Cold Redemption Read Online Free PDF Page A

you?’
    The Fateguard in his iron mask strode through the doors of the Hall of Thrones. Eyes cast his way were full of dread. Marroc ran at the sight of him and even Lhosir tautened
their faces and gritted their teeth and waited desperately for him to go away; and that was but the smallest of the curses on those who served the Eyes of Time.
    The Marroc snake Grisic slithered out of the hall behind him and trotted on ahead, bowing and scraping and beckoning as though he wasn’t quite sure whether he was leading a man or some
sort of animal. He wore his mask of servility well, but the Fateguard had blessings to go with their curses, and one such blessing was to see the truth of a man’s heart. Good or evil, kind or
cruel, the men of iron cared little, but liars made the ice-cold blood burn in their veins, and this Marroc had a yellow streak of treachery to him.
    He ignored Grisic. Varyxhun was an ancient castle, carved out of the mountainside by Aulian miners, comforting in its darkness and its age and its deep old roots tunnelled far into the stone. He
crossed the courtyard, past gates that had never been sundered by any foe, not even the all-conquering Screambreaker. Below them, the gatehouse stairs wound down. There were tunnels here forgotten
even by the Marroc, tunnels that reached all the way to the town of Varyxhun and perhaps further, as far as the old Aulian fortress at Witches’ Reach or even the Aulian Bridge, the great span
that crossed the gorge of the Isset before the river tumbled through cataracts and rapids into the swamp of the Crackmarsh.
    The Fateguard embraced the gloom. He took a candle to light his way, but when the Marroc weasel took a torch for himself, the Fateguard gripped it in his iron-clad hand and crushed it out. Gloom
and darkness were an ironskin’s friends. They were where he belonged, in the shadows with the shadewalkers; but then he’d been to this place so often he could have done with no light at
all. The place where prisoners came and were broken and made to talk, where he would listen and hammer a nail into a man’s flesh for every lie that he heard.
    He passed two cells without bothering to look. The smell was of old rot and filth. He stopped at the third. Here was the Lhosir. Beardless, weak and thin and pale and beaten, but here he
was.
    There’s only one way into the valley of Varyxhun for a Lhosir, and that is to cross the Aulian Bridge. Yet not for you.
The Fateguard stared hard at the man in the cell. He had an
air to him. A meaning. A significance felt even in the Hall of Thrones, but there was something else, something the Fateguard had not expected. ‘Gallow? Gallow Truesword. Gallow Foxbeard.
Gallow the thief of the red sword.’
    The Lhosir looked up and stared. He seemed neither frightened nor pleased, merely resigned. Slowly the Fateguard lifted off his mask and crown. Light burned in the beardless Lhosir’s eyes
and then at last a flash of recognition. ‘Beyard?’
    The Fateguard curled his lip. ‘Hello, old friend.’

 
     
     
     
4
UPRISING
     
     
     
     
    O ribas had little memory of his last few miles down the Aulian Way. The cold had reached inside him by then, the sunlight was fading and he was as
close as he could be to dead without actually dying. He had some hazy notion of being dragged off the road and along a track between the black leafless bones of winter trees, of climbing and
climbing, step after remorseless step up some steep winding path, of being hauled through a doorway, of light and heat and a delicious warm fire, and then he’d been asleep.
    He thought he might have been asleep for a whole day, but only an hour or two passed before he woke again. Now there were half a dozen Marroc in a big open room that, as far as he could see, was
their whole house. A young woman was waving a pot of something warm and delicious-smelling under his nose. Oribas stared at her. Maybe he was delirious with fatigue or with disbelief that he