Dawn of the Ice Bear Page 17

  “What sense is that?” Conor wondered. “Sorcery most foul, I’d say.”

  “Sorcery?” Alanya echoed. “Perhaps. But it is what he wanted most.”

  Donial took Alanya’s hand. “To leave you behind, sister? I do not think he wanted that.”

  “I doubt he had a choice,” Alanya said. She appreciated her brother’s thoughts and agreed that Kral would probably have wanted a different option—one that included her. Presumably that option had not presented itself, however, and he had done what was best for his people.

  She would have expected nothing less.

  Conor went back into his hut. Donial and Tarawa followed. Alanya stayed where she was a while longer, watching as the footprints where Kral had been standing were filled in by drifting snow.

  When she got back inside, she was shivering, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. Conor had stoked the fire, and the flames roared, blasting warmth into the small space. Every place she looked reminded Alanya of Kral, even though they had only been here for a short time. The chair he’d sat in, the sack he’d carried the crown in. That reminded her of her own mirror, passed down from mother to daughter, and in which she could see the image of Kral whenever she needed to. She would not do it right now—the loss of him was too fresh, and seeing him would be far too painful. But later, she would, and even if it showed him in someplace where she could never reach him, at least she could gaze upon him. Maybe, in some way, he would know she was there.

  The time she had spent with Kral had been the strangest, most exciting, memorable period of her life. She could not say, at this moment, whether she would ever have another adventure like that. Part of her desperately hoped not—it had often been terrifying, and she’d been afraid on numerous occasions that they would never make it out alive.

  She took up a mug of the stuff Conor had made for them, sipped from it, not even tasting. She felt the warmth fill her belly. Smiled at Donial, who sat close to Tarawa, clutching her dark hand in his pale one. Smiled, even, at Conor, who had caused them so much trouble and danger.

  She didn’t know why, but she was in a very forgiving mood.

  ROAK TREEFELLER, MORNE, and the rest of the men from Taern stopped at the crest of a jagged ridgeline. Morne was the first one to notice what had changed, what had made them all halt at once. “It’s the wind,” Morne shouted. “Feel it!” He held his hand out as if to demonstrate.

  Roak did the same, then extended his tongue as if to taste it. Warm. Sweet. “It’s from the south,” he said, surprised. “It’s shifted.”

  “Right,” Morne agreed. He fell silent then, tugging off his outer fur. The other men did the same. Roak, mystified, felt the wind again. It blew harder now, as hard as the north winds had, like air blasting from a huge fire. The harder it blew, the hotter it got. Ice melted from trees, dripping onto the ground, where it joined the snow that turned to water under the strange wind’s influence. As they stood there on the ridge, the gray clouds parted, dissipated, as quickly as smoke on a breezy day. Roak could see the valley below, and it was obvious even from here that the same transformation took place there.

  As suddenly as it had come up, the wind died. “Sorcery,” Roak said uncomfortably.

  “Aye,” Morne agreed. “But not the worst kind, eh?”

  Roak didn’t like sorcery at all. But as he felt the warm air, saw the concentration of ice disappear, he could not disagree with Morne’s conclusion,

  Better this kind than the magic that had caused the ice storm in the first place. He didn’t know if it meant that Grimnir was dead—or if the whole thing had been someone else’s doing.

  Perhaps he never would.

  If Wolf-Eye still needed their help, the warriors of Taern would go to his side. But the going would be much easier, this way.

  He knew that thanking Crom would be useless. The Cimmerian god would not have interfered in such a way.

  But as they started down the other side of the hill, Roak issued silent thanks to whoever was behind it.

  GESTIAN STOOD ON the ramparts of Tanasul with a half dozen of his best men around him, looking down into the settlement instead of out at the forest. Picts had been thronging the city, but now there were none to be seen. There were corpses everywhere. Blood filled the cracks between paving stones and collected in pools, drawing flies and other vermin. Tanasul would need major repairs and cleanup before it would be fit for human habitation again.

  “They’re gone,” one of the soldiers said, interrupting his contemplation.

  “They seem to be,” Gestian agreed.

  “But where? Why?”

  “Who knows the minds of those savages?” Gestian replied. It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was the best one he had. “Perhaps all they ever meant was to harass the settlements, to make us reconsider our presence here. As they did with the wall project, in Koronaka.”

  One of the other men snorted angrily. Gestian knew he’d had family in Koronaka—a wife and two children who had been with the party that was attacked on the way to Tanasul. None of them had survived. “Would that they’d have stayed and fought,” he said bitterly. “Save me the trouble of chasing them into the woods to kill them.”

