Around noon, Arn paused at a stream to let the mare drink and to refill his waterskin from the cold water. Once the horse had its fill, he kicked it forward again. The high ridgelines gradually gave way to smaller hills and valleys. A forest of tall pine trees emerged to wrap itself around him. The going became easier, as the forest floor was relatively clear and spongy beneath the tall trees. An eerie quiet had settled upon the world.
Large flakes of snow began drifting down, coming faster and faster as wind moaned through the treetops. Arn untied his jacket from the top of his pack and put it on, along with his leather gloves. A spring blizzard was going to make its presence felt.
Arn continued east as the storm grew in strength. Snow swirled all around him, collecting on his horse’s neck and on his head and shoulders. Squinting his eyes to keep the flakes from temporarily blinding him, he now relied on his unerring sense of direction to guide him. As darkness fell, more than a foot of snow already covered the ground.
Still, he pressed on, although more slowly now, a long scarf covering his face, neck, and ears, as he and the horse resembled a moving snow pile. Arn was confident that the vorgs had holed up for shelter. Miserable conditions were usually the best for an assassin’s work. Discomfort made beings huddle up, dulling their senses. Few people liked being uncomfortable, but killers loved it. Weather like this helped keep them alive.
Arn moved on through the night, even though the snow continued, hard and steady, accumulating to a depth of more than two feet. The mare was tiring rapidly now. Their pace had slowed to a crawl. Snow pushed against the horse with each step, causing it to lurch forward in uneven hops. As dawn approached, Arn stopped. The mare was spent.
Arn took off his jacket. He removed his knife and cut the jacket into two halves, swung one leg over to sit sidesaddle, and began work on the leather pieces. He pulled one leg up and placed his foot inside the center of one of these pieces. Wrapping the leather up around his boot, Arn cut the material into straps and secured them to his leg. He repeated this process for the other leg so that now both legs were wrapped up to the knee in the thick leather, his boots completely covered.
Arn shivered in the cold air. His shirt and scarf did little to protect his upper body from the wind and blowing snow, but it was a necessary inconvenience. If he kept moving, he wouldn’t freeze. The real danger was to his feet. Armies took most of their war casualties from foot problems, not from battle. The cold compounded this. Frostbite attacked the feet first. When they went, the soldier stopped. When the soldier stopped, he died.
Swinging his pack onto his shoulder, he slipped from the horse, removed the bridle, and, with a smack of his hand, sent it looking for shelter among the trees.
Arn placed the bridle in his pack and resumed his eastward trek. He longed to move higher on the ridge to take advantage of the easier terrain. This he resisted doing. The easy route invariably led to death. The extra exertion of slipping and sliding along the steep slope would help to keep him warm.
The sky brightened, but the snowfall continued. Arn thought back to his sleep of days before. How long had it been? Chewing on a piece of dried venison from his pack, he tried to recall. He had reached the point where sleep deprivation induced hallucinations, waking dreams that competed with reality. Arn shook his head. He had been through this many times before. He had to keep moving, fatigue his new companion.
As the day brightened, Arn moved into even rougher terrain. The scarf that wrapped his face protected his ears from the biting cold while his exertions warmed his body. The sturdy leather of the jacket was holding up well on his feet, shielded from some of the sharp edges of the rocks by the deep snow. A layer of ice had formed in his hair and eyebrows.
Toward noon, Arn reached the end of the canyon through which he had been traveling. It faded out into a set of gently rolling valleys, wooded in patches, mainly along the low ground. The wind howled out of the west, blowing the snow in sheets, forcing Arn to duck his head to protect his eyes.
Travel became harder than ever, and he guessed that he had covered not quite three leagues by evening. Arn found himself laboring forward now, forcing himself onward through strength of will. Occasionally he reached into his pack to get the water skin or to retrieve a piece of dried meat.
