I was an Ender, and I had trained for this possibility when I was young and only just starting my training. I closed my eyes, though it didn’t change what I saw, and focused on the earth around me. I only needed a few large rocks. I found two. As the oxygen fled, and my mind began to wander into the abyss of death, I pulled the two large stones through the snow to me. One bumped into my right hand and I shot it “upward” with a mere thought.
The other I pulled close to my face and then sent it “up” through the snow as well. The sound of shifting snow, the feel of new snow falling on my face, and then there was a blessed rush of fresh cold air as the two stones erupted out of the surface of the snow above my head.
I managed to twist my head so that my nose was right under the opening I’d made with the second stone. The one near my right hand gave me the room to start moving snow, shoving it into the opening I’d created, eventually freeing my arm enough that I could bring it near my head.
“You bitch, I’m going to kill you twice over.” I breathed the words out, more for myself than anyone else.
“Who is that you’re going to kill?” A male voice, one I didn’t recognize, bounced down the walls of my snow chimney. I, well, I would have frozen if I wasn’t already encased in ice, but . . . you get the point.
Friend or foe above me? There was only one way to find out.
“Manner of speaking. Can you help me out?” I asked. I couldn’t see who was above me, but I assumed it was a Sylph drawn by the activity on the mountain. They were nosy bastards for the most part and territorial on top of that.
“Well, maybe.” He seemed rather uncertain. Since when was a Sylph uncertain? Never. They were cocky on top of being nosy as hell.
More snow fell down the tube as if he was standing right near it. It splattered my face and went up my nose. This was not going well. I needed to get the hell out. “Can I convince you to help me?”
“Ha. Probably not. What you doing on this mountain, Terraling? Sylphs don’t like visitors.”
Now that was interesting. So he wasn’t a Sylph and he knew I was a Terraling. But what options were left as to what he was? Oh shit.
“Yeti?”
“Well, duh. Who were you expecting, Santa Claus?”
Yeti were an interesting supernatural. They sprang from some sideline combination of Sylph, Undine, and human that had yet to be discovered. They were in a way cousins to the ogres on the North American continent. Just as mouthy, but not as prone to fighting. More prone to love a good joke, though, and they were always looking for ways to pull one over on anyone they could find.
Maybe I could use that to my advantage. “No, I’m just . . . I’m trying to pull a fast one on the new Sylph queen. So I kind of need to get out of here to do it.”
He gave a low grunt and more snow fell down the tunnel, smacking me in the face.
“Why you in there in the first place?” he asked.
Shit, this was not going as planned. I tried to move some more snow from around my head but only caused a cave-in, which left me barely able to keep my mouth and nose aboveboard. My bigger concern was that Peta had not shown up. Did that mean she’d been caught in the avalanche, or worse, had Cassava gotten her claws into the snow leopard?
“Can I help you with the prank?” the Yeti whispered down the tunnel. “I love a good prank.”
“Yes, that would be great,” I mumbled around the snow.
With lightning speed, the snow shifted around me and I was released from its grip. I fell a few feet to land in the bottom of a hole the Yeti created. I stared up at the big beast, getting my first good look at him.
He was about eight feet tall and covered in a fine dusting of long, floating hair that looked like it was made of spider web, it was so thin. He had a mouthful of flat, square teeth, though the top middle one was a sharp canine. Eyes of brilliant blue-green, he was obviously in a good mood as he grinned down at me, his wide nose wrinkling up. “Okay, how are we going to prank her? She’s pretty grumpy lately.” He clapped his hands together and the snow under my feet bulged upward, lifting me out of the deep hole.
“Well, I have a companion that was caught in the avalanche too. I have to find her first.”
“No, I want to do the prank now.” He caught me around my upper arm. I didn’t tense, didn’t try to pull away. He was strong enough he could have pulled my arm off and beat me to death with it. Yeti, like ogres, were not to be trifled with and not to be provoked when they were close enough to grab you.
