by David Cook
The Harper found Vil about a hundred yards from the hippogriff’s corpse. Luck had favored Vil more than Martine, providing him with a soft landing in the lee slope of a powder-crusted hummock. From the tumbled track through the snow, it appeared that the woodsman had hit near the top of the hummock and then slid to a rest near the bottom. There he lay, still sprawled out and unmoving. Hurrying to him as best she could, Martine was relieved to hear a choking gasp as she rolled his body over.
“Are you okay?” she demanded as she began examining him for broken bones.
“I’m—” Vil winced as her hands prodded his hip. “I’m all right.” He heaved himself to his feet stiffly. “How about you?”
Martine shrugged stoically. “I’m walking.”
“Good. And the hippogriff?”
“Dead.” The wind swept away the pain in her words.
Vil didn’t offer any condolences. “We’ve got to gather our supplies and move on,” he said brusquely as he started plodding across the snow.
“I’ve got to finish my mission.”
The man wheeled on Martine, wind whipping his crinkled face. “Your mission? Just what the Nine Hells is this about?” His voice wavered furiously. “When you needed a guide, I trusted you, and now, after damn near killing me, you want to go on. You’ve already killed your horse. Isn’t that enough?”
“I didn’t—”
“Then why in the hell did you fly so close?”
“I—I took a chance, okay? And it wasn’t a horse, it was Astriphie, my hippogriff. Astriphie’s dead, and I didn’t want that!” Martine shouted back, shivering with cold and fury. The wind caught the tears as they welled in her eyes and blew them across her cheeks. Biting back her words, Martine blindly stumbled past the man. “Go home if you want to. I’m staying here.”
The Harper cursed Vil, cursed the ice, cursed herself. The man was right, of course. She should not have pushed Astriphie so close to the rift. Her eagerness to finish the mission quickly meant everything was in ruins. All she could do was try to continue, even if that meant risking her own life. Pulling up the hood of her parka, she hid her face against the cold.
The snow crackled with Vil’s steady pursuit. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he shouted over the gusts.
The Harper nodded a bitter acceptance.
“We cannot stay.”
“I must.” She did not break her short, struggling strides.
“Is your mission that important?”
“It is to me.”
“You could die out here.”
“I won’t.” Words of false confidence, she thought bitterly.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” The man would not relent. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing! My business is my own, that’s all.” Martine stepped back warily from the man as his tone became increasingly demanding.
The woodsman stopped her with a mittened hand on her sleeve. A swordsman’s suspicion filled his face. “Who are you? Someone I should fear?” The honed words sliced through the defenses of polite trust between the two. The tenseness of his body and the hand hovering close to the sword were signs of his nervous state.
“You think I’m evil?” Her own body slipped into fighting tension to match his, a dog and a cat sizing each other up.
“I don’t know. Tell me otherwise.”
With the pair of them alone in a world of arctic white, Martine knew the truth was her only defense.
“I’m a Harper,” she stated in flat, cold tones that matched their surroundings. “Sort of, anyway. I’ve come up here to close that fissure.” She slowly pointed toward the turmoil overhead.
“A Harper?” Vil echoed doubtfully, though his body eased somewhat.
“Yes. You know, agents of good and—”
“I know what Harpers are. I just didn’t expect to find one here.”
Martine was growing increasingly testy, having bared her secret only to be met by doubt. “I didn’t choose to come here. I was sent.” She beat her arms together for warmth. “I’m supposed to close that—that thing—before something unpleasant happens.”
Vil looked away. “Torm’s eyes,” he swore softly, “a Harper.” Dropping his hands away from his weapons, he turned back to face her. “Why didn’t you say something? I was ready to kill you.”
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have let you,” she said as she started toward Astriphie. “Harpers are supposed to keep their activities secret. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Now that you know, will you help me?”
Vil fell in beside her, his suspicions gone, and the two trudged back to the hippogriff’s corpse, quietly listening to the sounds of the glacier as it cracked and rumbled beneath their feet. Already the hippogriff’s body was cool, and the bloody carcass had begun to freeze over. Ice and feathers cracked as the two humans set to the grim business of recovering their supplies.
