A Sword from Red Ice

The tone of his footsteps changed as he neared the center of the lake. There was a hollowness to them now. They rang. On impulse he drove the heel of his boot deep into the ice. It was like kicking a wall.

"To break it you must stand in all four worlds at once." Argola s words sounded like a taunt Clanholds. Sull. Want. What else? Raif Sevrance's heart failed a beat. He perceived it as a moment of prolonged suction, a hardness, followed by softness, followed by the release of another beat. He carried on walking… because there was nothing else to do.

Shadow homes to shadow.

Four worlds.

The Want held in place.

Raif looked down at his feet. He thought for a moment he saw something pale and head-shaped lying beneath the ice.. Perhaps it was one of the lamb brothers" lost souls. Perhaps it was his own reflection. It did not matter. Either way the ice would not hreak.

He needed to find its weak point

Raif suddenly remembered what Addie had told him, that morning after the first camp out of the city. A small charge of possibility fired along his nerves. Quickening his pace he headed toward the dam of mist. He could feel it now, the freezing fog, switching back and forth between ice and superfine droplets of water, moving between worlds.

The Red Ice spread out before him like an eye hill of blood How many men had died here? How marry bodies waited beneath the surface to be released? He believed he saw them now, pale legs and torsos, severed heads and smashed feet, sections of gut with gray and pipelike intestines spilled out, how-curved hips with the sexual organs frozen into forms that looked like split fruit. All mouths and eyes were open and gaping; black holes in the ice where the terror still lived. The demon hordes of the Unmade had slaughtered thousands. It was easy to close his eyes and see the violent fury, the cracking of spines, the fountaining of blood, the blades that sucked in light hacking limbs. Was it possible that such a battle would need to be fought again?

Raif Sevrance could not say No.

The mist dam spread before him, soaring hundreds of feet into the air. Lobes of cloud broke off and floated south across the lake. They peeled and divided, rotating into ever-thinning veils before vanishing-Sucked dry. Raif had assumed that if he walked close enough to the mist he would be lost, but now he was not so sure. Something held the Want back. And he was beginning to think he knew what that was.

He was far into the ice now and the hills were nothing but dark mounds in the distance. When lightning flashed, he judged the distance between the east and west shore and and altered his course to center himself between the two. Sull and clanhold. Satisfied, he concentrated upon the ke beneath his feet as he walked toward the Great Want

His left hand was numb to the wrist now and tingles jumped along his arm toward his heart. Stay, he told something. He wasn't sure what.

The crack in the ice was as fine as a drawn wire, a line of perfect blackness cutting through the Red Iee. The Want's mists would not, could not, pass it. It was the great flaw in the continent. The Rift.

It never closes, not wholly. North of Bludd it narrows so that men can cross it, but it's always there, a black crack running through the forests between here and the Night Sea.

Raif fell to his knees before it. Stupid tears were coming to his eyes. Relief and longing welled up in his failing heart. This was the fourth world, the darkness that lay in wait beneath the earth. The passageway to the Blind.

Ice fog coated his face and clothing as he drew Traggis Mole's longknife. The Want existed less than a foot away, on the north side of the Rift, and Raif breathed it in as he stripped off his gloves and molded his left hand around the haft. Using his right hand to fasten the numb fingers in place, he raised the knife above his head.

For Drey. Always and everything for Drey.

For the oath he had seconded. And Raif had failed.

A tower of lightning lit up the north as Raif Sevrance drove his blade into the Red Ice. A whoosh of air shot across the lake. The ice groaned as steel went deep into the hairline fissure of the Rift, down into the frozen blood. Cracks ran along the ice like burning fuses. Explosive charges followed them, firing up fist-size bursts of frozen matter and shattering the lake's surface like glass. As destruction fled outward from the blade, the surrounding clouds closed in. Whatever sorcery had held them at bay had snapped the instant the ice was breached, and the storm now rolled in.

The knife went deep. When the crosshilts slammed into the ice the knife continued sinking. Raif's fists slid down after them, and he leaned forward driving the steel as far as it could go. Around him the lake was fracturing and whitening, riding up in great plates and splintering into fragments. Corpses encased in ice were flung into the air. He could smell the battle now, the blood and fear, the horse shit and unmade flesh.