I smiled up at him, realizing quickly he wasn’t the usual Yeti. There was something . . . off with him, for lack of a better word. “Listen, friend, she’s integral to the prank. She’s the one who’s going to slip past all the guards and help us get in.”
He frowned and then nodded. “That makes sense. That the snow leopard, then?”
Hope soared. “You saw her?”
“Yup, she went down over there.” He pointed one of three fingers toward the base of the mountain. I broke into a jog, not knowing what I was going to find. Peta had been my companion while Lark had been in the oubliette. She was my friend and my unofficial familiar. My heart pulsed with anxiety at the thought of something happening to her.
“Peta!” I called for her, hoping she wasn’t buried too deeply. In fact, preferring her to be buried deeply over the alternative—being taken by Cassava.
“A lady took her,” the Yeti said, and I slid to a stop.
“Please tell me you’re kidding.”
He tipped his head to one side and smiled. “No, but would it be funny if I were?”
I dropped to my knees, feeling Peta’s loss as keenly as if she were my familiar. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Mother goddess, how do I find her now?” There was no way I could get into one of the Traveling rooms to see the globe and try and sense where Peta was. Or Cassava, for that matter.
On my knees in the snow, I struggled to pull my mind around what had happened. How quickly things had gone sideways.
“Hey, I thought we were going to pull a prank?” The Yeti crouched beside me. “I want to pull a prank.”
A one-track mind didn’t even begin to describe his intensity. As I said, there was something off with him. I was going to have to continue to play along for now.
“It’s going to be hard now that I don’t have my cat with me.”
“Oh. Well, damn it, I was looking forward to pulling a prank.” He was thoughtful for a moment. “Can we pull a different prank?”
A different prank. The words rumbled through my head, sparking off a possibility. Cassava . . . why would she have taken Peta? Why not kill her?
Because she knew that I would come looking for the snow leopard. Because she said she wanted to destroy both Lark’s heart and soul.
You can find them both. You just have to look. The Yeti can help you.
I wasn’t sure if the words were mine or not, but I agreed, shivering away the crawling sensation on my spine.
“Yeti, do you have a name?”
“Me?”
Goddess, this was going to be painful. “Yes, you.”
“Well, my mema calls me Norm. I guess you could call me that. She said only my friends could call me Norm.” He scratched at his ass with one hand and then held it out to me. “What’s your name then, friend Terraling?”
“Ash.” I slapped my hand into his and shook it once. His grin widened.
“Never had a friend before, not since the accident.”
I did a slow turn, thinking about what I needed, and knowing that I was about to break every rule I’d held to as an Ender to find Peta, and stop Cassava. “Is there a mage amongst your people?”
“Oh, yeah, he’s great. Big guy, kinda grumpy, but I haven’t seen him in a long time. You think he can help with a prank?” Norm’s blue-green eyes lit up.
I nodded slowly. “Yes. I do.”
He reached for me and threw me around in a circle so I landed on his back with an oomph. I scrambled to get m
y arms around his neck.
Again, this was not normal behavior for a Yeti, I knew that. From his back, I could see the possible reason why. There was a thick scar where the hair hadn’t grown back. It looked old, and yet I could see that it had been bad. What had he said? No friends after the accident. I knew that many supernaturals kicked their own out if they became sick, or injured. Survival of the fittest was a true principle in our world.
A head injury then, that did explain the strange behavior. He loped forward through the snow with ease, carrying me like I weighed nothing. I clung to his shoulders and used the higher vantage point to see if there was any trace of Cassava or Peta. Not that I truly expected to see them, but I could hope. I wanted to believe there would be some clue as to their whereabouts.
Nothing. There wasn’t even so much as a footprint.
Norm bounded away from the site of the avalanche and along narrow slopes that I wasn’t sure even Peta could have traversed. He didn’t so much as blink. Though I will admit there was a moment or two where I closed my eyes and tried not to think about how high up we were, or how one simple misstep could have sent us tumbling to our deaths.
“Almost there, friend Terraling,” Norm said. “You think Miko will help with the prank?”
