The Ogre's Pact Page 17

  Soon they reached a thicket of seracs, looming ice spires that had fallen off the ice wall and imbedded themselves among the crevasses. The seracs resembled nothing so much as a city of craggy blue towers, unkempt and jagged, inclining in every direction and at impossible angles. Some minarets lay almost upon their sides, with no more distance than a human’s height between their peaks and the glacier surface. Other towers stood bolt upright, as straight and proud as any steeple in Castle Hartwick.

  Tavis led his company a few steps into the seracs, then paused to look back down the slope. The ogres had reached the base of the ice fall, and the first warriors were already rushing up the trail he had blazed through the crevasse-field. Although they were easily within Bear Driller’s range, the scout did not take Avner off his shoulder to reach for his arrows. Goboka had been wise enough to hang back, with his own archers at his side, and let his warriors lead the charge.

  “We’re running out of room,” Morten growled. “Shoot!”

  “Not yet,” Tavis said. “It’s better to wait until there are more of them behind us.”

  The scout turned and began to thread his way through the seracs. When the small company reached the base of the ice wall, Tavis and Morten deposited their burdens behind a fallen serac, then the two firbolgs and Brianna retraced their steps to a small clearing that afforded a relatively unobstructed view down the glacier. The first ogre was just entering the serac thicket, and behind him came a long winding file of his fellows. They were all following Tavis’s trail, which, now that it could be seen from above, often seemed to pass unnecessarily close to dozens of crevasses, both hidden and open to plain sight. Only Goboka and his archers had not yet entered the ice fall. They still stood well out of range, watching the others climb until they saw what was going to happen.

  Tavis took a handful of arrows from his quiver and stuck them in the snow at his side. “Now it’s time to shoot,” he said.

  The scout let his first shaft fly, then began firing as fast as he could nock arrows. First the lead warrior fell, then the second and third. Suddenly the ogres at the front of the line were scrambling for cover. As they scurried off Tavis’s trail, they began to drop into crevasses in groups of three and four, leaving nothing behind but the empty air where they had been standing only a moment earlier.

  Tavis shifted his aim farther down the trail, to where the ogres were not yet scattering. He began to pepper the entire line, sometimes putting a single arrow through the bodies of two warriors. The brutes stampeded away from the attacks, scattering in every direction. They vanished into the crevasses a dozen at a time, as often as not forced over the edge by the press of their panicked fellows. Many of those who did not perish simply threw themselves to the ground and cowered in the snow. The scout aimed a few more arrows at these targets, and soon they were up again, rushing about with the rest of their peers.

  Goboka’s angry voice echoed up the ice fall, yelling commands at his warriors in their own guttural language. A few of the brutes heeded his words and began trying to calm their comrades. Tavis concentrated his fire on these would-be leaders and prevented the ogres from regrouping. The survivors began to take shelter in shallow depressions and behind blocks of ice, but showed no inclination to resume the journey up the dangerous icefall—at least not while Bear Driller was showering them with arrows.

  When it became apparent that the scout had stopped the ogre warriors, Goboka spoke a few words to his archers. They arranged themselves in a three-abreast column. The shaman stepped into the middle of the group and ducked down to prevent himself from becoming an easy target. The entire line started up the trail Tavis had blazed, those in front using their bows to probe for crevasses along the edges of the path.

  The scout did not bother firing at the column. He did not have enough arrows left to kill even half of them, and he would only empty his quiver in vain if he tried to frighten them off the path as he had the first group.

  “This makes no sense,” Morten growled. “Why doesn’t the shaman use his archers, or cast a spell at us?”

  “Because of Brianna. He won’t risk killing her by accident,” Tavis explained. “He wants her alive as much as we do.”

  “Then let’s count ourselves lucky and run for it,” the bodyguard urged.

  Tavis shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “If we run now, the others will regain their courage and prevent us from climbing off the glacier.”

  “They’re doing that now,” Brianna said. She cast an angry glance at the ice cliff behind them. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “You’re looking the wrong way,” Tavis said. He pointed along the base of the icy cliff, to where a jagged rib of granite rose from beneath the glacier to ascend the canyon wall. “All we need is time enough to get up that ridge.”

