A Sword From Red Ice (78 page)

Food was growing scarce and the low-grade hunting
afforded by being constantly afoot rendered little beyond ptarmigan
and molting hares. Snow had driven anything larger into hiding. Given
time Addie could prepare a decent bird, but he didn't have any love
for plucking and usually assigned feather duty to Raif. Raif seemed
to recall that Tern had known a couple of ingenious ways to pluck
birds, but couldn't for the life of him remember any of them—one
might have had something to do with mud. Oddly enough it was the lack
of tea that was felt the most. The ritual of boiling water and
steeping the herbs was something they both missed. Addie still
insisted on boiling and serving water, and had collected various
twigs and leaves along the journey in attempt to conjure up new kinds
of tea. So far saxifrage, goatsbeard, hagberry and dead nettle had
delivered various watery, yellowy weed-tasting teas. Addie was still
hopeful. Legend had it that a plant existed called trapper's tea that
bloomed with white flowers in high summer and could be found growing
amidst rocks. The drink produced from crushing and then steeping its
leaves was said to be so delicious that Addie could only talk about
in a whisper. "Day we find it there'll be some fine drinking,"
he'd murmured more than once.

Addie had grown chilblains on his nose and hands
and was having a spot of bother with his feet. Every night he would
dry livermoss on a stick above the fire and every morning he would
stuff the springy filaments into the toes of his boots. The cragsman
moved no slower for his troubles, but Raif had seen him hesitate a
few times before starting a sharp descent, and then lean heavily on
his stick. Raif's own feet were holding up. Both he and Addie wore
double layers of hareskin socks that kept out all but the worst of
the cold, and Raif's ancient hand-me-down boots fitted him so well
that there was little chafing. When he touched his face he felt
patches of hard and tender skin and he thought there might be some
frost damage, but as long as it didn't hurt he didn't spare it much
thought.

It was the shoulder that bothered him. Slowly,
steadily, over the course of the past seven days Raif had felt it
burning a hole in his chest. He'd once watched as Brog Widdie proofed
the temperature on a batch of blister steel he had been firing. With
his long, crab-craw tongs the master smith had formed a small portion
of the red-hot metal into a ball, and then pulled it from the fire.
Immediately he dropped the ball onto his proofing block and watched
how quickly the molten metal burned through the green wood. The ball
would blacken and hiss, igniting a ring of flames as it burned a hole
through the wood. That's what the Shatan Maer's claw had begun to
feel like to Raif; a piece of molten metal incinerating his flesh.

"Do you know how to start a stopped heart?"
Yiselle No Knife had asked Addie Gunn in the Sull camp by the Rift.
The words haunted Raif, the tone of them, the lightness yet certainty
in her voice. She had meant to shock both of them, him and Addie, and
she succeeded better than she realized. Until she spoke Raif had
managed to squash it into the back of his thoughts. The shoulder
hurt. It had grown worse since the creature on the rimrock had
smashed him in the back. It ached, sometimes a lot. That was it. Now
it loomed constantly in his thoughts, and he couldn't tell if he was
imagining that it was growing worse, or if it really was growing
worse. Either way Yiselle No Knife had won a victory. She hadn't
prevented them from heading east as she had intended, but she had
intimidated them. The Sull were experts at that.

"Let's head a mite south," Addie
mumbled, surprising Raif by speaking for the first time since they'd
broken camp earlier that morning. "After those icestones we
drifted too far north."

Raif nodded his agreement. They were both wearing
face masks roughly shaped from hareskins, and as it was difficult to
talk they'd taken to signing basic instructions and requests. It was
snowing in big flakes that were as light and airy as dandelion fluff.
The clouds were thickly gray and did not appear to be moving.
Underfoot the snow formed complicated layers, by turns mushy, grainy,
gravelly and plain hard. Some drifts were as deep as Addie's waist,
but generally the cover lay between one and one and a half feet.
They'd been lucky with the afternoon thaw two days back: it had
prevented the snow from becoming too deep.

