With a snarl of fury he lunged. His foot landed badly on the uneven turf and as he fell, his blade caught against a buried rock. It snapped off near the hilt.
Coilla slashed down at his overextended arm. Blood gushed out. Not even the cloth of his coat could stem the flow.
Again he roared. Scrambling to his feet and backing off, he pulled the knife-blade out of his stump and snapped a vicious, two-sided hook in its place. It looked like something a butcher would use to hang a carcass.
“This is for Blaan!” he yelled, slicing the hook towards her.
She let it swing past then jumped in to seize his forearm. Taken by surprise, Aulay couldn’t resist as she turned the hook in on his guts and disembowelled him. She gave the hook another twist. “And this is for you, scumpouch.”
His face was a picture of stunned disbelief as his lifeblood trickled away.
All this time Stryke had been trying to drive Lekmann down towards the river. The rough ground was proving more of a hindrance than a help, and the orc was too tired for dancing. Once on a better surface, Stryke let rip. His blade a blur of icy moonlight, he cut the stocky man’s defence to shreds.
Lekmann disengaged, gasping for breath. But Stryke had had enough. He sprang forward, his free hand slapping his thigh. The sound distracted his opponent for a brief second but it was enough. Stryke’s sword plunged between Lekmann’s ribs.
The orc put his foot on the bounty hunter’s chest and pushed. Stryke’s blade slid free of flesh and Lekmann hit the water with a splash. His greasy black hair fanned out around him as he lay face down in the wavelets.
The last Stryke saw of him, Lekmann was drifting along with the current, a deeper darkness spreading from his body.
Arms around each other’s shoulders, the two orcs staggered back to their companions.
“I’ve had enough of quiet moments,” Coilla muttered.
They were about to approach the cold, dark camp when Stryke suddenly pulled Coilla into the bushes. With the rising wind she couldn’t hear a thing. But she was beginning to trust Stryke’s hunches.
Moments later, a band of riders thundered to a halt on every side of the half-asleep orcs. There wasn’t a thing the sentries could do about it. Stryke thought his band was getting sloppy, but that was hardly the point now.
From their hiding place Stryke and Coilla watched as Krista Galby stared down at the Wolverines. “Where is it?” she demanded bluntly.
“Where’s what?” Haskeer blustered.
“Don’t give us that!” the leader of Krista’s temple guard said. He dismounted, never taking his sword’s point from a line with Haskeer’s throat.
“Jarno,” the High Priestess warned. “These orcs were our allies. They fought alongside us. That old man there saved my son’s life.” She held her hands out to her sides, then dropped them in a weary gesture. “I don’t want to hurt you. But you took something that belongs to us. It’s important to us, a cornerstone of our faith.”
Nobody said anything. The wind blew its uncanny chill across the clearing. In the bushes Coilla and Stryke felt their own brand of guilt.
“We need it,” Krista added.
The uncomfortable silence stretched out.
Rellston’s patience snapped. He had caught up with his Priestess’s band several hours ago, and now a hundred men stirred restlessly around the Wolverines. The tension in the air was palpable. He dismounted and strode forward to stand over Jup and Haskeer.
Behind the screen of frost-browned leaves, Stryke whispered, “I knew we shouldn’t have stopped.”
Coilla nodded at the scene before them. “So why isn’t your girlfriend keeping Rellston on a tight rein?”
“Maybe that’s as tight as it gets. Come on,” he said. “If they’d wanted to kill anybody they would have started by now. Let’s go and talk to her before Rellston gets out of control.”
They pushed their way out of the tangled leaves.
When Krista saw them, she said coldly, “You’ve done me two favours. Now I’ll do you one. Give me the instrumentality and the Commander here won’t exact a penalty for its theft.”
“What if I need them?” Stryke said, and instantly could have cut his own tongue out.
“Them?” Krista returned. “You have more than one?”
“That’s why we needed yours, don’t you see?” He looked up at her, trying to read her face in the misty moonlight.
