A Sword From Red Ice by J. V. Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

up the moment salty fluid
from his temple slid into his eye socket. His hands and face were now
numb, so when he ran a fist across his forehead and his glove came
back wet it was a shock.
    He was losing too much water. Swallowing hard, he
forced himself to stop and think. Ahead, the gravel bank darkened as
the charcoal granite of the spineback hills began to peek through.
Farther along an entire ridge emerged, rising from the sea of stones
and broadening into a rock mass that fused with the first hill.
There, Raif decided. We'll go as far as the junction. The high
vantage point would enable them to see what lay ahead.
    If there's no water we're damned.
    It was the first clear thought he had until
nightfall. Bear began wheezing during the climb across the gravel
banks, a sharp little piping noise that sounded as if it were coming
from a broken flute. And she shied for the first time. When they
reached a deep chute filled with younger, sharper scree she refused
to cross it, digging in her back hooves and weakly tossing her head.
Raif went on ahead awhile, but she wouldn't follow, even when he
called her, and he was forced to go back. Light was beginning to
fail, and more than anything else he did not want to lose sight of
her. He feared the landscape might shift while he wasn't looking and
the Want would cancel her out.
    It was becoming hard to think. There should have
been a way around the chute—he even saw it once, laid out like
a treasure map before him—but he couldn't keep the facts in his
head. Bear didn't want to walk through the jagged scree. The chute
was narrow. Maybe they could double back . . .
    He lost time. Standing on the hillside, thoughts
stalled, he was aware only of the intense cold. Ice twinkled in his
eyelashes when he blinked. Something—he couldn't say
what—snapped him back. For an instant he wasn't glad;
everything took too much effort here. It was easier to drift. Yet
when he saw Bear he felt shamed. The little pony was standing where
he had left her, shaking and making that little piping noise when she
inhaled.
    "Come on, girl" he coaxed, trudging
toward her through shin-high gravel. "Not far now. We'll go down
a bit and then around." He didn't know if they could make it
that way, but it hardly seemed to matter anymore. Doing was better
than thinking in this place.
    Night fell in layers. The sun hung on the farthest
edge of the horizon and smoldered. A dusk of long shadows made it
difficult to see the way forward. Overhead the first of the big
northern stars ignited in a sky turning deep-sea blue. Raif had taken
to plowing the breath ice from his nose and chin and shoveling it
into his mouth. The moisture it rendered wasn't sufficient to be
called liquid, but the sensation of fizzy coolness on his tongue was
deeply pleasing. When he tried, to perform the same service for Bear,
she shied away from him. Blood was oozing from a cut on her back
heel, and she'd started to carry her head and tail low. She wouldn't
go much farther, he realized.
    He owed her a decent end. As he peered through the
darkness toward the turn of the hill his spirits sank. They'd barely
made any progress since sunset, simply retraced their steps from the
chute. Glancing from his sword to Bear, he made a decision. One hour.
No more.
    He was gentle with her as they took their final
climb.
    Starlight lit the hillside, making the rocks glow
blue. Raif thought about how he'd first met Bear—she'd been a
replacement for the horse he'd lost in canyon country west of the
Rift—and how she had carried him to the Fortress of Grey Ice.
She had kept him sane, he knew that now. After the raid on the silver
mine at Black Hole he was nearly lost. Bitty's death had been too
much to bear.
    Raif girded himself for the memories. He would not
fight them off or deny them: Bitty Shank, son of Orwin and sworn
clansman of Blackhail, deserved better than that. He had not deserved
to die at the hands of a fellow