As night fell over the frozen land, the wind died, and Arn breathed a small sigh of relief. He was as tired as he could ever remember being. He had gone longer without sleep or rest, but the tremendous effort required to plow through the snow had taken its toll.
Suddenly he came to a halt at the edge of a clearing. Across the valley, less than a tenth of a league away, a fire blazed, and figures could be seen moving in front of a cave.
Arn went forward with renewed strength, skirting the clearing, losing himself in the thickets and briar patches that covered the low ground. As he approached the cave, Arn stopped more often, pausing to look and listen before continuing on. Several times he slipped and fell, but the deep snow deadened the sound.
Once again, Arn forced himself to slow down, approaching the mouth of the cave by way of a shallow gully. The vorgs had no guards posted outside the cave and only one at the entrance. This one’s duty seemed to consist of stoking the fire and warming his backside instead of watching for attackers. So much the better.
Charna had a couple of dozen vorgs with her in the cave, all but one asleep. Arn would have liked to take out the guard with a throwing knife, then sneak in and kill the wielder and Charna silently while they slept. But his hands were now too cold to throw a knife accurately.
Arn placed Slaken in his right hand and held one of the pointed throwing daggers in his left. He lowered himself into the deep snow and began crawling toward the cave entrance. He buried himself completely, wriggling slowly forward on his belly, tilting his head to one side so that he could keep one eye out of the snow to watch the guard. As he neared the circle of firelight outside the mouth of the cave, the vorg straightened, walking forward to peer out into the darkness.
Arn burst from the snow, running full speed at the guard, who screamed as Arn drove the smaller blade into his eye socket. As Arn’s shoulder propelled the vorg backward into the fire, his momentum carried him into the cave and into the midst of the scrambling band. Most were struggling to grab weapons and get to their feet. The nearest of these crumbled to the ground, blood gurgling from the gash where the vorg’s throat had been. Arn drove the dagger into the back of another as he plowed forward.
The group’s wielder jumped to his feet in the middle of the room, waving his arm and gesturing at the running assassin. Fire blazed from his fingers but failed to strike the intended target, instead engulfing several warriors to Arn’s left.
Lunging forward, Arn reached the wielder, driving his knee up into the vorg’s groin. As the sorcerer doubled over, Arn thrust Slaken through the base of the wielder’s skull.
“Blade!”
Charna’s enraged scream echoed through the cave. Seeing that he was almost upon her, Charna grabbed the nearest vorg and shoved him into Arn’s path, impaling her soldier onto midnight steel. From the back of the cave, the vorgs’ horses suddenly stampeded through their rope corral, bolting through the warrior horde and racing out into the night.
The confusion had allowed Charna to gather several of the vorgs into a fighting group that prevented Arn from reaching her. One of these lunged forward with a long spear. Arn jerked sideways and backward, crashing into another vorg as he did. Shoving his knives into the vorg’s stomach, Arn drove both of them back out of the cave, plunging down the slope, coming to rest in a snowbank atop the dead body.
Sheathing both knives, Arn wrenched the dead vorg up onto his back as he ran forward, pulling a muscle in his left arm as he did so. He slid down the ridge, carrying the vorg’s body on his back. He felt the thunk of an arrow embed itself in the corpse as he became one more shadow in the darkness.
Arn dropped the vorg and ran at full speed. He fell, struggled to his feet, and plunged forward
once more. He turned hard right, angling through the trees toward the dense woods. In seconds, he was in the thick brush, hearing the vorgs’ yells over his own labored breathing. As the shouts became faint, he knew that, at least for now, they had lost him.
Arn backtracked, working his way up the ridge behind the vorg cave before turning west. The vorgs no longer had their wielder, but they would not need one to follow his tracks through the snow once the sky became light.
Vorgs had the ability to see much better at night than men did, but their night vision came from an ability to see temperature differences such as body heat. Tracks in the snow at night were as invisible to vorgs as they were to humans. And these vorgs would want to find their horses first.
