Traggis Mole's longknife was inhumanly sharp, sharper than any sword Raif had ever wielded in his entire eighteen-year life. It seemed to take no pressure at all to puncture shadowflesh, no effort at all to slide between the dark ventricles of the grossly inhuman heart. Voided steel came up, touched real steel with a queer vibrating tone. That carried no force.
Raif yanked out the blade, rolled clear onto the snow. Embers and pine needles crackled as his spine crushed them. The man-thing rocked like a wedge-cut tree about to topple, and then went crashing to the ground.
Deep and perfect silence followed. Neither Raif nor Addie moved. The cragsman was standing upslope from the camp by the tallest of the red pines. Moonlight made his face blue. A great gray owl calling out across the forest broke the silence. Hoo. Hoo. Hoo. Addie was the first to move, rushing toward Raif. Raif thought he'd like to stay awhile lyingdown in the snow and did just that.
"C'mon, lad," Addie's voice was hard, angry. His finger poked at Raif's ribs like sticks. "Get up now. Get up."
Raif blinked at him and thought, Leave me be old man. I'm tired.
Addie Gunn would not let Raif Sevrance be. He was a cragsman and he knew how to leverage his weight to haul sheep, and that's what he did to Raif. He hauled Raif up over his shoulder and carried him clear of the camp. When he found a bed of tender yearling spruce he deposited Raif upon it. Two layers of rawhide were yanked up. The leech jar was opened. Curses were sworn, and then Raif felt the circle-bite of a fresh leech on his back.
"Wait here," Addie said, unclasping his cloak and laying it over him. "I'm going back to get the gear."
Raif waited and then slept.
Two times in the night he was roused by Addie, yet Raif managed to submit to the cragsman's ministrations while not fully waking. His dreams were all of death, of that moment that divided this world from the next. The eyeblink. The thin line. The failure of the heart.
When he awoke fully and properly it was light. He was still lying on the spruce, curled up on his side. A new pain in his lowest rib just above his spleen throbbed with dull persistence. He supposed he should be grateful the voided steel had touched bone.
Addie was sitting by a fire the size of a horse, toasting a piece of liver on a stick. He had a wild, disheveled look about him. His hair was sticking up and some of it was frozen. A pine needle was embedded in his cheek. The corner of one of the blankets that hung across his shoulders had been scorched. When he heard Raif move he looked over and said, "Ain't getting no easier."
It was the closest Addie Gunn had ever come to complaining.
Raif stood. It took a moment for all the various hurts and bruises to settle themselves into place. Some kind of order was being established, a hierarchy of pain. A snap of dizziness hit as he crossed to the fire, but he forced himself to walk through it. "Breakfast?" he asked, coming to a halt by the wall of yellow flames.
"Aye. Tea's gone. Liver's dry. There's hardbread on the rock."
Raif took a drink of hot water and forced himself to eat the liver. The hardbread had been placed on a rock in the embers and was slowly turning black.
The heat from the fire was intense. After a while Raif had to step away. The cragsman must have been up all night building and tending it. As he walked around the hastily set camp that lay about a hundred feet above the old one, Raif wondered what to say to Addie. Sleep, I'll stand watch. Sorry about worrying you sick. Sorry 1 didn't offer the stor-mglass for trade that day by the campfire. All apologies were too late, he comprehended, running a gloved hand along an icicle that hung from one of the red pines. And Raif Sevrance did not have the time to watch Addie Gunn while he slept. Returning to the fire, he asked, "How many leeches?" Addie rose to his feet. He understood what the question meant— time to get moving—and by making himself suddenly busy he could duck the need for an answer. They had to be down to the last ten by now: not enough to outlast the day.
The sack containing the tea had been lost to last night's fire, along with one of Addie's mitts and some spare clothing. Addie cut the toe off one of his socks and declared it a glove. Raif threw snow on the flames and patched it turn to steam. It took ten precious minutes to kill the fire. The sun was already visible above the forest canopy; a slender disk circled by mirages. They'd already lost an hour and a half of daylight. What was Addie thinking, leaving him to sleep?
Raif set the pace north. Even when the stand or red pines was hidden behind the crest of the slope the path was clear. They had to keep heading along the same axis. If the red pines marked the true border between the Racklands and Bludd then all they had to do was maintain their bearings and eventually they'd cross the Red Ice. If what the Trenchlander said was true. It had to be true. Raif didn't have time for it not to be.
One border. Four worlds. If they went far enough north would they enter the Want? And if they did would they know it? Raif looked down at forested valley that lay below them, the spires of cedar, the knuckles of red rock, the frozen streams, the kitty hawk circling for prey. It looked too full of life to be named the Great Want.
"Clouds are coming in."
Raif saw that Addie was right. A dark crack had opened up on the edge of the horizon. A blackness in the silver of the sky.
They spent the morning crossing the valley, eating on foot and stopping only to apply new leeches. The air was raw and changing, and the wind started to show its teeth. Raif walked huddled in the Orrl cloak, slightly bent at the waist to relieve the pressure of the wound. Addie had cleaned and bandaged it in the night; he said it was shaped like an X.
Raif found his thoughts kept returning to the moment the fire had gone out. If the Unmade had extinguished it then that meant they were capable of cunning. And that was something new and dangerous. Creatures that could plan as well as fight.
By the time they reached the valley's northern slope the clouds were moving with force. Sharp gusts broke icicles and brittle branches from the pines. Addie and Raif walked against the headwind, shoulders hunched. When they came across two big trees with boughs interlaced they stopped to shelter from the weather and apply another leech. They were down to one at a time now. As Addie took the jar from his gear pouch, Raif saw how few were left. And not all of them were moving.
The cragsman had trouble getting the leech to bite and prodded Raif s back several times. When he took his hand away his fingers were red with blood. "It's hanging," he said grimly. "Gods help it to stay in place."
To change the subject, Raif told Addie about Thomas Argola's words. "Four worlds?" Addie pondered, wiping his hand on his cloak. "Clanholds. Sull." He frowned. "The Want?"
Raif shrugged. "What could be the fourth?"
Addie tugged on the sock with force, quickly losing his patience with puzzling. "How the hell would I know that, lad? I'm a sheepman not a scholar. If it's land I know it. If it's fancy worlds dreamed up by Argola then I can't see that either of us has much of a chance of figuring it out."
Raif considered this. "I think you just insulted me."
Addie harrumphed. "Well I insulted myself as well."
The day darkened quickly as the thunderheads charged the sky. Raif felt wire-drawn and full of energy. His thoughts thrived in the gray stormlight, rippled along with the trees. He saw Traggis Mole take his final breath, sucking air through his nose hole, heard Yiselle No Knife ask quite clearly Do you know how to start a stopped heart? And smelled the emptiness of the space between the stars, the stench of voided steel.