“Mo—go below!”
Alan heard Mark’s shout to his sister.
But Mo took no notice. Her small figure was stumbling and sliding over the slippery boards toward Kate and her brother. With horrified eyes, Alan watched as Mo clattered into them both, reaching out toward Kate, who still held onto the rail with one desperate arm. Spray drenched Mo’s hair so it was flat with the oval of her head. Her eyes were protruding. Mark held out his hand to her but she refused his help, her feet slipping and sliding over the icy deck. Suddenly the prow caught on another reef. There was a great shudder as the stern jerked high out of the water and another foaming torrent rushed over the deck. Through the mist, Alan caught a glimpse of something monstrous, a creature larger than a man, with a long lizard-like tail and huge fangs bared in its bat-like mouth. Its leathery wings were battering through the gusts of wind, its clawed feet were extended out toward the three struggling friends.
“No!” Mark cried, and let go of Kate, throwing his body forward in order to slide toward the staggering figure of his sister.
As he reached Mo, she evaded him again, her arm stretched out as if struggling to clutch Kate’s outstretched hand. Against the roar of the surf Alan faintly heard both girls scream. The clawed foot of the monster caught Mo by her hair and she was raised aloft. Then, as she writhed and reeled in its grasp, the creature opened its claws and dropped her into the moiling water. Mark clutched the terrified figure of Kate in his arms, while his teeth clenched together in despair.
Terror! Alan’s mind was suddenly flooded with the sensations in Mo’s bewildered brain.
In that instant, he knew that Mo was drowning somewhere in the wake of the ship. He dived in and was swallowed by the tumult, crashing against ship and boulders, yet struggling to search with open eyes in the swirling currents beneath the surface. Shaking the confusion from his mind, he struck upward, his legs and arms flailing until his face broke the surface. But he could see nothing. Mo was nowhere near him.
“Mo!” he shouted, his voice torn from his lips and lost in the background thunder.
A moment later he was sucked back under.
Mo!
He expressed his call through the triangle in his brow. In answer there was the faintest whimper. If they were communicating it was through thought alone. Through Mo’s open eyes he glimpsed the race of water, a whirling current around a huge black stone. She too was under the surface, still alive, but she would not survive long. He tried to shake off his fur-lined boots but they were too tightly laced. His coat, heavy with water, was dragging him under. But his fingers were too numbed to unfasten it. There was no time. Mo’s terror was overwhelming him. Her mental screams had become an explosion in his brain. But where was she? She couldn’t be far from him.
Think, Mo—think!
Panic lunged at him from her frightened mind. The terror was so great, no sensible message could possibly get through it.
Alan’s body had been thrown close to one of the following boats and his flailing hand clutched a guardrail that ran just above the waterline. He hauled himself above the surface and held on, rising and falling with the heaving timber. His eyes scanned the river in front of him. He saw a great fang of rock that bisected the stream. It looked like the stone he had glimpsed in the terrified mind of his friend. Pushing hard with his feet against the hull, he swam away from the sanctuary of the boat and back into the raging water.
He forced all awareness from his mind, tethering everything to that flickering mote of life. Mo! he called again, his eyes closed to focus through the triangle, searching desperately for the presence of Mo’s mind with every ounce of strength.
Alan . . . Alan . . . Alan! In her mind, as in her singing, Mo did not stammer. She was answering at last, as if the oxygen deprivation of drowning had numbed her terror. That communication was still so powerful, stemming from her will to live. It was as if he had searched for a distant star and encountered a nearby sun. His senses were overwhelmed by the immensity of her terror.
Then he saw the rock again. The fang-like shape of it flashed across his vision, as if through the open eyes of the half-conscious girl.
Diving under the surface currents, he saw her. Mo’s body, bent and limp, was brought up against the submerged portion of rock, held against it by the force of the river. Thrusting out with his lungs bursting, he caught hold of her under her arms and he lunged to the surface.