What they recovered wasn’t promising—several blankets iced up with blood and a little food that hadn’t been scattered in the crash. “It’s not enough,” Vil announced. “We need more food.” He drew his thick-bladed skinning knife and gestured toward Astriphie’s carcass. “It must be done. You can keep watch.”
Up here there was nothing to watch for but stinging snow, yet Martine gratefully accepted Vil’s excuse not to help as the woodsman, with the cold practicality that matched the terrain, sliced strips from Astriphie’s haunch. Bloody meat plopped onto the snow as he sawed at the carcass. Finally, the work finished, Vil skewered the meat on arrows and jabbed them into the snow, leaving the meat to dry in the breeze.
“Still not enough,” he muttered as he turned away from the bloody task.
“How so?” breathed Martine from where she crouched close to the ground, as if the ice held warmth.
“We cannot both live on the food we have. Not up here, at least. One of us could, but there isn’t enough for two. One of us must go back for supplies.”
The Harper cast a shivering glance at the meat-weighted stakes. “And?”
The woodsman was already loading one of the salvaged saddlebags with supplies. “Since you will not leave, I must. I’ll take a little food and hunt for whatever else I need on the way.”
The glacier rocked under their feet as the geyser shot up another of its massive plumes. Martine looked to the sky, knowing that soon they would be showered with a flurry of ice crystals too large to be snow, yet too small to be hail. She pulled one of the stiff blankets closer about her shoulders and began chipping at the frozen ground with her dagger.
Now it was Martine’s turn to be suspicious as she looked up at the woodsman. “And why should I trust you to come back?”
Vilheim snorted, amused by something Martine did not understand. The Harper couldn’t judge his reaction at all. His mouth was drawn tight, and his eyes were lost in the distance. At last he spoke in an almost perfect monotone, unconsciously beating mittened fist to mittened palm. He had all the air of a man giving testimony at an inquest.
“I am … was … a paladin of Torm.”
Martine blinked, so stupefied by the admission that it overcame her thoughts even of the cold, then waited for Vilheim to continue. He waited, perhaps expecting more of a reaction, and the two stared at each while the wind whistled across the icy plain.
“You were a paladin of Torm?” Martine finally echoed, thrusting her dagger deep into the ice.
His reply was fierce, filled with passion that she should doubt his word. “Yes … Torm the True, Torm the Brave, Torm the Binder of Oaths.… We … they … hold his faith in trust.”
Martine quickly thought back to everything she knew about paladins, which was mostly hearsay and opinion. The few she had met were stiff-necked, self-righteous, and unlikable swordsmen who were supposed to be austerely virtuous, lightened only by the glory of their god.
“A paladin? All that business about honor, truth, goodness, purging wickedness?”
Vil broke into a genuine smile, amused by the description. “So
mething like that. We were taught to keep our word. But it does not matter anymore. I am no longer a paladin.”
The words stirred sudden concern in Martine. What had prompted Vilheim’s fall from grace? She caught her breath as she waited for some sinister revelation to follow, her gaze flicking from the bloody knife Vilheim held to Astriphie’s ice-whitened remains. “So I’m supposed to trust you because you aren’t a paladin anymore?” she breathed, the words forming ice crystals in the air.
“I woke up one day and my god was gone. I did not sin, if that is what you are thinking.” The man carefully cleaned his knife and slipped it back in its sheath, defensively aware of her unwavering gaze. “It was during the Time of Troubles. One morning I woke up and Torm was no longer there. Before that day, I could always sense Torm’s purpose in everything. That day the feeling was gone. Torm had disappeared, as a good many of the gods did.”
Martine only remembered the Time of Troubles somewhat vaguely. She had been young and had not yet taken up the adventuring life. For her, the gods and their turmoils had seemed distant compared to Giles, the prefect’s son, who lived just down the lane.
