Mortal Consequences (2 page)

“Track?” Knucklebones said. She couldn’t even trust the ground she walked on. White on white, it always looked too far or too near, so she blundered like a drunk.

“A lurker follows the vibrations of our feet. It swims under the snow, circles to get in front of you, so you step on it. Lucky I threw you clear.”

Lucky nothing, the thief knew. A lifetime on the tundra had saved him. Both of them, actually, for she wouldn’t last a night if Sunbright died.

“I should have seen the outline. And ant steam.” To her puzzled look, he explained, “The ants are cold-blooded, but storing food underground in their burrows makes heat and wisps of steam. Ants often burrow near lurkers to pick up scraps of food, and they swarm over the beast’s hide after lice. They help each other survive. Everything up here works together.”

And eats each other, Knucklebones thought. “How much farther to your tribe’s hunting grounds?” she asked, for perhaps the millionth time.

“Not far now,” he answered patiently. “In fact, that’s why I missed the lurker. I was excited about getting home.” He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sunset. The sun had only risen a hand high in the southeast, and after only four hours sank toward the southwest. Nights were twenty hours long, so they mostly traveled by starlight. Why they hadn’t been eaten long ago—by lurkers or polar bears or wolves or ants—Knucklebones couldn’t fathom, but Sunbright’s knowledge of the land and its inhabitants had steered them around danger. Usually.

He pointed into the gathering dusk and said, “There. Where the land begins to fall again. A shallow rill feeds a frozen stream that drops off a low cliff at a rookery into an arm of the Narrow Sea. My people ice fish at this time of year, then pack the sledges and search for reindeer before spring. It won’t be more than six hours on.”

“What will you do when you arrive?” Knucklebones phrased the question delicately.

Sunbright rubbed his stubbly jaw, picked an icicle of blood off his upper lip, and said, “I have no idea.”

Knucklebones stifled a sigh. In the few months they’d been together, he’d explained how he left his tribe, the Rengarth Barbarians of the tundra. How his father, Sevenhaunt, a great shaman, had died suddenly, mysteriously wasting away. How Owldark, the new shaman, dreamed a vision that showed Sunbright the ruin of his people, and so demanded his death. How his mother, Monkberry, warned her only child to take his father’s sword and flee. How he’d fled to the “lowlands,” as barbarians called all territories south, for no single individual could survive on the tundra. And of his adventures to hell and to the future, where he met Knucklebones, then returned. How he’d conquered death. How in a few years, the boy had grown to a man, then a warrior, and finally a shaman.

But a shaman was worthless without a tribe, and so, defying the sentence of death, Sunbright journeyed home. And Knucklebones, herself cast to the winds, went with him, knowing she might be executed too. So, without a plan, and with little hope, they trudged across the darkening wastes.

After a time, Knucklebones said, “It’s a long way to come for revenge.”

“I don’t want revenge!” Sunbright snapped. “I want…”

“What?” she asked, peeking around her furred hood.

“I want to clear my name, and that of my father,” the shaman, staring at the dark horizon, said. “I want to find out why my father died, if possible. I want to disprove the notion that I’ll bring destruction to the tribe. I want—I just want to go home. And I feel—I know bad times are coming. I want to be with my tribe, for good or ill.”

“Do you mean the fall of the Netherese Empire? That’s not for three hundred and fifty-odd years yet.”

“No, sooner trouble. I’ve dreamt of it.”

Knucklebones’s sigh blew fog. “I believe you,” she said. “A shaman’s dreams are both a gift and a curse. Sometimes you thrash all night, then drag yourself through the day, half asleep.”

The barbarian nodded grimly and said, “And sometimes dreams show the future, or distant events, and sometimes they mean nothing. Sorting them out is the chore.”

“Why do it then? Why take the responsibility of being a shaman? It must be hell trying to advise folk on what’s true and what’s false.”

Oddly, the shaman grinned in the darkness, his fine white teeth glowing by starlight. “Better to be a thief,” he asked, “see what one can steal without losing a hand? Like a jackdaw waiting to swoop down and steal a button?”

“Yes, better that. Life is simple for thieves. If you can carry something off, fine. The owner should have been more careful. It teaches folks responsibility.”

Sunbright laughed aloud, and swatted her fanny wrapped in wool and fur. “I’ll remember that,” he said. “But you were born to be a thief and I a shaman, like my father and forebears. We can’t escape our destiny, we can only endure it.”

Knucklebones cast about the barren landscape, which hadn’t changed a jot to her eye. “I’ll be glad to escape this wasteland.”