He broke into air with his right arm wrapped under her chest. His breath came in gasps. After a few seconds of rising panic, he drove away from the rock.
Thrashing out against the current, he glimpsed how the raging water lifted one of the stragglers among the boats clear out of the water, dripping spume and spray, then smashed it to pieces on a boulder. He heard the screams of the family on board, soon silenced as they too were dashed against the rock.
He held more tightly to Mo, forcing her unconscious face above the wave-lashed surface. He communicated to her, mind to mind, urgently: Hold on!
Even as he did so, an arc of livid green cut through the spray and another boat exploded into flame.
The Storm Wolves had timed their attack to perfection. There would be no counterattack with thunder and lightning here. He tried to recall his dad’s life-saving lessons. Struggling to stay alive in the tumult, he brought Mo’s back against his chest and, encircling her body under the armpits with his left arm, he turned on his side, maneuvering his own position so her head was out of the water, then he kicked out with his feet, treading water.
Mo’s eyes flickered open.
Swim!
A new voice entered his mind, alien and strange. The voice was a deep contralto, devoid of emotion.
Where to? He pressed his own mental voice back, like a gasp.
He was so drained that he could barely float, let alone swim. The air was full of oaths and curses as more arcs of the sinister green cut through the whipping winds to find their targets. Alan had the impression of fierce conflict close to the bank—then an armored figure plunged into the water not twenty feet away from him.
“Blasphemer’s brat!” He heard the hate-filled growl. “The Master would relish your impious heart.”
Alan searched for a small reserve of strength. Still clinging to Mo, he attempted to get her away from the bank into deeper water. But within moments an armored fist gripped his hair. A brutal strength was plunging him back under the surface. Gasping to rise up from under the water, Alan saw the soldier’s other hand reach to his submerged waist and extract a dagger. Alan’s head was dragged clear of the surface—he reeled from the blow of the dagger’s pommel. But even as he struggled to fight unconsciousness, the soldier’s own head parted company with his body and fell, trailing blood, spinning and dancing into the current before Alan’s failing vision.
Struggling to find his legs, Alan’s hand never relinquished his hold on Mo. Bloodied, exhausted, his head still reeling from the blow of the dagger’s pommel, he lifted her face once more above the surface.
They were tumbling over a millrace of smaller boulders, descending through the jarring impacts into a white-frothed basin. His body was numb. For a moment or two, he thought he was suffocating again, his face below the deluge. Then, suddenly, the chaos was over. The water, beyond the cauldron of mist and spume, was fast-running, but there were no longer any rocks.
He felt the weight of his burden increase but then realized that his feet were touching the bottom of the river. He willed his exhausted legs to stagger toward the bank, though his numbed feet could barely register the hard surface beneath him.
Shoving Mo out of the water onto a gravelly shelf by the river’s edge, he was too weary to climb out himself. He remained submerged up to chest level, holding on to the shelf, which sloped gently up to the forest floor. His ears were filled by the sounds of continuing attack. His vision caught the flickering green light of the Storm Wolves’ weaponry. In moments chain-mailed arms grabbed hold of him and he was dragged out of the water and ont
o the sloping shingle. A sharp crack at the back of his head was followed by darkness.
Captured
When Alan recovered consciousness, Mo was gone. The Storm Wolves must have dragged her away. Breathless and bewildered, he was aware of hoarse shouts and curses from nearby.
Those guttural commands, accompanied by jabs of weapons and kicks, were coming from faces hidden behind fur-covered masks that made the Storm Wolves seem more animal than human. Their helmets were constructed of a metal alloy that resembled matte steel. Black bearskin coats covered their trunks and limbs over chainmail bodices of the same black alloy. Their black-booted feet were also fur-wrapped and their hands were protected by leathery mittens that seemed like extensions of the fur tunic, designed for combat in the extreme cold.
