by Troy Denning
Something gave, so he struck again and again, his movements growing increasingly jerky and erratic. Finally, Kelemvor stopped to see what he had accomplished. The fighter had smashed the end of the branch into a rounded pulp. His hand throbbed with the force of his blows, but the exertion had warmed his body a little.
The black ice showed only the tiniest depression. It was much harder than the driftwood, and the fighter’s efforts had done nothing to break it. If he wanted to smash his way free, Kelemvor knew he would have to find something harder than the driftwood, harder than the ice.
Kelemvor thought of the flint and steel in the purse he kept around his neck, but quickly discarded the idea; they were just chips he used to start campfires. They might serve well enough as hard points if fastened onto the end of the stick, but he had no way to do that. Besides, they would certainly be lost if they flew off the end of the stick, and that was a risk the fighter could not take. When he freed himself, he would need the flint and steel to start a fire. If it came down to death, he would use the flint to scratch at the ice, but it would be futile effort and he knew it.
Kelemvor turned his attention back to the shoreline. With the dulled stick he still held, the warrior could reach other objects. Unfortunately, the only things on the shore were more sticks and the bird. A wave of despair passed over Kelemvor as he decided that he could do nothing to save himself, for the ice was too thick and too hard. He was going to die, like the others …
Don’t think about them, he told himself. Thinking about them will demoralize you, make you want to die.
And Kelemvor wanted to live. It surprised him, somehow, but he definitely wanted to live.
The crow hopped to within the fighter’s reach. The bird pretended to take no notice of Kelemvor, though it was difficult to tell exactly what its black eyes were focused upon. Perhaps the crow was testing the warrior, trying to decide how much longer it would take for him to die.
“I won’t hurry on your account,” Kelemvor grumbled.
The crow cocked its head, then opened its beak and hissed. Kelemvor thought of the beak pecking at his eyes, of the spiked claws digging at his ears and nose. He winced.
Then an idea occurred to him, though it was born not of wisdom, but of the irrationality that comes with freezing to death. He scratched at the ice with his fingernails and noticed that he had scraped away the slightest bit. Of course, even muddled as he was, Kelemvor knew he would be long dead before working free of the ice with his own nails.
But the crow’s claws were sharper than fingernails. And the fighter could see many possibilities for the beak.
As if sensing his thoughts, the crow watched Kelemvor warily.
“I think I’ll go to sleep,” Kelemvor said, concerned by how thick his speech had become. In his confusion, he feared the crow might not understand him if he slurred his words.
The bird, of course, showed no sign of understanding him at all.
Kelemvor laid his head in his arms, keeping one eye open just enough to watch the bird. It felt good to rest his head, and he noticed that he was finally warm. The warrior was extremely drowsy, and thought the effort of his long swim had finally caught up to him. He closed both his eyes.
Ten minutes later, the crow decided to investigate the immobile man. Taking to its wings, the bird approached twice and fluttered overhead without landing. Finally, it settled a foot from Kelemvor’s head and stared directly into the warrior’s face. The man’s eyes remained firmly closed, and his breath was so shallow it could not be detected.
The crow hopped forward, then pecked at the fighter’s nose. When Kelemvor did not stir, the crow pecked again, this time taking a pinch of flesh away in its beak.
Kelemvor woke with a start and saw the black form in front of his eyes. Even as addled as he was, the fighter realized the crow was causing his pain. He lunged and his right hand closed on oily feathers. His left hand caught the bird by the leg, and the warrior felt a bone snap.
The crow squawked and slashed with its free foot. Kelemvor closed his eyes. Sharp claws ripped into his brow. The fighter screamed and the bird pressed harder, trying to rip through the man’s eyelids and jerk an eyeball loose.
Kelemvor released the bird and covered his face. An instant later, the crow’s wings beat the air and the bird was airborne. The fighter wiped the blood from his brow and looked after the bird. The fight had charged Kelemvor’s body with adrenaline, and the warrior was thinking clearly enough to wonder why he had ever believed it possible to scratch through six inches of ice with a crow’s claw.