“Wasteland?” Sunbright barked a laugh. “This is beautiful country! Wide open, bright and clean, sweet-smelling, sharp-edged, and simple. Either you adapt or you die.”

Knucklebones saw snow and stars. “Perhaps,” she mumbled. “Maybe in the summertime….”

“Oh, no. Summer’s a sea of mud. Bog so thick and gooey it jerks your boots off. No, in summer you’re a prisoner of the land, and have to camp by the sea and stay put. In winter you can hitch up dog or reindeer sleds, or strap on snowshoes or skis, and go wherever you want. No, this is the finest time of year!”

The thief swallowed a groan.

More walking, for the tenth straight day. A rest with cold rations, since they had nothing to burn. Eating snow for water. Walking and more walking. Trudging through fog for two days once. Darkness, daylight, darkness. Boots crunching a million times, and walking on.

Just when Knucklebones thought she’d go screaming mad, a spark glowed on the horizon. “Is that a village?” she asked.

“No. Northern lights.”

The thief stared in awe. Reds and blues shimmered like rainbow curtains in the sky. The colors danced, dipped, soared, settled, jiggled, never still.

“They’re beautiful!”

“You’re learning,” Sunbright chuckled. “Feel? The land dips. And hear that?”

The part-elf tipped her hood to reveal pointed ears. Far off she heard a jabbering, the first noise in days.

“What is it?”

“A rookery. A nesting ground for puffins.”

They walked faster over snow tinged red and blue by northern lights. Gradually the land sloped, then dropped by the frozen stream Sunbright had mentioned. (And found unerringly, she noted, after ten days of walking through a void.) The slope grew lumpy with rocks where the tundra had been scraped away eons ago. Rocks the size of skulls lay beside boulders as big as houses. Scattered amidst them bobbed knee-high birds with black bodies, white masks, and fat yellow beaks. Even at midnight they were busy, waddling, gossiping, arguing, fighting, lovemaking, even tumbling and sliding on their bellies down a slick mud slope. Knucklebones laughed, “It looks like market day!”

Sunbright pointed and said, “And down that rill we’ll find my tribe. They’ve wintered here for centuries, pulling the whitefish through the ice and salting them down… .”

His voice was mixed with joy and sorrow. Happiness at seeing his tribe and mother, sadness that they might be killed outright. Or driven away again. Knucklebones wondered which, for Sunbright, would be the crueler fate.

Skirting rocks, careful of twisting ankles, they negotiated the rill by starlight, then touched coarse sand. A bluff rose at their right, and the frozen arm of the sea trapped a narrow beach between. Ice floes grinding together drowned out the happy clatter of the puffins.

Down the beach they walked and walked. At every step Sunbright strode faster, until Knucklebones trotted to keep up. Finally they rounded the bluff, and walked onto a sandy spit. Before them loomed the growling, ice-packed ocean. And nothing else.

“Where are they?”

Sunbright cast about again and again. “I … I don’t know.”

Knucklebones felt a pang for him. “But—if they’re not here—where can they be?”

The shaman’s voice drifted away. “I don’t know. I can’t even guess….”

The gulguthhydra was hungry. It was always hungry. Now it sensed food approaching.

The cavern was black, so its many heads couldn’t see. The gulguthhydra was also black, though its dozen eyes would shine dull white in any light. The monster looked like a hill of black thorns that sprouted necks studded with scales like chips of volcanic glass, and atop the necks were fang-studded mouths, pug noses, and short, sharp ears. Too, the beast sported a pair of tentacles. All these writhing organs roved over the walls and floor of the cavern incessantly, scouring the stone so often it was worn smooth as far as the beast could reach. Centuries ago, the black hydra had been captured by the pit fiend Prinquis, and rooted in this corridor by magic. Over decades, it had scraped the walls clean, caught the occasional rat or bat or lesser imp, growing a tiny bit at a time, reaching a little further with tooth and tentacle.

But always it was starving, and here came food.

The creature picking along the corridor came with a heavy tread. The monster was taller than a tall man, naked but for an ugly, lumpy, flinty hide formed of something stronger than stone, for its jagged feet scratched and nicked the polished stone floor. In light, the flinty hide would have glistened slightly, so dense were the minerals that made up its skin. It had hands and feet like a human, but no eyelids, so its blue eyes were round and staring and frightening. No hair, no fingernails or toenails, no marks on its body except the dense flint.