Rescuing Mo had exhausted him so he couldn’t resist them as they dragged him up the bank of gravel. At the top, they beat him again until he was almost unconscious. As he fell onto his hands and knees, he caught their derogatory reference to him, “beardless cur.”
A single thought remained, and that was Mo. Where was she? Where had they taken her?
A group of Storm Wolves came running back out of the trees. They carried two sinewy poles covered by bark. Ripping off his Olhyiu coat and boots, they made a cross by tying together the springy poles at their centers and bending each pole into a bow, then lashed his wrists and ankles to their extremities with leather thongs. The effect was to stretch all four of his limbs on a rack, the tension in the bowed poles tearing at every joint in his body. A gag of filthy leather was rammed between his teeth before they threw him, face upward, onto the trampled snow and shingle.
A huge soldier—the legionary rank of a centurion entered Alan’s mind—leaned over him to test his bonds. The fur-mittened hands also carried sharp metal spikes, sharpened to claws at the finger tips, so the probing left him scratched and bleeding. The pain in his joints was agonizing. As minutes passed, the pain grew steadily worse. It made it almost impossible for Alan to think. Yet he had to try to think clearly. He had to focus his mind on the fact that some kind of battle was taking place nearby. Who was fighting the Storm Wolves? Had the Olhyiu stopped and come out onto the banks to fight? If they had, they would surely be beaten in hand-to-hand fighting with these professional killers. And what then would happen to Kate?
Alan couldn’t bear to think of them harming Kate.
If he could just focus on that, on the sounds of battle; if he could sense through the triangle in his brow what was happening and where.
Fight against it! Use the pain!
He heard the calm contralto voice again in his head—surely some kind of communication, mind-to-mind. But who was attempting to communicate with him? Alan concentrated on his tormented joints, accepting the agony, bringing it into focus in his mind.
Then, through the curtain of his pain, came the memory of that soldier’s head falling into the water. A sword had done that. But the Olhyiu had no swords. Who could it be that was wielding that sword? Whoever it was, he must be part of some bigger group of fighters, an army of a different kind, and that army was fighting the Storm Wolves in this battle that raged around him.
He heard the sounds of heavy feet approaching, then six or seven Storm Wolves burst out of the undergrowth to join the group holding him prisoner. One was carrying a body over one of his shoulders, and now he cast it down like a sack of firewood onto the trampled snow next to him. Alan struggled to see who his fellow prisoner might be, hoping it was Mo.
“Snakoil Kawkaw!” he hissed, inside his gag.
It was with difficulty that he recognized the Olhyiu traitor. Kawkaw’s weasel-thin face was bloodied and swollen. His gray-furred neck was encircled by a leather strap that was tethered to his shackled feet so it arched his body backward. Alan assumed that Kawkaw’s overlords had punished him for leading them into the trap on the ice-bound lake. Even now, the guard who had thrown Kawkaw onto the frozen ground gave his body a bone-crunching kick. Alan heard the slobbering sound that came from the traitor’s split lips.
“Kawkaw!” he hissed again, trying to force some sort of communication through the triangle.
The shock of hearing his name caused the figure to stop moaning. He twisted his neck in Alan’s direction, his eyes wildly staring.
“Huloima!” Even in his mind the evil man snarled. “How is it I hear you in my mind? Are you a demon?”
Alan shook his head, and his eyes turned upward, toward his brow, where the triangle must be visibly pulsating, judging from the throbbing he felt.
Kawkaw jerked his eyes to the triangle. A cough sounded deep in his throat, and his tongue forced a gobbet of blood from his lips. His senses, from what Alan could make of them through the triangle, were overwhelmed with fear—yet still he was full of the spite and cunning of old. As if fallen back upon the very dregs of his soul, hatred had become an inspiration for this depraved creature. And in the traitor’s mind Alan confirmed the fate that lay in store for them both.
They were to be ritually sacrificed.
