As Willard and Banderas walked over to take a look, I summoned my ally who didn’t rely only on his eyes or his ability to sense magic to hunt prey. Silver mist formed at my side, with Sindari soon following.
Clarke looked over at him, offered his cocky smile, and Sindari’s first words were: Why is that one here?
We’re on a mission with the Army. He’s in the Army.
He talks too much to be a warrior. And he has presumptuous hands.
As far as I could remember, Sindari had only met Clarke once, when we’d been helping Willard move into her new apartment. Clarke had petted Sindari, something he allowed from friends—Dimitri apparently had excellent hands—but had hissy fits about if others did it without asking.
He’s here because he can sense magical beings. Just like you. I patted Sindari on the back. We need to find out if the dark elves are up here. They would most likely be in caves formed by ice melting under the glaciers.
Why would ice melt under a glacier?
It’s a volcano, and hot gases ooze out of the ground.
Sindari lifted a paw and looked at it, as if expecting to see these oozing gases tainting his pads.
We also saw tracks as large as but different from sasquatch, I added. Only a few miles from here. How are tigers at walking on snow and ice?
Unless the snow is deep, it should not be problematic. I am a magnificent stalker from the Tangled Tundra and have hunted and downed prey in all weather conditions.
Good, because I couldn’t find booties with cleats for tigers.
Booties? No predator would wear such a thing.
Dogs wear them in poor weather. I’m sure Rocket has a set.
Sindari sniffed. Your dogs are not real predators. They chase their own tails.
I bet Rocket would have found the dark elves by now.
Sindari glared at me and then gave my foot a significant look.
If you chew it off now, you’ll find the experience unpleasant. I’m wearing little metal spikes on the soles of my boots.
Armor for your feet?
Armor to keep my ass from sliding off the mountain.
“Get that tiger up here,” Willard called.
She may not pet me either, Sindari informed me, then stalked up to the empty patch of ground Willard and Banderas were examining.
Her cat will appreciate a lack of tiger scent on her hands when she returns home.
I pulled my pack out of the helicopter and arranged it on my back so I could still access Chopper. Even though we ought to be safe from dark elves during the day, the prints of those mystery creatures ensured I wouldn’t set my weapons aside, even to pee.
As I walked up to join Willard—Sindari was already sniffing the ground—the ice axes, carabiners, and other climbing gear jangled. There wouldn’t be much point in activating my cloaking charm as long as I carried all this.
“I don’t see a monitoring station,” I said.
Sindari, already finished sniffing, headed off up the mountain.
Willard kicked aside some snow and pointed to four metal legs with the tops melted off, leaving only nubs bolted to a boulder embedded in the earth. “It was here. You’re sure there aren’t any dragons on Earth right now?”
The melted and re-hardened nubs did look like they had been blasted by fire—extremely hot fire.
“Reasonably sure,” I said. “Dark elves would be able to conjure heat with magic.”
Off to the left, Banderas pushed aside more snow, revealing the warped and melted husk of what must have been the equipment’s metal housing.
Dark elves were here, Sindari spoke into my mind. Not dragons. This happened last night. I am following their trail.
I don’t see any prints here except ours.
It snowed after they walked this way, but I can smell them. There were four.
Four isn’t so bad.
I’m sure there are more at their destination. Are you coming?
Yeah.
“Sindari has the trail of dark elves.” I waved to where his silver form was already a quarter of a mile up the slope. “Are we going in now if he finds a cave?”
“Better by day than by night.” Willard had the men set up and test radios and gave orders to the helicopter pilots to wait until we figured out if we would be setting up a camp and staying in the area.
I pulled out my phone and wasn’t surprised to see reception that fluctuated between one bar and no signal. No ordering pizza delivery up here.
We tramped up the mountain after Sindari, maneuvering over the snow and slick rock much more slowly than he did. Soon, the rock disappeared as we trekked onto a glacier. Since we were well above the tree line, it was easy to see the route ahead. It grew steeper, so we would have to dig out ropes and ice screws and slow down even further.
Sindari reached the last relatively flat spot and sat, gazing up a rocky slope that would be challenging for us to climb. Blue ice gleamed in the sun, making me squint even with sunglasses on.
The trail disappears here. His nostrils twitched as he tested the air.
Disappears? I don’t see any caves they could have gone into.
My guess is that they levitated over the glacier. Wait here. I will find a route to the top and attempt to locate where they came down. Perhaps an entrance to their lair is close.
I trusted that he, much closer to a mountain goat than a human, could find a path safe for him. If he fell off a cliff, he could return to his own realm, and I could summon him again to my side. If only the rest of us had that luxury.
“We’re climbing that?” Clarke asked as Sindari trekked up the mountainside. “I didn’t realize the dangerous mountain-scaling portion of this adventure would start right away.”
“Sindari is checking it out first,” I said, “to see if he can pick up the trail again.”
“He lost it?” Willard frowned.
“He thinks the dark elves started levitating at this point.”
“Handy. When do you learn to do that?”
