A Sword from Red Ice

She could not escape them, not on her own. While she was here she was dependent upon Lan Fallstar. If the Far Rider were to walk away and leave her she could be lost forever in these trees. Every birch and square foot of land looked the same. She had tried to apply what little she knew of the Sull path lores, looking for chips in the bark two feet off the ground, double nailheads sunk into the wood that looked like beetle holes until you stopped and inspected them, and subtle yellow burns in the tree moss where flames had been brushed against them in curving motions to form moon-shapes, but she had yet to spot anything so far. Most blazes did not seem to apply here. She knew the Sull often selected a single branch on a tree, stripped it bare of twigs and leaves and used it as a signpost to point the way of a trail, but the spindly crowns of the birches were as good as bare to begin with. And the slim, branchless trunks would be almost impossible to climb without spiked boots or ladders. They offered no footholds or handholds to aid an ascent. Rock blazes, bush blazes and fallen log blazes did not seem to apply either, as there was not a single fallen log, bush or rock to be seen in the entire forest. Snow, sedge and trees: they were its only features.

She had noticed osprey nests in some trees, big whirlwind-shaped constructions built out of twigs and scraps of sedge, and had spotted frequent elk and bear tracks, but although she suspected there was something to be learned from their presence she was unsure what that might be. Ark Veinsplitter would have helped her if he'd lived, explained how it was possible to navigate this land of phantom trees. He had made her Sull, drained her human blood to make way for Sull blood. He would have trusted her with the secrets of the birch way.

Lan Fallstar did not. She had asked him outright last night as they'd made a miserable and tentless camp in the mist. The fire had slowly reddened and died, suffocated by the film of mist that coated every log. "How do you find your way here?" she had said. "I should know in case anything happens to you."

The Far Rider had been rubbing clarified horse fat into the crusted and canyonlike bum on his left arm. He stopped and turned his deeply angled face toward her and said, "Nothing will happen."

"That's no answer."

The horse grease was stowed in a horn of fossilized ivory and he sealed it before speaking, thumping a stopper into the opening with the heel of his hand. "This Sull does not believe he has need to answer questions."

She had not argued with him. The tone of his voice was clear enough. He believed her to be an outsider, and he was right. In a way she could not fault him. The one clear thing she understood about the Sull was that they believed themselves to be a people under threat. They had once claimed the vast continent to the south; glass deserts, warm seas, city ports, rain forests, salt flats, marble islands, grasslands, high steppes, vast snaking rivers and mountains so tall their peaks could only be seen on a handful of days each year. And then there were the places beyond this continent, places with names that sounded alien and threatening to Ash. The Unholy Sea. Sankang. The Spoiled Lands. Balgaras. The Ore Islands. All this and more had once belonged to the Sull. Now they were reduced to a strip of land in the the Northern Territories, perhaps a third of a continent.

And they lived in fear they would lose it. Ash had grown up hearing stories of the Sull's ruthlessness. Tales of the bloody battle at Hell's Core, where the Sull slaughtered the Vor king's son and ten thousand of his men and then refused to allow Vorish priests onto the battlefield to collect the bodies; tales of the massacre of innocents at Clan Gray where eight hundred women and children were killed in under an hour for daring to set foot on Sull land; and tales of the great burning of ships on the Sea of Souls where thirty-one vessels went down with all hands. What she had not heard at Mask Fortress was the other side of the tale. Of Sull dispossession and defeats, and of their great and driving fear they would one day lose their home. Every slaughter they carried out was defensive.

Ash raised a hand as she passed one of the trees and touched its flak-ing and silvery trunk. These birches were part of the Sull's defenses. They were an impenetrable wall guarding a vulnerable portion of its western border, and it wasn't surprising that Lan Fallstar would not share their secret with someone who claimed to be Sull, yet neither acted nor looked like Sull.