“I do not, Master Pendrake.”
“Then we’ll have to do the best we can. Let us hurry now.”
The companions set out along the ridge until it became too narrow and steep to climb. At this point they turned and began to descend the western flank of the ridge, into the great bowl itself. Their route took them down a long slope of scree that was tricky to walk on, until they found a goat path and followed it. Below them lay a barren plain of mud and boulders crossed by immense, snaking ridges of heaped stones that Pendrake said had been deposited there as the ice receded over the ages. The few evergreen trees that managed to grow in this inhospitable landscape were stunted, their spindly limbs all growing on one side, away from the knife-sharp wind that streamed down from the ice. From time to time the travellers heard a distant crack and rumble, and looked up to see that a chunk of the upper glacier had given way and was tumbling down into the valley in a cloud of snow, the echoes rolling back and forth across the valley like distant thunder. Morrigan circled far above them, keeping watch.
“Ice once filled this entire valley,” Pendrake said. “Much of it melted during the Broken Years, when even the sun left its path and grew swollen in the sky.”
They kept along the gradually descending path, until the glacier’s wide melt-water tarn lay directly below them, its waters a bright blue-green. In the tarn floated chunks of ice that had fallen from the glacier, weirdly shaped by sun and wind and drifting in the water like aimless spectres. The midday heat had also released many slender cataracts of white water that spilled down the face of the rock wall, the roar of their fall muted by distance to a faint rumble in the air.
Morrigan gave a cry and swooped down past them. They followed the path of her flight and saw many dark, man-like figures toiling across the valley floor.
“Nightbane!” Moth cried.
“We must forget the stair and make straight for the ice,” Pendrake shouted. “It’s our only chance now.”
Morrigan gave another, even more piercing cry. She was circling a boulder-strewn area beside the tarn. Will shielded his eyes with his hand and saw two smaller figures darting in and out of the concealment of the boulders. They were wearing heavy cloaks and fur caps that concealed their features, but Will knew at once who they were.
It is not hard to understand why wolves are generally feared and even hated. They howl eerily at the moon, their eyes shine in the dark, they frequent haunted places. This misunderstanding of their character is unfortunate, however, for the wolf is a noble and personable beast, not at all the bloodthirsty monster that so many stories make him out to be.
— Balthazar Budd’s Flora and Fauna of Wildernesse
“ROWEN AND FREYA ARE DOWN THERE,” Will shouted.
“No,” Pendrake said in a choked whisper. He leant heavily on his staff as if the will and strength that had brought him this far had suddenly deserted him. Then he gave a cry and plunged down the slope. The others quickly followed, Shade soon bounding past the toymaker.
By now Rowen and Freya had seen them and were racing towards the slope. Several hundred yards behind them a horde of Nightbane had crested the last of the stone ridges and was descending in leaps and bounds towards the tarn. Despite his fear and the slippery slope beneath him, Will couldn’t take his eyes from what he was seeing.
Some of the Nightbane were like tall and powerfully built men. They wore blood-red plates of armour and bristled with weapons. The mordog, Will guessed. They were larger than he had imagined. Among them were other creatures, smaller but far stranger. They were thin and bony, and moved with an insect-like scuttling of their limbs.
In a few moments Will’s party had reached Rowen and Freya. Pendrake clasped his granddaughter in his arms. Freya was limping, and her right leg was bound with a bloody cloth.
“After you left Skald, our lookouts reported a horde of Nightbane heading west along the Whitewing,” Freya panted as they gathered round her.
“I had to warn you,” Rowen gasped. “I’m sorry…”
“They picked up our trail last night,” Freya said. “There’s at least five score of them. I tried to stop her, Father Nicholas—”
“No time now,” the toymaker said. “Run for the waterfall, all of you, and don’t look back.”
He took the lead. Shade ran beside Will and Rowen, and behind them came Finn with Freya, and finally Moth. Morrigan flew on ahead, her wings rippling like ragged black pennants as she beat against the streaming wind.
