Master of Whitestorm (50 page)

On the far shore lay boulder fields deposited by some mighty and ancient glacier. Progress there would be treacherous. Drifts masked pitfalls and warm springs glazed over by parchment thin ice. The route wound through a twisty maze of melt-streams. Even in places where winds had stripped the snow cover, dangers awaited the unwary. The largest rocks might turn and fall, and sink-holes laced the land where underground streams had leached off the sediment of moraine. Hidden fissures could swallow a booted leg like trap jaws, macerating flesh and bone beyond hope or healing.

“Misstep, and you’re bait for the Corrigan,” Indlvarrn warned. “This place has no pity for the injured, so I advise: use your axe spikes, and trust no ground you have not tested thoroughly. Fhingold or I will lead. Use the boot tracks of the man in front wherever you can, and still, check before you shift your weight.”

But the weather which had harried their progress up the Graley perversely failed to cooperate. The nights turned diamond clear. Rather than stall and consume stores needed sorely in Arrax, the expedition pressed on. They crossed the lake, nakedly exposed and raked by winds that whistled through the northern escarpments. Tracks marked their progress like a scar. Mountain born traced their faces with luck signs, and soldiers not in the habit of praying appealed to their maker for protection until gusts erased their trail. The dwarves became simply silent; except Indlvarrn, who sat with Korendir through hours of scholarly argument.

All without exception huddled under blankets each dawn to watch the Corrigon kite skyward from the ridges. The monster’s black-feathered, horn-scaled breast knifed the winds like old bone. Swift as a crossbow quarrel, it soared in tireless circles and scoured the mountains for prey. Once it dipped overhead, a yearling bullock impaled in blood-crusted talons; the animal was still alive. It thrashed and bawled in pitiable agony. The monster turned narrowed, bead-yellow eyes, then whipped its head down between wing beats and crushed the beast’s brain in its beak. Men and dwarves, the company sweated in terror as the predator arrowed away. Confronted firsthand by the monster which afflicted Arrax, the king’s men exchanged whispers, but furtively, lest Korendir overhear their talk.

Nightfall saw the company on the move once again. Dragging the supply sleighs, they marched over frost-blasted tundra, shadowed by a grandeur whose desolation dwindled the soul. Restlessly urgent, Korendir exhorted the stragglers to haste, though the storms returned and gale winds screamed like curses across the vista of ice and rock.

The party paused on the rising ground at the far edge of the valley. There, harried by driving snow, lndlvarrn ordered teams to rope up for ascent up a vertical gash in the rockface. That the fourth pitch must route them within yards of the Corrigon’s eyrie was noted by the king’s men-at-arms; several shot glances at their captain. Korendir noticed. With keenest intuition he assigned the ones who clustered to separate teams. Now each rope was led off by a mountain born or a dwarf. They had most to lose if nerves faltered, and no one needed to name what would befall any climber who strayed from protection in the cleft. The Corrigon’s insatiable appetite caused it to hunt during gales; snowfall might hamper its eyesight, but not its ability to kill.

Slowly, with much trepidation, the party began the final stage of the journey. Arrax might lie in the valley beyond the next ridge, but dire were the hazards in between. The fissure was damp, runged with frozen cascades where springs sprang from the rock. Icicles offered precarious footing. Patterns of freeze and thaw had set down layers that shattered under the jab and pressure of crampons; the slate beneath was less trustworthy still, crumbled with erosion and frost. Indlvarrn drilled his screws well away from such watercourses, but often that precaution necessitated a pitch off the direct route up the cleft. The dwarf guide wormed up slippery overhangs, threaded past seracs riven with cracks. Forward progress stalled while he side-tracked. Men were compelled to wait for untold spans of time, while muscles stiffened, and faces burned numb from the cold. None but the leaders could see to know the reason for delay. Nerves frayed, and tempers shortened, and the strain told the worst upon Indlvarrn. His partner noticed and suggested with utmost tact that Dalon’s team head the next pitch.

“What would you do if I refused?” Indlvarrn called from above. Between a blast of driven snow, Fhingold caught a merry smile that belied the attrition of fatigue.

Fhingold framed answer in the same spirit. “Say no, and I’ll gnaw through your boots at the ankle. Then here you’d be, pink as a baby and wiggling your toes for the Corrigon.”

Indlvarrn returned an epithet torn short by another gust; the back draft wafted a stench of putrified flesh, probably from the carcasses that rotted in the nest up above.

“Dastardly housekeeper,” muttered Fhingold. “Birds usually are, Neth in His wisdom knows why.”

“What d’you expect from a species born without a sphincter?” Dalon offered up from the ledge below.

Fhingold scraped an itch under his cap and searched for a stinging retort. That moment Indlvarrn shouted warning.

