A Sword From Red Ice Read Online Free PDF

his
lungs. His second was to kill his lifelong instinct to call on the
gods for comfort. The gods were dead, and he was no longer bound by
their commands.
    Moving forward, he cut a straight path to the
graves. Only three. The baby must have been buried with her mother. A
different man would have taken comfort in that.
    The man without a soul refused it.
    All becomes nothing, he murmured as he knelt by
the graves and began to dig.

ONE
    Want
    "Ash."
    Raif woke with a start, immediately sitting
upright. His heart was pumping hard in his chest and there was a
rawness in his throat as if he had been screaming. A quick glance at
Bear showed the sturdy little hill pony's ears were twitching.
Probably had been screaming then.
    Ash's name.
    Raif shook his head, hoping to drive away all
thoughts of her. Nothing could be gained by them. Madness lay in wait
here, in the vast and shifting landscape of the Great Want, and to
worry about Ash March and crave her presence was a sure way to drive
himself insane. She was gone. He could not have her. It was as simple
and as unchangeable as that.
    Rising to his feet, Raif forced himself to
evaluate the landscape. Thirst made his tongue feel big in his mouth.
He ignored it. Light was moving through the Want and the last of the
bright stars were fading to the direction that might have been east,
the horizon was flushed with the first suggestion of sun. The
landscape seemed familiar. Scale-covered rock formations rose from
the buckled limestone floor like stalagmites, craggy and jagged,
silently forming minerals as they grew. On the ground, a litter of
lime fragments and calcified insect husk cracked beneath his boots
like chicken bones. Bear was snuffling something that a while back
might have been a plant. As Raif's gaze moved from the distant purple
peaks floating above the mist, to the canyon lines that forked
Want-north across the valley floor, he felt some measure of relief.
It looked pretty much like the place he had set camp in last night.
    Anchored, that was the word. The Want had not
drifted while he slept. Grateful for that, Raif crossed over to Bear
and started rubbing down her coat. She head-butted him, sniffing for
water, but it was too early for her morning ration so he pushed her
head back gently and told her, "No."
    The puncture wounds caused by the Shatan Maer's
claws had stiffened his left shoulder muscle, and as he worked on
Bear's hooves he felt some pain. When he made a quick movement up her
leg, a cold little tingle traveled toward his heart. Stopping for a
moment, he put a hand on Bear's belly to steady himself. Something
about the pain, a kind of liquid probing, had unsettled him, and he
couldn't seem to get the Shatan Maer out of his head. He could smell
its rankness, see its cunning dead eyes as it came for him.
    Shivering, Raif stepped away from the pony. "Do
I look mad to you?" he asked her as he massaged the aching
muscle.
    Bear flicked her tail lazily; a pony's equivalent
of a shrug. The gesture was strangely reassuring. Sometimes that was
all it took to drive away your fears: the indifference of another
living thing. The pain was just the last remnants of an infection,
nothing more.
    Although he didn't much feel like it, Raif set
about taking stock of his meager supplies. Fresh water had become a
problem. The aurochs' bladder rested slack against a block of
limestone, its contents nearly drained. The little that remained
tasted of rawhide. Raif doubted whether it would last the day. There
was food—sprouted millet for the pony, hard cheese and pemmican
for himself—yet he knew enough not to be tempted by it. He
wanted to be sure where his next drink was coming from before he ate.
Yesterday he'd learned that it wasn't enough just to see water. In
the Want you had to jump in it and watch your clothe get wet before
could be absolutely certain it was there. Yesterday he and Bear had
tracked leagues out of their way to pursue a glassy shimmer in the
valley