The Ranger exploded into action. He wheeled and struck out with his sword at the leader of the three riders. Trey, the Bossonian, let an arrow fly, catching the second rider between helm and breastplate. The outlaw flew from his horse and landed hard in the dirt.
From above, shafts rained down toward the Rangers. Three stuck into the wagon, not far from where Lupinius sat. But he whipped the drawing horses into a frenzy and egged them lurching onward.
The third rider loosed a crossbow bolt that slammed into a Ranger’s breast, knocking him from his mount with a spray of crimson gore. Another Ranger fell under a boulder hurled from the cliff’s face. A third went down with two arrows jutting from his back like quills.
Lupinius kept the horses pulling the wagon on the road and moving forward. Ahead, Calvert and the leader of the brigands were trading sword blows. Sparks flew when their blades clashed, and the clang of steel against steel echoed off the cliff wall. Lupinius didn’t want to run over his own man, but the arrows from above were coming dangerously close, so he bore down anyway.
Before he reached the battling horsemen, however, a jolt to his wagon caused him to spin in his seat. One of the brigands had jumped from the wall and advanced unsteadily on him. The man was helmeted, like the rest, but his mail shirt was worn and ragged, and his blade nicked from dozens of battles.
Lupinius released the reins and hastily drew his own sword from its place in the wagon’s boot. He brought it up just in time to block the brigand’s downward swing. The motion of the wagon’s bed made it hard for him to stand, reducing the amount of force he could get behind his swing. Lupinius, parrying from a seated position, put more power into his. The other man staggered backward. Lupinius didn’t dare pursue him into the wagon’s bed, but pawed for the reins while keeping his attention riveted on his assailant.
When the man composed himself enough to make a second try, Lupinius jerked the reins, bringing the horses suddenly short. The brigand’s legs went out from under him again, this time tossing him forward. Lupinius slashed upward at the same moment, and his sword bit cleanly through the brigand’s sternum, splashing Lupinius with hot blood.
The man’s corpse fell toward Lupinius, who shoved it off the wagon. He tried to bring the horses under control at the same time. He was almost on top of Calvert, who still matched the robbers’ leader blow for blow. At the last moment, he was able to nudge the horses away from Calvert and his opponent, racing past the battling men. The brigand’s steed reared back as the wagon rumbled past it. Calvert wheeled his horse into the other while it was off-balance. The outlaw’s horse fell over on its side, sending the outlaw leader flying.
Calvert leapt down from his own mount and ran to where the brigand was trying to recover from the spill. Showing no quarter, Calvert cleaved him from shoulder blade to stomach before the man could regain his footing.
Lupinius kept the wagon charging forward at full speed, beyond the last of the outlaws. He glanced back when he felt he could afford to take his gaze away from the road ahead. A severely depleted Ranger force rode toward him, away from the ambush. Calvert yet lived, as did Trey, Constantus, Rufio, Ondene, and Kelvan. Four had fallen to the brigands’ attack.
Lupinius’s heart pounded in his chest as he drove the horses on. Calvert and the other Rangers spurred their mounts onward, catching up shortly. Calvert rode alongside, his face still flushed with the effort of battle and the thrill of victory. “Who were they?” Lupinius asked him.
“I don’t know,” Calvert admitted breathlessly. “At first . . . at first I thought it was Khatak and his rogues, as they haunt this region. But if it had been Khatak, I doubt we’d be speaking now, unless it was at the gates of hell.”
“If not him, then some other like him,” Lupinius said, beginning to calm a little at last. “That was good work, back there.”
“Aye,” Calvert agreed. “Not good enough, though. We lost four good men, and brave Rangers all. I would go back for their bodies if we dared.”
“Too many of the scoundrels,” Lupinius declared. “They would finish us if we went back for more.”
“Likely,” Calvert said. “We keep riding.”
ALANYA WAS AFRAID that she was slowing Kral down, but he kept reassuring her. “We need not catch your uncle today or tomorrow,” he insisted. “Sooner or later, he will come to rest. Good enough we catch him then.”
