Farlander Read Free

After a while his eyes began adjusting to the dark. As the ice walls brightened, they seemed to become infused with the faintest milky light.
    Ash exhaled purposely. He clasped his hands together, closed his mouth to stop his teeth from chattering. He began a silent mantra.
    Soon, a core of heat was pulsing outwards from his chest, seeping its steady course into his limbs, his fingers, his toes. Vapour began to rise from his goosebumped flesh. His shivering stilled.
    High above his bald head, the wind keened through a small airhole in the dome-like ceiling, as if calling to him, carrying with it the odd flake of snow.
    *

    He imagined he had erected his heavy canvas tent, and was now huddled inside it, safe from the wind, warming himself at the little oil stove made of brass. Broth simmered with smoky cheer. The air was steamy, heavy with the stench of his thawing clothes, the sweetness of the broth. Outside, the dogs moaned as they hunkered down in the storm.
    Oshwas with him in the tent.
    ‘You look bad,’ his old master told him in their native Honshu, lines of worry creasing ancient skin as dark as Ash’s own.
    Ash nodded. ‘I’m almost dead, I think.’
    ‘You are surprised? All of this, at your age?’
    ‘No,’ confessed Ash, though for a moment, chastised by his master, he did not feel his age.
    ‘Broth?’ Ash, asked, as he scooped some into a mug, though Oshdeclined by raising a single forefinger. Ash drank on his own, sipping loudly. Heat trickled down into his stomach, revitalizing. From somewhere elsewhere a moan sounded, as though in longing.
    His master observed him with interest.
    ‘Your head,’ he said. ‘Any pains?’
    ‘Some. I think another attack might be coming on.’
    ‘I told you it would be this way, did I not?’
    ‘I’m not dead yet.’
    Oshfrowned. He rubbed his hands together, blew into them.
    ‘Ash, you must see how it is time, at last.’
    The flames of the oil stove sputtered against Ash’s sigh. He looked about him, at the noisy flaps of the canvas, at the air rolling visible from the broth. His sword, perched upright against his leather pack, like the marker of a grave. ‘This work . . . it is all I have,’ he said. ‘Would you take it from me?’
    ‘Your condition does the taking, not I. Ash, even if you survive tonight, how much longer do you think you have?’
    ‘I will not lie down and wait for the end, no purpose left to me.’
    ‘I do not ask you to. But you should be here, with the order, and your companions. You deserve some rest, and what peace you may find while you still can.’
    ‘No,’ Ash responded hotly. He glanced away, staring far into the flames. ‘My father went that way, when his condition worsened. He gave in to grief after the blindness struck him, and lay weeping in his bed waiting for the end. It made a ghost of him. No, I will not squander what little time I have that way. I will die on my feet, still striving forwards.’
    Oshswept that comment aside with a gesture of his hand. ‘But you are in no shape for this. Your attacks are worsening. For days you can barely see due to them, let alone move. How can you expect to carry on in this way, to see a vendetta through to the end? No, I cannot allow it.’
    ‘You must!’ roared Ash.
    Across the sloping confines of the tent, Osh, head of the Rshun order, blinked but said nothing.
    Ash hung his head, then breathed deeply, composing himself.
    Softly came the words, offered like a sacrifice on an altar: ‘Osh, we have known each other for more than half a lifetime. We two are more than friends. We are closer even than father and son, or brothers. Listen to me now. I need this.’
    Their gazes locked: he and Osh, surrounded by canvas and winds and a thousand laqs of frozen waste; here in this imaginary cell of heat, so small in scale that they shared each other’s breath.
    ‘Very well,’ murmured Oshat last, causing Ash to rock back in surprise.
    He opened his mouth to thank him, but Oshheld up