A Sword from Red Ice

Raif's arm was beginning to numb. Something about the Robber Chief's smell was familiar and vaguely disturbing, but his mind could not grasp what it was. For some reason he kept thinking about Drey's dive board. Moving forward was the same as moving down.

"I will not slit your throat," he cried out.

Instantly the same force that held him, yanked him back and he fell backward onto the rock, landing on his butt. He sat there a moment, planting his palms on the ground and breathing hard. Sharp tingles rose up his arm toward the wound made by the Shatan Maer, and suddenly Raif knew what the Robber Chief smelled of.

He wished he had recognized it sooner for it might have prevented him from taking a step forward.

And down.

I will not slit your throat. The words were a lie; he had spoken them knowing he would defy them. Oh, he would have been sure not to use a knife and take it to the Robber Chief's throat, but in all other ways the statement was false. Raif would have, and might still, kill him.

Break an oath, kill a clansman, lie to a man's face: the list of his sins had just grown longer.

Raising his chin, Raif gazed at the stars. Perhaps, hundreds of leagues to the southwest at Blackhail, Drey and Effie were doing the same. He liked to think of them safe. It gave him something, not strength exactly, more like a solid surface to rest upon … as he fell.

Raif glanced over his shoulder toward the Robber Chief, who had come to rest by the fire. A gloved hand, angling out from his greatcloak and grasping the edge of the firewall, told everything. Raif wondered how he had not seen it sooner. He, of all people, should have known.

"So you will not slit my throat," Traggis Mole repeated, a soft bitterness edging his voice. "I will make myself grateful for that"

Rising to his feet, Raif said, "The Rift Brothers should be taught how to set traps. There's small game to the east of here. Rabbits, ground squirrels, coons. Lean meat, but a man could do worse."

A strange light glittered in Traggis Mole's black eyes. "Do it' he said.

That cost him, Raif thought, unsure whether or not he had been right to bring it up. Traggis Mole's pride ran deep.

"Linden Moodie leads a sortie into the clanholds at dawn tomorrow. You will not be expected to go along."

Raif and the Robber Chief regarded each other carefully, searching for the truth behind one another's statements. Just once Traggis Mole pulled his wooden nose free of his face and took a clear breath.

"Why here?" Raif asked as the wind picked up, sending the flames in the firepit shivering.

The robber chief did not shrug or hesitate as other men might. He said, "I fought the pits in Trance Vor; if any life could prepare a man for this it would be that one."

Pit fighting. Raif had thought it was a legend. Two men flung into a pit and not allowed out until one of them was dead.

"The walls were always eleven feet high, do you know why?"

Raif shook his head.

"Any higher and the gas lamps wouldn't be able to throw enough light into the pit and the crowd would be unable to see. Any shorter and a man could jump up and pull his way out." Traggis Mole watched Raif shiver. "The winner always had to wait for the rope to be lowered. One day I decided I no longer wanted to wait."

It was getting colder, Raif realized, yet the Mole did not appear to feel it. He was moving again, this time toward the north edge of the stack where a ridge of rock stretched down and back to join the cliff wall. "My story is no different than a dozen others men and women will tell you here. We're all lost, desperate. Chased. My mistake was in killing the man who lowered the rope to me that final time. He didn't deserve it, but I can't say that worried me much. He turned out to have the sort of brother that would not let the death rest. His name was Scurvy Pine and he called himself the King of Thieves. Took my nose from me and would have taken more if I hadn't escaped him. Next day he set a thieves' bounty on my head. A thousand pieces of gold, can you imagine it? Enough money to build a marble pool and drown yourself in riches. Every stableboy, man-at-arms, shopkeeper and villain in the city wanted to find me and chop off my head. And it didn't stop at Trance Vor. Word of Scurvy Pine's bounty spread west to Morning Star, Hound's Mire, Spire Vanis and Ille Glaive. Soon there was nowhere I could rest easy at night. I took to the roads and then the woods, spent a year scratching out a living at a lumber camp deep in the Trenchlands, and then, by some miracle of misfortune, I ended up in the Rift."

Traggis Mole's hand came up as he lightly touched his ribs through the fabric of his cloak. "And here is where I stay."

He knows, Raif realized, hearing the bleakness in his voice.

Traggis Mole met gazes with Raif, breathed hard through his wooden nose and then looked away.