Ta-se-ho smoked constantly. But he would not let them give in to fatigue, and when they had turned the corner on the endless swamps and soft snow of the N’gara peninsula, he led them along the edge of the inland sea, where for two days they made rapid time, all but running on the ice.
Until the ice broke and Nita Qwan went in.
They were close to shore, near the end of a day of cutting across a big bay, so far from land that they had passed terrifyingly close to the ice edge and the water. And late in the day, safe, apparently, Nita Qwan had turned aside to piss in the virgin snow, taken a few steps off the beaten snow where their toboggans had passed…
He felt the ice give, saw the snow darken, and then—faster than he’d have thought possible—he was in, all the way in, the black water closing over his head.
He had never been so cold. The water, when he went in, gave a new definition to what cold might be. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see. He panicked instantly.
And then he was out again.
Gas-a-ho pulled him out with one mighty heave on his blanket roll, which was buoyant and high on his shoulders. Gas-a-ho had run to him, thrown himself full length on the snow, and grabbed the pack. Ta-se-ho had his feet.
The ice on which he lay made noise, a low grumble like the rage of a living thing, and Ta-se-ho pulled them both back, and back again, and then they were all crunching through the swift-breaking ice over shallow water that did not immediately promise death.
Ashore and exposed to the wind, drowning seemed kinder. And now Ta-se-ho was like a madman, driving them on, making them run, walk, and run again, over and over, along the exposed shore. To their left, the inland sea went on, apparently forever, in an unbroken snowfield. To their right, atop bluffs that lowered over them, were snow-covered trees and naked black spruce that went on to the horizon, a wilderness of trees that seemed to cover all the earth.
When Nita Qwan thought he must be near death, the old man stopped them in a cove that offered some protection from the wind and pulled the cover off his own sled. He took the pot from his sled and carried it to an exposed rock at the base of the tall sand and stone bluffs and placed it gently there.
Almost instantly, it began to give more heat. Nita Qwan fell to his knees.
“Strip him,” Ta-se-ho said gruffly.
“My hands are still warm!” said Gas-a-ho in wonder.
“The greatest gift the Lady could give.” Ta-se-ho did not smile. “He’s far gone. He went all the way in.”
Nita Qwan heard them only from a distance.
He merely knelt and worshipped the warmth.
The wind rose, and icy rain began to fall. They stripped him and only then did the two Outwallers begin to collect materials for a shelter.
Unbelievably, as soon as Nita Qwan was naked, he was warmer—much warmer. He began to wake up.
Ta-se-ho was tying gut to a stake. He looked over. “Did you see the spirit world?” he asked.
Nita Qwan was having trouble speaking. But he nodded.
Ta-se-ho shook his head. “I dreamed all this. You do not die.”
Nita Qwan looked at the old man. “Do you?” he asked.
The old man looked away.
But by sunset, all three of them were warm enough, and dry. A roaring fire lit the edge of the coast and the bluffs behind them, and they made a chimney of hides and the fire came up through it, drying Nita Qwan’s clothes and moccasins.
The next day they killed a deer. Ta-se-ho tracked the buck, and Nita Qwan put an arrow into him at a good distance, earning him much praise from the other two. The old hunter nodded.
“In this snow, I couldn’t run down any of the deer’s children,” he said. He walked with a spear in his hand, but he never seemed to use it as anything but a walking staff. It was a fine spear, made far away by a skilled smith, and the old man had taken it as a war prize in his youth.
Like the spear, the deer was thin, but the meat was delicious, and they ate and ate and ate.
“How much farther to the People?” Gas-a-ho asked.
Ta-se-ho frowned. “Everything depends on the weather,” he said. “If it is cold tonight, we will risk the inland sea again. We must. This is not just for us, brothers. Think of all the people coming back this way. Every day matters.”
Morning saw them rise in full darkness. It was snowing, and coyotes bayed at the distant moon. Tapio had provided them with three beautiful crystal lights, and with the lights they were able to pack well and quickly, but even with light, there were numb fingers and badly tied knots. Each morning was a little worse—each morning, the damp and cold seeped into furs and blankets a little further. Nita Qwan’s joints ached and he was hungry as soon as he rose.
