A Sword from Red Ice

The man bowed his head slowly but did not speak. He had been waiting, Raif decided, allowing his visitor time to grow accustomed to his surroundings. Squatting, the man poured green liquid from a copper pot into a glass cup with a copper base. The liquid steamed as he crossed the small, circular space of the tent and laid the cup on the hides by Raif's bed. The man's eyes were an inky brown and his eye whites had a faint bluish tinge to them, like a bird's. His skin was ash brown and there were three small black dots spaced evenly across the bridge of his nose that might have been tattoos.

Nodding once toward the cup and then to a wooden bowl close to Raif's feet the man withdrew. Night air purled through the tent slit as he raised the guide rope and disappeared. Raif watched the tent flap spool back down. Thick raw air circled the tent, dragging down smoke from the seaglass lamps as it sank.

Raif sat up. Pain shot along his left side, spiking in his shoulder. Blood rushed to his head, making his skin flush, and then rushed back down, leaving him faint. Planting his feet on the strange green hide, he rested for a moment before standing. A question that had been waiting just beyond the radius of his thoughts came sharply into view. How long have I been here? He had no answer, he realized, no experience to relate his body's condition to time.

Standing brought on a wave of dizziness, and he clung to one of the yellow bones as he waited it out. The bone echoed when he tapped it with his knuckle; hollow as a birdbone. When the tent stopped spinning, Raif reached for the green drink. It smelled of licorice and something his memory couldn't find a name for. He did not taste it, simply drank in deep gulps, swallowing rhythmically. Done, he glanced down at the wooden pot. Shaking his head, he decided to go outside rather than piss in a bowl.

He was still in the Great Want. The knowledge came to him the instant he stepped upon the gray, powdery earth. Overhead, the great wheel of stars blazed and turned. Knowing better than to gauge the passage of time in the Want by lunar phases, Raif ignored the rising moon. A light wind was gusting, shifting the dust into dunes and car-rying the smelted-metal scent of new-formed glaciers. Raif was standing within a circle of five tents, all similar in shape and size to the one he had slept in. Outside the circle a corral consisting of tanned leathers hung from ivory tusks sheltered woolly mules and a single saffron-fleeced milk ewe. Inside the circle, at its center, four men squatted around a cook fire, spearing food from a black pot with sharpened sticks. No one spoke. All four glanced Raif's way before returning to the business of eating. They were dressed in similar robes of varying shades and it was impossible for Raif to tell which one of them had been in his tent. One of the four had plunged a lean copper spear into the soft earth, and it stood, point-up, within reach of his left hand.

Raif walked to the far side of the tent and urinated. From what he could make out the Want looked flat here, with only dunes and boulders casting shadows against the moon. On impulse he bent down and scooped up a fistful of earth. The soil was pulverized pumice, and it poured through his fingers like cool, dry sand. Watching it he was struck with the idea that the Want had allowed him closer. Closer to what he could barely put into words. Something had happened long ago in this place. Sadaluk, the Listener of the Ice Trappers, had told how the Want had once been like any other land. It had a North and South and stars that could be relied on. Water flowed, trees grew, animals grazed and others hunted. People had lived here; if not Men, then perhaps another, older race. Raif had stood in one of their cities: Kahl Barranon, the Fortress of Grey Ice.

He shivered. Placing a hand on his left shoulder, he worked away at the pain.

A doom had been laid upon this place. Life had been destroyed. Time had been broken and now leaked. Space and distance had been stretched and folded, worn so thin in parts that you could see things on the horizon-mountains, hills, cities-that were thousands of leagues away, and so thickly gathered in others that you could spend all day walking and then turn to see your starting point less than a hundred feet behind you. Raif could not begin to imagine the magnitude of catastrophe that could break the bones of a continent, crush it so com-pletely that its relation to nature and the heavens changed.

not imagine it, but standing here, bare feet sinking into soft pumice as he watched the wind carve the dunes, he had the sense that its after-math could be seen. Forces of heat and pressure had left scars Angus had once told him that pumice was formed when mountains exploded and molten rock gushed up from the center of the earth. Was that what had happened here? Or something worse?