“Filthy squab!” Kelemvor called, touching his fingers to the cuts in his forehead.
The crow circled several times, then flew away toward the west. With some alarm, the warrior noted that the sun was sinking and there were only about two hours of daylight remaining.
He began to feel lonely and frightened, and wished he had not chased the bird away. Though it had been waiting to pick his bones, at least the crow had been company.
Kelemvor noted that his legs had gone numb from the thighs down, and that his hands had taken on a blue tint. He was in danger of becoming a lump of ice. The fighter began waving his hands and trying to kick his feet, hoping to get the blood circulating and warm them.
This was only a temporary solution. If he was going to survive, he needed to warm himself. Fortunately, it looked as though the tools to do that were within arm’s reach.
Hoping that this was not another confused idea brought about by the cold, Kelemvor started gathering materials to start a fire. Stretching as far as he could, the fighter swept the snow off tufts of beach grass and pulled them out by their roots. He stored the grass inside his shirt, and did not stop gathering it until his shirt was bulging. The warrior was working more by instinct than by thought, for he had started a thousand fires and trusted his intuition more than his muddled intelligence.
Next, he gathered all the driftwood within reach, separating the smaller pieces from the larger. Within minutes, he had three small piles of wood. Finally, he selected his six largest sticks and laid them to his left, side by side so they made a small platform. From experience, he knew that once the fire was burning well, the flames would convert the ice directly to steam. But in the initial stages, the fire had to be kept off the ice.
Kelemvor removed a handful of grass and rubbed it vigorously between his hands to dry it. He laid it atop the platform of sticks and repeated the process until he had a small pile of fairly dry tinder. Then he took the flint and steel from his purse and started striking them together. Five anxious and painful minutes later, a spark caught. One blade of grass began to burn, then two, then several. The fighter put on more grass and, after it started burning, held several twigs over the fire to dry.
Thirty seconds later, Kelemvor began to shiver and could no longer hold the twigs. He laid them on the fire. The wood began to smoke, then one caught. The fighter blew gently on the flame. The other two twigs began to burn.
Kelemvor put his flint and steel away. Minutes later, a small circle of orange flames danced in front of him. The breeze eddied around his body, blowing ash and smoke into his face. His eyes teared and he coughed, but the warrior didn’t care. To him, the smoke was perfume and the coughing a small price to pay for heat. Soon, he stopped shivering and his whole torso was warm.
Ten minutes later, Kelemvor no longer felt confused. He was fatigued and numb below the waist, but he was no longer drowsy. His motor coordination had returned to normal. The fire had made a small bowl in the black ice, and the fighter took comfort in seeing that it melted like normal ice. Now, all he had to do was find a way to break it.
Kelemvor considered starting a fire where his hips disappeared into the frozen lake, but rejected the idea. He could not reach enough driftwood to melt away that much ice. What he needed was a way to chip the ice, and that meant he needed something hard.
The lake was surrounded by all sorts of cliffs, boulders, and rocks, but there wasn’t even a p
ebble within reach. They were all buried beneath the sandy beach.
Had Kelemvor still been half-frozen and muddled, he would have missed the significance of his last thought. However, now that he was warm, his thoughts were focused and he was mentally alert. With renewed determination, he grabbed the strongest piece of driftwood within reach and began digging in the sand in front of him.
Not six inches below the surface, he found the first rock. It was a round, hand-sized stone useful for throwing, but not for smashing through ice. He kept digging.
The second stone was a little better, being about the same size, but with jagged features more suited to chipping. He set aside this rock, too, and kept digging.
A foot beneath the surface, Kelemvor found the ideal stone. It was a dark gray thing, featureless and drab. But to the fighter, the stone was more beautiful than any diamond. It was as large as he could handle with a single hand. On one end it had a small, sharp point, and the other end was large and ideal for gripping.
Kelemvor took the stone, then smashed it into the ice near his hip. A small spray of black chips shot up. He brought the rock down a dozen more times, trying to create a crack in the ice. The result was simply a dozen more small chips.
