Snowbrother

by S. M. Stirling

A chanting came from where the coffles of Minztans were herded for the night. Shkai'ra ground her teeth, remembering where else she had heard it that very night.

  "And they won't stop that, either," the caravanmaster finished.

  "And morale is worse than ever since you pulled the scoutmesh in closer, Chiefkin," Eh'rik said. "Half the band are staying awake all night, then sleeping in the saddle the next day."

  She looked at him coldly, for a full half minute, until he dropped his eyes. "I did that," she said slowly and deliberately, "because the effect on morale would be even worse if I gave an order and couldn't enforce it. Which would happen, if I tried to send them out into the woods alone. So we have to double up, which means less territory covered."

  There was silence. They had all known it, after a fashion, but it was still shocking to hear the words spoken among a folk who would fall on their own swords if commanded on campaign in enemy territory. Eternal shame, miserable rebirth, would be on them if successful mutiny occurred. And the example… Discipline was life to the whole folk.

  "Go ahead," she said. "Somebody propose it."

  The silence stretched. Each officer glanced sidelong at the others, waiting for someone to speak. This was the moment that would be recorded in the song, if there was one, and none wished to be the one remembered as the first to say the naked words.

  At last, Eh'rik spoke. "Some think," he said, using the distancing unpersonal mode, "some think that if we released the slaves, left the rest of the booty, we could get out alive. There have been warbands that never came back from the forests. Not often, but it has happened."

  The wind in the trees and the singing of the slaves were the loudest sounds, and the hissing of fresh snow as the air blew it along the surface of the ice. He paused to look each one of them in the eyes before going on:

  "I say no. It would be against honor. The gods would turn their faces from our ghosts at the Judging. We all die, soon or late, but we are the children of the Ztrateke-ahkomman. We do not concede, we cannot be defeated. Killed, yes, but we do not bow the neck. Even if none sees our endings and returns to tell how we die"—that was a dreadful prospect, to be deprived of the praisesong—"Zaik Godlord and Baiwun Avenger will know."

  Shkai'ra felt a warm rush of gratitude; he would back her to the end. There was a rustling and settling around the circle. It was done, and they were relieved. Now they could abandon hope, and set about seeing that they and their followers died well. The best grave for teeth was a throat, went the Saying.

  The shaman shook his head. "This woodswizard— stronger than I thought, yes. Every night I fight him, yes, until my magic falters, yet still he has the strength to summon the demon." He rubbed a hand over the scars and bruises on his face. "So well I know him, that I see each bristle of his beard—"

  Shkai'ra flung up a hand for silence. A thought nagged at the corner of her mind: she saw Dh'ingun bristling at the sound of strange music, heard a dying forest warrior speak… Kommanzanu had a single pronoun for both sexes. Minztan was more archaic in its grammar; it had three, and used the specific as often as the general one when speaking of a particular individual. And the Minztan in the woods, as he lay bleeding…

  " 'She summons well,"" Shkai'ra quoted softly. She came to her feet. "General attack alert: to your posts. Kh'ait, Eh'rik, you, spook-pusher, come with me!" She plunged toward the sled.

  Maihu dropped the contact as she watched the camp, after Shkai'ra left. It was strong, and growing closer. Soon now. That gave her a tightly reined-in satisfaction, and so did the sight of the camp itself. The Kommanz warriors no longer sang or talked at their tasks; they were quiet even for a taciturn people. Few bothered with sex, and none was pulling partners out of the slave herd; most ate their jerky cold in an echoing silence, then rolled themselves in their bags and sought sleep. Many stayed squatting upright in pairs, back to back with their bows across their knees, listening in haunted fascination to the singing of their captives.

  When she saw the Kommanz leaders walking toward her, Maihu knew a moment of wild hope. If they were going to ask for terms…

  She could sense their fear. Perhaps no one would have to die after all. She struggled to put down a sudden hot longing for revenge; to so repel the raid would be a blow for the New Way, and she had always felt that the ultimate goal of the Seeker's movement was not just to defend, but to bring all the peoples into the Harmony.

  And is that all my reason? she asked herself.

