Soldiers of Ice (7 page)

The ranger’s mittened hand closed on the handle of

something she could only hope was her knife, and with a blind slash, she hacked at the saddle’s restraining belts.

Half her body, suddenly freed of its bonds, swung upward as if it had lost all weight. Instantly she lost her position, and the hippogriff’s wing folded, slamming against her with a force that almost knocked the blade from her grasp. Beating back the feathers with one hand, Martine slashed furiously at the last strap. As she was still sawing at the leather, she tumbled away from the doomed mount, and at the

same instant, the last strap gave way. She flew off the rump of the hippogriff, her feet flying over her heels just as Astriphie’s wings cracked into an upthrust sheet of ice. The roar that filled the glacier was superseded by the squealing, popping, pulpy grind as the hippogriff gouged a bloody track across the dirty white snow.

Marfine saw none of this, however, for in the instant Astriphie hit, she was twisting futilely in midair in an attempt to land on her feet. Then all at once the white was upon her—tearing, ripping, and beating as she smashed through the frozen crust and sank into the needlelike snow beneath it.

Three

Martine’s next recollection was of

darkness—a blessed darkness that

numbed the raging fire coming from

somewhere inside her body. She floated

back in the light cocoon where she had

been hurled and tried to pinpoint the

source of the pain that dreamily eluded

her understanding. Even so, the fire became steadily stronger, and with it came awareness. The pain settled over her the way autumn leaves accumulated on the ground, slowly spreading throughout her body but primarily in the legs, a frightening combination of raw, shredded nerves and cold, soothing numbness. The here and now struggled through the agonizing haze, bringing a view of a queer, phantasmagoric world, exaggerated and tilted. Shades of white, lathered red, and pink resolved themselves into angles of ivory all splattered with blood and gore.

Not ivory, Martine corrected herself. Ice… I’m half buried in ice tinged with blood. The crimson stains captured her attention, a clarion call to warn her of the danger 50

The Harpers

of her condition—the steady glaciation of her limbs if she didn’t get moving, and soon. Floundering in the broken snow, Martine twisted about to view her own body, make sure it was intact, only to have the constant fire give way to stabbing pain. The darkness swirled back, threatening to overwhelm the dim light of her world. Martine held it at bay by focusing on her serf, on her mission.

Using the strange clarity that torment brought, Martine drove herself further, seeking to learn what had happened to her body. From the way her side hurt, one or More ribs were probably cracked. She had felt that pain once before, and the woman knew she could survive that. Elsewhere were More cuts than she could guess. Blood trickled down the ice crystals on her brow and clouded the vision in one eye. Reaching up to wipe the warm smear away, the Harper discovered that her arm throbbed fiercely. She remembered with absolute clarity hitting the snow with her shoulder.

After that pain, Martine gingerly put the rest of her body through a mental inventory. Although every move caused pain like fire to play along her bones, nothing seemed to be broken, other than perhaps her ribs. Ice-clotted, black-red scratches scored her once sturdy winter gear, but overall the woman was pleased she had no great gashes or dangerous wounds, at least so far as she could tell. Frantically she remembered Jazrac’s stones as if they, too, were part of her body. A quick pat assured her that these had also survived unbroken.

Satisfied that she was bloodied but in working order, Martine stiffly floundered out of the trench her body had dug. She had to find Astriphie and Vilheim. To her relief, she found that at the glacier’s surface, the howling wind had eased considerably, although the thundering booms from the fissure still shook the crystalline ground. It seemed that for every four steps she took, the ground Soldiers of Ice

51

would suddenly heave and tremble in response to the rift’s violent shifting.

Finding Astriphie was no problem. The hippogriff’s body was splayed across the glacier, smears of its blood trailing, sledgelike, in the beast’s wake. Astriphie had struck the top of an ice cap, shearing that away in a neat gouge. Pinion feathers decorated the bloody grooves where the animal had slid, and Martine could see clearly the long scratches where the beast had clawed the ice in its death slide. At the base of another mound lay the hippogriff, its mighty wings ripped and pierced by jagged splinters of ice. The beast’s eaglelike head was twisted around at an impossible angle.