An overwhelming, monstrous shadow raked past. Air sang over taut feathers and overlapped scales of burnished horn. The Corrigon swooped out to hunt, and this time its flight cut too close. Indlvarrn ducked a slashing talon; his axe fell, clanging and showering ice as it tumbled. Startled to instinctive reaction, Fhingold crooked his knuckles and hugged the face of the mountain. Braced with fear, he listened as the scuffle continued above.

Indlvarrn clutched to the outcrop as his body swayed out over air. His glove caught, scraped, and snagged for a second in a cleft. He grunted. His lips pulled back from his teeth as he strained in the effort of recovery. Then his hold ripped from the mountain. Gravel pelted downward, and Indlvarrn twisted.

“Hang onto me jewels,” he gasped as he lost his last purchase and plunged.

“You’ll owe me an ale,” Fhingold replied, eyes screwed shut in anticipation of the moment when the dwarf guide would fetch against the belay rope. Dread spared no thought for the Corrigon, which had flown on to Neth knew where. A safety line had been secured to the face above Fhingold; but the rock had accepted the drill too readily for the younger dwarf’s liking. He dared not rely on that anchor to spare the guide’s life from disaster.

His hands scrabbled desperately for purchase as the safety line whumped taut. The screw ripped out, and the rope yanked short a second time. Jerked cruelly against his harness, Fhingold grunted. His feet slithered free, and his body slammed full length into rock. The last gasp of breath was wrung from his lungs. But his hands held. Fhingold disregarded the ache of overtaxed wrists. With dwarvish obstinacy he set himself to endure for as long as his companion might require.

But the harness dug into his shoulders for barely a second’s interval. The rope sang short and sharp and then went ominously light.

Fhingold banged both knees and hastily recovered his footing. “Dal,” he gasped painfully. “Where’s Indie? There’s not any pull on the line.”

The king’s man called up from beneath. “Probably caught himself. The mountain born swear he’s half spider.”

But a glance down the face revealed only a tassel swinging in the wind.

Indlvarrn had gone without a sound.

Heartsore and shivering in reaction, Dalon pulled in the trailing rope. The plies were sheared cleanly, perhaps by ice, or more likely by the edge of an escarpment as the dwarf swung upon impact; except that the damage looked for all the world like a cut induced by honed steel. And now the expedition to save Arrax was left in the wilds without a guide.

XXVII

CORRIGON

JAMMED SHOULDER-
to-shoulder on the sloping confines of a ledge, the climbers raised voices in dissent. Indlvarrn’s fall had splintered a unity flawed from the first, and while dwarves might suspect the safety line had been slashed by a human’s knife, men swore the Corrigon was to blame. Arguments festered.

The predator had not flown back for a second pass; if it had, Echend, from beneath, would have seen. “Indie made no outcry. Surely a man skewered by a monster would have screamed in pain or warning.”

“Not if the bird snipped his head off with that great, ugly beak,” called a king’s man. “Remember what happened to the bull?”

The mountain born found this suggestion preposterous; they made their opinion plain by crossing to stand with the dwarves. More teams arrived. Angry men packed more tightly together, and as news of Indlvarrn’s fall reached the newcomers, grudges resurfaced with freshened vigor. The king’s men spoke of turning back. Whether by accident or design, the guide’s death offered them excuse; the Hyadons by themselves were murderous, and the lair of the Corrigon too close. A thieving dwarf might slip by alone, but not a company of fifty men. Any fool could see that the town beyond the ridge was inaccessible.

The dwarves shook their fists. “Murderers! Slave trappers!”

Other less savory insults mingled with rejoinders from the mountain born, who scorned that the rations for starving kinfolk should be squandered by soldiers who had no better honor than to flee home to the hearths of their mothers.

The trailing teams reached the ledge just as the king’s captain took umbrage and a fight started. Fhingold shoved forward to tear the combatants apart, and a bystander with a dagger took a slice at him. Fhingold ducked clear, and ducked again to avoid Korendir, just arrived, and driving through the press with bared steel. The offender with the knife was knocked sprawling, half paralyzed by a kick that had seemingly arisen from nowhere; Korendir had not unstrapped his crampons. Neither had he lightened his blow to compensate, but instead swept down his sword and laid the edge to the fallen man’s throat.

The soldier gasped in his pain, but carefully; each spasm of his windpipe drew blood against the blade that bore steadily against his flesh. He regarded the hand of the mercenary with his eyes ringed white with fear. The scrap between mountain born and captain ended abruptly of its own accord. Before the look on Korendir’s pale face, even Fhingold edged back toward the warmth of his fellows.

The mercenary’s gaze swept them all: the dwarves in their grease-stained leathers, the tattooed features of the mountain born, and the surly lowland soldiers whose king had commanded them to a duty too harsh for the asking. Lastly, he glanced at the wretch on the floor whose bleeding leg and stifled, agonized sobs raised plumes of condensation in the air.

