by David Cook
“I will do this, Vreesar.” Long claws scissored the air as the creature sidled over to Martine until it could reach out and chuck its taloned tips under her chin. “The Hot Blood will talk. It will tell me everything.”
Martine’s boot lashed out, but it was a little too stiff and slow to catch the agile creature, which scooted aside.
“See, Vreesar, it fears me already,” it chuckled gleefully. It skipped back close, watching Martine carefully. “It knows I will make it talk.”
“Then do so, pest! I hunt!”
With a sinuous leap, the elemental departed into the night as suddenly as it had arrived. The clatter of loosened ice tumbling from upslope echoed its retreat.
Martine tensed as she waited for the last sounds to fade away. The howling wind and distant rumbles from the rift quickly separated them from the world. Human and mephit faced each other at the bottom of the snowy world.
“How will I begin?” the thing across from her chortled, almost forgetful of her presence. “A finger? A nose? A cut here … or there?” With each question, it mapped out its intentions in the snow.
Preparing to spring, Martine drew in a great breath, a breath the mephit mistook for fear. It was time to strike, she knew. Her fingers dug into the snow until they squeezed tightly on her sword hilt once more.
“How—”
The question was cut clean by Martine’s charging scream, bellowed out as if to waken her rigid muscles. Snow burst outward as she jerked the sword free in a wild, slashing arc. Her legs were too stiff, her arms too weak as she lurched to her feet and lunged wildly toward the mephit.
If only she’d been faster, unfrozen and unspent, the ranger knew she could have caught the creature in that transitory moment when it froze in surprise. But her legs sagged under the need to move, her arm pulled the arc of the sword just a little too slow. With the blade still in midswing, the mephit lashed out a clawed hand. Martine heard the tear of leather and skin as the talons swept across the shoulder of her sword arm. Fire and ice mingled as blood rushed from the gashes and over her exposed skin. Pain charged her cries now.
The mephit didn’t wait for the sword to complete its crippled arc but lunged forward to meet her charge. Its barbed arms sliced viciously at her legs and left her sprawled in the snow. Springing onto her back, the imp wrapped its hard arms around her like a wrestler. With one arm, it wrenched her bleeding shoulder, triggering fits of pain, while the other wrapped around her neck and pulled at her hood to expose the soft flesh. She could feel its bitter breath, hear its teeth snap as it struggled to tear her throat.
Martine writhed and thrashed, desperately trying to reach the sword that had skittered once more beyond reach. Like a wild mare, she bucked and rolled, slamming the little imp on her back against the jagged ice.
“Let go, damn it!” she raged, but the imp clung with stubborn determination. Each rolling smash brought the Harper more numbing pain, at best preventing the little monster from biting home. But it seemed each lunge brought her sword no closer.
I’m not unarmed, she suddenly realized. Twisting, she gazed directly into the imp’s face. Its tiny jaws snapped, crystal teeth shining fiercely. Gulping for air, the Harper blew as warmly as she could into the mephit’s ice-ridged eyes.
“Burns!” squealed the imp. Its death lock grip loosened as it clutched at its scalded face, and in a flash, Martine clenched Jazrac’s knife.
“Burn, Hot Blood! You burn!” the creature squealed in her ear.
Martine wrenched her bloodied arm free and reached up to seize the creature’s forehead. The stretch of muscles triggered fires of pain that she forced herself to ignore. Somewhere she’d lost a mitten, and now the mephit’s icy ridges tore at her hand. With a panting effort, she bucked once more, twisting the imp’s head back as she did. Blindly she jabbed the dagger over her shoulder. It hit something solid, held, and then dug in farther. The mephit shrieked in her ear, proof enough she’d hit home. With all the strength she could muster, Martine shoved the blade outward, feeling it slide in jerky pops as it cut through something. All at once the blade broke free, and her arm shot out like a punch-drunk fighter’s.