It talked to itself in a gravelly voice like steel on a grindstone. The gulguthhydra perked up, stilled its lashing heads and tentacles to wait until the flint creature was close enough to seize. This being would make a fine meal.

“Out. This must be the way out. Must be. Outside, finally. Out…”

Closer trod the crusty feet of the monster. The hydra lunged.

Three heads struck as one. One dived from the right, one from the left, one straight down, like three fingers snatching a morsel. Toothy mouths clamped onto the flint creature in the same second, biting hard and gnashing fast to rip the prey to flinders, to reduce it to bloody gobbets before it could escape, or even limp away wounded.

The flinty fiend was knocked to its knees under the triple assault. One arm and one shoulder were pinned by mouths, and its head had been sucked into the maw of the largest head. Yet fangs broke on the stony hide, so the gulguthhydra’s mouths filled with chips and black blood. Champing furiously didn’t tear the stone skin, or even dent it.

Then the human monster struck back.

From one fist lanced a long white beam like a sword of moonfire. The blade exploded through the roof of one mouth and pierced the tiny brain and scaly skull so the head snapped back, then hung loose, dangling. From the other fist poured a rain of acid that smoked hydra flesh in a thousand places. Black blood shot in jets to stain the walls and ceiling. From the flint creature’s mouth shot a bolt of pure energy like venom. The invisible arrow-shaped jolt sliced through the biggest head, shearing it open like a rotten melon, then plunged deep into the hydra’s writhing, hilly shape. The thorny body was torn open, the many-chambered heart sundered.

With a scream from four mouths, the hydra whipped heads and tentacles in a frenzy until suddenly it stopped cold, and collapsed into a heap, stinking like charred garbage.

Spitting out scales and tooth chips, the flint monster arose, mounted the sodden, sundered carcass, climbed over, and moved on. If Prinquis, lord of this hell, had anchored the hydra here, then this passage, “… must be a way out. Outside. Got to be. Chance to get out…” But half a mile on, the flint creature bumped into a rockslide. The roof had collapsed, leaving a cavity of solid stone, and time and heat and pressure had sealed the whole tight. The monster screamed, wailed, pounded with blocky fists that cracked boulders. Yet it could never dig free, never escape this way.

Turning, the monster retraced it steps. Its rage still burned white-hot when it reached the dead hydra. Screaming anew, the monster kicked the carcass so chunks of black flesh rebounded from the walls. Tearing with stone claws, it ripped more hunks loose, bit through them, slammed them down, hurled them away. It raged and ranted and revelled in gore until the hydra was nothing but a black smear studded with teeth and gristle.

Only then did the black-spattered monster continue on, like some misshapen parody of a man or woman smeared with offal. As its great heavy feet scratched along, it muttered anew.

“… Not the way out. There must be. Must get out. Revenge… that’s all. Death to everyone I hate.

“But first, must get out…”

Onward they trekked. Winter waned as Sunbright and Knucklebones searched from the Channel Mountains in the east, north past the fork at Two Rivers, then westward along the edge of the High Ice, where even polar bears didn’t go. Nothing did they find.

Sunbright patiently explained that his people always followed this route, for as the snow retreated, the reindeer came after, cropping the soft moss of the tundra, until the herd reached the High Ice and turned westward. Yet there was no evidence of any tribe. Disturbingly, Sunbright noted the reindeer herd was thinner, the animals gaunt. The moss was thin, and the tiny purple blossoms he remembered from his youth were sparse.

“The land is weak,” he told Knucklebones. “Even the deer’s bones are flimsy. All these skulls of infant reindeer means they’re stillborn, which means their mothers are sickly. The life of the land is being sapped somehow.”

Spring turned to summer, until Knucklebones stripped to leathers by day, though she was never very warm. As the shaman had foretold, the soft earth of the tundra turned to bog. Muddy wallows under the moss formed a gluey trap that pulled Sunbright’s boots off, made their legs throb from the weight of mud, slowed them down, and finally stopped them.

So they abandoned the search for the summer. They had reached the edge of the tundra at the west anyway, and faced high cliffs topped by the Cold Forest and the icy mountains of the Dementia Range in the distance. Skirting the Bay of Ascore, Sunbright sought work in Sepulcher and Arctic Rim. He found it easily, for the towns were starved for meat. Even townsfolk saw that the once vast herds had thinned, and few would enter the trackless bogs for food. So Sunbright hunted, and sold venison, wild boar, even bear meat. He gave the money to Knucklebones, for he had no use for it. The thief, with shrewd bets and quick hands, doubled and tripled their coins gambling with sailors and loggers and fishwives.