The moment he had turned the corner in the road and seen the burned house he knew. He had lived with risk for so long that the anticipation of disaster had become a reflex, a string held at tension waiting to snap. A muscle contracting in his gut had told him everything. The walk through the house had simply confirmed it. The blaze had burned from the outside in. Fires had been set at windows and doors. The occupants had been trapped inside and forced to fill their lungs with hot, lethal smoke.
The man pushed a fist against the charred plaster and took a breath.
And then another. His wife and girls had trusted him with their safety. And he had failed them. He, who knew more than most about evil and the men and women who practiced it, and knew just how long they | would wait for an opportunity to bring harm. He, who had dedicated his life to opposing the dark and unfathomable forces of destruction. |
Those forces had come to bear on this house—he had led them here. How could he have been such a fool? How could he have imagined that it was possible to outwit them? They were beyond his comprehension; unbound by earthly forms. What had he been thinking when he'd made the decision to hide his most precious girls from them in plain sight?
Eighteen, five and one; those were their ages. Add them up and you'd get exactly the number of years he'd known his wife.
The man breathed. Inhaled. Exhaled. Pushed himself off from the wall.
The back door was there so he took it. Never again would he enter this house.
He had one job to do, and he did not care how it was done. Those who had planned and executed this would die. He had one cold and empty lifetime to take care of it.
Outside, the late-afternoon sun was shining. In the woods beyond the yard a woodpecker was drilling a softwood for lice. A brisk wind spun clouds to the south and drove the stale smell of char back in the house. The man's gaze swept over the remains of the kitchen garden. A row of unharvested winter kale was yellowing in a raised bed. Tarp still covered the woodpile. Three distinct earthen mounds beneath the shade oak caught his attention.
The ground had been too hard to bury them.
The man swayed. His first act of will was to steady himself, to force his knees to rigidity and suck air into his lungs. His second was to kill his lifelong instinct to call on the gods for comfort. The gods were dead, and he was no longer bound by their commands.
Moving forward, he cut a straight path to the graves. Only three. The baby must have been buried with her mother. A different man would have taken comfort in that.
The man without a soul refused it.
All becomes nothing, he murmured as he knelt by the graves and began to dig.
When he was ready he stepped into the remains of his hallway. Fire had burned intensely here. The interior walls had been limestone-and-horsehair plaster skimmed onto wood lath. His mistake had been to paint them. Oil in the paint had accelerated the bum, working against the natural retardant of the lime. The smoke produced would have been black and toxic. It would have burned holes in a child's lungs.
The man did not pause. He could no longer trust himself that far. Walking through the center of the house he passed the stairs and the black skeleton of the stair rail. Snow had found its way in through the partially collapsed roof and open windows, and lay in thin drifts against the risers of each of the nine steps. The man knew snow; knew that what he looked at was dry with age, the granules loosely packed and rolled into pellets by the wind. Footsteps stamped into the drifts hew no interest for him. Men had come later, after the house had cooled.
ONE Want
Ash.
Raif woke with a start, immediately sittng upright His heart was pumping hard in his chest and there was a raw-ness in his throat as if he had been screaming. A quick glance at Bear showed the sturdy little hill pony's ears were twitching. Probably had been screaming then.
Ash's name.
Raif shook his head, hoping to drive away all thoughts of her. Nothing could be gained by them. Madness lay in wait here, in the vast and shifting landscape of the Great Want, and to worry about Ash March and crave her presence was a sure way to drive himself insane. She was gone. He could not have her. It was as simple and as unchangeable as that.
Rising to his feet, Raif forced himself to evaluate the landscape. Thirst made his tongue feel big in his mouth. He ignored it. Light was moving through the Want and the last of the bright stars were fading. to the direction that might have been east, the horizon was flushed with the first suggestion of sun. The landscape seemed familiar. Scale-covered rock formations rose from the buckled limestone floor like stalagmites, craggy and jagged, silently forming minerals as they grew. On the ground, a litter of lime fragments and calcified insect husk cracked beneath his boots like chicken bones. Bear was snuffling something that a while back might have been a plant. As Raif's moved from the distant purple peaks floating above the mist, to the canyon lines that forked Want-north across the valley floor, he felt some measure of relief. It looked pretty much like the place he had set camp in last night.
Anchored, that was the word. The Want had not drifted while he slept. Grate for that, Raif crossed over to Bear and started rubbing down her coat. She head-butted him, sniffing for water, but it was too early for her morning ration so he pushed her head back gently and told her, "No."
The puncure wounds caused by the Shatan Maer's claws had stiffened his left shoulder muscle, and as he worked on Bear's hooves he felt some pain. When he made a quick movement up her leg, a cold little tingle traveled toward his heart. Stopping for a moment, he put a hand on Bear's belly to steady himself. Something about the pain, a kind of liquid probing, had unseffied him, and he couldn't seem to get the Shatan Maer out of his head. He could smell its rankness, see its cunning dead eyes as it came for him.
Shivering, Raif stepped away from the pony. "Do I look mad to you?" he asked her as he massaged the aching muscle.
Bear flicked her tail lazily; a pony's equivalent of a shrug. The gesture was strangely reassuring. Sometimes that was all it took to drive away your fears: the indifference of another living thing. The pain was just the last remnants of an infection, nothing more.
Although he didn't much feel like it, Raif set about taking stock of his meager supplies. Fresh water had become a problem. The aurochs' bladder rested slack against a block of limestone, its contents nearly drained. The little that remained tasted of rawhide. Raif doubted whether it would last the day. There was food — sprouted millet for the pony, hard cheese and pemmican for himself-yet he knew enough not to be tempted by it. He wanted to be sure where his next drink was coming from before he ate. Yesterday he'd learned that it wasn't enough,just to see water. In the Want you had to jump in it and watch your clothe get wet before could be absolutely certain it was there. Yesterday he and Bear had tracked leagues out of their way to persue a glassy shimmer in the valley between two hills. They stood in that valley today. It wasn't just dry, it was bone dry, and Raif had been left feeling like a fool. You'd think he would have learned by now.
Unable to help himself, he flicked the cap off the waterskin and squirted a small amount into his mouth. The fluid was gone before he had a chance to swallow it, sucked away by parched gums. He was tempted to take more, but resisted. His duty to his animal came first. As he poured a careful measure into the pony's waxed snufflebag, Raif wondered what heading to take next At test he could tell, five days had passed since bed left the Fortress of Grey Ice. The first few days were lost to him, gone in a few dream of blood poisoning and pain. He did not recall leaving the fortress or choosing a route to lead them out of the Want. He remembered waking one morning and looking at his left arm and not being sure that it belong to him. The skin floated on top of the muscle as if separated by a layer of liquid. It leaked when he pressed it, clear fluid that seeped through a crack Raif supposed must be a wound. The strange thing was it hadn't hurt. Even stranger, he could not recall being concerned.