After that first day’s ride, she had wanted some time out of the saddle. Her bottom wasn’t used to riding all day long. They had stopped in a pleasant river valley, Kral insisting they make their camp well away from the road, and they had spent the night underneath the stars.
Early in the morning, Kral had roused them. Alanya woke quickly, Donial with more resistance. But Kral had already been up long enough to catch a large bird of some kind and roast it on a spit over a campfire. They had eaten only some bread and dried meat brought from Lupinius’s kitchen the day before, so the aroma of the bird set her stomach roaring.
They were back on the road shortly. Alanya ached even more today than the day before, she thought, but had no choice other than to keep riding. She swore that once this journey was over she would never again spend an entire day on horseback.
The landscape they covered changed regularly throughout the day. They crossed low mountain ranges separated by wide valleys. The trees went from being predominantly pines and spreading oaks to a wider variety, including spruce, ash, maple, and other types that she didn’t know the names of. Their leaves were a riot of colors, reds and golds and browns, like swatches of bright fabric strewn over the landscape. In the valleys, grasslands predominated, and the farther east they got the more likely they were to see herds of animals browsing there—wild ones, such as elk or deer, as well as domestic sheep and cattle. They began to see occasional farmhouses as well.
Overhead, the sky was blue and nearly cloudless, and the sun bore down on them with a ferocity she had almost forgotten. Alanya was a creature of the city, where she could always go inside under a roof to escape the sun, or take a cooling dip at the nearest public baths. Even in Koronaka she had spent most of her time inside, and the air had been cooler there.
As the day wore on, the sun and the scenery and the steady, repetitive motion of the horse lulled her into a kind of drowsy comfort. She talked now and again to Kral, telling him of life in Aquilonia and what he might expect if the chase took them as far as Tarantia. Donial was quiet. She couldn’t tell if he was being a sullen adolescent or just exhausted from the journey. She didn’t think he had slept much the night before, but had stayed awake, starting at every night noise.
She didn’t really recognize the country they traversed because she had only made the trip once before, while heading in the other direction. She knew they were on the same road, the main thoroughfare from Tarantia to the Westermarck. Soon enough they would be nearing real civilization again. One more mountain range to cross. Or maybe two.
They were riding away from the huge, flaming ball of the setting sun when they came across the bodies.
Kral rode in the lead, and he reined up when he spotted them. He glanced back at Alanya, his face clouded with concern, as if he didn’t want her to see them. But she was too close behind and had noticed what he was looking at almost as soon as he saw them.
“Those are—” she began.
“Corpses,” Kral confirmed. They had been stripped bare and tossed by the side of the road like abandoned chunks of raw meat. Vultures had already been digging at them. Alanya’s stomach turned at the sight. Trying to imagine the violence that had occurred here left her feeling dizzy and sick.
“Who would have done this?” she asked.
Kral took a moment to answer, probably trying to remember the words. “Highwaymen, bandits,” he said.
Donial caught up then, and Alanya tried to put her horse between him and the bodies. “Don’t look, Donial,” she urged him. “It’s awful.”
But his youthful curiosity got the better of him, and he craned
to peer past her. His face blanched. “I know them!” he cried.
“No,” Alanya said reflexively. “You can’t.”
“That’s Pollonius,” Donial insisted. “And Trellin. And those others are familiar, too. They’re all Rangers!”
Alanya forced herself to look again, to see beyond the blood and the wounds, and she realized that he was right. She had seen those faces before, in Koronaka, and in her uncle’s employ. “We have to see if there are more!” she shouted. Kral glared at her. “Quiet!” he snapped. “We have to get out of here. If the ones who did this are still around . . .”
“But what if Uncle Lupinius is nearby, maybe injured?” she asked. Knowing that wouldn’t necessarily have much impact on Kral, she added, “What if he was robbed, and the thieves took the crown you’re looking for?”