Torture and death was the way of life in the brutal existence of these legionaries. Cruelty was their pleasure, the reward they coveted for their work of oppression and killing.
The centurion had returned. Kawkaw knocked his foot against Alan to make him aware of something, though he couldn’t read what it was on that face, contorted as it was with pain.
He spoke to Kawkaw through the triangle, “What is it? What are you trying to say?”
“I am accursed,” he wheedled. “A renegade from my own kind.”
“Through your own greed and betrayal!”
“So it may be. Yet I spit upon it!” That ravaged face twisted into a snarl again as he twisted around his constrained neck, so he was squinting at Alan from the corners of his eyes. “Siam, the stupid! Who could make such a man leader in place of me? I had the guile of a true leader. As to that shambling hogsturd, Lapeep! What shaman would shackle the soul of his people into such servility and bondage? If I betrayed them, it was out of contempt because they had betrayed themselves. What was left for me but to gather the crumbs before even they were taken from them?”
One of the guards noticed the looks they were exchanging and he ran at Alan and kicked him viciously in the ribs. The pain, when he was forced to breathe, was agony. It was several minutes before he could focus his thoughts. He kept his head averted from Kawkaw as he attempted communication again.
“What are they waiting for?”
“The service of their god.” Kawkaw’s lips parted in a broken cackle.
Alan glimpsed horrible scenes in the memories lodged in Kawkaw’s mind. The traitor had seen the Storm Wolves at play.
“What god?”
“The slime of offal that is their leader.”
This made Alan forget his caution of just moments before. “Help me, Kawkaw. Now you have a chance for redemption—atonement!”
Hatred contorted the face of the traitor, even the muscles of his neck. “I shit on your atonement. Those miserable rabble who thought themselves my people! Ah, but I relish their doom, as they forced my own upon me. Hah! These abominations of flesh-spoilers will exterminate them, just as they will see you and me off, and soon enough, this I promise you. But I don’t give a damn that they will kill me. I have had enough of suffering. But you—if you can but live—might be the tool of my vengeance on these abominations.”
Alan wasn’t so stupid he couldn’t see the calculating intelligence in Kawkaw’s mind. “But how? When I’m as doomed as you are!”
“Hearken to the battle! Who do you think attacks these excremental scum with such deadly earnest? Not those fish-gutters.”
Alan did his best to probe what Kawkaw was talking about. He had to force his mind to think against the agony in his limbs. “Who, then?”
“Those self-abasing witches!”
Witches? In Kawkaw’s mind the derogatory term was accompanied by a vision of fierce-looking women. But there was no time to question h
im about this because the centurion was back. He stamped down hard on the crossed poles, causing a new agony to rack Alan’s spine. Then, abruptly, Alan found an unexpected respite. Kawkaw kicked out with all of the strength of both tethered feet at the crutch of their tormentor. In spite of the tightening this caused in the leather noose around his own throat, the Olhyiu was distracting attention from Alan to himself.
Kawkaw’s diversion saved Alan further torment. But he had no time to feel gratitude. He needed that moment to return to his previous thought.
The fierce women that Kawkaw called witches—who were they? In Kawkaw’s mind they clearly evoked fear. Could it have been one of their weapons that had decapitated the Storm Wolf while Alan was being forced under the icy water? The calm contralto voice that had made contact during his struggle in the river . . .
Swim!
That communication had been authoritative. Think, he urged himself through the distraction of his pain—think! It had not been a voice. Or, rather, the authority who spoke it had known how to communicate mind-to-mind. Somebody who understood the triangle in his brow? Yet it had been a female voice, of that he was sure, a very deep and calm female voice, and definitely not the voice of Granny Dew. If this female warrior was still nearby, there was a chance he could communicate back with her. Alan didn’t waste any more time. The call burst from his tormented mind, cutting through the surrounding shadows of forest.
In that same moment a scream from Kawkaw brought him back to the reality of his position.
The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) Page 24