Vanx was starting to follow the trail into the forest when they heard another roaring eruption of snow in the distance. Chelda’s angry voice and Brody’s insistent orders followed the noise; then they were all drowned out by a growling hiss.
“I go,” the Skmoe said. “Shrew take bait. Skog need help.”
Vanx looked at him as if he were crazy. Poops was missing. Who cared about the damn shrew?
He took a deep breath to clear his head and sought out a mental place he had found in his youth. It was a place where the stress and panic of reality could be shed and clear decisions could be rendered. He understood then that the Skmoe was worried about his companion, too. Neither Skog, Chelda or Brody had left the baited area. Xavian was probably still there, as well. They were now fighting the shrew.
“Go,” Vanx said. He made the easy choice to go after Poops, instead of going to help the others. It was a decision based on loyalty and responsibility. Unlike the others, Poops was just a pup. The others were grown people being paid to be here. They could defend themselves, if need be. Vanx just hoped it was a decision that he wouldn’t regret, for the farther he went away from the battle, the more it sounded like they needed him.
Chapter Ten
I’m off to make a fool of a fool,
and a fool of a kingdom too.
I might lose my head to the kingsman’s ax,
but I’ll try to fool him too.
– The King of Fools
Chelda’s first arrow struck the shrew before it had even fully breached the surface. Her shaft was only a splinter in the beast’s thickly furred skin, though. The shrew crunched the staked-out leaper and a wagon-load’s worth of bloody snow in its powerful, toothy jaws, then turned toward her and roared. Seeing this, Brody loosed immediately.
Brody’s first shaft thumped deeply into the shrew’s neck, causing the huge beast to come completely out of its hole. It thrashed and clawed at the arrow to no avail, but only for a moment.
Easily fifteen paces in length, not counting a tail half again as long, it looked like some grotesquely malformed prairie dog. Its teeth were fanged on top and bottom: the bottom two jutting up and coming back around its snout, the top two coming down as gently curving spikes. Its eyes were the size of dinner plates but looked small on its massive, rodent head. They were jaundiced, but with an ember glow in their depths. Brody saw that the beast was keeping its pink lids squinted, as if the daylight were a great discomfort.
Its fur was gray and damp, and streaked with traces of gold, red and brown. Its forepaws were small in comparison with the rest of it, but the four shovel-like claws splayed off of each of them were as big as a man’s forearm and sharp enough to tunnel through eons’ worth of compacted glacial ice. The long, hairless tail was flicking and flitting behind it, kicking up puffs of loose snow.
It let out a breathy roar that clouded its head in steam, then moved impossibly fast.
Brody nearly fumbled his great-bow when the shrew spun around to face him. It raised up and lunged on its haunches, stretching its seemingly compact body out to a surprising length, like a mongoose striking a snake. Brody managed to loose an arrow at its taut midsection before its head and claws came down just three paces before him, but he hadn’t had a full draw on his bow when he’d let it fly. He doubted the shaft had gotten any sort of penetration at all. He didn’t have time to fret about it, though, for he had to turn and run to avoid the shrew’s raking claws.
Skog lowered his long pike when the shrew landed with its body fully extended before Brody. The beast had exposed its entire profile to him. The half-breed Skmoe charged across the snow like a raging bull and thrust his barb-bladed pike deep into the shrew’s side. He twisted the shaft with a roll of his body, jumped up and violently yanked on it several times before turning and fleeing toward Chelda.
During all of this, Xavian was stiff with fear. Only the sight of one of the small, fur-clad twins charging back from the forest brought him out of shock. He was still in a panic, and apparently forgot the powerful charm spell with which he was going to befuddle the beast. For a second, it looked to Brody like the mage was frozen, but then Xavian mastered himself and started moving toward Chelda as well.
Anda, or maybe it was Inda, loosed an arrow on the run. Shot from the small horn bow, there was little hope of it doing real damage, but the Skmoe knew what he was doing—at least it appeared that he did.
The arrow struck the shrew just behind the eye and probably saved Brody from being mashed to a pulp by the raging beast’s foreclaw.
