The second thing Silsk noticed was that he wasn't dead.
He was standing — upright, both feet on stone, his spine aligned in a way it hadn't been since his thirties. His chest didn't hurt. His left knee didn't ache. The barb that had gone through him — the barb he could still feel, precisely, the way you remember the exact angle of a bad fall — was gone. Not healed. Gone. The way a bad dream goes when morning comes, leaving only the knowledge that something had happened where the thing itself had been.
The first thing he'd noticed was the light.
It was the color of late afternoon — not harsh, not fading, not the thin yellow of a winter sun. The deep, settled gold of an hour before the forge fires needed lighting, when the work of the day had been good and there was still enough time to finish what was started. He'd worked in that light for fifty-three years and he knew its quality by feel, the way he knew the difference between iron and stonesteel by the ring of a hammer.
