A Sword from Red Ice

The attack had taken place seven days ago and they'd been traveling hard ever since. East and then south, through ancient forests overgrown with moss and ghostvines, along worn stone roads that ran alongside icy green rivers and blackwater lakes, through hills milky with pale winter grasses, and past the valley of blasted trees. That had been the only day when they had seen other people, when they had ridden along the valley's rim and looked down upon square leagues of flattened and blackened pines. The valley was a perfectly shaped bowl and the trees had fallen in a radial pattern as if blasted from a central point. Their trunks were black and greasy and some had crumbled into sections like fallen pillars. An open mine was being worked in the valley's center, and Ash saw the distant figures of men and women digging with picks and working machines. The chink and rumble of their labors was amplified by the valley's steep walls.

She could smell the stale char of the trees. "What's happening down there?" she had asked Lan.

Lan had been maintaining a brisk pace along the ridgeline and did not slow to answer her. "It is Scara'il Ixa. A Hole Made By God." He would say no more.

Ash had the sense that he wanted to be gone as quickly as possible. He did not acknowledge the faces that turned upward to look at them, or the two horsemen armed with longbows who patrolled the head of the valley. She wondered if he had been nervous. He held the reins more closely than normal and his gaze continually scanned the spaces between the trees.

"Where are we going?" she had asked him later that day as he crouched by a stream os snowmet to fill his waterskin. " The Heart Fires are to the south." She didn't know this for a fact but she stated it like one anyway. "And we are heading east."

"Tommorow we turn south," he had said.

She had decided she would leave him if thev did not head south in the morning.

That night she did not sleep in the tent and had bundled in her blankets by the fire. The sky had been diamond clear and crushed with stars. As she watched the constellations turn, the horses wandered over to check on her. The stallion held itself at a companionable distance and began nosing the snow for grass, while the gelding stood right over her and blew on her face. She'd had to push him away in the end, but it had felt good to know that both horses had offered their company.

As she settled down to sleep, she glanced over at the wolfhide tent. The entrance flap was moving back and forth. Ash watched it come to rest, and then waited to see if a stray gust of wind might sat it into motion. It did not. Had Lan been watching her? Or had he simply heard the horses stirring and put out his head to check on them? Uneasy, she had fallen asleep.

Her dreams were of the gray, unsettled place, and the armies of creatures that suffered within it. They roiled with the smoke, hissing, arching their spines, jerking back their heads and clawing at each other and themselves. To be there was a torture. And they wanted out. Something dark and infinitely evil moved along the edge of her perception. It was the calm in the rage, the master of the chaos. Mistressss, it warned. Do not come here m the flesh.

Ash snapped awake. Cold sweat had pooled in the hollow of her throat and it totted down her dress as she sat upright. Dawn was a a silver line on the horizon, and woodcocks were performing their strange slow mating flights above the trees. The horses were asleep; their elbows and stifles locked in place, their eyelids fluttering but not com pletely closed. Ash knew that if she were to stand she would wake them.

Smoky red coals were all that was left of the fire. Reaching for a stick to poke some air in them, she glanced at the tent. The hide was to remember their movements last night. The stream was behind the tent. They had come in from the north. The footsteps led south.

She stood. The horses' ears tracked the movement and their heads came up. Cutting toward the trees, she felt for her sickle knife. She was still sweating, and when she blinked she saw images from the dream. Claws uncurling. Limbs writhing. Eye sockets filled with the cold black substance of space. It occurred to her that she should call Lan's name and look inside the tent, but she did neither. She had some knowledge of path lores and once she saw the footprints close up she decided they were fresh. The surrounding snow was icy, but the little lumps kicked up by the boot heels were soft. They would have hardened if they'd been left overnight.

Camp had been made in a small depression in a sloped woodland of mixed hardwood and pine. Old and swollen oaks lay dormant beside ladders of purple hemlock. Ash headed into the trees, following the path created by the footsteps. It never occurred to her that Lan might be in danger; later she would think about that.