“What a sorry pass we have come to,” Korendir said. The sadness behind his words did not show, only the anger, cold as death, and as pitiless. He did not appeal to reason, for generations of prejudice understood none; neither did he plead for reconciliation. What rapport he might have fostered with king’s men had withered on the Graley, when urgency had disallowed pause for a funeral rite.

The silence stretched on and became brittle. Korendir had no intention of inviting dissent by volunteering his opinion. Stung to disadvantage by a command tactic he knew all too well, the king’s captain spoke in defiance. “I say we strive for a useless cause. The people of Arrax cannot possibly last the winter on our pitiful store of supplies. If we survive to reach the town, what then? We couldn’t leave. Only offer ourselves up to starve, or add to the mouths taking food from children. If, I say, this Neth-forsaken mountain and the Corrigon don’t kill us first.” The captain raised his stubbled chin. “The dwarves and the Arrax born may do as they wish, but no man in my company will die of foolishness. We lost our luck on the Graley and now we have no guide. By my order, the king’s men-at-arms go no further.”

His determination rooted a new brand of quiet in the party gathered within the ice cleft. Argument could not reunite them, Korendir sensed at once; to speak of suffering children would just wed each side the more firmly to a course that must end in disaster. Instead, in nerveless detachment, the Master of Whitestorm sheathed his sword. The offender sprawled at his feet accepted reprieve with a whimper. He scuttled to rejoin his fellows where, pointedly solicitous, the captain helped him to his feet.

Korendir rejected the inuendo, that misdirection had brought them to impasse. “A dog team can reach the coast in five days,” he contradicted crisply. “Relief could reach Arrax in a fortnight, and properly rationed, the supplies we deliver might be stretched to last for a month.”

“All true,” the captain allowed, but smugly. “Except for the Corrigon, of course.”

Korendir returned a look like a whetted blade. He gave no sign that his patience was spent. Always more loner than leader, he announced his own style of countermeasure. “Then by dawn tomorrow, I’ll give you the Corrigon’s death. Failing that, you may each do as you please. Otherwise,
as a company,
you shall all press on to Arrax.”

The captain gained no space for rebuttal. Korendir gathered up crossbow and quarrels, a quarter flask of ale, and an ice axe. He slipped out into the whiteness of the storm before anyone present had fully grasped the impact of his promise.

Fhingold was first to recover. “My ancestors would weep for shame, that one man should be left to go these cliffs alone. Will we stand here stunned while he tries to slay that horror by himself?”

“Won’t find me stopping him,” retorted the soldier whose leg stung yet from the effects of Korendir’s reflexes. “If that madman from Whitestorm seeks death for the glory of Arrax, I say let him.”

Fhingold disdained answer and reached for his tattered gloves. He was joined by Echend, and after a moment, by the steadfast presence of Dalon. Quietly the three assembled their gear. The eyes of the others stared elsewhere; not a man or a dwarf in their number was not diminished by Korendir’s brave challenge. Families might languish in slavery, or children starve, but dread of the Corrigan shackled all but one dwarf, one Arrax man, and one soldier who held a mercenary that kept faith in higher regard than his captain.

* * *

Lights seared the dark from Ithariel’s chamber each night since Orame’s arrival. Rays speared like blades from the casements of the upper tower, shining and silver as moonbeams, but bright enough to blind any mortal who lingered too long in awed wonder. That nine White Circle enchanters raised their powers to generate the phenomenon brought scant comfort to Haldeth. Huddled on his cot in the forge, and muffled under blankets and counterpane, he strove to escape into dreams. Yet sleep would not come. His feet went sweaty and cold by turns, and the hours dragged without relief.

The smith rolled over yet again. He kicked at an offending fold of blanket and stubbornly forced himself still. The familiar tang of iron and woodfire failed to lull his senses to forgetfulness. When the first, creeping sensation that he was not alone pricked at the nerves along his spine, Haldeth screwed his eyes closed and concentrated upon the whine of the wind across the eaves.

He would not yield to the impulse that urged him to shove back the bed clothes and rise.

In time that early, inward suspicion became an itch; Haldeth clamped his fists between his knees. The particulars of the weather outside suddenly acquired critical importance. Focused on the moment the next gust would peak, he considered prayer, while the itch became an ache, then swelled into compulsion that stung his mind like a burn. Finally harried past conscious volition, the smith flung off the covers.

“You sleep soundly,” Orame commented from the dark. His robed form shifted like shadow against the cherry glow of the forge coals.

Hot where he had earlier been cold, Haldeth kicked clear of his bedclothes. The knife he kept to trim leather tumbled out, unsheathed, from the cranny between mattress and forearm. The pommel struck with a clang that condemned on the swept stones of the floor.

“Remarkable you should sleep at all, for a man whose distrust abides with him even in bed.” The enchanter gestured disparagingly. “That lump of a crossguard looks hefty enough to put your back out.”