“Torm came back, though. You could still be a paladin.”
Vil spoke softly but resonantly, his voice carrying force across the frozen gap. “Life is never simple. When Torm left me, I was suddenly on my own for the first time in my life, and—and I liked it. You could not know the freedom I felt.”
And now you want me to trust you? Martine thought.
Perhaps it was a raised eyebrow or a quirk in her face that prompted Vil to speak. “I give you my word I will return. I am still an honest man, Martine of Sembia. A lifetime of training does not evaporate into thin air overnight.” The man rose with firm resolution, shouldering the saddlebag to go. “Besides, there is no choice. You will not leave, and two cannot stay. I will find you here in four days. Take care, and good fortune in your mission, Harper.”
Martine knew she could protest. She could stand out on this glacier arguing until they both froze, but their time spent trading secrets had already chilled her to the bone, and she knew the ex-paladin was right. There was no choice. “Travel safely,” she offered. “In four days, you’ll find me here.”
The words practically vanished in the wind, and the former paladin bent forward as he turned into the gale to begin his journey. The Harper didn’t waste any time watching him leave, but instead busied herself gathering up the supplies, the bulk of which he’d left behind. As she worked, the ice heaved again, this time hurling her to the ground with its violence. Three more tremors, each almost as fierce, struck before Martine started toward the edge of the rift.
The hike was no more than a mile, and the woman made good time with the snowshoes that had survived the crash, a miracle for which Martine thanked Tymora, the mistress of luck. The snow was deeper and softer here, much of it fresh powder from the seething fountain that created its own massive cloud overhead. Through the cloud, light from the the noontime sun was deflected into a million sparkling motes of swirling silver frost. She found that looking at it directly burned her eyes, but at least it distracted her from the ground glare that might otherwise blind her.
As she drew near the fissure, the tremors and the roaring swelled like some fulsome giant struggling to break its frozen chains. The rift had pushed the glacier’s crust upward and outward to form a ridgelike cone. Not knowing how close she needed to be for the seals to work, the Harper elected to climb to the rim, in order to be certain of success. Besides, coming this far, she had to satisfy her curiosity. No doubt, she rationalized, Jazrac would appreciate an eyewitness description of the rupture.
The base of the slope was a jagged mass of icy scree. Closer now, Martine watched how with each surge, great ice blocks hove over the crack’s broken edge, some to fall back inside while others tumbled down the slope. Bounding and crashing, these arctic boulders smashed into others below with sharp cracks that sometimes triggered other shifts and slides in the unstable mass. Wary of the risks, the Harper took extra caution as she picked her way through the frozen scree, mindful that an avalanche could cascade down upon her at any moment. The whistle of the numbing wind was drowned out by the grinding crashes that emanated from beyond the rim and repeated themselves all down the slope.
Finally above the scree, the woman continued her climb, using the dagger to help now, for here the ground was nothing but smooth, windswept ice. Slowly she chopped footholds in the angled slope, all the time watching for danger ahead. The work raised a sweat while her fingers went numb even through her leather gloves and thick mittens. Wedged into grips of ice, her toes felt almost as chilly. Her side throbbed, and her shoulder protested with every twist, until she doubted the wisdom of the whole mission. I can’t give up, she fiercely charged herself. Not this close to my destination.
The jagged surface of the top finally came into view, and Martine dragged herself up on it with gasping relief. Every inch of her burned, inside and outside. Her throat was scorched with bitter cold, her muscles ached as if aflame, and her fingers curled with the peculiar fire that near-frostbite brings. Then the roar and tremble struck again, heightened by the crash of ice nearby, all of which urged the spent woman to her feet.
Three steps and Martine reached the inner rim. There she halted, dumbfounded by the grotesque landscape below her. From the air, she had only seen how the rift spread like a starlike crack a half-mile or so in length, but now, close up, she could see the canyon bottom. The canyon floor flowed impossibly, like water—no, she decided, more like gelatin or unset custard. The surface rippled in smooth waves that still glistened with the shining hardness of ice. Where the waves broke like water against the canyon walls, the spray turned instantly rigid, hurling hail and frost into the air. The water-ice bubbled and roiled, its feathery spouts frosting the walls of the rift, small at first but gradually increasing in speed and height.