“No, I don’t see.” It wasn’t Krista who spoke but Rellston. He stepped in close, staring down into Stryke’s eyes. “If you’ve got another, you don’t need ours. Give it back now.” The tip of his sword came up to rest against Stryke’s windpipe. “I knew I should never have trusted you. Orc trash.”
“Calm down!” Krista insisted. She reached over and gently pulled Rellston’s sword point clear of Stryke’s flesh. “I’m sure we can solve this amicably.”
“I’m not,” Rellston growled, his anger barely in check.
All around them the Wolverines heard the restless sounds of men unsheathing weapons and climbing down from their horses. The orcs found themselves ringed by hostile townsmen. They began easing out their own weapons.
“Don’t be more stupid than you have to be, Stryke,” the Commander said. “You can’t win. You’re outnumbered. Just hand the thing over. That or I’ll make you.”
“Yeah?” snapped Haskeer. “You and whose army?”
“This one, lamebrain,” a man called out from behind him.
One of the grunts suddenly cried out as someone shoved into him. The grunt shoved back. All around the camp scuffles were beginning to break out.
“Stop it!” Krista shouted. “Stop it!”
“Calm down!” Stryke yelled, trying to cool the situation. A swift clash of blades almost drowned his words. Louder he said, “You know us! We’ve fought alongside you. Do you really think a bunch like you can take us all?”
Rellston cursed, earning himself a hurt look from his Priestess. Then he said, “At ease, lads. Let them go for now.”
“Wolverines, fall back,” Stryke ordered. His blade hung loosely in his grasp, ready to attack at any moment as he covered his band’s withdrawal.
Almost all of them had faded back into the night when one of Rellston’s men suddenly called, “We can’t let ’em get away! After ’em!”
Instantly, all was chaos.
“Don’t kill anybody you don’t have to!” Stryke shouted.
Their band’s horses were out of reach, beyond the Mani force. Stryke yelled, “Let’s get out of here!”
He plunged into the bushes at his back once more, ducking overhanging branches and trying not to step on any rotten twigs. It helped that the ground was so waterlogged; the thick layer of mud deadened any sound. Straining his senses to the utmost, he tracked his warband by intuition.
It scared him. But it worked. Soon he’d passed through the thin screen of trees.
He found himself facing an open meadow and, in the faint light that came before the dawn, he saw the darker lines of footsteps painted on the rain-silvered grass. Sprinting along in their wake, he crested a slight rise and saw yet another thicket, with the last of the Wolverines just disappearing into its protection.
He raced up the shallow slope and into the trees. “Should be safe here for a while,” he panted.
“Oh yeah?” Haskeer grumbled from the dappled shadows not an arm’s length away. “Take a look at that, then.”
That was the far side of the copse. And beyond it lay Calyparr Inlet, dull grey beneath the cloudy morning.
Stryke spun around. On every side but one the waters rushed past the little headland on which they stood. And the Manis were streaming up across the meadow at them, Rellston in the lead.
“What we supposed to do now?” Haskeer shouted in frustration. “Swim?”
Jup snarled, “Just open your big mouth and drink it.”
Oblivious of the Ruffetts View contingent bearing down on them, dwarf and orc glared at each other.
&nb
sp; Coilla’s temper snapped. “This is you and your bloody stars!” she yelled at Stryke, slashing her knife through the pouch at his belt.
The pouch fell apart. Almost in slow motion Stryke watched the single, five-spiked instrumentality spinning through the air. One hand belatedly trying to hold the pouch shut, he threw himself forward. But it was too late. The four joined pieces also tumbled out. His fingertips just touched it, sending it cartwheeling across a narrow clearing beneath the trees.
As the Manis burst into the woodland, Stryke saw the single green piece seem to leap upwards as it bounced off the stony turf.
Neither he nor the other orcs were aware of a sodden figure crawling out of the water and into the fringes of the wood.
As Stryke’s scrabbling hands reached out to scoop up the single star, he knocked it flying straight at the rolling meshed pieces. Pouncing on his hoard, he scooped them up against his chest.