As he raced on Will heard the scuff of feet on rock and the dull clatter of armour, growing louder and louder. It was all he could do not to turn round, expecting at any moment to feel a heavy claw clutch his shoulder.
A hoarse shout came from Moth. Although Will thought he was almost out of strength he ran faster, leaping over larger stones and miraculously keeping his footing on the uneven ground. The plain began to rise steeply as they neared the rock wall. Will struggled up this last slope, his boots sinking in the soft gravel, his eyes fixed only on the ground before him. Shade stayed beside him, and when Will began to slip and stumble he gripped the shaggy ruff at the back of the wolf’s neck. As they toiled on together, Will heard the swish of a blade behind him and a scream, but he did not turn his head. He clambered on, his breath coming in gasps, and when he next dared to look up, he saw that the rock wall now loomed over them. Pendrake had reached the waterfall and was already vanishing into its billowing cloud of spray, with Rowen close behind him.
“Go on,” Shade shouted to Will. “Do not stop.”
The wolf fell back with a snarl. Will lowered his head again for one last burst of speed, feeling the spray upon his face as he ran. The next thing he knew he had passed through the wall of slashing water and found himself in a dark, shuddering space on the other side, soaked and stunned by the cold. Pendrake was here, with Rowen. At the back of this hidden chamber in the rock was the stone stair, rising steeply in a deep crevice.
Rowen screamed, “Will! Watch out!”
He whirled round just as a huge shape came crashing through the fall into the rock chamber. Will had a brief terrifying glimpse of cold inhuman eyes, teeth bared in a hideous grimace, a jagged blade raised high. The creature jerked to a halt and stood, teetering like a tree about to fall. Then its weapon hit the floor with a clang, and the mordog toppled head first, an arrow in its back.
Finn, Freya and Moth came bursting through the fall with Shade at their heels. The swords of both men were streaked with black blood, and Finn had a cut above one eye.
“We dealt with the front-runners,” Moth said. “The rest of the horde is further back, but they will be here soon enough.”
Pendrake was leaning with a hand against the rock, breathing hard. For a moment Will feared for him, but then the old man took a deep breath, straightened, and picked up his staff. It was as if he had been drawing strength from the stone itself.
“Up the steps, everyone,” he said.
Pendrake herded Will and Rowen ahead of him, and the others followed. Shade took his place at Will’s side without a word, and Will saw the dark stains on his muzzle.
As they climbed the steps out of the cavern, the outer wall of the stair dropped away, leaving no barrier between them and a sheer drop to the valley floor. Will edged his way along, trying to look only at his feet and not at the terrifying void just beyond them.
After a long, toiling climb they rounded a bend in the rock face and found their path blocked by a mound of huge fallen stones. Moth leapt without pausing onto the mound and helped the others up. They scrambled as quickly as they could over the wet rocks to the other side. Here they found themselves on the edge of a precipice, with the long lower slope of the glacier revealed beneath them, hundreds of feet below. They were at the head of the stair. Ahead of them it descended steeply to a spur of rock that jutted out onto the ice, like a spearhead aimed at the horn of Aran Tir.
They halted to catch their breath. The wind shrieked in their ears, and all they could see in any dire
ction was ice and rock. Will shivered. He felt as though they had come to the very top of the world.
“There used to be a guard post here,” said Pendrake, gazing back at the mound of fallen stones. “And a rope bridge that ran from this height to the base of Aran Tir.”
Morrigan swooped down, bringing the news that there were many mordog coming up the stair, but also that the other Nightbane, the smaller, scuttling ones called creech, were scaling the rock wall, as well as climbing the glacier itself.
“I thought they were afraid of the ice,” Rowen cried.
“They are being driven,” Moth said, “and it is not hard to guess by what.”
“They mean to cut us off before we can reach Aran Tir,” Pendrake shouted. “We cannot linger here.”
Moth spoke to the raven, who hopped to the edge of the stair and dived into empty space. A moment later Will saw her, already far below, a ragged black arrow speeding across the gulf of air towards the rock island, a small swift ripple of shadow following her upon the ice.
