The Ogre's Pact Page 14

  “Did you see where he went?” Tavis asked. “He didn’t take the earls into the side gulch, did he?”

  Avner shrugged. “If he did, there’s not much we can do for him now,” the youth replied. “Let’s get out of here before the ogres—”

  A distant clunk cut the boy off. The sound was followed by a surprised shout, then more clanging and yelling.

  Tavis started toward the sound. “I’m going to help Morten.”

  “What?” Avner shrieked. “You’ll get us killed.”

  “Not us. You stay here. If I don’t come back, hide here. You can start back to Hartsvale in the morning.”

  “So the king can have me arrested?” the youth scoffed. “No way.”

  “Then go where you please,” Tavis snapped. “We don’t have time to argue about it now.”

  The scout sprinted down the hill, his long legs carrying him across the ravine as swiftly as a wolf. Basil followed along, his heavy footfalls only slightly muffled by the thick layer of pine needles covering the ground.

  “I welcome your help, Basil,” Tavis said. “But maybe you should follow at a slower pace. You won’t be much good to anyone if you’re too tired to fight.”

  “And I’m too clumsy to take the ambushers by surprise.” The verbeeg smiled at Tavis’s diplomacy, then began to fade back. “I’ll come as quickly as I can without alarming the ogres.”

  Tavis continued forward at a sprint, guided by the clanging of armor and the angry battle cries of Morten and his companions. The ogres made no sound at all. So ingrained were their habits of stealth that they usually fought in complete silence, rarely uttering a sound except when they suffered a grievous wound—and sometimes not even then. Soon, as the scout crested the bank of the ravine, he saw the crescent-shaped rim of a box canyon on the slope ahead. Clambering among the boulders and spruces along its brink were almost two dozen ogres, all firing black arrows down into the gulch. From the panicked cries echoing from the hollow, it appeared their shafts were finding targets all too often.

  Tavis stopped just outside the range of their bows, then leaned his quiver against his knee. He did not remove any arrows from the case because once his foes realized where he was, he would have to move in a hurry.

  As the scout nocked his first shaft, an ogre suddenly clutched his breast and spun around, stumbling away from the canyon. Though the distance was too great for the scout to be certain, it looked like the fletching of a short quarrel was protruding from between the brute’s bloody fingers. Apparently, the earls had their crossbows.

  Tavis took aim and fired, shooting at the ogres on the far side of the gulch first. His arrows tore through three targets before the pack realized it was being attacked, then he hit two more of the brutes as they tried to figure out where the arrows were coming from. A large warrior in a wolfskin headdress began barking commands. The scout silenced him by ripping his throat open with a well-placed arrow.

  The leader’s death spurred the war party into reacting. As one, they spun and launched a volley of arrows. Without bothering to hide, Tavis killed another of his foes before the black shafts fell out of the air, lodging in the ground about fifteen paces short of his position. The scout fired again. His arrow struck home, spinning the victim around so that he fell over the edge into the gulch. Several cheers rose from the hollow, then a flurry of bolts claimed the last few brutes on the far side of the canyon.

  Realizing the danger of being caught in a crossfire, the ogres on the near side dived away from the rim, taking shelter behind what cover they could find. There were only ten of them here, and Tavis quickly reduced that number to eight by picking out holes in their cover.

  When the sounds of battle continued to rise from inside the gorge, Tavis realized that he had solved only part of the problem by drawing the pack on the brim of the gorge away. The group that had been acting as beaters had followed Morten’s party into the gulch, and no doubt still had the men pinned against the cliffs.

  That was a problem the bodyguard and his earls would have to handle by themselves. The eight survivors on top of the gulch had gathered their wits enough to begin an assault against Tavis. As the scout watched, they jumped to their feet and rushed forward.

  Tavis calmly stood his ground long enough to kill two more, then grabbed his quiver and retreated over the bank of the ravine. Once he was out of sight, he ran along the slope, silently traversing it toward the box canyon for about a hundred paces. Then, when he judged he had moved past the ogres’ flank, he climbed the bank and peered over the top.