He looked at Ta-se-ho, who bent over, touching his toes—and cursing.
“I am too old for this,” he said with a bitter smile. Then his eyes went out to the hard surface of the inland sea. “Pray to Tar that the ice holds,” he added.
Nita Qwan watched the ice while he ate some strips of dried venison and drank a cup of hot water laced with maple sugar.
“Let’s go,” muttered Gas-a-ho.
Ta-se-ho stood smoking his small stone pipe. He smoked slowly and carefully and watched the lake and the sky, letting the younger men collect the last camp items and pack the toboggan and tying down the hide cover.
“Ready,” Gas-a-ho said, sounding tired already.
Ta-se-ho nodded. He threw tobacco to all four compass points, and the other two men sang wordlessly. Nita Qwan went onto the ice carefully.
But the ice held all day. The clouds were high and solid grey, and snow fell for most of the morning, and then the wind came in great gusts towards evening. They camped in the spruce hedge along the shore, a cold, miserable camp made habitable only by Tapio’s pot. There wasn’t enough wood to make a fire big enough to warm a man. But the pot warmed them, and warmed their water and their venison, and they slept.
They woke to fog. It was deep and bleak, and very cold. Despite the freezing fog, Ta-se-ho led them out onto the ice and again they walked, and walked, heads bowed, backs bent against the strain of towing the toboggans at the ends, walking as swiftly as the snow and ice under their feet would allow them. The fog was thick and somehow malevolent.
Twice that day, the ice cracked audibly, and Nita Qwan flinched, but in both cases Ta-se-ho seemed to commune with it and then led them on. He was aiming for a distant bluff that towered above the lake, visible when the wind shifted the fog, then lost again as the fog came back and covered the sun.
The old man made the other two men uneasy by taking the shortest route, which was across the great north bay of the inland sea. They walked almost thirty miles, the hardest day so far. With the intermittent fog and the flat surface of the inland sea, the day took on a mythical tinge, as though they were travelling across one of the frozen hells that most of the Outwallers feared. The presence of the lake under their feet, the groaning of the ice, the odd sounds in the fog…
From time to time the old man would stop, and turn around. Once he stopped and smoked.
To Nita Qwan, the day seemed endless and the fear increased all day—fear of drowning, fear of being lost. When the fog covered them they had no path and no landmarks, and yet the old man kept walking, barely visible a few yards in front.
Ta-se-ho stopped for the fifth or sixth time.
“Is this a break?” asked Gas-a-ho. He began to drop his pack.
“Silence,” Ta-se-ho said.
They were perfectly still.
The ice groaned, a long, low crunching sound that came from everywhere and nowhere in the frozen, fog-bound hell into which they’d stumbled.
“Something is hunting us,” Ta-se-ho said suddenly.
Gas-a-ho nodded sharply. His face became slack, like a person walking in sleep.
Nita Qwan took his bow from its deer hide case, took his best string from inside his shirt. It had been drying there for two days, and it was warm.
Carefu
lly, trying not to display his near-panic and the trembling of his hands, Nita Qwan strung his bow. He rubbed it a little before he bent it, and he listened as he pressed it down.
It didn’t crack. Either the bow was not so very cold, or he had prepared it well.
The string bit into the grooves in the horn tips, and he was armed.
Only then did he give voice to his fears. “What is it?” he said, watching the fog around him.
Ta-se-ho shook his head. “It is only a feeling,” he said.
Gas-a-ho surfaced from inside his mind. “Flying!” he barked.
His right hand shot up, and a flash of lightning left his hand. It was an angry orange white and it left a dazzle on Nita Qwan’s eyes.
There was a detonation that made them all flinch, following Gas-a-ho’s lightning bolt by about one beat of a scared man’s heart.
Just over Nita Qwan’s head, something screeched.
The old man thrust with his spear—the spear moved faster than sight could fully perceive, and then everything happened at once—Gas-a-ho was down in the snow, blood flowering around him, and there were black feathers in the air around them, and Nita Qwan found himself fitting a broad-headed arrow of irkish steel to his bow. He was conscious that he had already drawn and loosed twice.
