small things now
seemed like a silly luxury, like wearing a lace bonnet on a windy
day. Vain too, a demonstration of delicacy, an announcement that one
has managed to steer clear of the hardships of everyday life. Same
with spiders and darkness and thunderstorms: girlish fears for girls
who did not know the real things they should fear. Raina could tell
them. Sometimes she would like to yell them out loud just to get them
off her chest.