  The scout saw immediately that his maneuver had not fooled the ogres. Two of them were still moving toward where he had jumped over the bank, but the other four were nowhere in sight. They were no doubt lurking somewhere nearby, waiting for him to show himself.

  Tavis fired and ducked. He heard a muffled thump as his arrow struck its target, then several of the ambushers’ shafts flew over his head. The scout grabbed a rock and threw it across the slope, hoping the sound would convince his enemies he was on the move again. Then he nocked another arrow and stuck his head up, killing the second ogre he had seen earlier.

  Two of the unseen warriors returned fire immediately, one of their arrows passing so close that Tavis felt its coarse feather brush his skull. He yelled as though wounded, then drew his sword and laid it on the slope beside him. He heard the ogres’ feet pattering over the pine needles as they rushed forward to finish the kill. The scout nocked another arrow and laid the tip over the edge of the bank, not raising his head to look. Runolf had lectured him many times on the importance of using more than his eyes to pick targets, explaining that he would sometimes find himself fighting on cloudy nights or in lightless caves. It was a lesson that Tavis had learned well, and one that had saved his life more than once.

  The scout lifted his arrow slightly, as if he were rising to fire. He heard the snap of an ogre’s bowstring, then a single shaft sailed overhead and disappeared into the ravine below. Tavis waited, listening to the soft steps of the approaching enemy. When it seemed they had to be almost on him, he turned the tip of the arrow toward the loudest set of footfalls and released the bowstring.

  Because of his awkward firing position, the shot was not particularly powerful, but it had force enough to create a moist thump as it sank into an ogre’s abdomen. The target collapsed to the ground with a muffled thud.

  The footsteps of the victim’s companions faltered. Tavis dropped his bow, then pushed the tip of another arrow above the bank. This time, the action drew the fire of two alarmed ogres. Smiling at their skittish reactions, the scout grabbed his sword and clambered over the bank. He found himself two paces away from the three surviving ogres. One was just drawing his bowstring back to fire, and the others were frantically trying to nock fresh arrows.

  Tavis twisted sideways, pushing his sword arm forward and also moving his torso out of the arrow’s path. The tip of his blade slipped between the ogre’s ribs in the same instant the brute released his bowstring. The poisoned arrow sizzled past the scout’s breast. He lunged forward, driving his sword deeper, until foul-smelling blood began to froth from the ogre’s mouth.

  Tavis stepped back and braced one foot on the warrior’s hip, jerking his sword free of the dying brute. He spun around to face the last two survivors—only to discover they had nocked their arrows and were even now drawing their bowstrings to fire. The scout could kill one of them, but the other one would slay him.

  “Tavis!” screamed Avner’s voice. A small stone came whispering through the air and struck one ogre in the head. The blow did not kill the warrior, but it stunned him enough to prevent the brute from completing the pull of his bowstring. “What are you doing?”

  Tavis started to slash at the other ogre, but even as the young thief spoke, a huge boulder arced down upon this brute’s head. The stone struck with a crack, then thumped to the ground. The warrior’s knees buckled, and he released his arrow into the air. The scout spun, using a backhand stroke to be
head the ogre Avner’s stone had stunned.

  “When I said go on ahead, I didn’t mean you should kill all the ogres yourself.” Basil dropped a second boulder he had picked up, then walked over with Avner at his side.

  “You could’ve gotten yourself killed,” Avner complained.

  “I thought I told you to stay at the cliff,” Tavis said.

  “Lucky for you I don’t listen too well,” the boy countered.

  Realizing he could hardly argue with the statement, Tavis retrieved his bow and quiver, then turned toward the gulch. The sounds of fighting had grown faint and sporadic, suggesting that the battle was almost at an end. Fearing that he knew who was on the losing side, the scout rushed over to the gorge’s rim.

  The battle had come down to only five figures: Morten, Earl Dobbin, and three ogres. The firbolg was standing directly between two of their foes, swinging a huge, double-headed battle-axe first at one, then the other. The ogres had picked up a pair of fallen earls to use as shields, but were rapidly falling back under the bodyguard’s withering attacks.

  Earl Dobbin was not faring so well. He had collapsed to one knee and was swinging his pitifully small sword at the last ogre’s legs, barely managing to duck the wild swings of his foe’s large club. The other earls lay scattered among fallen ogres, either dead or unconscious from the bite of poisoned arrows.