He felt more than heard them click together. The puzzle was complete.
Then reality took a step to the left.
21
Blackness.
There was a feeling of intense cold and Stryke’s stomach clenched as though he were falling. His ears were ringing too much for him to hear anything. He reached out to save himself but there was nothing to grasp.
Nothing beneath his feet.
Nothing at all.
Then abruptly he landed.
He tumbled forward, his hands plunging into something icy and dazzling. The shock brought him to himself.
Snow.
Snow, under a blanket of cloud so light it was almost as pale as the whiteness beneath him. Where it had been night just heartbeats before, now it was broad daylight. Low on the southern horizon hung a bleached disc that must have been the sun.
Panic threatened to overwhelm him.
He called out but he couldn’t hear himself shout. For a moment he was terrified he’d gone deaf. Then sound came roaring back. An arctic wind was shrieking around him, tearing at his clothing. Squinting, he could just make out the huddled dark shapes that were the other Wolverines.
Tottering to his feet, he felt the gale pushing at him. He scooped up the precious stars, which had again fallen from his grasp. Then he fought his way to Jup and Coilla, who were just making their first dizzy attempts at standing. Holding on to each other, they all began speaking at once. “Where are we?” and “Where are the others?” were the main questions.
Soon the other warband members staggered into view. They gathered in a slight depression nearby and it kept off the worst of the blast. Drifting snow blew in skeins over their heads and they had to bellow to make themselves heard.
“What the fuck’s happening?” Haskeer yelled.
“I figure we’re in the ice cap.” Stryke’s teeth were rattling with the cold.
“What? How?”
Coilla, arms folded across her body in a futile attempt to keep warm, said, “Never mind the philosophical debate. The real question is, how do we keep from freezing to death?”
Several of the warband had managed to snatch up packs or bedrolls as they fled from the Manis. Some, however, like Stryke and Coilla, had been too busy fending off the humans’ attack. Even sharing their blankets and spare clothes there wasn’t enough to go round.
“Jup,” Stryke managed to say, through lips that were rapidly numbing with cold, “are you up to trying to find a high point? To get some idea of where we are?”
“Right, Chief!” The dwarf stumbled off into the teeth of the wind.
Huddling together for warmth, the rest of the orcs tried to work out what had happened.
“It’s those bloody stars,” Coilla muttered.
“If it was, they saved us from being cut to pieces,” Alfray pointed out.
“Yeah, so we can freeze to death out here,” Haskeer put in bitterly. “Wherever here is.”
Stryke said, “It’s got to be the northern glacier field. The sun was almost due south of us, but I don’t know whether it’s morning or evening now.”
With stiff blue fingers he fumbled at his pouch, then remembered that Coilla had slashed it. Instead, he stuffed the stars inside his jerkin, just hoping he didn’t fall on them if he tripped. At least he found his gloves tucked under his belt.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” said Alfray. “If we live that long.” A gloomy thought struck him. “What if this is Jennesta getting her own back? It’s just the sort of trick she’d play.”
“No.” Coilla’s firm tone was marred by her shudders of cold. “If she could do this, why didn’t she just bring us all back to her camp so she could get her hands on us? And the stars?”
“This is pointless,” Stryke decided. “We don’t have enough to go on.” He pulled his fur jerkin tighter around him. It seemed utterly inadequate in this place. “What provisions do we have?”
A short rummage amongst their salvaged possessions brought a few strips of dried meat to light, along with some crumbling trail bread and a couple of flasks of liquor. Not much to go around twenty-four hungry beings.
Trying to hide his disappointment, Stryke pointed to one of the grunts with a blanket. “Go up and see if you can make out what’s happened to Jup, Calthmon.”
Reluctantly the grunt waded up through the snowdrifts. He was almost knocked flying by the wind when he got above the rim of the depression. It wasn’t that much longer before he returned with Jup following in his footsteps.
The dwarf hunkered down, rubbing his arms, then sticking his numb hands under his armpits.