“Move!” Ta-se-ho said.
Nita Qwan got Gas-a-ho onto his own toboggan. The younger man was bleeding from a terrible wound right across his back where a talon had sliced through his backpack straps and into the meat of his shoulders. But even as he got the man onto his toboggan and began to pull, the blood flow slowed and then stopped.
Nita Qwan tried not to look up. He got the tumpline and brow band of Gas-a-ho’s ruined pack over the younger man and tied the neatly sliced ends to the thongs that ran the length of the body of the sled.
Ta-se-ho put himself in the straps of the now heavily overloaded toboggan. “I’ll pull,” he said. “You watch the sky.”
Nita Qwan took up his bow.
The old man leaned into the straps and began to run.
Above them, something gave vent to avian rage—a long, slow scream that froze the blood.
“Trees,” Ta-se-ho panted. “We need to reach the trees.”
“How far?” Nita Qwan asked.
The old man put his head down and ran.
It is very difficult to run on snow and ice with a bow in your hand and snow shoes on your feet. Harder to do so and watch the sky above you.
The wind came again—a gust, then a sudden wall of wind, so hard that it seeemed to lift them and move them along the surface of the inland sea. It came from behind them, pushing them forward.
In a hundred heartbeats, the fog began to break for the third time that day. The sun was setting in the west—already, the day had a red tinge.
The tree line of the shore was only half a mile away.
The great bluff towered over the lake, a pinnacle of stone that rose many, many times the height of a man. Up close, even in a state of fear, Nita Qwan could see that the whole pinnacle of stone was carved—or perhaps moulded. It was fantastically complicated, even from this distance a terrifying, massive evocation of fractal geometry.
But more immediate was the pair of black avian shapes wheeling in the air above and behind them. They were half a mile away, too.
The two men ran on.
The two predators banked and came on again.
Nita Qwan turned, saw their intention, and planted three shafts in the snow beside him.
He loosed his first shaft when the range was too long. His second shaft vanished into the air, and he had no way of judging his aim. His third shaft went into one of the great black monsters.
The fourth shaft…
At this range, he could see that the nearer creature had a great deal of trouble remaining airborne, and had Ta-se-ho’s spear deep in its side and a long burn mark.
The farther creature had a beak full of teeth—an unnatural sight that chilled the blood. It projected a wave-front of fear that caused Nita Qwan to lose the ability to breathe. But he got his fourth arrow on his bow, raised the shaft…
He loosed, the toboggan pulled by the old man seemed to explode, and Ta-se-ho leaped like a salmon.
His shaft vanished, black against black, into the mess of feathers on the farther monster’s breast.
Orange lightning played over it.
Ta-se-ho caught his spear-shaft. He was dragged—he was flying for a hundred paces.
The barbed spearhead ripped free of the great black bird even as it turned its teeth on the old man.
He fell.
Blood vomited on the snow—the bright orange bird blood fell like rain.
The great black thing fell onto the ice.
The ice cracked and broke.
Nita Qwan could spare the old man no more attention. The mate of the fallen creature turned for another pass.
Nita Qwan undid his sash, dropping his heavy wool capote in the snow. Then he took four more arrows from his bark quiver and pushed them into the snow.
“I can’t hold the wind,” Gas-a-ho said, as clearly as if they’d been having a conversation.
Nita Qwan registered that without understanding.
His adversary levelled out, wing-tips flexing up and down in the cross-breeze.
As fast as he could, Nita Qwan loosed all four arrows into the oncoming monster’s path.
The second one scored into a wing, and the giant bird seemed to lose fine control over its flight. It screamed, and the third arrow struck its breast—it paused, and the fourth arrow missed.
It passed well to the north of them, low, over the land, and kept flying.
The ice was breaking behind them.
“Save him,” Gas-a-ho said. “I will hold the ice.”
With one last glance at the sky, Nita Qwan threw his bow down atop his friend and took a hemp rope from his toboggan. He ran across the groaning ice towards the black water and the orange blood like fish roe on the snow. The setting sun threw a red pall over the whole ice field.