  Kh'ait wasted no time as he hobbled up. Maihu felt his hands grip the front of her jacket, sweep her into the air, and smash her as easily as a jointed doll against the side of the sled. Through the roaring in her head and the coppery salt taste she knew sickly that she should have remembered—in a steppe-dweller fear bred ruthlessness.

  Shkai'ra stepped close. Firelight gleamed on her eyes and teeth, lips drawn back in a rictus of carnivore fury. She motioned the Bannerleader aside and reached out to grip the Minztan's upper lip in one gauntleted hand, twisting until lances of pain shot out from the sensitive flesh.

  "We've guessed," she hissed in the Minztan's own tongue. "We know. Tell it all now, and you can still have your life. Balk and we'll rip you and your sprat apart."

  Even in the midst of her fear, Maihu noted the offer. Almost sadly, she shook her head, braced herself. It, needed only a few more minutes now, and the Seeker's force would be close behind It.

  Shkai'ra shrugged and turned aside. Eagerly, Kh'ait gripped her by the back of the neck. But he struck no blow. Instead, he forced her face down to the level of the Eater's, and the fingers of his other hand remorselessly held open her lids.

  The eyes… the pupils grew until they swallowed the blue of the iris. Then they swelled, swelled until they consumed her field of vision. They were black, and empty, but the emptiness knew and hungered. Slowly, effortlessly, something began to peel back the layers of her mind like the skins of an onion. And she knew when that was done, she would still be standing there, but that same bottomless nothing would be staring out of her eyes also…

  When the alarm came, she barely heard it. She tried to struggle, but her arms and legs were very far away. The red-bearded Kommanza dropped her and tried to whirl. His wounded leg gave under him, and he clutched at the side of the sled for support. It rocked under his weight.

  A horn bellowed through the night; there was panic in the sound. A sled near the head of the column went over on a campfire and exploded in a gout of blue flame as the shattered barrels spouted potato-spirits. Voices rose in the shrilling Kommanz war-cry, then cut off sharply as if a knife had sliced across that eerie keening. In their place came first a confused murmur, then a single hoarse scream of terror and the agony of death.

  "Stay here!" Shkai'ra yelped at Kh'ait. With a convulsive wrench she seized the shaman by his drum-laden belt and hurled him spinning a dozen paces, staggering as he struggled to keep his balance in the savage backlash of interrupted sorcery.

  "Get your spelltools! Do something!" she ordered, cuffing him away. To Eh'rik: "Come on!"

  They ran through a camp thrown into chaos; horses on picket lines screamed fear as they caught the whiff of terror from their masters, and a deeper alienness from beyond. The slaves milled about, nerving themselves for a break to the woods but not quite daring; not yet. Walks-with-Demons darted among them, cut a child free with a few economical strokes, and ran for his tent with his kicking burden, almost unnoticed in the milling confusion. There would be a conventional attack soon, he calculated, and he meant to be ready for that, at least.

  Walks-with-Demons gave a mental howl of anguish as he burst through the Veil, anguish and bitter pleasure. His body remained motionless in his tent, one hand thrust through the child's cracked breastbone; there had been no time for careful preparation, and the boy's piping scream cried counterpoint to his. The shaman's essence twisted, preparing to impose itself on the world. The currents were wild and dark tonight, amid fear and the sorcery-driven currents of the gathering sto
rm. Belief was stretched to breaking-point as hundreds found themselves drawn into waking nightmare; that strengthened him.

  Now they will know terror, he thought, as he prepared to walk out among the enemies of his folk. His consciousness fountained up through red-shot darkness, tearing through the fabric of reality like a great shark savaging its way to the surface behind an open grin.

  no.

  The shaman struggled, but the grip was too hard. Behind it was the strength of a belief as strong as his. He threw malevolent chaos at his enemy, and felt it met by an intricate ordering of music, surrounding him with a Dance that went on forever, driven by coruscating ropes of sunlight.

  i will eat, eat your soul! he screamed, lunging forward.

  indeed, yet there is more at work here than you or i or the one you serve, i do not contend with you. The sudden absence of resistance tricked him, and he felt himself tear loose from handholds of concept and intention, spiraling down into brightness, i make you a gift of my soul, come to me.