  “That’s no simple climb,” Morten said. “The ogres will catch up and pull us off before we’re ten feet up.”

  “Not without their shaman, they won’t,” Tavis said.

  The scout motioned for his two companions to follow, then dodged a short distance down the steep slope to a huge serac. The block was tipped almost horizontally across the slope, directly above the route Tavis had blazed up the crevasse-field. Morten instantly understood the plan. Without being asked, he braced his hands against the side and began to push.

  Goboka also realized the scout’s intentions. As Tavis laid his hands on the ice, the shaman shouted a harsh command. Dozens of bowstrings snapped. A volley of arrows sailed up the hill to clatter harmlessly off the spire’s far side.

  Tavis pushed. A loud crack sounded from the serac’s base.

  A deep, rumbling voice echoed through the night air: the shaman casting a spell. The scout pushed harder, drawing an involuntary scream of exertion from his lungs. Another crack sounded from the bottom of the tower—then Tavis heard Brianna utter a spell. A sharp sizzle filled the night air as the princess called Hiatea’s name and a bolt of red flame shot down the slope toward Goboka’s head.

  The shaman’s voice fell silent in the middle of a word and he kicked at the snow. A white spray erupted from beneath his feet, coalescing into an icy shield just as Brianna’s spell streaked down from above. The fiery bolt crashed into the frosty circle with a deafening blast, then both spells sizzled away in a cloud of steam.

  “Now, push!” Morten yelled.

  Tavis braced his boots against the snowy slope and, placing his shoulder against the serac, drove forward with all the strength in his legs. With a thunderous boom, the icy tower broke free. As it tumbled away, both firbolgs pitched forward and slid down the glacier on their faces.

  Tavis thrust his hands deep into the snow, arresting his fall before it had the chance to build momentum. He looked up and peered over Morten’s huge back as the serac tumbled down the slope. The scout couldn’t see on the other side of the spire, but the rumbling of the block of ice couldn’t overpower the shrieks of the terrified ogres, and Goboka’s angry scream was the loudest of all.

  Tavis rose to his feet, then reached down to help Morten do the same. “Now we can run.”

  10

  The High Forest

  A series of clumsy, flat-footed steps pulsed through the open ground of the montane forest. The footfalls were as enigmatic as they were fleeting, bouncing from the bole of one tree to another, until the palpitations seemed to come from many directions at once and no place in particular. They were also distant, so feeble that Tavis barely heard them drumming above the incessant lisp of the wind. Still, the ungainly rhythm was unmistakable. Basil was out there somewhere, running across an outcropping of bedrock.

  Slipping his fletcher’s tools and a handful of osprey feathers into his belt pouch, Tavis laid aside the arrow he had been crafting. Gathering his bow and the handful of arrows he had already made, he stood, trying to guess from the maddening echoes where he would find Basil.

  Beside the scout, Brianna was tending to the festering wound on Morten’s neck. She had already washed the yellow icho
r away and purified the gash with blessed water, and was now placing her goddess’s talisman on the gash.

  “I don’t know what good this will do.” Morten kept his voice to a soft whisper, for the wind had been carrying faint whiffs of ogre to them all morning long. “Simon already healed it once.”

  “It’s not uncommon for bite wounds to fester,” Brianna replied, equally softly. “We may have to do this many times.”

  The princess uttered her incantation, drawing a sharp hiss from the bodyguard as Hiatea’s fiery magic poured from the talisman into the ulcerous sore.

  On the other side of Brianna, Avner and Earl Dobbin were dozing in the midmorning light, sitting with their backs against a sun-baked crag of black basalt. Between them lay the remains of that morning’s meal, a pile of raw squawrat that Tavis had dug up as they crossed a meadow.

  The outcropping was not a large one, rising less than a quarter as high as the towering pines around it, but it made an ideal resting place. Not only did it catch the warm rays of the morning sun, it stood just high enough so that Morten could peer over the top to inspect the group’s back trail—as he had been doing all morning, until Brianna awakened and decided to heal his throat wound.