At the top of the slope, wings fluttered. The crow settled beneath its tree, holding its left claw off the ground.
Looking at the injured leg, Kelemvor said, “I’m sorry about the foot.”
The crow tilted its head and, unable to stand for long on one foot, settled on the ground as though sitting in a nest.
The fighter smiled and held up the rock. “It looks like dinner will be late,” Kelemvor added.
The crow’s head bobbed twice. Had Kelemvor’s mind been more addled, he might have interpreted the awkward gesture for agreement, as if the crow were saying, “Delayed, but not cancelled.”
The fighter decided to ignore the crow and began chipping beneath his chest, where the ice was thinner. To his delight, a large, jagged section broke away. Working toward his waist from this break, Kelemvor managed to start a crack that pointed more or less toward his right hip.
He worked for twenty minutes, pausing every now and then to throw some more driftwood on the fire. In that time, he managed to extend the crack clear to the middle of his hip. Then, as the sun sank toward the moor hills and the sky turned pink, his fire melted through the ice. It dropped into the water, leaving a sizzling and smoking hole two feet to his left.
“No!” Kelemvor screamed.
His only answer was the chill moan of the wind.
The fighter began to grow cold immediately. He tried to pull out of the ice, hoping the crack he had opened was enough to free him. His hips did not budge.
Kelemvor reached for more grass to start another fire, then found he had already used most of it. Worse, only a few sticks of driftwood remained within reach. Even if he did start a second fire, it would never last through the night.
He beat his forehead against the ice and cursed. Already, numbness was creeping back into his hands and fingers, and he knew that there was not much warmth left in his body. At last, Kelemvor allowed himself to think the unthinkable: he had been wrong to insist upon rescuing the caravan. His stubbornness had gotten Adon, and probably Midnight, killed.
“Friends!” he screamed. “Forgive me! Please, Midnight! Oh, Midnight!” He screamed her name again and again and again, until he could no longer bear hearing the hills throw the name back at him.
When he stopped yelling, the crow flapped down to the shore, taking care to land out of arm’s reach. It squawked three times, as if suggesting Kelemvor give up and die.
The bird’s eagerness enraged the fighter. “Not yet, squab!” he snarled. He grabbed the first stone he had uncovered, the small round one, and flung it at the crow. Though his aim was wide, the crow took the hint and flapped away into twilight. After the bird had gone, Kelemvor picked up his large stone and angrily pounded at the ice on his left. If he was going to die, he was determined to fight until the end.
Kelemvor was so angry that he did not notice the tiny fractures his blows were causing. Five minutes later, a long crack opened in the black ice from his shoulders to the hole the fire had caused. It took only ten minutes more to open a seam all the way to his left hip.
Then, as the warm hues of dusk gave way to the violet tones of night, the section of ice under Kelemvor’s chest broke free. The fighter pulled his body forward, no longer clamped into place by the ice at his hips. Without pausing to celebrate, he hauled himself onto the shore and began gathering grass and wood.
After starting his fire, Kelemvor removed his frozen pants and boots to examine his feet and legs. The legs were blotchy and pale, but he thought they would recover given time and warmth. His feet were in worse condition. They were white, numb, and cold to the touch.
Kelemvor had served in enough cold weather campaigns to know severe frostbite when he saw it.
Midnight woke from a deep slumber, her body sore and stiff. She had been dreaming of a dry bed in a warm inn, so the mage was confused and disoriented when she opened her eyes and found something else. The gloom was so thick she couldn’t see her own nose, and she was lying face down on cool sand, half in, half out of lapping water. Behind her, a waterfall pounded the surface of a small pool.
The waterfall reminded Midnight of her journey down the subterranean stream and the unpleasant drop through the whirlpool. The magic-user had landed in the dark pond behind her. After that, she had floated aimlessly until she’d reached the shore upon which she now lay.
Midnight had no way of knowing it, but that had been ten hours ago. Fatigued from the misfired cone of cold and the struggle in the stream, her body had collapsed into a restorative sleep as soon as immediate danger passed. The mage now felt physically and mentally rejuvenated, but was still emotionally exhausted. Adon was dead, and that knowledge blackened the joy and wonder of her own survival.