  —and he saw—

  —Shkai'ra before a city wall that rose like a mountain—

  —looking across a campfire at a small dark-haired woman; there was a silver streak in the black mane, and witchsight showed energy crawling over her in a curtain of blue-red—

  —holding to a great wooden pole in a lashing wilderness of storm-driven waves—

  —on the deck of a ship, looking up at a city carved into the side of a mountain as snow feathered down—

  The vision became closer, threads of fate connecting lives. For a moment the snowflake beauty of the pattern entranced him, and then he fled. This time his scream of pain was quite sincere, in world and Other-world. His body fell forward over the dead child.

  The war leaders ignored the shaman in their pounding run toward the head of the column. Shkai'ra passed a Kommanza running in the other direction, weaponless, mouth gaping in horror. She killed him without even breaking stride, and it was only as she was shouldering and cursing through the immobile ranks that stood facing the treeline and what stood outlined against it that she remembered him. It was the one with green eyes, Dh'vik.

  The useless fact crawled through her mind as she stood, riveted. There was light enough from the bright burning of the lifewater-soaked wood to see It clearly. With all her soul Shkai'ra wished that there was not. Here was what had eaten her killers.

  Tall it was, near three meters, and the outline was that of a man. But it was broad enough to seem squat, feet wider than snowshoes upholding legs like tree trunks; the arms hung lower on its thighs than a human's would. Dirty whitish-brown fur covered it, thickening to a mane around the head and down the spine. It was male, and she could smell the rankness of its scent across twenty meters of frozen lake. In some crazed stockbreeder's corner of her mind she estimated the weight of the thing to be at least four times her own.

  Worst was the face. The skull was long, rising to a ridge along the crest, set on a neck thick to vanishing; there was no chin under the thin-lipped mouth. That was open, showing yellow dog-tushes between puffs of white breath-fog, and it drooled. The nose was vestigial, a knot of flesh below eyes that were utterly out of place, long-lashed, golden brown, mild and curiously gentle. The creature called, in a high tone hideously unlike the bull roaring she expected. It was modulated; it was an echo of the chant the slaves had sung, and part of it was in registers not meant for the human ear, and part of it was not speech at all but a something else that woke feelings as old as the race, that bristled the hairs down her spine under her gambeson. She remembered that tone-series played out over her head, and her cat bristling at something she could not hear.

  It strode forward. A Kommanza stood before it, frozen, as helpless as those it had approached unseen in the woods. The huge hands stretched out, clenched into fists, swung bunched through the air to connect with ponderous force. The crunching sound came clearly, and the warrior made a rag-doll flight through the air, to land flopping and broken.

  A paleoanthropologist of another era might have been fascinated to see the sight, if she could have believed what no fossil recorded. Shkai'ra felt the pulse of her warband like blood in her throat; the face of the thing before her was an intolerable affront, the kinship to her own kind a thing that demanded the blotting-out of death, hers or the thing's. And in a moment the warriors would break. This was too much to ask of them. They would break, and the Minztans would hunt them through the woods like deer.

  Ancestors, receive me, she prayed silently, in that moment of transcendent fear become rage. Ahkom-man, judge me.

  Shrieking, she ran forward to meet it. Yet even then the Kommanz battlemind did not desert her. Despite fear, despite despair and killing-lust, the habits ground in by a lifetime prompted her to remember the beast's fighting style.

  Lunging, she went in under the hammerstrike of the great fists, stabbing for the thigh and the snakelike vein that showed through sparse fur. Speed saved her, and luck, and the reflex that kept her shield clenched hard against her left side. The slanted-chisel point hurt the beast, and the blow was glancing, and the protection enough that she merely flew through five meters of space, landing without the splintering of bone through heart and lungs and kidney that might easily have befallen.

  Flashing before her eyes, taste of metal and salt in her mouth; with a strength she had not known was in her, she rose to her feet and waved the blade. The world reeled drunkenly and showed double before her as she shouted, over the hooting of the animal and the crackling of the flames.