I thought about mentioning Lirena’s leaf. The night before, I’d spent a couple of hours trying to form the patterns in my mind that she had shown me, and succeeded only in giving myself a headache.
“I’ll let you know,” was all I said.
I smell fainter traces of other people who were up here. Sindari was no longer in view, and his words had grown fainter in my mind. Humans.
There’s a missing team of scientists up here somewhere.
A long silent minute passed before he spoke again. You better come up here.
Did you find the trail?
Yes. I also found your scientists.
19
It took us an hour to traverse what Sindari had goated up—I decided that was a legitimate word for it—in scant minutes. The glacier was slick under the fresh snow, and the slope grew steeper, so we had to rope together and drill in ice screws to set anchors along the way.
Our progress felt as glacial as the glacier itself, and I looked wistfully back at the area where we’d left the helicopters, but there wouldn’t have been anywhere for them to land up here, nor would it have been easy to find a safe place to rappel down from them.
I didn’t sense anyone magical around, other than Clarke, Lieutenant Sabo, and Sindari, but the mountain itself was dangerous, and who knew what had happened to the scientists? From the ominous way Sindari had spoken, I assumed we would find them dead. I doubted he was up there, sitting in the middle of a cheerful group and getting petted.
Behind me, Clarke grunted as his foot slipped, even with the crampons. “A bunch of scientists came this way?”
“I’m sure any scientists who come up here have mountain-climbing experience,” I said.
They probably knew Rainier a lot better than we did and had picked an easier path to their destination.
The ground shuddered faintly, and we all paused. Snaps came from the glacier, some right under us.
“Earthquake?” someone called.
“There’s
volcanic activity up here all the time,” Willard replied.
A hint of brimstone entered the air from some nearby vent.
I didn’t point out that the numbers we’d pored over from the now-defunct monitoring station had rarely registered high enough on the Richter scale for the ground shaking to be noticeable to people. At least, they hadn’t in the last year. The last couple of weeks were another matter.
The snaps faded, and we pressed on until we reached the edge of a gully. The ice we’d been walking on sloped steeply downward to scree and a stream of meltwater running along the bottom. A hundred meters up the gully was the source of the water, a large ice cave almost twenty feet high at the mouth. I sensed Sindari in that direction.
We climbed down the slope to reach the scree and water. A couple of food wrappers that had blown away from someone’s pack proved that others had been here, even to those of us who couldn’t sniff out trails.
Sindari appeared out of the darkness of the cave and waited in its mouth. Steam fogged the air around him, creating a surreal mist in the air, and the brimstone smell returned, more intense than before.
“Better than a hound,” Clarke said when we reached our furry guide.
Sindari didn’t comment, merely turning to face into the shadows. The cave entrance was in shade, the sun behind the mountain, but it still took a moment for our eyes to adjust to the dim interior. And to pick out the bodies. Mutilated bodies.
If I’d been skeptical that Sindari had truly smelled dark elves, this would have removed all doubt. There weren’t any beams that the bodies could have been hung from, but they were staked to posts driven into the hard, frozen ground—nothing short of a gas-powered fence-post driver or magic could have accomplished that. As with the dead in the Northern Pride headquarters, their eyes were gouged out, their tongues slit, and their hearts carved from their chests.
There were four men and two women, the entire research team. This ended my notion that the scientists might have somehow been turned into the creatures tramping across the mountainside. Finding them dead wasn’t any better, but I was a little relieved we wouldn’t have to battle monsters with human souls trapped inside.
Willard bowed her head and mumbled a prayer for the dead, then ordered Banderas and another man to scout the area to try to figure out what had happened. She had the rest of the soldiers take the bodies off the posts. While they worked, she radioed a report back to the helicopter pilots, saying that we had proof that hostiles were in the area and needed the choppers to come pick up the bodies.
I wasn’t sure who her reports went back to, but someone higher up her chain of command must have given permission for the outing. She would have to keep them in the loop.
The dark elves were here for several hours. Sindari walked past a spot where a campfire—or sacrifice fire—had recently burned, then headed deeper into the cave. But there is no access to deeper tunnels. At least not now.
As I followed him, we passed a vent spitting sulfuric smoke into the air. The ceiling grew lower after that. When we reached a spot where I could reach up and touch it, Sindari stopped. The way ahead was blocked, not with ice but with boulders. The way those boulders had been precisely packed to form a wall made me doubt Mother Nature had arranged them so.
Sindari nosed the ground. I pulled out a flashlight and fanned the beam over the area. There was more dirt than rock, and I could make out footprints. Human—or elf—sized footprints made by shoes, not bare feet.
I believe they closed this off recently, Sindari said, because there are old trails as well as fresh here. They may have been using this entrance for some time.
Can you tell if a tunnel continues on the other side of the blockage? Would there be any point in blowing up the boulders and trying to get back there? I looked over my shoulder to where Banderas had his hand in the ashes while Willard took photos of the bodies.
I cannot tell if there are tunnels back there, but I do not sense anyone with magical blood within my range.
And your range is larger than mine. So there’s not a dark elf for miles.
