Soldiers of Ice h-7

by David Cook

"Each respects the other's valley. Usually there is no trouble. Besides, it is best not to rouse the hornet's nest." As he spoke, three figures darted from the huts for the dark shelter of the woods. "Best to fly high. They are skilled with the bow"

  Were she alone, Martine would have swept as low as she dared for a better view. Instead, she heeded Vil's warning and pulled Astriphie back up.

  "Are there many of them?"

  "The gnolls? It's not a large tribe, but more than the Vani… enough to be a threat."

  Vil's answer sounded ominous. Although there were more questions she could have raised about the skills of the gnolls, their hunting patterns, and even their totems, Martine lapsed into silence, the cold and the shouting getting the better of her throat. There was a great deal you could learn about such creatures from things like totems,

  she thought idly. Take a bear totem it meant the tribe respected strength and solidity, a good sign all in all, even in savage creatures like gnolls. On the other hand, if the totem were, say, an ice worm, that wasn't a good sign. Tribes that chose totems like that were too often cruel and ravenous like their god.

  Given the proximity of the glacier, she wouldn't be surprised if this group had chosen the latter. The closeness of the ice probably made for sudden death. Hard lives bred hard gods.

  A tug at her coat reminded Martine of her duty. `There!" Vil shouted at her ear to be heard over the wind. "Over there!" Tentatively easing his grip, he pointed to a swirling plume of ice, a jet of frozen crystals, that heaved and spurted like the irregular storms of the sea against the crested shore. The icy column rose up until it expanded like some swollen vegetable a cauliflower instantly came to Martine's mind.

  "See it? Is that it?" Vil shouted again, uncertain if she had heard him.

  "It must be. It's certainly unusual," she howled back. Martine had no doubt it must be her goal. What else but a geyser of hoarfrost would mark a rift such as Jazrac had explained? She understood now why the wizard hadn't bothered to describe it. With a rekindled confidence that she could end this quickly, Martine leaned the hippogriff in a broad arc that would carry them toward the plume.

  When they had less than a mile to go, the air around them changed, the temperature plummeting with ferocious suddenness. Bone-gnawing cold attacked every inch of exposed skin, even penetrating through the layers of fur that had managed to keep them warm till now. Astriphie rocked and struggled mightily against the increasing buffets of the frenzied gale.

  The trio were close enough now to make out vaguely, through the swirling gaps of wind burning ice, the starshaped fissure, crudely heaved upward in cracked blocks. The main ice jet, for now it was apparent there was a small group of lesser fumaroles, pulsed with the otherworldly tide that forced its icy discharge up from the center of the fissure and sent it flowing down one of the jagged arms. The tighter the gap became, the higher the plume shot as the pressure increased until it hit the end. Lightning couldn't have raised greater thunder as the geyser broke over the splintered end, blowing out chunks of glacial ice visible even at a distance.

  Vil shouted something, but most of it was lost: "-so close!"

  Martine shook her head furiously at what she guessed he had said. "Closer. The less time on the ground, the better." She hoarsely shouted her explanation, although it was unlikely Vil could hear any better than she. With a firm command, she pushed the hippogriff, its normally keen eyes now flashing with fire, closer and closer. "We'll move in quick and"

  The concussive boom of the roaring flux devoured the rest of her words. Astriphie's wingbeats faltered, momentarily pitching the group into an unplanned dive. Behind her, Vil's weight shifted, threatening to overbalance the hippogriff. Dropping the reins from one hand, Martine thrust her arm back and levered the slipping woodsman back into his seat. The effort burned her throat in frozen gasps and triggered a fit of wracking coughs. The fire of ice scorched her lungs, left her mouth filled with pasty spit.

  The shuddering gasps left her unable to steer, and by the time Martine recovered, it was too late. Astriphie, uncontrolled, had panicked and plunged iceward while attempting to wheel away from the fissure, the source of the beast's terror. Just as the hippogriff slipped into a steep-banked turn, the geyser spewed forth another shuddering blast.

  The great pinioned wings were spread almost full against the outrushing force of the wind, catching it like the swollen sails of a yacht leaping before the ocean breeze. Frantically sensing the danger, Martine pitched her slight body hard into the rushing wind the way a sailor on that same yacht would lean himself as a counterbalance against the tipping hull. Understanding the need for her move, V'il leaned with her. For a perilous moment they held the balance, the arc of a perfect parabola suspended between the shattered white ground and the roiling sky. We can make it, Martine exulted.

  And then it was over. Astriphie's voice, a whinnying screech of pain, sundered all hope. The hoarse cry barely drowned out the sickening popping noise as the hippogriff's uppermost wing crumpled, flexing back over Martine and Vil to angle in directions it was never meant to point. The imaginary parabola collapsed as the rushing wind seemed to roll the crippled hippogriff completely over.

  Suspended time was replaced by a whirling blur of snow and sky as the hippogriff tumbled from the heavens. The beast frantically beat at the air with its remaining wing, the other flopping uselessly with each roll, feathers raking the Harper's face as she struggled to guide her frenzied mount down. Behind her, Vil could do no more than cling to whatever purchase he could gain, more than once finding himself suspended helplessly by the single safety rope around his waist.

  Loosing the now useless reins, Martine lunged to the side, flattening against the hippogriff's unsocketed wing as the fall righted the creature. The agonized screech from the pain she caused echoed in the woman's ears, but the great wing responded and struggled to spread itself full once more. It was barely enough time, for the ground, all icy barbs and jagged ridges, was speeding up toward them. There was no hope of slowing their furious glide, indeed barely any chance of remaining righted. As the glacial landing field swelled closer, Martine knew it meant the death of her brave steed and almost surely its riders.