Brody leapt away, and just as soon as he felt he had cleared the range of the new attack, he wrestled another of his long, deadly shafts from the quiver over his shoulder and nocked it. When he turned and began to draw the arrow back, he was relieved to see that the creature was shifting its attention toward the approaching twin. The relief only lasted until he saw the shrew lunge for the Skmoe, though.
“What are you waiting for, wizard?” Brody yelled over the angry, rumbling growl of the beast. “Blind it! Confuse it! Do something!”
Xavian stopped his flight and started moving his arms about, as if to cast a spell at the shrew’s rear. To everyone’s surprise, though, the shrew’s powerful tail came around and whip-cracked him across the spine. He went tumbling toward Chelda and Skog.
Brody turned in disgust and was amazed by what he saw. He couldn’t believe that the crazy Skmoe was charging headlong into disaster, and here came Chelda now, hop-skipping over Xavian and drawing her old sword. With the Skmoe howling like a stuck hog beside the thing, she ran right up behind the shrew, ducking its tail, and let out a mighty roar of her own.
Brody couldn’t see what happened next, but the shrew reacted in a savage fashion, mule-kicking Chelda across the snow as if she were a straw-filled rag doll. She hit the hard-packed surface and tumbled badly. The sound of breaking bones cut across the tundra, and a harrowing scream followed.
Brody drew another arrow and loosed it. He was glad to see that Xavian was trying to get to his feet. Then he saw what Chelda had done. The shrew’s tail was hacked almost completely through, dragging like dead weight and spilling hot blood like a faucet. The wizard, oddly enough, threw up his arms and bounded out before the shrew. A bit of silvery powder sparkled through the air in front of him as he waved and shouted out, “Maxium illumin!”
Brody watched the stuff glittering through the wind between the mage and the closing creature begin to sparkle unnaturally. The brilliant flash of light that followed was so intense that he had to shield his eyes. He thought he heard Xavian scream out like a girl-child, and when he looked again, the mage was back in a curled huddle in the snow.
Brody instantly took full advantage of the shrew’s stunned condition. The Skmoe didn’t fare as well. The flash had bright-blinded him, and he fell headlong into a deep gouge the beast had made in the snow with its hind claws.
Skog grabbed Chelda’s dropped sword and went charging back at the shrew. He sidestepped its claw and then took a hard-charging three paces into the thing. He shoved the blade deep into the shrew’s vitals. He then dove quickly away as the beast thrashed and howled out in pain and anger.
Brody also went for its guts. With measured calm, he strode closer to the blinded shrew and loosed two shafts deep into its underbelly.
The shrew had no inclination to die out in the open tundra, though. Driven by pure instinct, it started tunneling down, trying to get below the surface with all the strength it had left.
“Get up, wizard!” Brody yelled. “Muddle its mind!” He ran over and yanked Xavian up by the robe. “It’s getting away. Are you all right, man? Stop it from getting away!”
Xavian blinked at him and looked as if he didn’t know where he was. He shook his head a few times and then looked at Brody again. His eyes were unfocused and watery. Brody was no healer, but he could tell that the damage to them was serious.
“It’s going under, man,” Brody pleaded more calmly. “You don’t need to see it
to cast a spell, do you?”
Xavian managed to shove Brody away. “It’s done. Go see to Chelda.”
Brody looked, and already the beast was stilling its effort. Most of the creature’s rear was exposed, and it was shivering and twitching now, instead of clawing. The loss of blood and bitter cold was finishing the deed.
Poops’s bloody tracks led through the forest in a wild, zigzagging pattern. Vanx was stricken with dread. Not even the fear he’d felt standing before the mighty red dragon Pyra could compare to thoughts of losing Sir Poopsalot out here.
Fighting his way through a bramble that grabbed at his garb like tiny clawing hands, he stumbled into a heap, only to find himself looking at a larger, darker blood stain in the snow. Anguish nearly consumed him. He had to fight back the tears his human side wanted to shed because they burned his Zythian orbs so badly.
