Tagga lifted her face to the wind and scented the air. Slightly chillier than usual, with a slight smell of snow. It seemed to be coming from the northwest, though she could be off by a league or two.
Rhakki glowered at their small sled of provisions. The wolflike huskies harnessed to the front sat shivering in the layer of snow and gravel covering the icy surface of the Glacier, and one of the dogs whined plaintively to their handler. Rhakki rubbed its head, and frowned again at the sled. “I think we’ve too much weight for the hounds,” she growled to Tagga. “It’s hard on them, pulling it across the snow and ice like this.”
Toroch returned the glare and the growl, saving Tagga the effort of chastising the youngest team member. “If you’d like to get in harness and pull with them, be our guest. They’re here to pull the sled, and that’s what they’re going to do. No complaints, Rhak, or you can walk back to the outpost yourself.”
“Hush,” hissed Veless, crouching on the summit of a snowdrift. The scout, clad in warm wolf furs, looked much like a wolf himself, though not as much as Tagga, the hunting team’s leader. “If you keep talking that loudly, you’ll scare away the game, and then we won’t have any supper or any pelts to show for our efforts.”
Rhakki and Toroch both made a face at Veless, but shut up.
Tagga smiled at her second-in-command’s candor. Like a wolf pack’s leader, Veless had an air of authority that demanded respect. Fortunately for Tagga, Veless always deferred to her as the “bigger leader” of the pack.
The other five hunters—four men, one woman—huddled in the lee of a boulder lodged in the surface ice of the Glacier. The woman sneezed once, rubbing her reddened nose, while the four men shared swigs from a canteen of some sort of ale. Rhakki, Toroch, and Veless were the only hunters out of the shelter of the boulder, besides Tagga herself, who always insisted on being one of the first to scout out the next path of intended travel. Tagga frowned though. Maybe she should’ve stayed in the shelter this time. It was accursedly cold in the open, and her thick snowcat furs did little to block the icy winds.
Veless hissed his attention-getter, pointing to the white rise of ice due north. “Have you ever seen something like that?” he asked, glancing down questioningly.
Tagga squinted her eyes. An indistinct, misty form billowed in the air over the ice hills, changing shape as the winds gusted it about. “Never,” she replied.
Veless narrowed his own eyes, then slid down from the snowbank. “Rhakki, Toroch, you two get back in the shelter and stay there. Leave the dogs out here.”
Rhakki stepped forward. “But…” she protested.
“No ‘buts,’ just go.”
Rhakki and Toroch both hung their heads and returned to the shelter.
Veless squatted down next to Tagga and bent his head toward her. “I don’t know what that is out there on the horizon, but I don’t like the looks of it. It moves too much like an animal or something marginally intelligent to be a simple weather anomaly. I suggest we move as fast as we can back to the outpost.”
Tagga frowned. “I don’t know if we can, Vel. It looks like it’s moving closer, and the outpost’s at least two hours’ march away. We’ll never make it.”
Veless shrugged. “What other choice do we have? Stay and face it? What if I’m wrong, and it’s a severe storm? We don’t have a decent enough shelter to protect us from a Glacier blizzard, and our food supplies were only supposed to last us until we reached the next outpost.”
“We’ll head back then. You and I will stay with the sled, Rhakki will walk just behind it, and the others will follow.” She stood up and addressed the other hunters. “Men, Rhakki, Shira, we’re heading back to the outpost. That darkness to the north might be a storm, and we need to get to secure shelter before it hits. Understand?” The others nodded. “Good. Now pack quickly and we’ll move out.”
The other hunters, well-trained in speed-packing, were ready to leave within fifteen minutes. Rhakki barked an order to the sled dogs, which leaped up and began to trot forward of their own accord. The intelligent beasts would follow commands without someone to make sure they obeyed, and would keep following a command long after their handlers were gone. This time, Rhakki ordered the hounds to follow directions from Tagga and Veless, as they were leading, and she herself rode on the foot rests on the end of the sled.
They had been hiking for at least a good half an hour when the ice beneath their feet began to rumble. Tagga glanced behind them, and paled when she saw the ice behind them collapsing into a deep chasm. No matter how the hunters twisted and turned, the sinking ice snaked along behind them, mimicking their moves. Beside Tagga, Veless hissed. “Magic,” he whispered. “The blackness is not the weather.”
One of the hunters behind Tagga screamed. She turned her head to see young Jory sink into softened ice, a hole that closed up once he was completely beneath the surface. Seconds later, Shira and Carmon yelled, and disappeared. Toroch and the other two men pushed themselves harder. Rhakki jumped off the sled’s footrests to lessen the weight on the dogs, and ran as quickly as she could.
Two more screams echoed across the ice as the men behind Toroch disappeared. Veless growled something in his native forester language, drew his sword, and cut the bindings holding their food to the sled. Tagga reached out a hand to stop him. “What do you think you’re doing, Vel?”
“The food will do us no good if we’re dead!” he replied, and tossed another bag from the sled. With each bag, the hounds gave another leap forward.
Toroch screamed, and Rhakki hesitated and turned to help him. Tagga grabbed the girl’s furs. “Rhak, you can’t help him. It’s too late.”
Rhakki glared at Tagga. “He’s my clansman. I can’t leave him to die.”
“You’ll die with him. Come on.”
“No!” Rhakki pushed Tagga away and ran back toward the spot that had swallowed Toroch whole. Within moments, the girl was gone.
Veless pulled at Tagga’s parka. “You can’t help either of them now.”
With one last backward glance, Tagga ran after Veless and the sled-laden dogs.
Then the shadow in the sky dropped down on them.
