The Sign of the Broken Sword

⁠​​​‌​​​​‌‌​​‌‌​‌‌​‌‌​​​‌​​‌​‌​‌​​​​​‌‌‌​​​‌‌‌‌​‌‌​​​‌​‌​‌‌‌‌‌​​‌⁠The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver. In a sky of dark green-blue-like slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice. All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost. The black hollows between the trunks of the trees looked like bottomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell of inca