Martine suspected another jet was forming and hurriedly dug from her pouch the first of the stones Jazrac had given her. Remembering her brief instructions, she panned it about until the internal fires lit and then buried it in the snow safely back from the edge. It wouldn’t do to have the stone fall into the pit, she decided.
In another painful hour of trudging, Martine was at her second position. Stone in hand, she moved along the crest slowly until the rock began to glow in her hand. She planted it quickly. At this pace, she guessed there was barely enough daylight left to finish the task.
En route to the third point, Martine spied a movement among the ice blocks of the talus slope below. At first she dismissed it as merely a shifting in the loose boulders, until she saw another flash. She barely saw it, a blue-white form against the ice. It was small and incredibly fast, for before she could even take a step closer, it had disappeared once more. The huntress swore it had arms and legs, like some kind of little creature. Caution and curiosity warranted she track it down, but the Harper rejected the idea, since it would delay her mission. All she dared spare was a brief pause, but after a few minutes of inaction, the Harper pressed on before she froze on the spot.
It was only a piece of ice or a wayward snow eagle battered down by the wind, Martine decided as she passed the sighting point. She was too tired to ascribe it to anything else. Nonetheless, she remained watchful all the way to the next point of the seal, so much so that she almost ignored the stone when it started to glow in her hand.
With the third stone was buried at the highest tip of the fissure, the Harper began the descent along the opposite edge of the bubbling rift, swinging wide to work around the crevasse that formed the next point of the star. Eventually the crumbled crack tapered to almost nothing. After leaping the dwindling gap, the Harper blindly crisscrossed the plain, stone in hand, searching out the juncture that would make it glow. With each stone, she despaired, it took longer to find the point where all the forces balanced. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she’d missed the mark, the glittering opal lit with its internal fire.
Collapsing thankfully to her knees, the Harper buried the stone. Inside, her cracked rib throbbed as fiercely as ever, but her mind was now too dulled to the pain to even notice.
The glittering orange winter sun, hanging barely over the mountain peaks on the opposite side of the glacier, reminded Martine of the need for haste. Darkness would come quickly as soon as the sun slid behind the peaks, and Martine still had one stone to place and camp to make. There was no hope of getting off the glacier today, so the Harper wanted to dig herself a shelter before darkness fell.
Her chest heaving from the long sprint, Martine reached her last goal, the southernmost tip of the fissure, only a few hundred yards from the glacier’s edge. Sweat seeped out from under her parka hood to form ridges of sour frost in her eyebrows. The cloth mask that covered most of her cheeks and mouth was heavy with ice that grew thicker with each passing minute. Cold, fumbling hands shook the last stone from the pouch. The heart of the opal sparkled weakly in the setting sun. Holding it in her cupped hands like a precious child, Martine shuffled zombielike in questing arcs, searching for the stone’s resting place. She mumbled curses against the coming nightfall, but the rising evening wind tore away every breath that escaped her lips so that she couldn’t hear her own voice.
The last of the passing sunlight disappeared before the advancing mountain shadows, taking with it any pretense of warmth the light had promised. The deep-throated roars of the geysers sounded like thunder in the chilling air. High overhead, the soaring spume sparkled in the receding sunlight till the glittering cystals looked like descending stars in the darkness. The wind-whipped frost flew thicker, each flake biting with more sting.
After how much distance she did not know, the stone suddenly swelled with light. Exhausted and cold, the Harper stood dumbly watching it at first, not comprehending the meaning of the blue-white fire she cupped in her hands. Only slowly did it dawn on her that this was it, the end of her task. In moments, she would set the seal and fulfill Jazrac’s trust in her. She was sure the wizard was watching—no, sensing—for some ripple in the cosmic sea that marked the healing of this great wound in the earth.