The shriek still rang in her ears, almost blocking out the choking gurgle that replaced it. Clear blood, colder than ice water, washed down her shoulder as the arms of the imp broke loose in wild flails. Martine flung the creature off her and spun around to deliver the coup de grace. The killing stroke was unnecessary, for the mephit already lay on the ground, its head lolling as the body heaved in reflexive jerks. Her thrust had caught it just below what looked like its ear and sliced down the length of its neck, releasing a flood of silver-white blood.
Martine didn’t wait for the creature to die. Already she felt unsteady on her feet, and her wounds were icing up with blood-soaked frost. Concentrating dully, she gutted her pouch, first taking care to pocket Jazrac’s keystone, then plastered the leather over her shredded shoulder. A quick inspection gave her no relief, for her wounds were both bloody and deep. She recovered her mitten and gingerly slipped it over her scraped hand.
“I can’t wait here. Vreesar might be back.” Talking kept her focused. She looked up into the darkness at the jumble of the slide. Somewhere up there was the glacier wall and the valley beyond. Gathering her sword and her few recovered possessions, the woman began to climb.
Two steps up, one back; two steps up, one back … So it seemed through the long ascent. Boulders tauntingly gave beneath her feet, triggering slides that threatened to drag her back down to the bottom of the slide. Ice made her footing treacherous. Wind froze her hands into claws. She stabbed into the ice with her sword like an ice axe, chipping footholds with the point, driving the blade in as deep as possible. The blue light of magic was gone, leaving only the feeble starlight to suggest the way. More than once she almost plunged into darkened hollows, thinking they were solid ground.
How long it took her to reach the top or how she reached it, Martine could not say. After a point there was no memory of the climb’s details, only the need to climb and keep moving. The exhausted ranger wasn’t even aware she’d cleared the worst of it until she found herself staggering across the cracked ice plain of the surface. Up here, with all the stars of the night to guide her, Martine could just see the subtle change where the frozen wall sagged to the valley floor, a descending road to safety. She made for it.
At least I can die in the forest, she thought morbidly.
At the edge of the great ramp, Martine heard voices. Dumbly, she froze where she stood, unable to think of cover or safety. She concentrated on the voices. They were guttural and sharp, not like Vreesar’s hissing buzz. There were several of them, too—a group, though she couldn’t tell how many. Numbly she moved slowly closer to the source.
Then she saw them, no more than twenty feet below her. There were six, perhaps seven gnolls, working their way up the slope, well armed and thickly furred. They were still too far away to understand their words, but Martine could only presume the night’s events had drawn them here. Vreesar wasn’t with them, and she doubted they even knew of him.
Perhaps it was blind exhaustion that gave her the idea, or perhaps it was the need to survive. Although the Harper knew she could hide and let them pass by, instead she stepped boldly into the path—or as boldly as her wavering muscles could support her—and raised her arms above her head in the universal sign of surrender.
Five
For a moment, the gnolls stood gaping at the apparition over them, their weapons dangling at their sides. The leader tore back its parka hood and sniffed the air in suspicion, its glistening muzzle quivering to catch the scents of the night. Its black lips curled back from yellowed fangs as it barked orders to the others. In a concerted rush of flapping furs and clanking weapons, they fell upon their prisoner with astonishing haste.
The five dog-men acted quickly to take control of their prize. Martine was so weak and consumed with fatigue that she practically fell into their arms. She knew surr
endering was a risk, but if it worked, it would at least get her off the ice. She denied to herself the other possibility—that they just might kill her.
Under the leader’s command, the group stripped her of weapons with brutal efficiency, even finding Jazrac’s pretty little knife, before lashing her wrists with a spare bowstring. Her torn shoulder hurt terribly, but at least they hadn’t killed her outright
“What do we with it?” the smallest gnoll in the group yipped finally. The fur of its hide was still raw beige and downy. It was barely more than a cub, Martine guessed.
“Kill it.” The snarl came from a stocky male, the long jut of its muzzle barely visible under the cowl of its hood.