  Tavis dispatched the ogre attacking Earl Dobbin first, then quickly killed one of the brutes fighting Morten. The bodyguard finished the other himself, cleaving the warrior’s heavy skull with a single, terrible blow of his battle-axe.

  The ogre had hardly hit the ground before Morten was glaring up at his savior. “Tavis!” he thundered. “Come down here!”

  The scout shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “Not until you and I come to an agreement.”

  Morten snorted. “The only thing I’ll agree to is splitting your head.”

  “Really?” Tavis replied. “I should think you’d be more interested in saving Brianna—I am.”

  This calmed the angry firbolg a little. “Tell me where she is,” he demanded. “I’ll make your death an easy one.”

  Earl Dobbin rose, his face red with fury. “You don’t have the right to make such an agreement!” he said, grabbing the bodyguard’s burly arm. “The king sent us to bring these thieves back to Hartsvale, not to rescue his daughter!”

  Morten jerked his arm free. “Brianna was my responsibility. If I can save her by letting a few thieves die an easy death, then so be it.” The firbolg continued to glare at Tavis. “Now tell me.”

  “Right now, the princess is somewhere on the Needle Peak glacier with about a thousand ogres,” Tavis explained. As he spoke, Basil and Avner came up to stand at his side. “They’re taking her to a place called the Twilight Vale.”

  Morten scowled. “Where’s that?”

  “The Twilight Vale lies somewhere in the shadow of the Great Glacier, far north of the Ice Spires,” Basil explained. “But if you want to return Brianna to Hartsvale, I’d suggest you free her long before then.”

  Morten narrowed his eyes. “Why’s that?”

  “The Twilight Vale’s sacred to the giants,” Tavis explained. “We don’t know why the ogres are taking Brianna there, but if they succeed it’ll be impossible to get her back.”

  Morten considered this for a moment, then asked, “Where’d you learn all this?”

  “We happened upon the guide who helped the ogres kidnap Brianna,” Tavis explained. “Basil interrogated him.”

  The scout said nothing about the roles of Runolf and the king in the princess’s abduction. As much as Morten wanted to save Brianna, Tavis did not think the bodyguard would defy Camden’s wishes to do so.

  Morten considered Tavis’s information for a moment, then nodded in satisfaction. “Good enough. I’ll make your death quick,” he said. “Now, will you come down here peacefully, or do I have to hunt you down?”

  “I’ll let you take me back to Hartsvale or kill me on the spot,” Tavis offered, “but only after we rescue Brianna.”

  Basil quickly stepped forward. “Please understand that he’s speaking only for himself,” the verbeeg said. “Avner and I have no intention of letting you kill us at any time.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Morten replied, shaking his head. “I couldn’t accept Tavis’s deal, even if it included you all.”

  The scout frowned. “Why not?”

  The bodyguard snorted in derision, then waved his hand at the carnage in the gulch. “You let me lead eighteen good men into this, and now you expect me to place my faith in you?”

  “Let you!” Tavis exploded. “We tried to stop you. If you had followed the boy, you’d all be alive and well.”

  Morten frowned in confusion. “What boy?” he asked. “We never saw any boy!”

  “You didn’t see Avner at the mouth of the gulch? He dropped out of a tree and ran up the ravine!”

  Morten shook his head. “We saw nothing but bodies and a blood trail leading up here. We were afraid the ogres had trapped you here. There was no boy.”

  His head reeling with the implications of what the bodyguard had just told him, Tavis stumbled back from the edge of the gulch. He spun around and found Avner slowly backing away. The boy’s face was pale with fear, and tears of shame were welling in his eyes.

  “You lied,” Tavis said. His voice was not as angry as it was astonished and hurt. “You lied to me.”

  8

  The Glacier

  The nickering returned, a series of soft, chattering snorts somewhere above the rim of the icy crevasse. Brianna’s talisman, dangling from a piece of rune-inscribed bark in Tavis’s hand, slowly spun in the darkness and pointed toward the sound. The tip wavered there a moment, then whirled back in the direction it had been pointing earlier. The silver spear began to sweep back and forth, never holding its position more than a second.