He couldn’t give up. He wouldn’t.
Eventually, the bloody paw prints led back to the very place where Vanx, Brody and the young dog had been huddled earlier in the morning, waiting for the snow leaper to flush out. With the relief of a mother finding her lost child flooding over him, Vanx fell to his knees beside his stilled friend. Poops’s wound wasn’t mortal, but the dog was stiffening in the cold, nonetheless. His eyes were glazed, and he was unresponsive. Vanx wanted to snatch him up in his arms and cradle him. Instead, he set about using what little natural magic his Zythian blood afforded him.
Sometime later, the soft yellow glow of power radiating from Vanx’s hands faded. The tears were flowing now. He felt exhausted and sick. He’d expended far more energy than he ever had, and Poops hadn’t responded at all. It was all he could do to pull his thick fur cloak about both of them before he drifted off into a deep, spell-weary sleep.
It was nearly dark when Brody found Vanx. He and the others had been so caught up in tending Chelda’s broken arm and using the two remaining haulkats to pull the shrew back out of its hole, that they forgot all about Smythe, Vanx and the dog.
The old archer grew deeply concerned when he couldn’t stir Vanx. He could see that he was alive, though. Vanx’s every shallow breath expelled a small cloud of steam from the depths of his furred collar. He gave up nudging his boss with his boot, then knelt down and shook him a little more violently. He was rewarded with a heart-stopping snap of teeth as some terrible creature came bursting from the folds of the cloak. The bundle of aggressiveness faded into a happy yipping wag as Poops recognized who it was.
Only careful coaxing, and a good-sized piece of bloody shrew meat, got Poops to give up guarding his companion. Skog threw their employer over his shoulder and carried him out to the sled.
After seeing how Poops was hobbling and favoring his wounded side, Brody picked him up and carried him as well. When they got to the sled, he sat Poops down and the dog went straight to where Vanx was laid out in the back.
The only sound that broke over the steady hiss of the wind on the long, starlit ride back to camp was Chelda’s occasional burst of angry gibberish each time the sled went over a bump. Between them, wrapped in a blanket, was Smythe’s frozen leg. It was all that was left of the man.
Skog and the Skmoes had stayed behind, setting up a tent on the lee side of the beast. Someone had to watch over it and keep the frost-wings from picking apart their prize. Brody only hoped they would still be there in the morning when he returned.
Chapter Eleven
AThe wizard saw the king and the king gave toast,
“Here’s to the wizard that blessed our host.”
“Its true,” said the wizard. “But now you owe.”
“The price is small. Just an unborn soul.”
– The Weary Wizard
Before Vanx had fully recovered from the stupor in which the healing of Sir Poopsalot had put him, they were halfway back to Orendyn. He hadn’t intended to go with the others. He’d wanted to follow the feeling in his guts and head off to find Rimehold, or whatever it was that was calling. With Chelda and Sir Poopsalot injured, and the third sled destroyed, he had to concede that going back to Orendyn to recover and regroup was the wisest thing to do. Besides that, he’d been too dazed and spent to argue with his companions.
He was amazed by the clever way Endell and Brody had rigged up the sleds to haul them and their kill. It was no easy feat. Without their cunning, losing that third sled could have proven to be a disaster.
The front half of the front sled was left clear for some of them to ride on. In the wagon-bed-like back of the sled, the shrew’s massive head and shoulders were lashed down tightly. The weight of the beast’s body was suspended from there to the other sled. It didn’t sag in the middle because it was frozen solid. All three of the haulkattens were hooked up to the traces in single file in a pulling rig that the Skmoes had fashioned out of the lines of the broken sled. The cats didn’t like it, but they pulled anyway.
It took them an extra five hundred paces just to get the load started, but once it was moving along, it glided across the snow nicely.
Endell rode the lead haulkat not only to keep it pulling, but so he could look out for hollows and gullies, and also so he could let those riding in the rear know when to pull the sticks so that the rig didn’t slide over the animals.
