A Sword from Red Ice

The man-shaped thing rushed them. It pushed its own shape before it in smoke. Moonlight bent toward its thick diamond-shaped blade. Raif loosed his arrow. Even before the twine recoiled he had thrown down the bow. The arrowhead had penetrated heart muscle but it had not gone deep enough into the gristle and the thing still came at them.

"Addie. Get back," he heard himself scream as Traggis Moe's longknife scribed the quarter-circle from his hip to a position at right-angle to his chest. Raif saw the creature's hollow, craving eyes. Heard the explosive crack of its weight coming down upon jane needles suspended in ice. Its blade had to be four feet long. Raif's was two.

Raif leaped forward, feinted right. The man-shaped thing swung his sword at him like a club. It was screeching like a seagull. Raif stepped behind ft, made the thing turn. Voided steel came at him: its edge the glistening razor where chaos and destruction met. It stunk like the absence of all things. Raif rolled ahead of it, felt it touch his lower rib. Life heat sucked from the hole. Springing up Raif braced the Mole's longknife against the hard plate where muscle met bone in the exact center of his ribcage. The man-thing was yanking back its blade for another strike. There was air around its chest.

Traggis Mole's longknife was inhumanly sharp, sharper than any sword Raif had ever wielded in his entire eighteen-year life. It seemed to take no pressure at all to puncture shadowflesh, no effort at all to slide between the dark ventricles of the grossly inhuman heart. Voided steel came up, touched real steel with a queer vibrating tone. That carried no force.

Raif yanked out the blade, rolled clear onto the snow. Embers and pine needles crackled as his spine crushed them. The man-thing rocked like a wedge-cut tree about to topple, and then went crashing to the ground.

Deep and perfect silence followed. Neither Raif nor Addie moved. The cragsman was standing upslope from the camp by the tallest of the red pines. Moonlight made his face blue. A great gray owl calling out across the forest broke the silence. Hoo. Hoo. Hoo. Addie was the first to move, rushing toward Raif. Raif thought he'd like to stay awhile lyingdown in the snow and did just that.

"C'mon, lad," Addie's voice was hard, angry. His finger poked at Raif's ribs like sticks. "Get up now. Get up."

Raif blinked at him and thought, Leave me be old man. I'm tired.

Addie Gunn would not let Raif Sevrance be. He was a cragsman and he knew how to leverage his weight to haul sheep, and that's what he did to Raif. He hauled Raif up over his shoulder and carried him clear of the camp. When he found a bed of tender yearling spruce he deposited Raif upon it. Two layers of rawhide were yanked up. The leech jar was opened. Curses were sworn, and then Raif felt the circle-bite of a fresh leech on his back.

"Wait here," Addie said, unclasping his cloak and laying it over him. "I'm going back to get the gear."

Raif waited and then slept.

Two times in the night he was roused by Addie, yet Raif managed to submit to the cragsman's ministrations while not fully waking. His dreams were all of death, of that moment that divided this world from the next. The eyeblink. The thin line. The failure of the heart.

When he awoke fully and properly it was light. He was still lying on the spruce, curled up on his side. A new pain in his lowest rib just above his spleen throbbed with dull persistence. He supposed he should be grateful the voided steel had touched bone.

Addie was sitting by a fire the size of a horse, toasting a piece of liver on a stick. He had a wild, disheveled look about him. His hair was sticking up and some of it was frozen. A pine needle was embedded in his cheek. The corner of one of the blankets that hung across his shoulders had been scorched. When he heard Raif move he looked over and said, "Ain't getting no easier."

It was the closest Addie Gunn had ever come to complaining.

Raif stood. It took a moment for all the various hurts and bruises to settle themselves into place. Some kind of order was being established, a hierarchy of pain. A snap of dizziness hit as he crossed to the fire, but he forced himself to walk through it. "Breakfast?" he asked, coming to a halt by the wall of yellow flames.

"Aye. Tea's gone. Liver's dry. There's hardbread on the rock."

Raif took a drink of hot water and forced himself to eat the liver. The hardbread had been placed on a rock in the embers and was slowly turning black.