She could tell when the idea struck home. Kral’s anxious stare suddenly changed, his forehead wrinkling, his eyes narrowing. “Quickly,” he said. “We can look around, but quickly. If they come back, we’re dead.”
20
THE SUN WOULD set before too long, and Kral didn’t want to be anywhere near the cliffs when it did. He could envision the whole scene in his head. Men hidden up among the rocks above, waiting for the Rangers to come along. They probably blocked off the road ahead, pinning the Rangers down between cliffs and trees, then opened fire from above. Others probably streamed out of the brush, and before the Rangers knew it they were overwhelmed, dragged from their horses, heads split open, throats cut.
At least, that was the way he would have done it.
Searching the immediate area, they found no more bodies, so Kral assumed that these were the only victims. Their bodies had been dragged to a central point, stripped and looted, then tossed off to the side for the jackals and carrion birds. The bandits had probably carried off their own dead, leaving only their victims to mark the spot and terrorize future travelers.
Kral glanced at the position of the sun again, just starting to sink over the distant mountain range. If terror had been the bandits’ goal, it was working. Dying in battle didn’t especially scare him. It was the noblest way a Pict could fall, and would guarantee him safe passage to the Mountains of the Dead. But he didn’t want to see Alanya captured or killed. And he didn’t want to die before he was able to restore the Teeth to its proper place in the Ice Bear’s cave.
Finally, he summoned Alanya and Donial together. “Your uncle is not here,” Kral said. “There are only those four bodies. That means the rest escaped. If Lupinius had fallen, he would be here with them.”
“Unless they took him captive.”
“I doubt that bandits like these take prisoners,” Kral replied. Looking at Alanya, he didn’t add the observation that they didn’t take male captives, but might change their minds for a young, golden-haired beauty.
There was always a chance that Lupinius had ransomed his life with the Teeth, and whatever other treasure he had looted before leaving Koronaka. Kral hoped that wasn’t the case. He couldn’t follow both the bandits and Lupinius. If he made the wrong choice, the Teeth might be lost forever.
He decided to stay on Lupinius’s trail. It was by far the safer bet. Once he had caught up with the man, if it turned out he had made the wrong choice, he could leave Alanya and Donial in the arms of civilization, where they belonged, and come back here after the thieves.
He swung himself up into his saddle. He knew Alanya was hurting from the days of riding, and he was more than a little sore himself. Traveling on horseback was not common for Picts, and he knew he’d need to build up some calluses before he was truly comfortable in the saddle. “We need to go,” he declared.
“But ...”
“He is not here, Alanya.”
She looked crestfallen. Had she secretly hoped that they would find her uncle’s body there? It would save her the discomfort of confronting him personally, Kral supposed. And it would make the rest of the trip easier.
But it wasn’t to be. Resigned, she climbed back up on her mount, and Donial did the same. Kral didn’t want to have to force them to ride through the dark of night, but he wanted some distance from this pile of rocks before he dared try to sleep.
MANG WALKED ALL that day and the next one, finally clambering up the steep, rocky slopes of a nearby mountain that the Picts called Talking Hill. There were many sacred spots in the Pict pantheon. As a people, they were close to the earth and took spiritual solace in her many moods. On Talking Hill, there was a spot where the Pictish ancestors, it was said, answered questions of the holy ones, the shamans. Mang was no shaman. But he had questions and didn’t know how else to get them answered, without confiding to some other clan’s shaman that crucial knowledge had been lost.
He knew about the sacred spot, though not where it was. Every Bear Clan Pict did, since it figured in many of their songs and stories. It was on the side of the mountain that faced the setting sun, halfway up, inside a circle of standing gray stones, in the shade of a tall, twisted tree. He began to wonder if he would ever find it, on the side of such a great hill as this. But presently his path intersected a series of stone steps, twined with native grasses and covered in lichens and soil so that they might have been carved from the face of the mountain itself. Mang started up them. They were smooth, worn down by the feet of hundreds of generations of Pictish shamans.