  A broad expanse of lodgepole pines surrounded the crag, their thin bare trunks as straight as horse lances. Though the boles were not densely packed, their sheer number created the impression of a gray, foglike wall through which any manner of evil spirit might walk at any moment.

  “Wait here,” Tavis whispered. “I’ll be back soon.”

  As the scout moved to enter the depths of the gray forest, Morten’s large hand clasped his shoulder.

  “Where are you going?” Morten asked. All that remained of the wound on his neck was an ugly red scar resembling a huge boil. “This is no time to go wandering.”

  “Don’t you recognize those steps?” Tavis whispered back. “It’s Basil.”

  “How can you be certain?” Brianna demanded. Even as she asked the question, the verbeeg’s distant footfalls faded away, and there was no other sound in the forest except the wind slipping through the pine boughs. “I can hardly hear them.”

  “He’s moved onto softer ground,” Tavis explained. “But I’m certain it was Basil. I recognized his gait.”

  Brianna and Morten exchanged doubtful looks.

  “Basil’s done as much to rescue you as anyone,” Tavis reminded her.

  The princess’s expression became fretful. “That’s not the issue,” she said, still speaking softly. “It’s whether you really heard him.”

  “You think I’m lying?” Tavis gasped.

  “No, of course not!” Brianna’s reply was quick and emphatic, but no sooner had she uttered it than she gave the scout a sideways glance and added, “Not this time, anyway.”

  “Not ever! I’ve always been truthful,” Tavis insisted. “I had nothing to do with the theft of Earl Dobbin’s books!”

  “Then why did the princess find them in your barn?” whispered the lord mayor, opening his eyes to join the conversation. “And why are you now willing to risk your life—indeed, all of our lives—to go off searching for the verbeeg who took them?”

  Brianna quickly interposed herself between the scout and Earl Dobbin. “We don’t need to discuss your books now.” She scowled at the lord mayor, then added, “At the moment, I don’t care if Tavis and his verbeeg took your ancestral jewels. The important thing is to return to my father’s castle, and Tavis Burdun is the only person who can get us there alive.”

  The words left Tavis with a hollow, anguished feeling in the pit of his stomach. It seemed clear the princess had placed her trust in him only because she had no other choice—and she had said nothing at all about believing his words. If he could not persuade her of his innocence in the theft of Earl Dobbin’s books, how could he convince her that her own father had betrayed her to the ogres?

  The scout sighed at his quandary, then asked, “Princess, if you don’t think I’m lying, why the doubts about what I heard?”

  “Because the shaman’s a mimic,” she said. “That’s how he lured me into his trap the first time.”

  “Thanks for the advice.” Tavis said. He did not bother to question whether the shaman had survived the battle on the ice fall. That the ogres had regrouped was evidence of that, for the brutes were a notoriously shiftless and disorderly race that would not have mounted such a sizable pursuit without a strong leader. “I’ll be careful.”

  “You’re still going?” Morten asked.

  Tavis nodded. “Even a mimic can’t duplicate what he hasn’t heard—at least not precisely,” the scout explained. “And if Goboka has heard Basil’s feet slapping against bedrock, there’s a good chance Basil’s still alive. Whether those footfalls were real or not, I have to take a look.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for looking,” said Earl Dobbin. The lord mayor’s gaze was fixed on the forest, and he was scrambling to his feet. “We have a—”

  The drone of a flying arrow cut the lord mayor off. A black shaft suddenly appeared in his thigh, and he cried out in pain.

  Already nocking an arrow, Tavis spun in the direction from which the shaft had come. He did not see any ogre warriors, of course, but noticed a few trembling stalks in a huckleberry thicket.

  The scout drew his bowstring back. A pair of huckleberry leaves suddenly fluttered to the ground, and a black dot appeared outside the bush: an ogre’s arrow coming dead on. Tavis released his own shaft then twisted away, at the same time swinging Bear Driller vertically through the air.