Midnight wanted to blame somebody for Adon’s death, and Kelemvor was the easiest one to condemn. If the warrior had not insisted upon aiding the caravan, the zombies would never have trapped the party and Cyric would not have caught them unprepared.
But such reasoning was weak, and Midnight knew it. There were too many coincidences and contingencies. That Cyric would recover so quickly had been unthinkable, and the magic-user still could not imagine how he had. But given the fact that he had, it was inevitable that the thief would catch up and attack. Midnight had been just as blind to that possibility as Kelemvor, and it was not fair to blame the warrior for not foreseeing what she had also failed to predict.
If the blame for Adon’s death lay with anybody, Midnight thought it lay with her. She should never have let her friends convince her not to kill Cyric when she had the chance. The magic-user alone had seen how brutal the thief had grown, and she should have known that his willpower and ruthlessness would give him the strength to pursue them.
She would not make the same mistake again. There was nothing she could do to bring Adon back. But if she ever escaped from this cavern and saw Cyric again, she would avenge the cleric’s death.
The thought of escaping the cavern turned Midnight’s thoughts to Kelemvor, whom she assumed was also in the cave. The warrior had splashed into the stream after her, and that had been the last she’d heard of him. It did not seem unreasonable to assume he had dropped through the whirlpool behind her. He could be sitting thirty feet away, thinking himself alone in dark.
“Kelemvor!” Midnight called, rising to her feet.
Her voice echoed off the cavern’s unseen walls, barely audible above the roar of the waterfall.
“Kelemvor, where are you?”
Again, the only answer was her echo.
A depressing thought occurred to her. She had avoided drowning, but that was no guarantee the fighter had. After all, Kelemvor had been carrying the tablet. It would have been difficult to keep from drowning while holding onto the saddlebags.
“Kelemvor,” she called
, more desperately. “Answer me!”
He did not answer.
Picturing Kelemvor’s drowned body floating beneath the waterfall, Midnight drew her dagger. She summoned the incantation to create magical light and performed it. The dagger began glowing with a brilliant white light. It suddenly grew extremely hot and she dropped it, her fingers searing with pain. The magic-user kneeled and thrust her hand into the pool’s cool water, irritated that her magic had misfired.
Still, the dagger glowed brightly enough for Midnight to see that she was on the shore of a dark pond. Twenty feet away, the waterfall poured into the cave from a hole in the ceiling, churning the surface of the pond into a dark froth. The ceiling was fifteen feet high and vaulted like the interior of a cathedral. Hundreds of stalactites hung from it, their tips glistening with moisture. Drooping spheres of minerals, with skins as rough and pebbly as dragonhide, sprouted from the walls. In every corner, murky tunnels and alcoves ran back into the depths of the cave.
“Kel!” Midnight called again.
Her voice echoed off the walls, then faded into the sound of the waterfall. She was alone, lost underground. Adon was dead and Kelemvor was gone—maybe dead as well.
As if to emphasize the mage’s morbid point, her dagger’s light suddenly dimmed and changed to a red hue. She looked down and saw that it had become a puddle of molten iron. It was slowly trickling away, taking the last vestiges of light with it and leaving Midnight in the dark once more.
The magic-user considered her situation. First of all, even if it was impossible to find a way out of the cavern on foot, she realized she was not trapped. If the circumstances became desperate, she could try using her art to escape. Considering the unpredictability of magic, doing that would be risky. But if there was no other option, Midnight would not hesitate to trust her luck.
Once the mage realized she had a way out of the cave, it became easier to think calmly. The second thing Midnight considered was that she was alone. Adon was certainly dead. If Cyric’s arrow had not killed him, the fall or the stream had. But the only proof she had that Kelemvor drowned was her own conjecture, and it was born out of solitude and fear rather than sound thinking. After all, Kelemvor was stronger than Midnight, and she had not died. Even burdened with the tablet, his chances of surviving were much greater than hers. It seemed likely that he had washed out of the water in a different part of the cavern.