The Skmoes rode in the front sled. Skog rode with them, when he wasn’t sitting atop the shrew’s back. For a long time, he’d sat there with his spear held high, as if the frozen shrew were his mount. The silly charade had gone on far longer than it had been funny.
They’d left the base camp intact so that any of them could return and use it in the future. Vanx hadn’t argued, thinking he’d be using it again on his way into the Bitterpeaks. What supplies they had left were stuffed here and there, where space allowed, so that he, Poops and Chelda could lay out in the back of the trailing sled.
Looking around while sitting up on his elbows, he was thinking about going back. He figured the Hoar Witch’s ice palace and Rimehold were most likely one and the same. After a few moments, he noticed that Xavian wanted to say something but couldn’t find his words. Curiously, the wizard never did get around to speaking.
As the sled slid casually along, about a day out of Orendyn, Vanx was absently scratching Poops behind the ears and contemplating the map Chelda had found. He wasn’t sure that Rimehold was where the feeling was pulling him, but it felt right, especially since Skully believed his father was born from the Hoar Witch. The feeling was only growing more insistent each day. He wanted to ask Chelda about guiding him up into the Bitterpeaks but wasn’t sure she would be healed soon enough to suit his growing impatience. She clearly wanted to go, even though their destination sat right in the middle of the Lurr. Still, he would rather wait a week or two longer and have a guide he felt he could trust.
He knew Darbon wouldn’t be coming along, which was just as well. This was a personal expedition, and he wouldn’t want the boy to come to harm over his curiosities. He couldn’t be sure what awaited him in the mountains, but that didn’t dissuade him at all.
“I’ll not want to be turning loose my share of the map I found,” Chelda sat up suddenly and said to both of them.
“Nor I,” Xavian blurted under his breath.
There was a short, tense silence.
“Well, good, then,” Vanx finally said, surprising them both. “Now I don’t have to try to talk the two of you into traipsing off into the Bitterpeaks with me.”
The three of them seemed content for a while. Then Brody, who was sitting facing rearward on the blanket-covered stump of the shrew’s tail just above them, said, “I’ll be wanting in on that, too, I guess, but only if it’s planned and prepared for well.” He gave Vanx a stern look. “The Bitterpeaks are no place to go blundering around in.”
“Aw, and you’ve been there, then?” Chelda taunted him. “I myself was born and raised in those crags and valleys. It didn’t take much planning for all that now, did it?”
“He’s right, Chelda,” Vanx said with a grin at her spunk. “He’
s just used to there being a sense of order to things.”
“How would you approach organizing this trek into my people’s homeland, then?” Chelda asked.
Vanx and Xavian both watched and listened intently to the exchange.
“Well, first, we’d only bring one sled,” Brody started. “It would only go with us until the foothills get too steep for the animals to pull it.” He scratched his chin and shrugged. “We would ride the kattens in saddles, like they use to haul ore in Parydon, and maybe take two extra animals to carry the supplies.”
“Nah, nah,” Chelda said with a shake of her round head. “All those supplies will just weigh us down. We carry on our person what we need to stay warm and hunt with: rope, arrows, and dried staples. Those big cats can’t traverse that sort of terrain, and you can’t travel with them without hauling their bulky sacks of meal. You need a hoofed mount up there, not one with pads and claws.” She snorted out a laugh, then. “Stupid cats will fall right off the mountainside and take you down with them.”
“What would we ride, then?” Xavian asked.
“Ride?” Chelda laughed out a big cloud of steam. “If you have to ride, you ride a devil-horned goat, or a big ramma, like the rim riders. It’s easier just to walk.”
Xavian shivered. “That seems so tiring.”
Chelda and Brody both laughed at that.
“If we wanted to ride, say on the less dangerous passes and through the valleys and such…” Vanx smiled at their mirth as he asked, “…do you know where we could get hold of some of these creatures?”
“Of course.” Chelda tried to make a gesture with her splinted arm and the color drained from her face. She cursed under her breath.
“We shouldn’t listen to her, Vanx,” Brody jested. “She found a way to break her arm on flat ground; there’s no telling how bad she could hurt herself up in the mountains.”
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