It had in fact done exactly that, but Haldeth was too flustered to retort. That magic had made him uneasy in the first place was reason enough to be peevish. “What do you want, wizard?” The smith ducked the sorcerer’s look of rebuke by raking the hair from his brow. An afterthought troubled him. “And you didn’t waken me.”

“Certainly not.” Deceptively agreeable, Orame flicked one hand. The forge coals flared up into flame. “I wish you to dress yourself, master smith. In precisely one hour a midwife will come calling at the gate. Someone must be up to let her in.”

Haldeth shot upright in his quilts and a rip in the patchwork loosed a puff of goose down in the draft. “Midwife? Who for? Ithariel’s due to bear at spring equinox, not solstice. I know we’ve had blizzards, but hasn’t your pack of conjurers bothered to look out and check the stars?”

Orame shrugged. “What does a star know? Whitestorm’s daughter, now, she will be naming her own hour.”

“Neth forsake us, not three months early.” Haldeth swiped at a drifting bit of lint. He missed.

The feather shot aside in the rush of disturbed air, then angled through the space which should have been occupied by Orame. But the wizard had silently disappeared.

The smith muttered the rude phrase he should have thought of earlier; then he swung his feet from sweaty sheets and stood erect. His first step set him skidding on the haft of his forgotten knife. He escaped being skewered in a fall, but consoled himself without expletives. Shaken at last to straight thinking, Haldeth interpreted the only possible reason for Ithariel’s labor to defy nature.

His heart missed a beat from comprehension.

When the curses came, they were each and every one for the Master of Whitestorm, and whatever lofty folly had sent him on a harebrained chase into the Hyadons to slay the Corrigon.

Korendir must have forsaken the ice cleft immediately after his departure; at least Dalon had been unable to overtake him, or find any trace of human passing as he set off to lead the first pitch. Behind came the grieving Fhingold, and Echend, who had given his Name, and intended to honor the significance of the deed whether he died in the attempt. Snow swirled off the heights, blindingly dense, and without any sign of abating. Visibility closed down to inches during gusts, when the white of blown drifts added to the flakes already falling. Conditions were too severe to locate a man alone on the mountain, Dalon knew this. He shifted grip on his axe and scrabbled under snowfall to find footholds. Pursuit of Korendir at this point was stubborn folly, with darkness nigh and not so much as a track to affirm their purpose. Yet when the team of three paused in a cranny to rotate leaders, no one suggested turning back.

“I say we climb past the Corrigon’s lair, then traverse the open slope,” suggested Echend. “He’ll be there, if he hasn’t fallen, and my feeling is that he won’t.”

“Not that one.” Dalon slapped his glove in frustration.

“But after dark, how will we know the place where the Corrigon nests?”

Fhingold snorted. “You can’t smell it?” He scrubbed his knuckles over the ice which fleeced his eyebrows, that his frown of contempt not be wasted. Each gust since noon had carried the stink of putrescent meat; only a stone-headed human could miss it. But the soldier and the mountain born could hardly be ranked among the selfish, if they would venture up these rocks in a blizzard. The dwarf adjusted his harness and relented. “Anyway, Indlvarrn’s notes were very clear. The ice near the Corrigon’s lair will be streaked with frozen blood.”

“How reassuring.” Dalon glanced through falling snow to Echend, and received an unsmiling affirmation. “Off we go, then, to yon haven of stench in the clouds.”

“Not funny, soldier.” Echend flicked the belay line clear of his knees and shouldered forward to lead. “Not funny at all, when by dawn all our bones might be beak fodder.”

“Hell,” muttered Fhingold as he jammed up his snowcrusted hood. “Better that than drink coward’s broth with the rest of them.”

Echend hauled himself with a chink and a grate of crampons into the teeth of the storm. “Hope you still feel that way later, dwarf.”

Dalon waited while the diminutive, broad-shouldered bundle tackled the ice face ahead of him. “Just hope we’re alive to feel anything at all. Damn Korendir for recklessness, I say we make him stand us to a barrel of jack cider. The night we get down off these peaks, I definitely want to get drunk.”

Conversation died after that, as the climb demanded total concentration. Here the cleft was choked with icicles from melt streams, and springs which seeped from the rocks. The footing was rotten and undependable; Echend, leading, had to test and triple test the screws he set for his safety rope; the water had frozen in layers that faulted at the slightest bit of pressure. The only relief to offset the dangerous ascent was the fact that the storm began to slacken. Snowfall tapered off, and the gusts subsided to the barest whisper of a breeze. Clouds drifted clear of a sky vaulted aquamarine and citrine in the afterglow of sunset, and silence settled over the mountains. Uncanny and complete, it enfolded the climbers in comfortless isolation. Companions, warmth, and memories of family and home seemed more like a dream in the midst of waking nightmare.