Neither Addie nor Raif no longer had much idea of
where they were. Most mornings they would align themselves with the
rising sun, pick a point far in the distance—a stand of big
trees, a ridge, a hummock, a frozen pond—and head toward it.
If they reached it before dark they'd pick something else, correcting
either north or south depending on how Addie felt about the going.
This morning Addie had picked a knoll that stuck out above the forest
canopy and glinted with blue-green lenses of ice. Now they slowed
their pace while the cragsman chose a second target farther south.

Hiking onto a rock, Addie surveyed the land ahead.
His brown wool cloak was deeply ringed with pine sap and his boots
had been poked so many times by rocks and branches that the leather
looked like it had been chewed on by dogs. Never one to waste much
time, the cragsman made his decision, and then carefully lowered
himself onto the floor of the slope. "Stream. This way," he
said, striking a new path that took them down into the trees.

The cedar forests to the south formed a green lake
on the valley floor, leaving the slopes and ridges free for other,
scrappier trees. Spruce and white pines took the ground the cedars
did not want, but even they stayed clear of the higher slopes. Forest
fires and bog rot had killed successive generations of trees and
there were many fallen logs and standing deadwoods. For the past day
and a half Raif and Addie had walked above the northern treeline,
following a goat path along the rocks, but now they entered woodland.

Light dimmed and the air grew colder. The snow
underfoot was patchy, but you could hear the great weight of it in
the trees. Boughs creaked and whirred as they strained to hold their
loads. No decent wind in several days meant the trees had been given
little relief. Some pines had bent in the middle, forming white humps
that looked like bridges. Branches had failed and snapped. Entire
trunks had split in two. Raif suggested they pick up their pace.
Addie grumbled but agreed.

It was hard to know exactly where they lay in
relation to Bludd. At some point in the east, Bludd forests melted
into forests claimed and patrolled by the Sull. Bludd was a huge
clanhold, and its northeastern reaches were wild and barely
populated. Occasionally Raif and Addie saw smoke, but after the
encounter with Yiselle No Knife and the Spinebreaker, neither had
managed to work up sufficient desire to investigate. Raif assumed
they were still above Bludd's borders, but couldn't be sure. Addie
had an understandable fear of traveling too far north—the Want
lay that way and you might simply blink and find yourself in the
middle of it, unable to get out—and tended to steer them due
east and southeast.

The Rift no longer existed as an unmissable marker
that divided the continent into the clanholds and the lands of the
barren north. The great fissure in the earth had narrowed to a canyon
filled with debris, then a gulch choked with willow, then a simple
gash in the rock. "It's still there," Addie had said,
wagging his head at the ground when Raif asked, "but now you
have to look for it. With all this snow we could be standing right
upon it and wouldn't even know." Whenever Raif thought of
Addie's words he couldn't help looking at his feet. He glanced down
now as they made their way through a stand of hundred-year cedar.
Nothing underfoot only pine needles and snow. "Whoa, laddie,"
Addie said, gripping his arm.

Raif looked at him, startled.

"Nearly lost your footing there." Above
the face mask, Addie's gray eyes searched Raif's. "Probably hit
a tree root."

A question lay behind the statement. Raif blinked.
He felt as if he'd missed something. He'd been looking down at his
feet and then then . . . Addie had spoken.

"Rest a minute," Addie said, clenching
Raif's elbow like a vise. "Take a mouthful of water."

Considering Addie had him in an arm lock, Raif
didn't have much choice. His chest felt strange. Tight. Inside his
boarskin glove all five fingers of his left hand were numb. When he
held the water bladder above his head to drink, strange tingles
passed along his arm to his shoulder.

Addie watched him. Raif knew what the cragsman was
thinking. He tried to formulate a reply to the inevitable questions
but couldn't think of anything reassuring that wouldn't be a lie.

Snow sifted down to the forest floor as they stood
facing each other, silent. Last year's ferns poked through the ground
cover like rusted iron bars. Finally Addie said, "Dead men don't
fulfill oaths." Angry, he set off along the path on his own.