“She has gone ahead to find out if Aran Tir is already taken,” Moth said.
“And if it is?” Finn asked.
“Then we look for some other position that can be defended. Perhaps higher up on the glacier,” Moth replied.
“The steps down to the ice look open at least,” said Pendrake. “Let us hurry.”
“Wait, I have some rope,” Finn shouted, digging in his pack. “Not a lot, but enough, I think. We should be roped together on the ice.”
There was a clatter of stones from above. As one they looked up and saw a beaked, skull-like face with huge bulging eyes. The creature came scuttling down the rock wall directly at Will, its body squat and carapaced like a crab’s, its bone-like limbs strung together with naked red sinews. With an ear-splitting shriek, the thing leapt through the air and landed in the midst of the company, swiftly followed by many more of its kind.
“Creech!” Moth shouted as he blocked a blow from a slashing claw.
“Stay with Shade,” Pendrake cried to Will and Rowen as he charged forward with his staff on high. They unsheathed their knives and drew close together with the wall at their backs. Shade planted himself in front of Will with his teeth bared.
The battle was fierce but brief. The creech gabbled and screamed as they fought, talons and fangs their only weapons. They were smaller and more wiry than the mordog, moving with a speed that amazed Will, but they were reckless and outmatched. The swords of Finn and Moth lopped limbs and split carapaces. Freya’s hammer sent her foes tumbling end over end. Pendrake’s staff landed with a terrible crack on several skulls. One of the creech jumped on Finn’s back and clawed at his face before he managed to fling it over his head and off the edge of the stair.
At Will’s side, Rowen gave a sharp gasp. He looked up. A creech had climbed face down like a huge insect from the wall above. It was clutching Rowen’s hair and dragging back her head, its jaws slavering at her neck. Before he could think Will slashed at the creech’s bony claw with his knife. The thing hissed and turned its attention to Will, giving Rowen the chance to pull away. The creech lost its grip on the wet rock and tumbled to the stones at their feet. It was up again in an instant, lunging at Will and Rowen before they could move, but now Shade was in front of them, snarling.
The creech froze, then retreated with a guttural sound like bones clattering together as Shade advanced. Another few steps and the creech was at the brink. It bared its fangs at Shade, spat, then flung itself over the edge.
In another moment the fight was over. Those creech that had not fallen to the ice below lay lifeless on the stones.
“They are good climbers,” Finn said, gingerly touching the livid scratches on his neck. “They must have scrambled up here ahead of us and lain in wait.”
“Which means there may be more of them soon,” Pendrake said.
Will tried to keep his hands from shaking as he sheathed his knife.
“You’re hurt,” Rowen said with concern in her voice. Will felt a burning on his neck. He touched the spot and his fingers came away bloody. There was no time to do anything about it. They still had to climb down to the ice and then cross it to reach Aran Tir.
Will was already following Rowen down the steps when Shade made a sound unlike anything he had heard before. It was a growl so low and seething with fury that it froze him to the spot.
Will turned. Shade stood among the fallen creech, gazing at the heap of fallen stones, his hackles raised, his ears back.
“Run now, Will Lightfoot,” he growled.
There at the top of the heap of stones stood another wolf.
Or something that might once have been a wolf. It was much larger than Shade, its fur black and matted into thick spines, its hulking frame like something that had been twisted into shape by a mind mad with hate. Its ears were torn scraps of raw flesh and its eyes were not amber like Shade’s, but a dead cold black rimmed with red fire. From its huge jaws thick slaver dripped.
“Run!” Shade barked at Will, and in the next instant he bounded up the heap of stones and met the garm-wolf as it hurtled itself down.
The combatants collided in a writhing, churning mass of fur and snapping jaws, like a single monstrous creature tearing itself apart. Will stumbled backwards, his gaze fixed on the terrible sight before him. The sounds coming from the throats of the two wolves he knew he would never forget. In the next moment the desperate frenzy of the struggle had carried the combatants to the brink of the precipice, and they were gone.