Miko, that had to be the mage then. “I’m going to ask,” I said.
The big Yeti slid to a stop at the very edge of a ledge overlooking the biggest chasm yet, his feet scrabbling for purchase as his momentum carried us forward. His arms pinwheeled and I clutched harder to him while I considered leaping off. Shit, we were going down.
As fast as he’d slid, he stopped and I held my breath. What the hell?
He barked out a laugh and looked over his shoulder at me. One big eye winked back at me. “I scared you, didn’t I?”
My heart was pounding and I was sure that a lesser man might have lost control of his bladder. I slid from his back and took a big breath, my legs trembling more than a little. “Yeah, you scared me. Good job.”
He slapped a big hand on my back, nearly sending me into the chasm a second time. I went to my knees and tapped into the earth, letting it anchor me.
“Wow, that’s a nifty trick. Think you can show me?” He crouched down and put a finger to where the rock had wrapped up around my legs.
“Probably not. It’s a Terraling power.”
“Darn. I’d like to learn a new trick.”
I drew a breath and somewhat reluctantly let go of the earth so I could stand up. “Your mage, Miko, is he here?”
Norm crouched beside me and shook his head. “You know, I wasn’t supposed to come back here.”
Oh shit. I wracked my brain for anything else I knew of Yeti. I vaguely recalled that they abhorred weakness or difference—again, survival of the fittest. Norm was not fit to survive here, even I could see that.
“Stay behind me,” I said, and he slid around until he was between me and the chasm. Already, three Yeti approached us, their faces drawn and completely devoid of emotion. Built like Norm, their coats ranged from pure white to a soft pale cream, and their eyes varied likewise from a pale, almost silver blue to a deep summer blue that had hints of violet. All three were males, all three were posturing with the way their three-fingered hands were fisted, and their nostrils flared. Subtle, but the signs were there.
I held up both hands, palms facing the approaching Yeti. “I come to speak with your mage, Miko. It is of utmost importance I can hear his wisdom.”
The middle Yeti’s lips twitched. “Wisdom? From Miko?”
I frowned. “It is my understanding he is your mage, is he not?”
“Well, shit, yeah, but that doesn’t make him wise. He’s a bit of a dumb fuck if you ask me.” The Yeti frowned again. “Speaking of dumb fucks, we told you not to come back, Norm.”
Norm cringed. “I brought my new friend, Billy. He says he’s got a new prank I can help with. I like pranks, you know that.”
Billy’s head swiveled back to me. “A new prank?”
I scrunched up my face. “Something like that.”
Billy laughed. “You realize that by taking him on, you’ve taken him on?”
No, no, I was not keeping the Yeti. I shook my head. “I—”
“Too late, no backsies,” Billy said. “But I’ll introduce you to Miko if you really want. For what good he might do you, I don’t fucking know. He’s pretty useless to us. I mean, when he shows up, that is.”
His language was jarring, reminding me so much of the human world, I had to shake my head. But he was leading the way down a path I hadn’t seen that took us into the chasm and hopefully toward their mage, which was what I’d asked for. I followed, and the two other Yeti slid in behind me. Norm didn’t come down the path, but stayed up top and peered over the ledge. He waved a huge hand at me. “Bye! See you later, friend!”
I hoped his farewell wasn’t because I was about to get my ass handed to me. “What happened to Norm? That scar on his head isn’t an accident.”
Billy didn’t turn around. “He was a scrapper, one of our best fighters, and he got in a tussle with a pack of wandering ogres. It didn’t end well for them. He killed them all, but in the middle of it, he got a sword stuck in his skull.”
My jaw dropped. “Was there a healer nearby? Is that how he survived?”
“No, he walked through a snowstorm to get home,” the Yeti right behind me said. I glanced back.
“Seriously?”
I had no idea Yeti were so tough. Ogres tended to be the supernatural badass everyone feared, but I was beginning to think their “gentle cousins,” as the Yeti were so often referred to, were perhaps a deadlier breed.
“How many ogres?” I had to ask. The warrior in me wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t know.