  "If it can bleed, it can die! It's only a beast, a strong beast! Kill it! Kill! Kill!"

  There was a deep base throb, a whirring thump. The arrow sank feather-deep between the huge ribs. The creature gave an almost human moan of bewilderment and pain, plucking at its chest. There were too many humans, too much light; it could not hide. Among the Kommanz fear turned to fury, as a dozen shafts flickered toward the thing that had made them admit they were afraid.

  Safest it would have been to stand off and fill it with arrows, but their hearts demanded a closer ending. Screaming, maddened, they swarmed over it with sword and knife and warhammer. And though it killed two more and wounded many, though some would never walk hale again, at the last, they got it down and gave it its death.

  None had much attention to spare for what passed elsewhere.

  The first of the attacking Minztans nearly ran into a small horsehide tent in the darkness. Pragmatic, he slashed the guyropes to imprison the Kommanza within. He did not succeed, but what flowed forth was only a momentary chill. Shaking it off, he plunged on.

  Maihu struggled to her feet as she heard the call of the Snowbrother, fighting off the sense of glassy detachment that lingered before her eyes. It had come; her people would be close behind, but there was no sense in remaining, no need for further risk now that duty was done. She was not tethered. Taimi was; he dropped from the end of the sled and thrust a hammer into her hands. It was one of her own work tools, a long iron-headed sledge. Two quick blows against the back of a knife held down on the link of wooden chain nearest his ankle cut most of the way through; only the leather casing held, a slender thong of it.

  Kh'ait turned from the dim outline of the struggle by the fire and saw them. The pale eyes lit in his narrow red-bearded face, under the braids; here was something that could not run, that he could slay before he fell. The deepest, buried wish of all his kind, to kill and kill and kill and kill and die. He drew blade. Maihu faced him and called to her child.

  "Taimi, run for the woods. Go to the Seeker—she will find you a place." He sawed at the last link of leather, then hesitated. His face twisted.

  "Oh, please, run!" she said.

  Kh'ait lurched forward, and she prepared to delay him, no more. Then something woke in her. She remembered a sacked village and dead kinmates, rape, and laughter, and Sharli pinned living to a door, and the knives driven through his flesh. The first blow knocked the saber from Kh'ait's hand. He yelled in surprise, lurch
ed, fell to one knee, snatched for his dagger left-handed. The second stroke crunched down on his collarbone. The third landed on the back of his head.

  She saw a shadow moving out of the corner of her eye. The world ended in darkness.

  The shieldwall halted. Narritanni hacked over his shield, swept it up and around to catch the blow, then stabbed underneath it. The snarling painted face disappeared, but another took its place.

  "Ward me!" he snapped, leaping backward.

  Two others crowded in, and the line stayed intact. The Minztan strained his eyes into the night; the snow made the darkness almost impenetrable, like fighting in a closet that threw ice in your face. He looked left and right. The attack had stopped, and as he watched the Minztan line took a lurching half-step backward toward the east. More and more Kommanza were running up to take places in it; a mounted squad appeared, distant firelight glinting red on their lanceheads above the dark mass of foot that shoved and smashed and grappled across the surface of the river. His second ran up panting behind him.

  "Got them loose," she shouted in his ear. "All we can find!"

  A smaller body collided with him out of the darkness. Narritanni's sword turned aside its killing arc barely in time.

  "Who the ahlspl are you?" he said.

  "Taimi—Taimi Jonnans-kin," he gabbled, grasping at the soldier's shoulders. "My kinmother—Maihu—'

  "Where is she?" Narritanni asked eagerly.

  The boy pointed west, beyond the Kommanz line. Then he screamed as Narritanni shook his head.

  "She'll have to make her own— Circle, grab him!" Between them they wrestled the boy to a halt. "Get him out of here," he went on. "I'll manage the retreat."

  He doubted very much the raiders would pursue them into the woods… or do anything much in the morning but head west at full speed. "An expensive lesson," he muttered to himself, readying his hoarse throat for the bull-bellow it would need. "For all concerned."