Arn’s left arm ached with pain from a pulled muscle. Still, he pushed himself forward. Now that the excitement had stopped, he was once again exhausted.
For two hours, he moved along the side of the ridge, staying in terrain that would make horseback travel difficult. Arn guessed that it was about three hours after midnight when he turned back. Hurrying as quickly as he could back the way he had come, he stayed in the path he had already made through the snow. Since the snow was so deep, he did not need to walk backward in his own footsteps. Merely dragging his feet plowed a trail to disguise that he had doubled back. And because he had already cut a path through the snow, he made better time. Arn thus arrived close to the vorg cave with almost an hour of darkness to spare.
As he got to within less than a quarter league of the camp, Arn began searching carefully for just the right spot to leave the trail. Finally, he found what he was looking for. During his escape, he had passed under several tall pines with thick branches extending out over his path.
Arn jumped up, grabbed one of these lower branches, and swung his body up. Working his way around to the far side of the big tree, he began scaling upward. He continued climbing through the thick boughs until he was confident that he was invisible from the ground below. Then he climbed higher just to be sure. Now he had to wait until dawn.
The wait was not long. Arn was nearly frozen by daybreak. His flight from the scene had worked up a sweat that now chilled him to the bone.
The eastern sky brightened quickly, the ground below seemingly darker than ever as the sky turned gray above. Then the first rays of sunlight that Arn had seen in days struck the top of the nearby hills. To his tired eyes, the painfully bright landscape was mesmerizing.
He was in a grove of pines, about forty feet up. The branches arced downward under their snowy burden, blocking his view.
The snort of horses and the guttural yells of vorgs broke the calm. The sounds grew louder, passing directly below him, only to fade and disappear in the distance. Arn waited a short time after the sounds died away, then climbed rapidly to the ground.
He was stiff and had a hard time moving. His injured left arm made its presence known. Still, climbing down was considerably easier than climbing up. At the lowest branches, Arn glanced around. Seeing no sign of the vorgs, he leapt the eight feet to the ground and turned back along the trail toward the vorg cave.
The vorgs had left only one guard behind. Snorts and stamping from within indicated that, in addition to their own, the vorgs had recovered their dead companions’ horses. That and the fire that blazed inside the cave indicated their intention to return.
Staying in the thick brush as long as possible, Arn took out one of his throwing knives and hurled it at the lone vorg. The knife slipped from his numbed fingers, sailed five feet over the vorg’s head, and clattered to the ground inside the cave. Whirling toward the sound, the vorg pulled his sword.
As Arn rushed forward, the guard spun toward him but was too late. Arn’s blade quickly felled the warrior.
He looked around the cave, stooping to recover his throwing knife. The surviving vorgs had stripped the dead ones and piled their bodies in the snow just outside the cave entrance. Inside, their clothes and belongings lay heaped against the far wall. The repaired rope corral held six horses. Crude vorg saddles and spiked bridles lay stacked nearby.
Arn searched through the clothes quickly but carefully, using a discarded spear to move the material around before touching them in case they had been booby-trapped. Finding no traps, he sorted through the items, separating out heavy coats, clubs, swords, and spears. The money, if there had been any, was gone.
Selecting a thick shirt and sheepskin coat from the pile, Arn removed his frozen buckskin shirt, put it in his pack, and donned the vorg garb. Warmth trumped smell. Then he noticed a strangely marked bundle leaning against the far wall. The wielder’s pack.
Arn opened it carefully, using Slaken to spring the catch and lift the flap. As the flap came open, a spring snapped into the leather surface of the pack, driving forth a small needle. Arn looked at the weapon carefully. The curved needle was covered with a red, gummy substance.
Opening the flap, Arn spilled the pack’s contents onto the floor. Ignoring the jars filled with strange ointments, he focused on a leather-bound tome. While he could not read the words written on the cover, he guessed it was the wielder’s spell book.