The leader of the pack, its hood pulled back as it surveyed the glacier, flicked a loose ear in irritation. “No killing now,” it barked in gravelly whisper. “Later—back in camp. We will share meat with our females.” A sharp finger prodded the Harper’s side, as if testing the thickness of her fat. “Or maybe we eat it all ourselves.” The group broke into a coughing laugh, stomping their snowy feet with approval.
It was clear her captors didn’t realize their prisoner understood every word of their guttural language, knowledge gained from her years as a huntress. Nor was she about to tell them. It might be the only advantage she would get, so it was best to keep her knowledge concealed for now. Doing her best to play dumb, Martine waited for the last of their chuckles to die.
“And the lights on the tall ice?” the runt asked with a nod toward the crest of the plain. “Do we go closer?”
The bareheaded one, its thin white fur wisping in the breeze, shook its head from side to side. “We came to hunt, not to look at colored lights. Now we have good game. We go.” There was no debate against the old gnoll’s decision, and Martine could tell it expected none.
The group made a quick descent, their keen night sight allowing them to move easily through the darkness. Martine, her bound hands hampering her balance, unable to see the path in the blackness, stumbled along trying to keep up. None of the hyenalike men ever once slowed its pace or suggested concern for the struggling human. Each slip and fall was rewarded with a savage jerk or shove to set her back on course, the fire in her shoulder renewed.
Even at their breakneck pace through the starlit night, Martine tried to note their passage. It was an attention to detail born of habit. The curl of a drift, the switchbacks of their trail, even the grating shifts of crumbling snow beneath her feet were like islands of reality in a nightmarish sea of ice. The slide they were on was not fresh. She could tell by the way the wind had sculpted the snowy blocks and by the stiff-crusted drifts that nestled in the hollows. Near the base, where the slope tapered off, the path crossed a ribbon of ice that left the ranger confused. Even in the starlight, it glinted with clear purity, reflecting the night back in the smooth ripples of its surface. It should have been jagged and cracked, the way ice gets when it warms and freezes, but she could only imagine it as a flowing river.
She noticed, too, that there was something about the ice that spooked the gnolls. Their rapid pace broke as they neared its edge, and they crossed almost gingerly. The eyes of those closest to her were filled with fear, constantly straying to one another as if waiting for some hidden peril. Once they were off the ice, the tension faded as quickly as it had risen.
At the leader’s barked call, the pack plunged across the snowy moraine at the glacier’s base. They followed the winding moraine straight into the woods, moving along a well-packed track that cut through the waist-deep snow.
In the darkness of the screening branches, Martine had no opportunity to take sightings and therefore had no clear idea where they were when the pack finally rounded a dense thicket and broke into a shimmering clearing. Five dark arches of primitive longhouses were nestled at the forest’s edge. The tang of pine smoke and burnt meat filled the air.
“Harrrooo!” the pack’s leader howled before stepping into the clearing. A deep-throated howl blended with the echo. Satisfied, the pack hurried across the trampled snow, past cold fire pits and snow-buried mounds of wood to the largest of the longhouses, an arch of bent wood clad in birch and leather that flapped in the breeze, as if welcoming the hunters with ghostly applause.
The leader threw open the thick hide doorway and barked at Martine to go inside. She stumbled at the sill, and a gnoll shoved her through, mistaking the near fall for hesitation. The inner curtain was pulled aside, unleashing a thick rush of humid odors, a mixture of leather, blood, smoke, flesh, birch, and sweat. A mumbled snarl rising from a horde of throats greeted her entrance.
The lodge was filled with warm yellow flickers of fire that made Martine blink. The long hall was draped with furs and hides. The work was sloppily done. The coverings didn’t always match up, leaving the frame of woven saplings that formed the longhouse’s arch exposed. Elk skulls and antlers hung from the arch as macabre decorations, alongside soot-black strips of jerky. The general impression was that of a moldering cellar. The ranger could guess the rest of the lodge’s construction—a layer of pine boughs for insulation, capped by the outside shell she’d already seen.
This place is a tinderbox waiting for a spark. The thought came nervously to the Harper’s tired mind. Perhaps it was prompted by the source of the glow, a long fire trench dug at the far end of the hut, filled to the edges and beyond with glowing coals.
