East was where the greatest threat lay. He could feel it in his lore and his plagued and punctured heart. A shape rippled into existence, then disappeared. It was big and man-shaped and Raif did not want it near him. Ever since the night on the rimrock he'd had no trust in hand-to-hand combat with blades. Let the Sull bow and the case-hardened arrowheads do the work.
Keep away, he murmured under his breath. Keep away.
Suddenly there was a series of crunches to the west. Addie loosed a second arrow, rumbled, replated. The footfalls accelerated, smashing the frozen snow with their force. Raif could no longer stand it and swung to second his friend.
Both men loosed their arrows in perfect time. A single thuc sounded with the depth and richness of a musical chord. The arrowheads converged … and slammed together in the unmade heart. Sparks shot out of shadowflesh. Something not human jerked upward and then collapsed. A sound on the edge of hearing sizzled through the forest air.
Pivoting east on the balls of his feet, Raif reloaded and drew his bow. The cragsman was a half-second behind him. Flames shivered at their backs, casting fans of jittery shadows at their feet. Clouds of bitter smelling smoke pumped outward from the fire stack; items from their gear pile were going up in flames.
Raif scanned the darkness for the man-shaped thing's heart. His own heart was fluttering queerly, and he could feel the shadowflesh burning through it like a hot ember set upon wax. All was still. Addie's breaths were ragged, but his grip on the bow was rock-firm. The moon began to rise above the treeline, its light beaming in their faces and moving between the trees. Without realizing it both men edged away from the camp. Addie was taking Raifs lead, and Raif was moving in the direction he'd last seen the Unmade.
The fire went out. Darkness was sudden and complete. Flattened coals popped and spat. Something hot landed by Raifs heel. He and Addie swung back to face the killed fire. Addie let an arrow fly into the swirling blackness of night and smoke. Raif understood the impulse but held. He knew exactly how long it took him to reload and draw a bow. It was too long. An eyeblink, that was the difference between life and death.
The man-shaped thing rushed them. It pushed its own shape before it in smoke. Moonlight bent toward its thick diamond-shaped blade. Raif loosed his arrow. Even before the twine recoiled he had thrown down the bow. The arrowhead had penetrated heart muscle but it had not gone deep enough into the gristle and the thing still came at them.
"Addie. Get back," he heard himself scream as Traggis Moe's longknife scribed the quarter-circle from his hip to a position at right-angle to his chest. Raif saw the creature's hollow, craving eyes. Heard the explosive crack of its weight coming down upon jane needles suspended in ice. Its blade had to be four feet long. Raif's was two.
Raif leaped forward, feinted right. The man-shaped thing swung his sword at him like a club. It was screeching like a seagull. Raif stepped behind ft, made the thing turn. Voided steel came at him: its edge the glistening razor where chaos and destruction met. It stunk like the absence of all things. Raif rolled ahead of it, felt it touch his lower rib. Life heat sucked from the hole. Springing up Raif braced the Mole's longknife against the hard plate where muscle met bone in the exact center of his ribcage. The man-thing was yanking back its blade for another strike. There was air around its chest.
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?