Below the neck, the left half of the mount’s feathered rib cage was caved in; white angles of bone and tissue showed through the remains of the downy hide. Steam rose from the blood and viscera spilled onto the snow, partially held in by the tangled straps of the Harper’s saddle.

Martine suddenly felt the intense cold penetrating deep through her body. She collapsed to the ice, seized by vio lent trembling, and tears mixed with blood in her eyes.

Breathing was possible only in lancing heaves that sucked in swirls of icy air. Her throat burned with each spasmodic gasp.

Even after the fit passed, Martine could not move for a long time. The cold ground, smooth-slick and red, sapped her energy, making it harder than before to rouse herself. It would be nice just to sleep here with Astriphie The thought

whispered insidiously in her mind. Surely she could just lie here and rest a bit before doing anything else ….

Martine swore as

she realized what was happening. It was a decidedly creative oath, laced with a sea dog’s salt and bitter references to geysers. The thought of what Jazrac might think

of her less than ladylike tongue made Martine appreciate her cursing all the More. It helped immensely. Before she realized it, she was up on her feet,

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53

wavering unsteadily as she surveyed the crash site, looking for Vii.

Unsupported by snowshoes, her feet sometimes broke

through the snow crust in places where the surface was a deceptive sheet of old snow. Every time it happened, the glacier seemed to try to swallow her whole. As she labored her way out of another snowy morass, she sardonically thought how fortunate she was to be on the smooth ice field here and not in the tangle of crevasses they had seen from the air.

The Harper found Vil about a hundred yards from the hippogriff’s corpse. Luck had favored Vii More than Martine, providing him with a soft landing in the lee slope of a powder-crusted hummock. From the tumbled track through the snow, it appeared that the woodsman had hit near the top of the hummock and then slid to a rest near the bottom.

There he lay, still sprawled out and unmoving. Hurrying to him as best she could, Martine was relieved to hear a choking gasp as she rolled his body over.

“Are you okay?” she demanded as she began examining him for broken bones.

“I’m—” Vil winced as her hands prodded his hip. “I’m all right.” He heaved himself to his feet stiffly. “How about you?”

Martine shrugged stoically. “I’m walking.”

“Good. And the hippogriff?.’

“Dead.” The wind swept away the pain in her words.

Vil didn’t offer any condolences. “We’ve got to gather our supplies and move on,” he said brusquely as he started plodding across the snow.

“I’ve got to finish my mission.”

The man wheeled on Martine, wind whipping his crinkled face. “Your mission? Just what the Nine Hells is this about?” His voice wavered furiously. “When you needed a guide, I trusted you, and now, after damn near killing me, you want to go on. You’ve already killed your horse. Isn’

that enough?”

“I didn’t—”

‘q’hen why in the hell did you fly so close?”

“I—I took a chance, okay? And it wasn’t a horse, it wa Astriphie, my hippogriff. Astriphie’s dead, and I didn’t wan that!” Marfine shouted back, shivering with cold and fur3

The wind caught the tears as they welled in her eyes an blew them across her cheeks. Biting back her words, Ma tine blindly stumbled past the man. “Go home if you wan to. I’m staying here.”

The Harper cursed Vil, cursed the ice, cursed herselt The man was right, of course. She should not have pushe Astriphie so close to the rift. Her eagerness to finish th, mission quickly meant everything was in ruins. All sh could do was try to continue, even if that meant risking he own life. Pulling up the hood of her parka, she hid her fac against the cold.

The snow crackled with Vil’s steady pursuit. “I’m sorry lost my temper,” he shouted over the gusts.

The Harper nodded a bitter acceptance.

‘“Ne cannot stay.”

“I must.” She did not break her short, struggling stride.’

“Is your mission that important?” “It is to me.”

‘you could die out here.”

“I won’t.” Words of false confidence, she thought bitterl3

‘grhat are you doing here, anyway?” The man would m relent. ‘qhat are you hiding?”

“Nothing! My business is my own, that’s all.” Martir stepped back warily from the man as his tone becarr increasingly demanding.