  “You’ll never kill all the Picts,” Gestian said. “King Conan is right. Better to make peace with them because they’ll always be with us.”

  Even as he spoke the words, a lookout on the eastern wall cried out. “Aquilonian banners!” he shouted. “I can see the lion! And a lot of them!”

  “There it is,” Gestian said. “Reinforcements from the King. The Pictish scouts must have spotted them earlier, and that’s why they drew back.”

  “Savages and cowards,” the man who had lost his family insisted. “With any luck, the King’s orders were to follow them into their own lands and wipe them off the face of the Earth.”

  Gestian shook his head, but remained silent. He knew such an order was most unlikely given Conan’s professions of peace. He also knew, glancing down at the dead all around, that the Picts were no cowards. Savages, perhaps, for what that was worth. But he had taken part in the raid on the Bear Clan village that seemed to instigate all this trouble. He had seen the destruction that Lupinius and his Rangers had caused, and, in the heat of the battle, he and his fellow soldiers of Aquilonia had joined in. So he was not about to make judgments about the relative savagery of his own kind versus that of the Picts. They were the enemy, but they had fought well and bravely, and if it was the coming of the Aquilonian reinforcements that had chased them off, he was glad of it.

  For his part, he would be happy never to cross weapons with the Picts again. The price of peace was high, but the cost of war ever so much higher.

  With a shrug and a smile for his comrades, Gestian went to the ladder, to climb down and greet the Aquilonian troops.

  THE DEATHS OF his acolytes woke Shehkmi al Nasir from a deep slumber with a sensation like needles piercing his temples. These magics were wearying, and grew more so with every passing year. He had hoped that, among other things, the mystical energies of the ancient crown would help restore his strength.

  But when he tried to locate the crown once again, he could not. The smoke window that should have shown it failed him. It remained empty, a blank gray screen. He cursed, extinguished the fire, and tried again, with the same disappointing result.

  Furious, he stormed around the room, inhaling the enchanted smoke and swearing at the ceiling. That crown should have been his! Had been his, for a distressingly brief time. With all the effort he had gone through to send acolytes after it—twice!—the fact that it was still not in his possession enraged him.

  Worse, he seemed to have no way to find it again. This could have meant some sorcerer with greater powers than his own had decided to shield it from him, but that seemed most unlikely. More disturbingly, he guessed that it probably meant the crown had been returned to wherever it had been hidden for the last several millennia. Somewhere, he had to assume, inside the vast Pictish wilderness. All
of his acolytes, multiplied a hundredfold, could not search that entire area.

  But something had to quell his wrath. He clapped for the nearest servant, and after only a moment, a man named Debullah entered the chamber.

  “My lord?” the slave said.

  “Bring me a dozen slaves,” al Nasir commanded. “No—twenty. Female if they’re about, the younger and more beautiful the better.” Debullah nodded and went to do his master’s bidding without comment. Shehkmi al Nasir smiled for the first time since he’d discovered that the crown was gone. He would picture Tarawa’s face while he killed the women—face-to-face, one at a time, with a sharp knife. No magic for this task. The screams of terror and pain would blunt the edge of his fury, at least for a time.

  But he was not done with the Pictish prize. He vowed to remain alert for any additional news of it. And if he ever found Tarawa again, she would pay a considerable price for her complicity in its theft. But he would not obsess over the ugly thing or waste any more time now trying to find it. There were always better things he could be doing. And if he could not challenge Thoth Amon for supremacy this month, there would be many, many more opportunities in the future.

  Weary or not, Shehkmi al Nasir still had centuries of life left in him. One chance had passed him by. But there would be others. He would be prepared for them.

  IT WAS TIWOK, a shaman of the Raven Clan, who brought the news to Usam. “Do you feel the air?” Tiwok asked.

  Usam was leaning against the log wall of a building, breathing heavily. His wounds screamed with pain, his muscles cried exhaustion, but two more of the soldiers lay dead at his feet. His war axe rested, head down, on the dirt beside him. At Tiwok’s question, he paused to consider. “Warmer,” he answered after a moment.

  “Much warmer,” the shaman said. “The Teeth of the Ice Bear is back in the cave.”

  “How do you know this?” Usam asked, certain the man had been nowhere near the Bear Clan village.

  “That is not your concern,” Tiwok said. “Only know that I do. All the shamans do.”

  “But . . . how is it possible?”

  “You ask many questions, Usam, to which you need not know the answers.”

  Usam realized the shaman was right. He had not even known what function the sacred crown served until after its disappearance. If the shamans had known, they had kept quiet about it, in the manner of such people everywhere, he had no doubt. No surprise, then, that they would be equally enigmatic now.

