And there was no telling how deep the ice ran. He would never find the sword unless he knew exactly where it lay.
Although he didn't much want to, he forced himself to consider the vast dam of mist. If he walked toward it at what point would the Want grab him and not let go? He had entered the Want before and the one thing he knew for certain was that you were never aware when you passed the point of no return. It was like death that way. That same short but untrackable distance.
Feeling the soft give of pain in his shoulder, Raif set out cross the Red Ice. He scanned west and then east and wondered if it might be as simple as locating the lake's exact center. Four worlds meeting in the middle. It wasn't a bad idea, but instinct told him it wasn't right. The Want was in play here. Even if half the lake lay in Bludd territory and the other half in Sull lands there would still be something else.
What was he missing? What was the fourth world?
The moon rose in the clearing above the valley, a lean sickle of silver surrounded by a blue corona. It had grown too dark to make out the details of the clouds, and it was strange to see the stars restricted to the space above his head. Lightning and the distant rumble of thunder were his only indications that the storm was still playing itself out across the northern forests.
Raif went over everything anyone had ever told him about the sword named Loss and the Red Ice. There wasn't much. Sadaluk of the Ice Trappers had been the first one to mention Loss, though not by name. Did you really think this will be the sword that makes you? Those had been his words as he'd handed Raif the Forsworn blade. He had not mentioned where this better, second sword might be found. Tallal of the lamb brothers had known about the sword also. The Red Ice was sacred to them: a flooded battlefield where thousands of their dead lay frozen.
Raif shivered. Squatting, he placed his gloved hands upon the ice and scrubbed away at the surface. He thought perhaps that if he generated enough friction it might melt the top layer of ice and help to clear it The lake was too cold though and as he scratched its surface it refroze in pale streaks. What had kept it frozen for so long? Even this far north there were summers. Maygi hide it, that was what Flawless had claimed. Perhaps he was right and some ancient sorcery held it in place.
Or perhaps it had something to do with the Want. For there it was, curling out its mist limbs toward him, beckoning him back.
Step too far and I am lost Step back and I will never fulfill my oath.
Maybe he could just stay here, squatting on the ice.
Lighting bolted across the sky in a thick, muscular fork. Raif stood. As his legs took his weight he experienced a brief instant of disorientation. Not dizziness, he told himself quickly. Just the normal thing that happens when you rise quickly to your feet.
He could no longer feel the fingers on his left hand.
Ignoring them, he forced his mind elsewhere. What held the Want in place, he wondered. Why didn't the wall of mist just come tumbling across the lake? One thing he had always assumed about the shifting uncertainty that topped the continent was that it was unbounded, able to stretch and shrink at will. Yet it only stretched partway across the Red Ice. Why?
The tone of his footsteps changed as he neared the center of the lake. There was a hollowness to them now. They rang. On impulse he drove the heel of his boot deep into the ice. It was like kicking a wall.
"To break it you must stand in all four worlds at once." Argola s words sounded like a taunt Clanholds. Sull. Want. What else? Raif Sevrance's heart failed a beat. He perceived it as a moment of prolonged suction, a hardness, followed by softness, followed by the release of another beat. He carried on walking… because there was nothing else to do.
Shadow homes to shadow.
Four worlds.
The Want held in place.
Raif looked down at his feet. He thought for a moment he saw something pale and head-shaped lying beneath the ice.. Perhaps it was one of the lamb brothers" lost souls. Perhaps it was his own reflection. It did not matter. Either way the ice would not hreak.
He needed to find its weak point
Raif suddenly remembered what Addie had told him, that morning after the first camp out of the city. A small charge of possibility fired along his nerves. Quickening his pace he headed toward the dam of mist. He could feel it now, the freezing fog, switching back and forth between ice and superfine droplets of water, moving between worlds.
The Red Ice spread out before him like an eye hill of blood How many men had died here? How marry bodies waited beneath the surface to be released? He believed he saw them now, pale legs and torsos, severed heads and smashed feet, sections of gut with gray and pipelike intestines spilled out, how-curved hips with the sexual organs frozen into forms that looked like split fruit. All mouths and eyes were open and gaping; black holes in the ice where the terror still lived. The demon hordes of the Unmade had slaughtered thousands. It was easy to close his eyes and see the violent fury, the cracking of spines, the fountaining of blood, the blades that sucked in light hacking limbs. Was it possible that such a battle would need to be fought again?
Raif Sevrance could not say No.
The mist dam spread before him, soaring hundreds of feet into the air. Lobes of cloud broke off and floated south across the lake. They peeled and divided, rotating into ever-thinning veils before vanishing-Sucked dry. Raif had assumed that if he walked close enough to the mist he would be lost, but now he was not so sure. Something held the Want back. And he was beginning to think he knew what that was.
He was far into the ice now and the hills were nothing but dark mounds in the distance. When lightning flashed, he judged the distance between the east and west shore and and altered his course to center himself between the two. Sull and clanhold. Satisfied, he concentrated upon the ke beneath his feet as he walked toward the Great Want
His left hand was numb to the wrist now and tingles jumped along his arm toward his heart. Stay, he told something. He wasn't sure what.
The crack in the ice was as fine as a drawn wire, a line of perfect blackness cutting through the Red Iee. The Want's mists would not, could not, pass it. It was the great flaw in the continent. The Rift.
It never closes, not wholly. North of Bludd it narrows so that men can cross it, but it's always there, a black crack running through the forests between here and the Night Sea.
Raif fell to his knees before it. Stupid tears were coming to his eyes. Relief and longing welled up in his failing heart. This was the fourth world, the darkness that lay in wait beneath the earth. The passageway to the Blind.
Ice fog coated his face and clothing as he drew Traggis Mole's longknife. The Want existed less than a foot away, on the north side of the Rift, and Raif breathed it in as he stripped off his gloves and molded his left hand around the haft. Using his right hand to fasten the numb fingers in place, he raised the knife above his head.
For Drey. Always and everything for Drey.
For the oath he had seconded. And Raif had failed.
A tower of lightning lit up the north as Raif Sevrance drove his blade into the Red Ice. A whoosh of air shot across the lake. The ice groaned as steel went deep into the hairline fissure of the Rift, down into the frozen blood. Cracks ran along the ice like burning fuses. Explosive charges followed them, firing up fist-size bursts of frozen matter and shattering the lake's surface like glass. As destruction fled outward from the blade, the surrounding clouds closed in. Whatever sorcery had held them at bay had snapped the instant the ice was breached, and the storm now rolled in.