Correct, he said.
We should look for another access point then.
Even if there were miles of tunnels back there—I assumed the promise of something expansive to study had drawn the scientists to this place—they would probably be even harder to traverse than the glacier outside. These passages, formed by warm gases from vents, wouldn’t be as spacious and open as something like an old lava tube.
It is possible the dark elves are there and cloaking their auras, Sindari pointed out.
That’s true. Let’s see what Willard wants to do. I had grenades, but I’d seen her team pack explosives specifically designed for clearing rock.
“Anything back there?” Willard asked when I rejoined the group.
“They blocked the passage with boulders. Sindari doesn’t sense them anywhere behind it. If this was the entrance to their new underground lair, they’ve moved it.”
“They were here last night.” Banderas rose, wiping ash off his hand. “There’s still a hint of heat within the embers.”
“They may have come specifically to deal with the scientists,” Willard said, “to make sure nobody stumbled across them and could report their existence to the world.”
One of the other soldiers brought over something he’d found. A smashed cell phone.
“Definitely no reporting back,” I murmured, then raised my voice and shared Sindari’s thoughts on the blockage.
“He speaks to you?” Clarke asked.
“Telepathically.”
The men regarded Sindari curiously, but again, nobody questioned it beyond Clarke’s query.
The helicopters arrived while Willard and Banderas were checking the back of the cave. I helped the others carry the dead scientists outside and carefully wrap them up to be airlifted out. Not that their comfort mattered much now. They’d been killed and their bodies maimed. What would their families think? What had they thought? They’d thought the dangers of the mountain would be the worst thing they would face and had probably only stayed in that cave for protection from the storm.
“We can blow up those boulders,” Willard said after the helicopters departed and we reconvened in the cave mouth, “but I have to have a good reason. This is a national park.” She looked at the posts where the dead scientists had hung. “I think that’s reason enough. Sergeant Parekh, set up the charge.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As the rest of the team climbed the gully slope back up to our anchors and ropes, I quietly asked Willard, “Is there any chance an explosion up here will set off the volcano?”
“No. I had Einhorn—our physicist—do a big analysis yesterday of what dark elves could possibly be planning to do to make Rainier erupt. He spent an hour on the phone conferring with a volcanologist. I was hoping the answer would be nothing, that the dark elves are deluding themselves.”
“I take it the answer is that they aren’t?”
“We don’t think so,” Willard said. “We’re all fuzzy on what exactly they can do with magic and what kinds of devices they can make, but we’ve seen a lot of magical goblin devices, so we can make guesses about what’s possible.”
“Goblins are the demo species? Gondo with his stapler trebuchet?”
Willard snorted. “Some of them make more serious inventions. For the dark-elf plan to work, our guys said it would take a volcano that’s already primed to erupt, one with a lot of magma and pressure built up down there over decades. It’s been more than a hundred and twenty years since Rainier has done anything significant. There was an eruption recorded in the first half of the nineteenth century and volcanic activity all through the last half, but it’s been quiet since 1894.”
As we climbed out of the gully together, I thought of the vents melting the ice, promising a great deal of geothermal activity in the area. But those little vents probably weren’t enough to let off the serious pressure that built up in a volcano.
“So it’s primed to erupt even if the dark elves do nothing?” I hunkered down beside Willard.
“We can’t predict when it would happen naturally, but there’s a reason there are seismic monitors all over the mountain. And then there are the glaciers. Einhorn says Hollywood movies of dropping nukes into calderas aside, the most likely way to trigger an explosion would be to weaken the top of the mountain—the cork on the champagne bottle essentially—and release the lithostatic pressure keeping all that rock in place, then dump a bunch of cold water on the molten magma and let the fireworks start.” Her voice was absolutely humorless as she spoke.
“So all they have to do is make some holes in the roof and melt the ice?”
“Basically.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. It wouldn’t be easy for us to do with explosives—which is probably why you don’t see a lot of terrorist plots to blow up Yellowstone—but your dragon could do it, I’m sure. And we know the dark elves are powerful and that they like to build magical artifacts.”
“They probably know what lithostatic means without having to Google it too.” I eyed my phone and the lack of reception. I couldn’t even pretend to be smart without the internet at hand.
“Probably.”
“Did you know? Before talking to Einhorn?”
“Of course.”
I squinted at her. “I’m debating if I believe you.”
“Try opening a book now and then that doesn’t have dragons in it.”
“Trust me, I’ve sworn off dragon books. I’m reading a romantic comedy now. All of the characters are human.”
“Sounds unimaginative.”
Sindari left the cave, and bounded up the slope to sit next to me. For the briefest moment, I thought I detected some magic behind those boulders.
A dark elf? I rested a hand on his back.
It seemed inanimate, like one of your charms, but it had even less of a magical signature.
Maybe a beacon or alarm to let them know if someone disturbs their rocks?
That is a possibility, Sindari said, but I suspect they already know we’re here and what we’re doing.
Elven Doom (Death Before Dragons Book 4) Page 16