  He could not deny his own senses, however, and the warmth of the air—even a faint, sweet smell, like flowers on the wind—told him that the advance of the Ice Bear had been halted, or reversed.

  “What you say seems to be true, Tiwok,” he said. “But it means nothing. I have vowed to drive the Aquilonians from our lands forever.”

  Tiwok laughed at him. If the man hadn’t been a shaman, he would have paid for that with his life, Usam thought. But the wise ones could get away with things that others could not. “That will never happen, Usam,” Tiwok said. “They are innumerable. Our world is changing, and the influence of the Aquilonians—particularly under their Cimmerian king—grows every day. No empire is forever, and theirs may yet fall one day. Not in your lifetime, though, or mine. Until that day, Usam, they will be our neighbors. You might as well accustom yourself to that fact.”

  “Never,” Usam said. The thought was repulsive to him—living in peace with those pale, civilized people? It was absurd.

  “Look in your heart, and you’ll see I’m right,” Tiwok said. “They are too many, and more follow all the time. Our world is never stable for long, Usam. Kingdoms come and go, empires rise and fall, the sea snatches away lands even as it reveals others. We either adapt or die.”

  Usam wanted to argue with the holy man, but the words wouldn’t come. Tiwok spoke a truth that he did not want to acknowledge. Finally, he saw the wisdom in the shaman’s ideas, and he nodded glumly. “If you’re right, then we have no reason to continue fighting,” he said.

  “Not only that, but Aquilonian troops will be here within the hour. If we stay, we’ll be routed. Best to preserve as many lives as we can and go home.”

  Usam nodded again. Perhaps the shaman was wrong about what the future held, in which case every Pictish warrior would be needed for the next battle and the one after that. No sense letting them die for a hopeless cause when they could retreat to their own lands and wait for another chance. “Spread the word,” he said. The knowledge that his brief reign as war commander of the united Pictish clans might be coming to an end made him sad, but it was tempered with happiness that the Ice Bear had been bested once again. “I will do the same. Tonight we will stay at the war camp and celebrate the crown’s return. When the sun rises again we will break for our separate villages.”

  Tiwok agreed, and both men set out to inform the rest of their people that the war against the settlements was over. Drums would signal to those attacking Thandara.

  Silently, stealthily, like ghosts—as they had come—the Pictish warriors left the settlement, melted back into the welcoming trees. Once again, Usam knew, a fragile peace would grip the land. And once again, if the Aquilonians allowed it to remain intact, so would he.

  INSIDE THE GUARDIAN’S cave, Kral looked at the Teeth of the Ice Bear, resting in its proper place of honor on top of a stone pillar. He smiled with satisfaction as he regarded it. He knew that its presence there represented an accomplishment of some sort, a struggle against long odds. He could not remember the nature of that struggle, though. The sense that it had happened was a lingering memory, like the scar of a long-healed wound, of which he had many. He could not recall the circumstances behind them, either.

  This did not make him unhappy. He knew that it was as it should be. The Guardian had a sacred task, and a difficult, demanding one. He would be in the cave with the crown for decades. Longer. The oldest Guardian had served for a hundred hundred years, and most stayed in the cave for well over a hundred. Kral understood that with absolute clarity—he could picture the entire history of the crown and the Guardians who had protected it before him, as readily as if it had all happened just that morning. It was the things that had occurred in his own life before he became the new Guardian that were hazy. That was so that staying in the cave would be easy for him, he realized. He would not miss aspects of his former life that he could not remember.

  He sat down in a comfortable chair, carved from the very wall of the cave by the first Guardian. Each successive one had sat in this chair, and somehow it conformed to each one’s anatomy as it already had to his. Still looking at the crown, still with the residual contentment of whatever he had done to restore it to the cave. While he could not recall what exactly he had done, he could feel scabs on his head, just healed, and figured they were part of the whole story. His muscles still ached from some kind of intense effort, and he derived satisfaction from that as well.

  And there was something else, an image that lingered just beyond his mind’s eye. He kept trying to grasp it, and failing, like trying to catch and hold a handful of river water that just kept running out between his fingers. When he could snatch a piece of it, he saw a girl with hair of the finest gold and eyes as blue as the cloudless sky. A name almost came to him, then vanished.

  It didn’t matter.

  The fragment of an image that did come brought with it unbelievable happiness. Instead of missing her, the simple fact that he had known her was good enough. If he could just hold on to that shred of a picture, or recapture it from time to time, he could stay in the cave forever.

  Kral grinned and watched the crown.

 

 

 
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