A Sword from Red Ice

Raif allowed himself to be led to the sleeping mattress. When Stillborn thrust a cup in his fist, he drank. It wasn't water. He told himself he'd just lie down for a while to calm the pounding in his head. The sun was setting and rich pink light filled the cave.

He dreamed of Ash. She was floating on a plate of ice calved from a glacier. He was standing on the shore, and at first the current moved her toward him, and there was a moment when, if they'd both reached out their hands, they might have touched. He called her name and reached for her, his hand touching space she had just occupied. Yet Ash March no longer looked at him, and the current carried her away.

At first he thought the clanging was part of a new dream. A bell was tolling in the distance and he knew, as you knew things in dreams, that the sound was coming from a place where he did not want to go. He struck a path in the opposite direction, telling himself that the faster he moved the quicker the sound would decrease. He jogged and then sprinted. Someone called his name.

"Raif. Better be up. The Mole's sounding the alarm."

Opening his eyes, Raif saw it was full dark. The pole lamp Stillborn had brought earlier was the only illumination in the cave. Stillborn was squatting next to him. The spare tooth embedded in his neck tissue was biting.

"The alarm," he repeated, his hazel eyes glittering like cut stones. "Something's out there."

The noise was barbaric. A great clashing of tempered and untem-pered metals, beating out of time and driven by fear. Raif had never heard anything like it; the boom of gongs and peal of bells, the rasp of ridged metal being sawn across rock, the bedlam of iron plate smashing against iron plate like cymbals, and the hammer of hundreds of cook pots as the Maimed Women came out upon their ledges and tried to beat back the dark.

Standing upright, Stillborn cinched his gear belt. Two swords, a nail hammer and a knife hung there. "I best get going. Follow when you can."

Raif swung his feet onto the floor.

Nodding at Yelma as he passed her, Stillborn said, "Looks like she's got a case of exploding boils." "Still," Raif said. "The sword?" "Foot o' the bed, my old friend. Foot o' the bed."

The Forsworn sword had been wrapped in a length of cheesecloth and laid at the end of the mattress. Kneeling forward, Raif tore off the fabric and uncovered the blade. The flat had been polished so finely it reflected his face like a mirror. Drawing his thumb along the edge he tested for sharpness. It opened the skin but drew no blood. Good. The point was like a diamond, hard and brilliant, and the only thing he saw that was not perfect was a slight warping in the pattern of the steel where bent metal had been fired and hammered back to true.

Raif removed Stillborn's borrowed blade from his sealskin scabbard and replaced it with the Forsworn sword. The rock crystal surmounted on the pommel flashed as he moved across the cave. As he clasped the newly repaired Orrl cloak around his throat he fell some shame about what had happened earlier with Mallia Angola. He did not understand himself.

Grabbing the pole light on hit way out, Raif Sevrance headed toward the greatest concentration of noise.

The night was clear and lit by stars. Snow glowed blue. The moon had not yet risen, but Raif calculated it was due. He moved quickly, leaping from Stillborn's ledge to the one above and then up the rope ladder to one of the longer ledges that ran east. Others were moving too. Maimed Men, their faces blank, their knuckles while where they gripped scythes, stone-bladed axes, sharpened and fire-hardened wooden staves, cruciform halberds, forked spears, swords, knives. The frenzied clangor of the alarm worked on their bodies like a drug, making arms twitch and neck tendons spring out like wires. The clash of metal chopped Raif's thoughts into slices. He could no longer think of whole things, was incapable of formulating of retaining a plan. instead he thought in pulses. I must go up this ladder. I must avoid the hoist lifts. Too many people: Get out of my way.

He drew his sword. Two women kneeling on the ledge, heating cauldrons against the rock, cried out his name. Naked, their bodies obscenely shadowed and missing flesh, they hissed as he stared at them. Slowly they began beating out a new rhythm on the rock. " Twelv Kill. Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill."

He turned his back on them. Maimed Men made way for him as he landed on the lowest of the three great rimrocks that spanned the city.

Hiking on top of a boulder, he tried to see the way ahead. Armed men were moving across the snow. A watch fire had been lit by the mouth of the pool cave, but the flames were sluggish and needed pumping. A blind man beating a sheet of scrap metal by the fuel pile had caught the rhythm of the hags above and now fell in time with them. Twelve Kill Twelve Kill. Twelve Kill.