Ta-se-ho was alive. He wasn’t swimming or floating.
He was walking.
They were deep in the bay, but the black water was only a hand-span deep here, and the old man was slopping along, and cursing.
Again, they built the biggest fire that they could. By luck, or the will of the spirits and gods, Nita Qwan found a whole downed birch tree nearly free of snow. While the wounded Gas-a-ho and the old man curled around Tapio’s pot, Nita Qwan broke and stacked birch as fast as his frozen fingers and exhausted, post-combat muscles would allow. He stamped the snow flat, laid old rotted logs on it, and built a fire.
Ta-se-ho nodded. “That fire will tell every living thing on the inner sea we are here.”
Nita Qwan paused, his tinder box in hand.
Ta-se-ho shrugged. “I’m wet through and he’s lost a lot of blood. We can die right here, in a couple of hours, or risk the fire.” He shrugged.
But even frozen and afraid, they did not lack cunning. Nita Qwan’s hastily chosen campsite was close to the base of the spire of worked rock, in what was virtually a chamber cut into the living rock, closed on three sides. It took him four tries to get his tow to burst into flame, but he did—and he got a beeswax candle lit in the still air, and then put the flame to a scrap of birchbark.
In minutes, he had his companions stretched out under the canopy of a whole tree fire, the heat over their heads too much for a man to bear. The only way to be near it was lying flat, and the stone walls around them reflected the heat.
Nita Qwan bent over Gas-a-ho, but the younger man managed a weak smile. “I’m patching,” he said.
Ta-se-ho nodded. “Leave him, Nita Qwan. He’s deep in his art. Now that he’s warm, he’ll have more spirit.”
“Will the fire bring more foes?” Nita Qwan asked.
Ta-se-ho made a face. “We are at the base of the Tu-ro-seh. We will have strange dreams tonight.”
Nita Qwan shifted—his back w
as actually against the carved monolith. The carving was both bold and minute, and went in long whorls with no symmetry up the sides—but the closer that he focused on it, the more he saw. His eyes began to follow—
“Do not look too closely,” Ta-se-ho said.
“Who made it?” Nita Qwan asked.
“The Odine,” replied the hunter.
Nita Qwan shook his head. “I am new to the People, Old Hunter,” he said. “Who are the Odine?”
“Better ask, who were they?” Ta-se-ho said. He got out his pipe and began the lengthy process of filling and lighting it. There was silence punctuated by the exuberant sounds of birch burning. The smell was delicious—the very smell of warmth and comfort.
In the firelight, the shapes on the monolith seemed to move. The illusion was greater than it should have been. The surface of the stone appeared to have a million snakes crawling over it, and each snake to be covered with worms, and each worm with centipedes, and each centipede with some tiny creature—on and on.
“Do not look too much,” Ta-se-ho said again. He leaned back, fumbled for a burning stick, and found, like thousands of men before him, that a large fire is the worst place to light a pipe.
Finally he found a burning twig.
“Do you know how the People came here?” he asked.
Nita Qwan knew the legends of his own people. “My people—in Ifriquy’a—say that the black seas were parted and our people were led across the dry sea bed to our new home.”
Ta-se-ho nodded. “Too short to make a good story. But a good idea for a story.” He busied himself inhaling smoke.
“The earliest legends of the Sossag people are about the Odine. The Goddess Tar brought us here to defeat them. And we did. We destroyed them all—every tentacle and every worm.” He nodded. “The north is studded with their monuments and their tunnels.” He leaned back and exhaled smoke. “This is the tallest. The old women say that there is a city under our feet. Many who seek wisdom come here for the dreams of the old ones.” He nodded. “I did.”
“What did you dream about?” Nita Qwan asked.
The old man smoked quietly. “Awful things,” he said eventually. “Nothing from which to take a name, or follow a path.” He shrugged, and lay down. “But most of the Wild fears these places. Only men are too stupid, or too ill-attuned to stay near them. So perhaps the Odine are not dead, but merely sleep.” He grinned.
The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) Page 29