Books like this were rare and expensive. Every wielder hoarded the spells he knew, writing them down. Since wielders only knew spells that they had been taught or had found on scrolls or in books, one could sell one of these tomes for a handsome price. Arn picked the book up and put it in his pack.
He then moved to the back of the cave where the vorgs had penned the horses. Selecting the strongest looking of these, he saddled it, mounted up, and drove the other horses out of the cave before him.
For several hours, Arn followed this path before exiting the flow and turning west once more, allowing himself to doze in the saddle as he rode.
Evening found him walking Ax, the name he had given the ugly horse, up a beautiful valley. Here, the snow was far less deep. The hills on either side were forested in blue spruce, but the valley floor was clear, the snow giving the scene a peaceful quiet. Again, Arn found his head nodding forward as dreams mingled with his waking thoughts, the two forming an indistinguishable blur. He rode steadily west. The vorgs were probably lost behind him, but to rest was to invite death.
Twice during the night, Arn stopped to let the horse drink from streams and paw the snow for the grass buried beneath. Then he resumed his ride, again allowing himself to doze in the saddle, conserving his strength for the task ahead. He needed to be confident he had lost the vorgs before he could reunite with his companions. Even though they no longer had their wielder, he suspected one of the vorgs was a good tracker.
“Most likely it’s Charna herself,” Arn said, patting the horse on the neck. “Ax, what do you say we find out just how good she is?”
Ax did not respond.
11
Southern Borderland Range
YOR 412, Winter’s End
Having waited for dawn, Carol climbed to her feet beside Alan. The sunrise bathed the snow-covered landscape beyond the opening. The exit from the lower dungeon level yawned a hundred feet up on the rock promontory that was Far Castle. Carol stood beside Alan in the mouth of the opening, gazing over the edge and pondering what to do.
She looked at her brother. “Hang on to my belt while I lean out for a better look.”
Alan grabbed hold. “Got you.”
Carol eased up to the edge and leaned out, the sight of the drop directly below her causing her head to spin. A large pile of rock lay scattered about the base of the cliff. She imagined her belt coming unfastened, but a quick check revealed that it was still firmly attached.
She regained her composure and examined the cliff below them. Handholds were few and far between. Neither she nor Alan could make the descent. Carol was about to signal Alan to pull her back when she noticed an unusual rock formation four feet to her left.
“Walk me to the left,” she told him.
He moved left, still holding her belt, as she moved with him. She placed her left hand against the wall, l
eaning out even farther. Someone had carved hand- and footholds into the rock wall, extending down the face of the cliff and completely hidden from view to anyone not leaning out of the passage mouth.
“There are hand- and footholds over here,” Carol said. “Let go of my belt. I’m going to swing around and try to reach them.”
“Be careful.”
For an agonizing moment, it seemed that she would miss the rock ladder. But then she was on it. She paused, breathing heavily, her hands shaking so mightily that she worried about losing her grip.
“Are you okay?” Alan asked.
“I’m fine.”
She forced herself to concentrate on the cliff directly in front of her, lowered her body, and found the next foothold. Hand over hand she descended, with Alan following just above. Her feet finally touched the ground.
Alan jumped off the ladder from five feet up and stretched his arms toward the sky.
“Far Castle, be damned!”
Carol looked around. The landscape was clear of snow except for patches in the shade of trees and on the north-facing sides of the hills. The valley they had ridden up lay masked behind a ridge to the east.
“What do you think Father is doing now?” she asked. “Will he be looking for us?”
“I doubt it,” Alan said. “He’ll deal with the vorgs before he sends someone for us.”
The sun was not yet high in the sky, but its warmth was already making itself felt. The last of the mist that clung to the valley floor faded. The tang of pine clung to the air.
“Let’s find a secure spot to make camp and wait,” said Carol. “They know where we are.”
Mark of Fire (The Endarian Prophecy Book 1) Page 10