Sword from Red Ice A Sword of Shadows Novel

Chapter 1 Ash. Raif woke with a start, immediately sitting upright. His heart was pumping hard in his chest and there was a rawness 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. In 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 farming minerals as they grew. On the ground, a litter of lime fragments and calcified insect husks cracked beneath his boots like chicken bones. Bear was snuffling something that a while back might have been a plant. As Raif's gaze 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. Grateful 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 puncture 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 unsettled 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 foodsprouted millet for the pony, hard cheese and pemmican for himselfyet 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 clothes get wet before you could be absolutely certain it was there. Yesterday he and Bear had tracked leagues out of their way to pursue 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 leJones, J. V. is the author of 'Sword from Red Ice A Sword of Shadows Novel', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765306340 and ISBN 0765306344.