Raif bit off his glove, swiveled his arm back and
rubbed his shoulder with numb fingers. A point deep in his chest felt
hollow. Walking back along the course of his and Addie's footsteps,
he searched for the exact spot where he'd looked down to check for
the Rift. After a minute or two he thought he found it. His footsteps
had been steady, evenly paced and all pointing in the same direction,
and then one—just one—went awry. The toe of his left boot
had made contact at a slightly different angle to the previous steps
and the outside edge that led from it formed a wedge shape as if Raif
had been in the process of making a sudden turn. There was no heel
mark.

That lack of contact turned Raif cold. It was the
difference between life and death.

Was that what a heart-kill felt like?

Nothing.

Springing into motion, Raif followed Addie along
the path.

They traveled in silence for the rest of the day,
stopping once to eat the remains of last night's ptarmigan and search
a likely patch of undergrowth for eggs. The cragsman made a point of
not watching over Raif, though if it was possible to keep an eye on
someone without looking at them that was what Addie was doing. Raif
felt odd. Light and not quite sane. He kept seeing the failed
footstep and hearing Traggis Mole say, Swear it.

They reached the stream about an hour before dark.
Snowmelt was running in its middle, skirting over rocks and jammed
pine cones. They could have jumped it easily—it wouldn't have
even needed a run up—but Addie set about walking upstream. The
snow was thicker here and there were more dead trees. Raif thought he
caught a whiff of woodsmoke, but when he looked to Addie to confirm
it the cragsman's face gave nothing away.

"Here," Addie said, coming to a halt a
few minutes later. "It's as good a place as any to set camp."

Three big cedars formed a thick triangle of cover
hard along the bank. A root from the largest tree cut right across
the stream, forming a spillway where the water widened and slowed
before tipping over the root branch and continuing on its way.
Addie's gaze dared Raif to find fault. Raif did not. Squatting by the
spillway, he stripped off his gloves, scooped up two handfuls of
water and threw them over his face. The iciness was startling but it
didn't alter the lightness in his head.

That night he did not sleep. He suspected Addie
didn't get much rest either, for the cragsman had made himself a bed
out of pine boughs that crunched every time he rolled over—and
they crunched a lot. They were both short-tempered as they took their
morning drink of boiled water. Addie told Raif to fill the waterskins
with stream water and when Raif didn't jump to the task quick enough
for his liking he found fault. Raif dropped the skins in the snow and
went for a piss. How was it his fault that he had ended up with a
piece of shadow lodged next to his heart?

Addie's spirits improved as the morning wore on.
For once it didn't snow and it looked as if the wind might break up
the clouds. After they crossed the stream they decided to head out of
the trees. Snow dumps were beginning to happen and the thought of
being caught under a tree shedding a half-ton of snow was not
comforting. Occasionally Addie would dart from the path, checking
ground cover, snowbanks and rock piles for nests.

"Raif. Take a look at this."

Raif had gone on ahead while Addie investigated
the area surrounding a recently fallen cedar, and Raif had to
backtrack to join him. He found the cragsman staring at one of the
grounded cedar bows, holding his stick above the foliage like a
spear. Only when Raif drew abreast of him did he see it: a cast-iron
tooth-jawed bow trap built to spring a bear.

"Nearly stepped on the paddle. It was hidden
in the branches." Addie shook his head at it. "Fetch me a
log. I'm going to trigger it."

Raif pried off one of the thick lower branches of
the fallen cedar, and then watched as Addie jabbed it against the
paddle. Crack. The branch was crushed to wood chips as the jaws
snapped shut.

"Bastards," Addie said quietly. "Lost
two sheep to traps like this." Shaking his head, he picked up
his walking stick and turned to Raif. "At least now we know we
can head to the smoke."

"It's not Sull?"

"They wouldn't insult big game by trapping
it. It's not clannish by the looks of it either, though you never
know. Could have been traded. What I can say is that men who set
this—and it was recently set, see how there's no snow between
the coils—are cowards and varmints. And I'll take them over
Sull any day."

Raif opened his mouth to speak, but Addie halted
him by raising his stick.

"No. We need some medicine for that . . .
that thing in your back. And so help me Gods I'm going to trade for
some tea."

Raif didn't have the heart to tell him that he
didn't think medicine would work.