A Sword from Red Ice

Marafice didn't know what he himself was anymore. Protector General of the Rive Watch? Surlord-in-waiting? Commander of a ragtag army of mercenaries, old-timers, religious fanatics, machinists without machines and walking—and lying—wounded? One thing was certain though. He was a man finished with the clanholds. It was a dog-eat-dog world full of wild-eyed warriors and cunning chiefs, and the day he'd crossed the Wolf and left it was the day he vowed to himself he'd never go back. "Will you call a halt?" Tat asked, breaking through his thoughts. It was a good question and one Marafice had minded all day. Did he stop north of the city and approach Spire Vanis in the morning, refreshed, or march on and arrive by night? They were approaching the town of Oxbow in the Vale of Spires and it was growing late. Men who had been on their feet since dawn were weary. Marafice was weary, but it was not the kind of weariness that would let him sleep. The nearer they drew to the city the more tense he became. He did not know what he would meet at the gate, couldn't even be sure if they would let him in.

The journey south from the Wolf had been hard and slow. Ille Glaive had to be avoided, which had meant a detour through the Bitter Hills. Hill country was cold and barren, policed by sharp winds and thick snowfalls. Food had been hard to come by and they'd had to mount raids. Sheep were not afield, and farms had to be struck. It had not been pretty. There might have been rapings; Marafice did not get involved in what went on. He had three thousand men, a thousand horses, and two hundred pack mules to feed: pretty was seldom possible.

The hardest thing to bear had been the weather. Storms had hit in succession; great whiteouts where they had been forced to overtake barns and farm buildings and bed downpi the manure and hay. The worst storm had hit after they'd left hill country and entered the great floodplains of the Black Spill. It had acted strangely, that storm, everyone had agreed so later; the way it had seemed to pass overhead and then thought better of it, and turned right back for a second swipe. Its length and ferocity had caught them off-guard, and when the whiteout came it was so sudden and complete that it had left them stranded. These were grasslands and there were no woods to look to for protection. No farms either, at least none that could be found irmhurry. The winds were so high they couldife erect the tents, and they'd had to dig themselves into snowbanks, an experience so miserable Sd back-breaking that men had died with shovels in their hands.

Perish had made a killing that night. Men scared that if they fell asleep in the snow they would not wake up, were ripe for religious con-version. He had them chanting the pieties like ten-year-old boys. Marafice would have none of it—his balls might be freezing to hailstones but he wasn't crazy. Yet he could see that in this instance it had worth. Men were comforted in a place where there had been no comfort. It was something to be grateful for, Perish's makeshift church in the snow.

Two days had been lost. The greatest number of deaths were amongst the horses. Marafice had detected some relation between the fanciness of a horse—the length and skinniness of its legs and the shininess of its coat—to its ability to withstand cold. Fancy died faster. Men and mules fared better, though pretty much everyone and everything had ended up with chilblains, frostbite, dead skin, shed hair and snow blindness. Marafice's left foot, which had been badly frostbitten once before, had been paining him ever since. He would not put weight on it and spent all his days in the saddle, atop his decidedly unfancy stallion.

His eye socket had had to be stuffed with balled horse mane and sword grease. After the first few hours in the snowbank it had begun to smell. Men would not look at him, he'd noticed. Marafice One Eye, at the best of times, was rarely an appealing sight. Strange how you could forget all about how you looked. Spend months on end imagining imt your appearance did not matter and that you were being judged solely on your actions, only to be reminded with a shock that it wasn't true. A man with an ugly face was set apart. A man with only one eye in that ugly face was judged a monster.

Marafice told himself it was of no consequence, and mostly it was not, yet there were times, such as in the snowbank, where he felt filled with layers of hard-to-place resentment. Those men chanting their crazy pieties with Andrew Perish could all go to hell.

"Well call a halt when we reach the rocks," Marafice said to Tat Mackelroy, guiding his horse around a pothole filled with frozen mud. 'There's open ground. We'll make camp there."

Tat nodded slowly, thoughtful. They were riding eight abreast along a wide, unpaved road that led through closely spaced goose and pig farms. It was late afternoon, and the air was cool and clear and reeked of animal foulness. "Some in the company won't like it."