A Sword from Red Ice

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 blindman 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 impssibly 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 himelf 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.