A Sword From Red Ice Read Free

damned
and had little to lose. And there was no other living man who could
heart-kill as he could.
    The Shatan Maer fell, the flaw in the Blindwall
was sealed, and the North was freed from danger for a while . . .

PROLOGUE
    The Hail Wolf Returns
    Inigar Stoop opened his eyes and blinked into the
darkness of the guidehouse. The smoke fires had gone out while he
slept, and it took him long moments to make sense of the unfamiliar
shadows of deepest night. Something in his chest wasn't right. His
heartbeat was the same as ever, but there was a vague soreness
beneath his ribs, a sense that muscle had been working while he
slept.
    Indistinct forms loomed around him, their edges
bleeding into the darkness like ink spilled on cloth. To calm himself
Blackhail's clan guide named the forms in his head—the little
stone font where he drew his water, the hog-backed coffer where he
kept his ceremonial robes, the statue of lone that had been carved
from a riven fragment of the guidestone by the great warrior-guide
Harlec Sewell—but the ache in his chest persisted. Raising a
hand to knead his rib cage, Inigar became aware of the great
stillness he disturbed. The guide-house was as cold and quiet as a
grave dug for a horse. The smell of damp earth had pushed through the
sandstone walls, and Inigar could feel its coolness moving through
his lungs. Fighting the desire to shiver, he swung his legs over the
side of the pallet and rose to standing.
    Something is wrong here.
    Rock dust crunched beneath his bare feet as he
crossed toward the fire pit. He had not swept here in many days, and
debris from the guidestone lay thick on the flagstone floor. The time
for spring tilling was fast approaching and every farmer in the
clanhold would soon demand a measure of this dust to scatter in his
fields along with the grain. Night soils to fertilize the earth;
stone soils to hallow it. Nothing shed from the Hailstone was wasted.
Sometimes Inigar thought he was as much butcher as shaman—dividing
the carcass of the monolith, grinding down its bones.
    But a carcass meant death, and this guidestone had
to be alive.
    The gods shed part of their souls here.
    Inigar brought his hand to his forehead, pressed
fingers deep into his pulse points and almost succeeded in halting
his thoughts. Please Gods, do not withdraw from this clan.
    Yet hadn't the retreat already begun? Frost had
been living in the Hailstone since the Eve of Breaking, when good
clansmen had turned against their own, sending a hound to the fire
and trying a child as a witch. It went back farther than that,
though. Frost could not enter a shored-up house. Blackhail's house
had been vulnerable for half a year, ever since its chief had been
slaughtered in the Badlands by nameless raiders. Something evil had
punched a hole through clan walls that day. Something immense and
calculating, whose age was greater than the earth he stood upon and
whose purpose Inigar feared to name.
    I cannot dwell on it. A guide blunted by fear is
no good for his clan. Sharp of mind and sharp of chisel: that is the
way we must be.
    Working from touch alone he slipped on braided
leather sandals and pulled a polished pigskin cloak across his
shoulders. Air was quickening. The short gray hairs at the base of
Inigar's scalp rocked in their follicles like loose teeth. Once as a
seven-year-old he had climbed down a wellshaft on a dare. The well
had been known as Witch's Cunt, and a collapsed embankment upcountry
had poisoned its water with tar. It was old beyond knowing, and so
deep that as Inigar had descended, probing for toeholds in the dark,
the very nature of the air had changed. Saturated with groundwater,
it resisted exhalation. That sense of aliveness, the sudden
revelation that air had a will of its own and there were some places
in this world where it would rather not be, had haunted Inigar's
dreams for fifty years. He had felt it two other times since then:
the day on the great court when Raif