A Sword From Red Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

drifts against the risers of each of the nine steps. The
man knew snow; knew that what he looked at was dry with age, the
granules loosely packed and rolled into pellets by the wind.
Footsteps stamped into the drifts had no interest for him. Men had
come later, after the house had cooled.
    Ignoring the footsteps, the man headed down the
central hall toward the kitchen. His mind was working; cataloguing
details, noting absences, testing them against the theory coalescing
in his head. It was the only way to remain sane.
    The devil was in the details. The damage to the
doors and exterior walls was far greater than in the interior of the
house. Here, in the kitchen, the stone fireplace was barely damaged.
The fire irons had been stolen, not melted. The facing stones were
black, yet the heat had been insufficient to crack the mortar between
them. On the opposite wall, where the external door was located, the
destruction was far worse. The two windows were black holes. Plaster
surrounding them had warped and cracked. Varnish on the adjoining
floorboards had blistered. Part of the wall above the eastern window
had fallen in taking a chunk of the upper story along with it. The
man looked up and saw sky. When he looked down he noticed that one of
the house's exterior sandstone blocks had tumbled in. Its once dusty
orange face had been smelted into glass.
    Xhalia ex nihl. All becomes nothing: words he'd
learned from the Sull. They spoke them in times of grief as a comfort
. . . and in times of joy as a reminder. He'd thought them wise and
fair. He was wrong.
    His wife and daughters were dead. His three girls
and the woman he had loved for half his life were gone. Murdered.
    The moment he had turned the corner in the road
and seen the burned house he knew. He had lived with risk for so long
that the anticipation of disaster had become a reflex, a string held
at tension waiting to snap. A muscle contracting in his gut had told
him everything. The walk through the house had simply confirmed it.
The blaze had burned from the outside in. Fires had been set at
windows and doors. The occupants had been trapped inside and forced
to fill their lungs with hot, lethal smoke.
    The man pushed a fist against the charred plaster
and took a breath.
    And then another. His wife and girls had trusted
him with their safety. And he had failed them. He, who knew more than
most about evil and the men and women who practiced it, and knew just
how long they would wait for an opportunity to bring harm. He, who
had dedicated his life to opposing the dark and unfathomable forces
of destruction.
    Those forces had come to bear on this house—he
had led them here. How could he have been such a fool? How could he
have imagined that it was possible to outwit them? They were beyond
his comprehension; unbound by earthly forms. What had he been
thinking when he'd made the decision to hide his most precious girls
from them in plain sight?
    Eighteen, five and one; those were their ages. Add
them up and you'd get exactly the number of years he'd known his
wife.
    The man breathed. Inhaled. Exhaled. Pushed himself
off from the wall.
    The back door was there so he took it. Never again
would he enter this house.
    He had one job to do, and he did not care how it
was done. Those who had planned and executed this would die. He had
one cold and empty lifetime to take care of it.
    Outside, the late-afternoon sun was shining. In
the woods beyond the yard a woodpecker was drilling a softwood for
lice. A brisk wind spun clouds to the south and drove the stale smell
of char back in the house. The man's gaze swept over the remains of
the kitchen garden. A row of unharvested winter kale was yellowing in
a raised bed. Tarp still covered the woodpile. Three distinct earthen
mounds beneath the shade oak caught his attention.
    The ground had been too hard to bury them.
    The man swayed. His first act of will was to
steady himself, to force his knees to rigidity and suck air into