The woodsman stopped her with a mittened hand on h, sleeve. A swordsman’s suspicion filled his face. “Who ,r you? Someone I should fear?” The honed words slic{

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55

through the defenses of polite trust between the two. The tenseness of his body and the hand hovering close to the sword were signs of his nervous state.

“You think I’m evil?” Her own body slipped into fighting tension to match his, a dog and a cat sizing each other up.

“I don’t know. Tell me otherwise.”

With the pair of them alone in a world of arctic white, Martine knew the truth was her only defense.

“I’m a Harper,” she stated in flat, cold tones that matched their surroundings. “Sort of, anyway. I’ve come up here to close that fissure.” She slowly pointed toward the turmoil overhead.

“A Harper?” Vil echoed doubtfully, though his body

eased somewhat.

“Yes. You know, agents of good and—”

“I know what Harpers are. I just didn’t expect to find one here.”

Martine was growing increasingly testy, having bared her secret only to be met by doubt. “I didn’t choose to come here. I was sent.” She beat her arms together for warmth.

“I’m supposed to close that—that thing—before something unpleasant happens.”

Vil looked away. “Torm’s eyes,” he swore softly, “a Harper.” Dropping his hands away from his weapons, he turned back to face her. “Why didn’t you say something? I was ready to kill you.”

“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have let you,” she said as she started toward Astriphie. “Harpers are supposed to keep their activities secret. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Now that you know, will you help me?”

Vil fell in beside her, his suspicions gone, and the two trudged back to the hippogriff’s corpse, quietly listening to the sounds of the glacier as it cracked and rumbled beneath their feet. Already the hippogriff’s body was cool, and the bloody carcass had begun to freeze over. Ice and feathers cracked as the two humans set to the grim business of recovering their supplies.

What they recovered wasn’t promising—several blankets iced up with blood and a little food that hadn’t been scattered in the crash. “It’s not enough,” Vii announced. “We need More food.” He drew his thick-bladed skinning knife and gestured toward Astriphie’s carcass. “It must be done.

You can keep watch.”

Up here there was nothing to watch for but stinging snow, yet Martine gratefully accepted Vil’s excuse not to help as the woodsman, with the cold practicality that matched the terrain, sliced strips from Astriphie’s haunch.

Bloody meat plopped onto the snow as he sawed at the carcass.

Finally, the work finished, Vil skewered the meat on arrows and jabbed them into the snow, leaving the meat to dry in the breeze.

“Still not enough,” he muttered as he turned away from the bloody task.

“How so?” breathed Martine from where she crouched close to the ground, as if the ice held warmth.

“We cannot both live on the food we have. Not up here, at least. One of us could, but there isn’t enough for two. One of us must go back for supplies.”

The Harper cast a shivering glance at the meat-weighted stakes. “And?”

The woodsman was already loading one of the salvaged saddlebags with supplies. “Since you will not leave, I must.

I’ll take a little food and hunt for whatever else I need on the way.”

The glacier rocked under their feet as the geyser shot up another of its massive plumes. Martine looked to the sky, knowing that soon they would be showered with a flurry of ice crystals too large to be snow, yet too small to be hail. She pulled one of the stiff blankets closer about her shoulders and began chipping at the frozen ground with her dagger.

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Now it was Martine’s turn to be suspicious as she looked up at the woodsman. “And why should I trustyou to come back?”

Vilheim snorted, amused by something Martine did not understand. The Harper couldn’t judge his reaction at all.

His mouth was drawn tight, and his eyes were lost in the distance. At last he spoke in an almost perfect monotone, unconsciously beating mittened fist to mittened palm. He had all the air of a man giving testimony at an inquest, “I am… was.., a paladin of Torm.”

Martine blinked, so stupefied by the admission that it overcame her thoughts even of the cold, then waited for Vilheim to continue. He waited, perhaps expecting More of a reaction, and the two stared at each while the wind whisfied across the icy plain.

“You were a paladin of Torm?” Martine finally echoed, thrusting her dagger deep into the ice.