  With a sharp clack, the bow struck the shank of the ogre arrow. A tiny, stinging jolt ran through the scout’s hands, and he saw a curving black streak as his foe’s missile sailed away to shatter against the basalt crag.

  Tavis’s own arrow penetrated the thicket with a sound like tearing cloth. There was a thud and a strangled gasp, then a hush fell over the forest. The scout nocked another arrow, already searching for his next target.

  Among the lodgepoles, nothing else moved. Keeping his eyes on the forest, Tavis squatted beside Earl Dobbin, who had fallen to the ground. “How many were there?”

  The question went unanswered, for the ogre’s poison had already done its work and put the lord mayor fast asleep. Brianna pulled her borrowed dagger and set to work digging the arrow from the earl’s leg.

  “We’ll leave when you finish there,” the scout said.

  Tavis stepped over to Avner, who had not stirred during the ogre’s attack. If the youth felt any guilt for the disgrace he had brought upon his guardian—or the deaths he had caused by failing to warn Morten about the ogre ambush—it did not show. He was still sleeping, his expression as innocent as that of a newborn babe.

  “Wake up.” The scout kicked the sole of the boy’s boot harder than necessary. “Time to go!”

  Eyes half open, Avner leaped to his feet. “Got you covered!” he mumbled. The youth was already pulling his sling from beneath his cloak. “Where they at?”

  “Come and gone, boy,” chuckled Morten. The bodyguard passed a waterskin to the youth. “Wash the sleep from your eyes. We’re going to need you alert.”

  Tavis turned back to Brianna. She had bandaged Earl Dobbin’s wound and was about to cast a healing spell.

  “Let him sleep for a while,” Tavis suggested. “I doubt the lord mayor suffers pain quietly, and groans will attract ogres.”

  Brianna considered his advice, then hefted the lord mayor over her shoulder. Tavis slipped past her and, with an arrow still nocked, started off at a silent trot. He did not need to look to know the princess was following a dozen paces behind, for he could hear a muffled cadence of dry pine needles crackling beneath her soft steps. Morten’s steps were louder, a basal reverberation that Tavis sensed more than heard. Avner was the most difficult to keep track of. Despite having to run to keep pace with his large companions, the boy moved so silently that, if Brianna’s pace had not faltered now and then as she tried to avoid his heels, Tav
is could not have been certain the young thief was behind him.

  A short time later, the scout stopped so the others could catch up to him. He studied their back trail for a few moments, then pointed southward. “Keep going in that direction until I return,” he whispered. “I won’t be long.”

  “You still mean to go after Basil?” asked Morten. The bodyguard cast a nervous glance into the forest. “That’s foolhardy. The woods are swarming with ogres. They could kill you, and where would that leave us? Only you know the way.”

  “The ogres won’t kill me, but even if they do, you don’t need me to find your route,” Tavis said. “There’s only one way to go. Down the valley.”

  “But it’s too obvious,” Brianna objected, laying Earl Dobbin’s unconscious form on the ground. “The ogres will block that direction. We have to go another way.”

  “We can’t,” Tavis replied. “We can’t retrace our steps without running a gauntlet of ogres. And we can’t go north without venturing onto the Great Glacier.”

  “That’s not f-for me,” Avner said, shivering at the mere remembrance of how cold the Needle Peak glacier had been. “I’d freeze to death the f-first night.”

  “Only if a frost giant didn’t find you first,” said Morten. He looked back to Tavis. “But why not go west?”

  “Hill giants,” the scout explained. “The Gray Wolf clan claims the next valley from crestline to crestline.”

  “The Gray Wolf clan?” Brianna repeated. “Their chieftain has visited Castle Hartwick many times. Noote will protect us.”

  Tavis shook his head. “Hill giants aren’t very noble, and the ogres will outnumber the Gray Wolves by five to one,” he said. “This Noote’s more likely to turn us over to Goboka than to fight him on our behalf.”

  Brianna remained determined. “How many times have you met Noote?” she demanded.

  “I haven’t,” Tavis admitted. “But I know hill giants.”

  “And I know Noote,” Brianna countered. “I’ve spoken with him several times, and he’s always been very kind.”