Blood and Bone by Ian C. Esslemont

now wore a cuirass of banded iron with mail skirting and a large shield on his back, all beaten and badly scraped. The long grip and pommel of a hand-and-a-half blade stood tall from the sheath at his side. The two stood staring off to the west across the ice field. She joined them to scan the plain, which was brilliantly lit by the Great Banner arcing high like a sickly bruise across the night sky.
    After seeing no movement at all among the ink-black shadow and nauseatingly green snow, she asked, ‘What is it?’
    ‘Do you not sense it there?’ Turgal asked, his voice hoarse, as if from disuse.
    ‘Sense what?’
    ‘The shard our Jacuruku emissary spoke of,’ K’azz explained.
    ‘Shard?’
    ‘Omtose Phellack,’ Turgal added, his breath pluming. ‘The ice-magery of the Jaghut. Don’t you sense it there?’
    ‘No.’ Shimmer almost added
I am no mage
, but snapped her mouth shut, realizing
and neither are they. How then …? Well, K’azz invoked the Vow after all. Perhaps that gave him some sort of privileged insight. But Turgal? Why should he possess such an awareness?
    And yet … there were times when she sensed people nearby before seeing them; and the Jacuruku emissaries – their potency buzzed at her awareness like two distracting flies. So, perhaps she should not be surprised
.
    ‘A danger?’ she asked.
    K’azz shook his head. ‘No. It is fading. In a hundred years, who knows? All this may be gone.’
    A wind sharp with cold blew particles of ice into Shimmer’s eyes and bit at her naked hands. ‘Yet to have endured for so long … Why now?’
    The snow crackled beneath K’azz’s boots as he shifted his stance. ‘It seems that perhaps we live now in an age when the old is passing away.’ He cocked his head, thinking. ‘Yet does it seem this way to us merely because we are living now? Or does every age feel the same to those who live through it? Every age, after all, is an age of transition from what came before to what will follow.’
    Turgal gave a soft laugh in appreciation of the point. ‘A question for the cross-eyed philosophers of Darujhistan I think, Duke.’
    ‘No. Let us have mercy upon them. They are cross-eyed enough.’
    ‘Come,’ Shimmer urged, motioning to the tents. ‘This inhuman cold grips my bones.’
    K’azz eyed her, surprised. ‘You are cold?’
    All the crew and the Guard lent a hand to the repairs, which were completed in less than three days. Their fourth and last night, Shimmer suddenly awoke in the utter darkness. She knew that something powerful was approaching; she did not know how she knew, but she was certain of it. In the dark she pulled on her long mail coat, belted on her whipsword, and ducked out of the tent.
    Outside it was quiet but for the snow and ice particles hissing wind-driven against the hide tents. That and the stentorian snoring of a few of the sailors. And it had to be the sailors, for Shimmer saw that her fellow Avowed were awake already. Like ghosts summoned to some haunt, the figures of her companions walked silently among the tents, tying their last knots, adjusting belts, gathering to the west where they formed line – all without any given order.
    She joined them next to K’azz. ‘What is it?’ she whispered, her breath steaming.
    Without shifting his slit gaze from the darkened ice field he answered, ‘Not certain yet. But close.’
    Shimmer signed ‘
Ready
’ to the left and right. Turgal unsheathed his massive hand-and-a-half blade and raised his shield. Amatt drew his heavy broadsword and likewise readied his wide infantryman’s shield. Cole, who fought after the two-sword style, stepped aside a way for room to slide free his twinned longswords. Lor-sinn and Gwynn took up positions behind the line.
    ‘Ware!’ Gwynn warned, his voice taut with anticipation.
    Shimmer scanned the snowdrifts and gleaming wind-bitten ice shelves, seeing nothing.
Damn, it was strong!
She felt it now: a terrible potency. In fact, she’d not felt