  "Cut free!" she screamed, one thick gloved hand fumbling for her knife. "Cut yourself free and jump!" With the jagged ice splinters that lay below, it wasn't much of a chance, but it was their only one.

  Martine heard a sharp twanging sound behind her, and the plummeting hippogriff lurched as its load suddenly shifted. The Harper thought she heard a human howl, and then it was lost in the sweeping gale.

  The ranger's mittened hand closed on the handle of something she could only hope was her knife, and with a blind slash, she hacked at the saddle's restraining belts. Half her body, suddenly freed of its bonds, swung upward as if it had lost all weight. Instantly she lost her position, and the hippogriff's wing folded, slamming against her with a force that almost knocked the blade from her grasp. Beating back the feathers with one hand, Martine slashed furiously at the last strap. As she was still sawing at the leather, she tumbled away from the doomed mount, and at the same instant, the last strap gave way. She flew off the rump of the hippogriff, her feet flying over her heels just as Astriphie's wings cracked into an upthrust sheet of ice. The roar that filled the glacier was superseded by the squealing, popping, pulpy grind as the hippogriff gouged a bloody track across the dirty white snow.

  Martine saw none of this, however, for in the instant Astriphie hit, she was twisting futilely in midair in an attempt to land on her feet. Then all at once the white was upon her tearing, ripping, and beating as she smashed through the frozen crust and sank into the needlelike snow beneath it.

  Three

  Martine's next recollection was of darkness a blessed darkness that numbed the raging fire coming from somewhere inside her body. She floated back in the light cocoon where she had been hurled and tried to pinpoint the source of the pain that dreamily eluded her understanding. Even so, the fire became s
teadily stronger, and with it came awareness. The pain settled over her the way autumn leaves accumulated on the ground, slowly spreading throughout her body but primarily in the legs, a frightening combination of raw, shredded nerves and cold, soothing numbness. The here and now struggled through the agonizing haze, bringing a view of a queer, phantasmagoric world, exaggerated and tilted. Shades of white, lathered red, and pink resolved themselves into angles of ivory all splattered with blood and gore.

  Not ivory, Martine corrected herself. Ice… I'm half buried in ice tinged with blood. The crimson stains captured her attention, a clarion call to warn her of the danger of her condition the steady glaciation of her limbs if she didn't get moving, and soon. Floundering in the broken snow, Martine twisted about to view her own body, make sure it was intact, only to have the constant fire give way to stabbing pain. The darkness swirled back, threatening to overwhelm the dim light of her world. Martine held it at bay by focusing on her self, on her mission.

  Using the strange clarity that torment brought, Martine drove herself further, seeking to learn what had happened to her body. From the way her side hurt, one or more ribs were probably cracked. She had felt that pain once before, and the woman knew she could survive that. Elsewhere were more cuts than she could guess. Blood trickled down the ice crystals on her brow and clouded the vision in one eye. Reaching up to wipe the warm smear away, the Harper discovered that her arm throbbed fiercely. She remembered with absolute clarity hitting the snow with her shoulder.

  After that pain, Martine gingerly put the rest of her body through a mental inventory. Although every move caused pain like fire to play along her bones, nothing seemed to be broken, other than perhaps her ribs. Ice-clotted, black-red scratches scored her once sturdy winter gear, but overall the woman was pleased she had no great gashes or dangerous wounds, at least so far as she could tell. Frantically she remembered Jazrac's stones as if they, too, were part of her body. A quick pat assured her that these had also survived unbroken.

  Satisfied that she was bloodied but in working order, Martine stiffly floundered out of the trench her body had dug. She had to find Astriphie and Vilheim. To her relief, she found that at the glacier's surface, the howling wind had eased considerably, although the thundering booms from the fissure still shook the crystalline ground. It seemed that for every four steps she took, the ground

  would suddenly heave and tremble in response to the rift's violent shifting.

  Finding Astriphie was no problem. The hippogriff's body was splayed across the glacier, smears of its blood trailing, sledgelike, in the beast's wake. Astriphie had struck the top of an ice cap, shearing that away in a neat gauge: Pinion feathers decorated the bloody grooves where the animal had slid, and Martine could see clearly the long scratches where the beast had clawed the ice in its death slide. At the base of another mound lay the hippogriff, its mighty wings ripped and pierced by jagged splinters of ice. The beast's eaglelike head was twisted around at an impossible angle. Below the neck, the left half of the mount's feathered rib cage was caved in; white angles of bone and tissue showed through the remains of the downy hide. Steam rose from the blood and viscera spilled onto the snow, partially held in by the tangled straps of the Harper's saddle.

  Martine suddenly felt the intense cold penetrating deep through her body. She collapsed to the ice, seized by violent trembling, and tears mixed with blood in her eyes. Breathing was possible only in lancing heaves that sucked in swirls of icy air. Her throat burned with each spasmodic gasp.

  Even after the fit passed, Martine could not move for a long time. The cold ground, smooth-slick and red, sapped her energy, making it harder than before to rouse herself. It would be nice just to sleep here with Astriphie… The thought whispered insidiously in her mind.Surely she could just lie here and rest a bit before doing anything else…

  Martine swore as she realized what was happening. It was a decidedly creative oath, laced with a sea dog's salt and bitter references to geysers. The thought of what Jazrac might think of her less than ladylike tongue made Martine appreciate her cursing all the more. It helped immensely. Before she realized it, she was up on her feet, wavering unsteadily as she surveyed the crash site, looking for Vil.

  Unsupported by snowshoes, her feet sometimes broke through the snow crust in places where the surface was a deceptive sheet of old snow. Every time it happened, the glacier seemed to try to swallow her whole. As she labored her way out of another snowy morass, she sardonically thought how fortunate she was to be on the smooth ice field here and not in the tangle of crevasses they had seen from the air.

  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 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.