Finally, the steps led toward the twisted tree, standing by itself on a bluff. Once he had reached the correct level it was an easy matter to find the circle of stones. They were jet-black and polished to a glassy sheen, half the height of a man, and must have taken the work of many strong warriors to position in this way.
Unless it was the work of the gods.
Along the way, he found himself worrying about Klea from time to time. She had agreed to carry on Kral’s efforts, hampering the construction of the wall at every turn. The first night after Kral had left on his quest, she had gone to the wall to do that. Just before first light she had returned, energized and enthusiastic. She had been able to upend a new section that had been started but had not yet set, and she had fired three flaming arrows over the wall. When she had returned to find Mang sitting up waiting for her, she had broken into raucous laughter, describing the antics of the settlers trying to find her in the woods. Her blue paint was smeared from rivers and woods, but her spirits were high.
Mang had left then, confident that she would be able to keep herself safe and make life hard on their enemies at the same time. Besides, he had important things to do, too. He carried a bow and a knife, dressed in a loincloth with a fur wrap across his chest and shoulders, and wore hide sandals on his feet. His long, graying hair was tied back with a leather thong.
Now, outside the circle of strange stones, he put his weapons down on the ground, shook off the wrap, tugged away the loincloth and sandals. One entered the circle naked as the gods made you, or not at all.
Once inside, however, he wasn’t sure what to do. He was no holy man. He sat on the earth, as bare of leaves, weeds, and grass as if someone had raked it clean, and rested his hands on his knees. After about twenty minutes had passed with nothing at all happening, he decided to speak out loud.
“I need to know about the Teeth of the Ice Bear,” he said. “What happens if it is away from the cave and in the world of man? What happens if the crown of Teeth is lost?”
He sat for so long that he began to despair of ever getting the answers he sought. As the eldest survivor of the Bear Clan, looking after the Teeth was his responsibility. He had to find out somehow what it was all about.
Mang wasn’t sure when the landscape around him started to change. It was subtle at first, barely noticeable. A difference in the quality of the light. A thinning of the atmosphere, maybe. The green of tree leaves became richer, a shade darker. The dirt on which he sat grew darker brown, more saturated. Even the sunlight felt a little warmer on his naked flesh.
But then, at almost the same moment that Mang noticed things were changing around him
, the change grew more dramatic. Instead of getting warmer, the temperature dropped dramatically as an icy wind blew up, seemingly confined within the circle of standing stones. Outside the circle, everything blurred into liquid masses of color with no definable shape, while inside, Mang could see every pebble, every speck of dirt, with absolute crystal clarity. His chest tightened with fear, his hands clenching, nails digging into his skin.
And then even that changed, and Mang no longer sat on the mountainside. He didn’t seem to be anywhere in particular, to have any physical form at all. He was all senses—skin tingling with some invisible power, nose filled with out-of-place smells of pine sap and mint and the rich, earthy stink of a bush hog, ears rattled by winds and a high-pitched humming, tongue tasting the fresh bite of an apple, of all things.
And his eyes . . . his eyes were full of images that couldn’t be real, that he couldn’t truly be seeing. With what little self-awareness he could muster in that moment of dizzying strangeness, he wondered if he had gone mad. He saw—or believed he saw—the Ice Bear itself, massive and monstrous, its slavering jaw open, revealing huge, razor-like teeth. The thing walked with its head swaying before it, enormous shoulders moving under a coat of frosted white fur as thick and deep as the trees coating the side of a mountain. Icicles the size of inverted trees dangled from its thick coat. Its gigantic feet smashed forests flat with every stride. Its bulk was vast enough to block out the sun for miles. Around it swirled killing winds: winds that iced over the rivers, froze and destroyed the fields and the forests, and left hapless humans dead in their wake.
Mang watched the Ice Bear devastate villages. He could feel the mournful wailing of those left behind, the terror of those who witnessed its implacable approach with nowhere to run or hide.
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