  “Phaw! We can’t trust that amulet,” Morten growled, keeping his voice low. He wore a fresh bandage around his neck, for the last few days of hard travel had sapped his recuperative powers so much that the wound on his throat had begun to fester. “We know where Brianna is. Let’s just go get her.”

  Tavis did not answer. His eyes were fixed on the heavens, searching for the source of the strange nickering. He could see only a narrow wedge of purple starlit sky, for the scout and his rescue party were climbing through a lateral crevasse, an abyssal ice canyon that ran the entire length of the Needle Peak glacier. Gleaming blue walls loomed to both sides of them, impossibly high and so close together that any of the three giant-kin present could have touched both sides by extending his arms. In the bottom of the rift, cold, dead air hung heavy around their numb faces, while the frigid torrents of a tiny meltwater stream gushed over their frozen feet.

  Despite the cold, Tavis’s face was flushed with excitement. At dusk, Avner had climbed a few hundred feet up Needle Peak to survey the glacier. He had seen the ogres making camp not far above, at the base of a huge ice wall. Several brutes had been erecting an ice-block hut, and the youth had seen a smaller form, almost certainly Brianna, lying in the snow nearby. After hearing the boy’s report, Tavis and his companions had decided to sneak up the lateral crevasse to rescue Brianna.

  It had been shortly after they started the long journey up the glacier that the nickering began. The sound was soft and plaintive, so hushed that at times Tavis thought it might be nothing but the distant groans of flowing ice—until he looked down and saw Brianna’s talisman swinging toward the sound.

  Tavis turned to Basil and raised the wobbling amulet. “This happens each time we hear that snorting,” the scout said. Although he did not say so, he recognized the sound as that of a horse—most likely Blizzard. “Why does the talisman spin?”

  “His m-m-magic’s f-f-failing,” chattered Earl Dobbin. He and Avner were suffering more from the freezing cold than the three giant-kin. “What do you expect from a ch-charlatan?”

  The scout ignored the comment an
d waited for Basil’s reply. If it had been up to Tavis, the lord mayor would have returned to Hartsvale with the other earls who survived the ogre ambush, but Morten wouldn’t hear of it. The burly firbolg did not trust Tavis or his companions and had agreed to work with them only if Dobbin came along to balance the odds. Even when Basil had pointed out that Dobbin’s peers were all suffering from injuries and could use a healthy man’s assistance on the journey back, Morten had insisted that the lord mayor come along.

  Casting an angry glare at Dobbin, Basil said, “I assure you, I am no charlatan. The talisman is wavering for good reason.”

  A terrible thought occurred to Tavis. “Has Goboka vexed your rune?” the scout asked. Given that the shaman’s warriors had failed to return from their ambush, the ogre would be a fool not to assume his pursuers would try for Brianna tonight. “Can he do that sort of thing?”

  “A powerful shaman like him? Of course he can,” Basil replied. The verbeeg paused, then smiled proudly. “That’s why I didn’t use a rune that would lead us to Brianna herself. I employed one that’s designed to locate lost property. I doubt Goboka has thought of that.”

  “What nonsense are you babbling?” demanded Morten.

  “Simply put, the talisman isn’t pointing at Brianna,” the verbeeg explained. “It’s pointing at her belongings—in this case, her clothes and, I believe, at her horse.” He cast his eyes toward the crevasse rim, where the soft nickering continued.

  “That’s ridiculous!” Earl Dobbin scoffed. “No horse could follow over the t-terrain we’ve c-crossed!”

  “Lord Mayor, I’d think you, of all people, would know better than to underestimate Blizzard.” Tavis could not quite keep from sneering as he made the observation.

  “I do,” the earl replied. “But Blizzard is a horse, not a mountain goat. Even she could not have—”

  An alarmed whinny sounded from above, interrupting the lord mayor. Tavis looked up in time to see the black shadow of a horse leaping across the crevasse, then something clattered off the ice overhead. As the silhouette vanished from the night sky, a slender shaft of wood tumbled down the canyon walls and splashed into the icy stream. Morten grabbed the stick as it floated past.