A Sword from Red Ice

Why had her foster father wanted her so badly? If she hadn't run away from Mask Fortress what would have become of her? She knew Iss had planned to imprison her, but how had he intended to use her? What had Heritas Cant told her in Ille Glaive? 'You will be able to walk the borderlands at will, hear and sense the creatures that live there, and your flesh will become rakhar dan, reachflesh, which is held sacred by the Sull" It made about as much sense now as it did then. Yet she did not think Cant's words were false. Mistaken perhaps, but not false. And why had Ark insisted she become Sull? "If you are not with us you are against us, and as such no living, breathing Sull will let you live." What did she possess that filled them with such fear?

Thoughtful, Ash rocked her weight back onto her feet She was a Reach, and she did not know what that meant.

Leading the Sull horse by the cheek strap, she guided him toward the section of riverbank where rye and wild carrot had seeded between the scree. He deserved a treat. Once he'd eaten his fill he would head straight back to the camp. He would not stray, and if he heard anything that alarmed him he would immediately return to her side. Ash didn't know what she would have done without him these past six days. He knew the way home. With a loose hand on his reins he headed east, following a subtle path along the rivershore that Ash could only occasionally discern. Together they had passed vast beds of ice-rotted bulrushes humming with black flies, sulfurous tributaries that dumped mustard-colored ore into the Flow, hedge of spiny bushes that formed defensive walk around beachheads, salt ponds ringed with game paths, and long stretches of shoreline where ghostly forests of needle-thin birches grew from the frozen mud.

She wasn't sure how far she'd traveled from the Floating Bridge. Sometimes she rode, but more often she chose to walk. Awake before the first cock crow each morning, she was on the toil before dawn. It was easier to keep going than stop. If she had been traveling alone she would have walked all day, swigging from her water bladder as she wove between the trees, only halting to catch her breath and pee. The gelding needed to graze though, and she was forced to stand and wait for long intervals as he cropped last year s grass.

Waiting was a kind of torture. It gave her time to think. Katia, her little wild-haired maid, dead. Ark dead. Raif gone. All three had risked their lives to help her, and she had not paid them back. Ash filled her lungs with night air, punishing herself with its icy sharpnest. She lived in a world where she had not paid them back.

Camp was little more than a circular patch of kick-cleared ground twenty feet north of the treeline. Out of habit Ash had raised a guide-post, and now began laying stones for a fire ring. She had no tent hides and feared lighting a fire in this strange land, but it gave her something to do. The river stone was green traprock reefed with fool's gold, and it was cold and sharp. Ash had lost her gloves along with her supplies so she had to lay it bare-handed. Darkness rose as she worked, snuffing the wind and pulling up mist.

Intent on building the fire ring, stacking the stones in overlapping layers as Ark had taught her, she id not hear the gelding approach. When it pushed its nose against her back in way of greeting, she jumped in fright

"Bad horse," she scolded, feeling foolish. Suddenly everything seemed foolish: the guide post and the fire ring, Traveling alone— to the Heart of the Sull without even knowing why.

"What am I doing here?" she asked aloud, hearing the tremble in her voice and not liking it. "What am I good for except getting people killed?"

Nothing answered. Along the treeline the cedars swayed in long, rolling waves. The gelding watched her, its head cocked, straining to read her mood. Abruptly Ash sat. She was tired and hungry and quite possibly going insane. Frowning, she glanced at the near-perfect circle of rocks, thought about it for a moment, and then leaned forward and knocked it over with her fist. Feeling a bit better, she spoke a command to the horse.

The gelding moved closer, swinging about to present its flank. Ash reached into her coat, located her gear belt, and drew her knife. Two weapons Ark had given her: a sickle blade with a weighted nine-foot chain attached; and a slender handknife made of the rare white alloy that was more precious to the Sull than gold. Platinum. Case-hardened with arsenic and other strange metals, the blade was so fiercely edged that when it first sliced your skin you felt no pain. Angus Lok had possessed a similar weapon, also Sull-wrought, that he lovingly called his "mercy blade." Ash had never seen him use it, for although it had both the form and dimensions of a standard handknife it was not the sort of blade that lent itself to spearing meat or picking dirt from fingernails. It was too formal and deadly for that.