Some say that the land itself is a living thing.
That does not mean it is friendly.
— The Book of Errantry
WILL STARED AT THE PLACE where Shade had been only a moment before. Finn ran back and took him by the arm.
“We have to go, now!”
Numb with shock and sick at heart, Will fell into line with the others. As quickly as they dared they descended the steps, which were wet and eroded by exposure to the ice. In places they had to leap across a gap from one intact step to another further down. When they were halfway to the spear-shaped spur, they heard a clatter from above and saw that a band of mordog had reached the heap of fallen stones at the top of the stair and were on their way down. There were many of them, forty at least, and even more were out on the ice, along with a great number of creech, toiling upwards in an effort to reach Aran Tir first.
At last the steps ended in a hollow between two standing stones, and then Will and the others were upon the rock spur, which stretched before them like a flat, wide stage. Desperately Will scanned the surface of the glacier below the cliff from which Shade and the garm-wolf had fallen. Tears stung his eyes.
The companions dashed across the spur, splashing through the shallow melt-water pools that dotted its surface. They reached the end, where another, shorter flight of stone steps led down in a half-spiral onto the ice. The Nightbane behind them were still descending the long straight stair, and most of those on the glacier were still a good distance away, except for a vanguard of mordog and creech who had drawn ahead of the rest.
As they stepped out onto the ice, Morrigan returned.
“As far as she can tell the citadel is empty,” Moth said. “The rock is almost completely surrounded by a deep crevasse, but there is a snow bridge we might be able to cross.”
“That is how I reached Aran Tir the last time,” said Pendrake. “If we can get across the snow bridge to the citadel, there is a stairway that leads up to the great hall. From there we should be able to reach the upper towers, if the way is not blocked.”
The companions set out across the glacier. Despite the cold wind shearing snow off the heights above, the heat of the sun had brought the ice to life: from all around came the sound of water trickling, gushing, spilling, as if the glacier was turning into a river beneath them. Will and the others had to temper their need for haste with the dangers of this unfamiliar and dangerous terrain. Their progress was difficult and uneven, as they were sometim
es struggling through drifts of snow, or running across bare ice, and now and then even leaping over narrow melt-water streams.
On they struggled, and as they neared the great jutting horn of dark stone, they could hear a rushing that grew louder by the moment. The ice beneath them trembled.
Finally they neared the base of Aran Tir and came to a wide crevasse that yawned between them and the rock. The thunderous noise and shaking came from a melt-water stream that poured into the crevasse at its upper end, the water plunging with a roar to unseen depths. As Morrigan had said, there was only one way across this final obstruction: a slender span of snow and ice that arched over the gap to a narrow ledge that ran along the base of the great horn of rock.
Moth took one end of the rope from Finn and led the way. He walked slowly up the arch of the bridge, paying out the rope as he went. At the highest point of the span he paused and crouched down, placing a hand on the snow at his feet. Then he kept on to the far side, jumping at last onto the ledge at the base of the rock.
“The bridge is strong enough to hold your weight,” he called. “Go carefully, and keep some distance between you. Do not run.”
Will grasped the rope, followed by Rowen and her grandfather, and then Freya. Finn waited at the start of the bridge, his sword at the ready. When Will was almost halfway across the slender arch he stopped. A low rumbling, deeper and louder than the roar of the nearby waterfall, sounded from the depths of the crevasse.
The bridge shuddered and Will crouched, gripping the rope. He dared a look down and for an instant had a dizzying vision of glassy aquamarine walls dropping away into an inky well of blue-black shadow. Swiftly the tremor stopped and the sound faded, but Will stayed motionless, his heart pounding. Finally, at a shout from Moth he forced himself on.
At last he reached the rock ledge and stumbled forward.
“What was that?” he gasped.
“Perhaps the old tales are true,” Moth said, clutching Will’s arm to steady him. “The ice is alive and does not care for trespassers.”
The Shadow of Malabron Page 27