“Fifteen.”
I kept moving, but my brain stuttered over that number. Fifteen ogres? “Did he have weapons?”
There was more than a little pride in Billy’s answer. “Nope. Took their own weapons off those dirty fuckers, but mostly he used his hands.”
Again, my brain couldn’t quite wrap itself around that. A mob of fifteen ogres, taken out barehanded by a Yeti. The power and speed he would have had to display would have been nothing short of epic. I kind of wished I’d been there to see it. “And you still cast him out?”
Ahead of me, Billy shrugged. “That’s life. He’s no good to us now. Wouldn’t hurt a fly if you told him it had just bitten his own mema.”
He stopped in front of a random wooden door leaning against a chunk of the mountain. Like it had been placed there, ready to be thrown into a fire. “This is Miko’s place.”
Both my eyebrows shot up. The door wasn’t hinged on anything, and I could see the mountain behind it in places. Was this a prank maybe? I glanced at Billy and he shrugged.
“I haven’t seen him in years. Why Norm would think he could help is beyond my fucking ken.”
I reached past him and touched the door. It glowed softly, the wood warming under my hand. Heartwood of a cedar tree from deep in the redwoods. The connection was not lost on me.
I took a deep breath and pulled the door open.
CHAPTER 7
he door in the mountain chasm the Yeti led me to opened slowly to reveal a glowing tunnel behind it and the sound of a fire crackling and two voices conversing. I glanced at Billy, but he backed away.
“If you’re going to go, I suggest you go quickly.”
Feeling like I was making a mistake, while at the same time realizing I didn’t know where else to start, I stepped through the archway. The door slammed shut behind me, locking if the metal click was any indication. I reached back and tried to open the door.
Locked indeed. Damn it.
There was a laugh from down the tunnel and then a male voice, husky with age, spoke. “Well, now that he’s here we can discuss this properly, Niah.”
Niah? That couldn’t be right. There was no way she could be here—she was in the Rim. Wasn’t she?
I hurr
ied forward, not sure if I was hearing things right or not. Niah was our family’s bard and sometime magic woman from the Rim. A Terraling like me. What in the name of the mother goddess was she doing here deep in the Himalayan Mountains?
The end of the hall opened into a large circular room with a high ceiling and smooth polished walls.
But that wasn’t what kept my attention. In the center of the room, laden with food and drink, was a large, Yeti-sized table. On either side of the table were two people. One was a Yeti I assumed was Miko, and on the other sat Niah. She looked like a child at the adult’s table. Even her bear shifter, who sat quietly at her feet, looked small. She glanced at me and smiled. “Ash, good, I see Norm found you. That was rather tight timing, you know.”
Confusion rocked through me. “Wait, you sent him? How did you know I would be here? How did you know there would be an avalanche?”
“Well,” she put a spoon into a steaming cup and stirred, making the spoon clink on the edge of the cup, “to be fair, Miko sent him. But I asked him too since I knew you were going to need help out of that avalanche.”
I found my legs finally giving out and I dropped slowly to the floor. Too much, this was too much in a short period of time even for me. “But how did you know?”
Miko grinned at me. Built like the other Yeti, the only difference was his fur was tinged gray, shot through with flecks of silver, and his eyes were brilliantly yellow and glowed like fireflies in the dim light. They were not gold like mine, but a true yellow like the center of a daisy. “Yeah, yeah, sit down, kid. We’ve got lots to discuss.”
Kid, I hadn’t been called that in almost a hundred and fifty years. But I sat on the floor, letting the heat of the warm room wash through me and take away the last of the cold and fear for the moment.
“Niah, Cassava is alive, and she’s got Peta.”
“Yes, I know. I told her you would be here looking for her.”
My jaw dropped and all I could do was stare at her. “Why, why would you do that? And how the hell did you know I would be here? I told no one!”
I couldn’t remain seated. I shot to my feet and glared at the old woman. Lark had thought of her as a friend. What had happened?
Ash (The Elemental Series, Book 6) Page 7