The fire illuminated a tangle of furry bodies that covered the floor, a carpet that drew back before the blast of winter air that accompanied her entrance. Tawny, spotted arms stretched curiously while muzzles raised to sniff the new scent that had suddenly intruded upon them. Ears twitched; fleshy lips curled back from needle-sharp fangs.
Just beyond the sprawled mass, at the far end of the lodge, stood a high bench, the only recognizable piece of furniture in the place. The wooden benchtop was heaped with elk robes and mantles stitched together from the pelts of innumerable sables. Planted deep in its center was a burly gnoll. He dozed upright, robes pulled around him till they fell away from his shoulders like the talus slope of a mountain. Even asleep, his immense size and his passive dominance over the rest of the pack left no doubt that he was the chieftain.
“Forward,” grunted her guard. The command prompted another of her guards to step forward and force a path through the pack, which reminded Martine of dogs or wolves sleeping in huddled mounds to generate warmth as she gingerly stepped through the narrow passage.
Unlike the party that had found her, most of the gnolls in the hall were nearly naked, their winter gear hung from the arches near the entrance. Propriety was served only by simple loincloths and ornaments of bone, wood, and feathers. Each was covered with tarnished white fur, dappled with spots that ranged from red to black.
“What is it?” The chorus of whispered voices slithered through the cramped lodge.
“Human.”
“Trouble.”
“We kill it?”
“And eat it.”
“Too stringy.”
“What is this you bring me?” rose one voice above all the others, speaking with presumptive authority. The whispers stilled only slightly.
“Tonight we found new game, Hakk,” the old gnoll boasted, shoving Martine forward roughly. Pain shot through the Harper’s wounded shoulder, penetrating through her freezing numbness. With a strangled moan, the woman lost balance and sprawled onto the dirt floor just before the fire pit. The landing caused another searing stab of pain, which left her sweating, almost writhing before the coals.
“We trapped it on the tall ice, Hakk,” the old one continued. “It was doing terrible magic, but me and my pack mates caught it.” He proceeded to tell a tale of their great victory, more fanciful than real. In it, Martine became a powerful fiend, able to make the whole glacier tremble. The gnoll’s lies were palpably obvious as it strutted about, miming out the tale. Martine was astonished to note the rapt acceptance of the huddled pack. Martine was in no position or condition to object. As the pain fin
ally eased, she struggled to a kneeling position, no small accomplishment with her hands still bound.
Just as the mighty sorceress of the tale was about to fall for the final time in the leader’s spirited retelling, the one called Hakk cut in. “Enough! You are a brave pack leader, Brokka. You will have the choice meat.” With a thick-necked shrug, Hakk stood, letting the robes fall to the floor. Golden fur with fat rubbed into it was plastered smooth against the gnoll’s hard muscles. With a casual move, the chieftain sprang across the fire pit, landing in a squat just before the Harper.
Hakk is not without his share of vanity, Martine noted. That might be useful.
“It might need fattening up.” The chieftain prodded at Martine, reigniting the shuddering pain in her shoulder. Instinctively she reeled back, only to be shoved forward again by strong hands behind her.
“Kill me and you won’t know the danger of the tall ice,” Martine sputtered out in a mixture of gnoll and trade common.
The chieftain’s eyes flared, and a deep snarl forewarned her of the savage backhand that followed. Martine barely had time to pull back and roll with the blow, but the gnoll’s fist still glanced viciously off her temple. Her vision blurred in one eye, and it took more willpower than she thought she possessed to face the chieftain once more. She dare not show weakness now. She had to play it out all the way.
“There is someone else on the ice.” The words came hard as she blinked, half-blind and shivering.
“You speak only when I say!” the chief raged, but his face gave away his curiosity.
The Harper took a deep breath and then daubed with her bound hands at a trickle of blood seeping into the corner of her eye.
“What other? Speak, human, or I kill you.” The gnoll’s hot, greasy breath steamed against her skin.