Khelech, innkeeper of the Golden Serpent Inn in Eis’radill, started awake from a relaxing nap by the fire when a heavy fist began pounding on the door. Rising slowly from his seat, the old man hobbled to the oaken door. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he muttered, half to himself. People were so impatient these days, what with all the tribal warfare and everything. How could a man make a good living when everyone was rushing around, coming and going without a gold piece to spare?
He barely had the door open when the large, wolf-furred man stumbled in, a furred bundle in his thick arms. “I need help,” the man rasped in stiff cliffplains language. “We’re injured, and Tagga needs a Healer. I think she’s dying.”
“Please, please, come in,” Khelech replied, gesturing for the man to put the bundle—Tagga?—on the low couch in front of the fire. The man began to unwrap the snowcat furs from the bundle, revealing the battered and bloodied face of a woman. Khelech gasped, and ran to the kitchen for water. When he returned, the wolf-furred man had piled the furs around the woman as impromptu pillows, and was removing his own furs. The man was large, possibly a mountain man, and had a mosaic of white scars tracing patterns up both of his bare forearms.
Khelech set the bowl of water and a small pile of rags on the floor next to the couch, and pulled some herbs from a belt pouch. “I don’t know how much I can do. I’m not a certified bone-setter or anything, and certainly not a Healer.”
“Then maybe I can help,” a liquid voice said calmly. Both Khelech and the large man looked up to find a young woman, tan-skinned and golden-haired, standing at the end of the couch. Her furs and leathers were foreign, and the jet-black lovelock near her forehead spoke of Sothkis blood. She had a necklace-badge hanging around her neck, a symbol of a hand and a leaf stitched on it in blue. A Healer.
“Any help would be welcome,” the large man said stiffly. “You are…?”
“Healer Elin of Sothkis clan Drakindika, at your service.” The woman bowed slightly, and moved to the injured woman’s head. “And you?”
“I am Veless M’runan of the Greenwoods. This is Tagga N’hakis of the Darkwoods.”
“Foresters?”
“Yes.” Veless turned to look at the Sothkis woman. “We were attacked by dark creatures while in the Glacier. I believe they were demons.”
“The Glacier?” Elin moved her hands over Tagga’s body, working her Healing magic as she spoke. “That’s at least a week away from here. Yet her wounds are not even begun to heal.”
Veless glanced at the floor. “I have an elemental gift. I used it to keep our wounds frozen in time. To keep them from going septic or healing incorrectly.”
“Smart move.” Elin smiled slightly at Veless, then switched to the forester tongue. “Is this easier for you to speak?” she asked, despite the confused look from Khelech.
“Yes, very.” Veless looked relieved. “I held our wounds in a sort of frozen state, while the dogs carried us south. They’re in the hands of the stable master right now, poor things. Their handler is dead, swallowed by the ice, but at least her last command to them was to follow orders from Tagga and myself.”
Elin nodded. “Yes, that is a smart thing.” She washed her hands in the bowl of water and looked up at Veless. “I’m finished.”
“Thank you so very much.” Veless tried to stand, limped a step, and almost fell to the floor.
Elin stopped him before he could go any farther. “I hope you’re still working your magic on yourself because otherwise you’ll have just ruined your leg. I can tell from halfway across the room that it’s broken.” She frowned and ushered him to an easy chair with a footstool. “Sit now. I’ll have to set it for you.” She waved a teenage boy—another Sothkis—over and gave him swift orders in the Sothkis language. The boy ran up the stairs to the second floor of the inn.
Elin was examining Veless’ broken leg when the boy returned with a wooden box. Elin thanked him, then opened the box. She handed Veless a stick. “Bite this,” she ordered him. “This’ll hurt.”
Veless obediently put the stick in his mouth, and was grateful for something to bite. In the next moment his whole body was filled with white-hot pain as Elin quickly and deftly set the broken bone. She then removed a gauze bandage from her kit, soaked it in the bowl of water, and wrapped it around Veless’ leg. With a quick touch of her magic, she had dried out the gauze into a hard cast. “Don’t walk on it for at least a month. I’ve hastened the knitting process, so it should heal completely by then. Have the village woodcarver make you a set of crutches. In a month, come south to the White Hills. Look for the Drakindika Sothkis, and ask for Healer Elin or Healer Shivan—he’s my brother. One of us will remove the cast for you.”
“Thank you.” Veless looked back in Tagga’s direction. “Will she be all right now?”
“I should think so. I haven’t been highly trained in the Healer’s magic for nothing. Now I want you to go upstairs and take a long nap. Don’t worry about the cost; I’ll pay for you.”
“You don’t have to. I wouldn’t want to be a burden, and….”
“Nonsense. It’s never a burden to a Healer. Now go sleep.”
Veless obediently hobbled up the stairs, into a spare room, and promptly fell asleep.
Kios climbed down from the shaking pine and whistled to his companions. Nelek and Akani jogged over, their booted feet muffled by the thick blanket of snow. Akani ran her fingers through her short blond hair and hitched her pack higher on her shoulder. “What news?” she asked.
“I saw the walls of a village just a few miles north. Shelter for the night, and then we can return to the Pack.” Kios rubbed his beard. “Strangest thing, though. There weren’t no animals or nothing. Fields were empty.”
“That’s ’cause it’s winter, you dolt,” Nelek muttered, pulling his coat closer. “Accursed winter. Why’d we have to come this far north? It never got this cold down in the swamp.”
“That’s ’cause the swamp had thousands of hot pools,” Akani hissed. “And we came this far north because we were running out of work down south. There’s plenty of warring creatures up here, to give us something to do.” She punched Nelek’s shoulder. “Now shut up, and let’s get going. It’s getting dark, and I don’t want to fight whatever hungry animals is out this late at night. Besides us, at least,” she amended. |