“There’s lots of crevasses,” he managed through chattering teeth. “Some of them have got bridges of snow across them that won’t bear an orc’s weight. But I think I can see a way down over yonder.” He nodded towards what Stryke thought was the southeast. “We’re quite high up too.” As he spoke, his misty breath crystallised on his beard.
“Anything else out there?” Stryke asked.
“Not that I can see. No smoke. No signs of any houses. I did think I saw something moving. But whatever it was, it kept well away.”
“The sight of you would frighten anything with brains,” Haskeer told him.
Jup didn’t bother responding to the jibe. That in itself told Stryke how badly the devastating cold was affecting them.
“Right,” he said. “First order of business is to get the hell off this damned ice sheet and find shelter.”
In twos and threes they set off, with Jup trailblazing.
Within a short time the utter glaring whiteness had them seeing spots before their eyes. Limping, plunging through frozen crusts into snowdrifts as deep as an orc, they made their way east by south. It seemed like hours before they reached a bluff from which they could see quite a way around them.
Behind, to the north, towered the glacier, menacing in its vast solidity. It stretched from one side of the horizon to the other, a monument to the humans’ stupidity in killing the magic of Maras-Dantia. Even at this distance it seemed to loom above them, threatening to crush them at any moment. As they watched, a segment of it fell away with a sound like thunder. Clouds of snow swirled into the air, and some of the heavier blocks must have bounced for half a mile.
Hastily they began to clamber down the southern face of the bluff. Not all of it was compacted snow. A huge granite boulder seemed to have been trapped in the ice. That made for solid footing, but the rock was slick with hoar-frost. Slithering and sliding, they cursed their way down to a plateau that couldn’t have been more than a hundred and fifty feet above the frozen tundra.
They stopped to catch their breath. Here the rock kept the biting north wind off them. It also hid the intimidating bulk of the ice wall from view. That in itself was a blessing.
Below, in a curve between two thrusting glaciers, the land was flatter, pressed down, it seemed, by the weight of the advancing ice. It was grey with lichen and cut here and there by dark nets of streams that seemed threadlike at this range. Black against the horizon, there was a thin line that might or mi
ght not have been a forest. It was hard to tell with the sunlight glaring in their eyes.
“If we can make it down there,” Stryke said, slapping his gloved hands to bring back the circulation, “we might find shelter. Fuel. Whatever.”
“If’s the right word,” grumbled Haskeer. “I’m an orc, not a fucking mountain goat.”
But the trail down from the bluff wasn’t as easy as it looked. Time and again they came up against a dead end, a drop so sheer they’d never make it.
“Is it me,” said Coilla as they stared at yet another barrier, “or have you got that feeling there’s somebody following us?”
“Yeah.” Jup rubbed the back of his neck.
Stryke, when consulted, said he felt it too.
“Maybe it’s one of those abominable snowmen,” Coilla said, trying for levity.
“They’re just myths,” Alfray stated flatly. “What you’ve got to watch out for is snow leopards. Teeth the size of daggers.”
“Thanks. I really needed to know that.”
They trudged along in silence for a while.
“I see Jup’s scouting is up to its usual standard,” Haskeer muttered as they backtracked yet again.
The way was narrow, crowded with orcs changing direction. Even so, Jup managed to press himself back against the cliff, letting the others pass until Haskeer reached him. Jup’s hand shot out to grasp the orc by the neck. “Think you can do any better, scumpouch?”
Haskeer shrugged Jup off. “A blind man on a lame horse could do better,” he growled.
“Be my guest.”
Haskeer leading, they set off again. It still seemed to take forever to get down to the barren plain. A grunt slipped, only his mate’s grip on his jerkin saving him from certain death. After that they stumbled along holding on to each other’s clothing.
The sun rolled low along the skyline, rather than falling from its zenith. Whether they had been travelling all day or only half of it was moot. What was certain was that night was now falling, and with it came a bank of cloud. It blotted out the sun, dimming the long twilight as it raced overhead. A fine, stinging snow began to fall.
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