The Ogre's Pact (20 page)

The princess’s mouth fell open. “Where’d you find it?”

“The same place you lost it,” he replied curtly.

Tavis turned away and untied the rope from his belt, then sat down on the ledge to pull up Avner and the earl.

“What are you doing?” the princess asked, peering over his shoulder. The bitterness had gone from her voice, but it had not been replaced by any hint that she felt sorry for how she had treated him so far.

“I’m hauling up two people who risked their lives on your behalf,” Tavis said.

As the scout fed the rope through his hands, slivers of fiery light began to flicker across the ledge. He glanced back and found Brianna clutching her talisman to her chest, the red glow of her goddess’s magic slipping from between her fingers.

“Save some of your healing magic,” he said. “These humans are dying of cold and need your help-if it isn’t too much trouble for Your Highness.”

“Of course not.” If the princess noticed the reproach in Tavis’s voice, she showed no sign. “Who are they?”

“Avner and Earl Dobbin.”

“Really!” Brianna considered this news for a moment, then asked, “And what did my father promise them?”

Tavis did not bother to answer, and before the princess could say anything more an alarmed war cry sounded from above. The scout looked up to see Morten flinging his dagger at something across the glacier.

“Morten?” Brianna gasped. “What’s he doing here?”

“He came with us,” Tavis explained.

The scout redoubled his efforts to pull his companions up, but raising two humans over such a distance was not an easy task, even for a firbolg.

Brianna sat down beside him, then reached for the rope. “I’ll bring them up,” she said. “You help Morten.”

Tavis did not yield the line. “They’re too heavy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the princess said. She grabbed the rope about a foot below Tavis’s hands, then began to raise the humans almost as fast as the scout had been doing. “After all, I am a Hartwick.”

“So I see,” Tavis said, standing. Like almost everyone in Hartsvale, he knew of the supernatural strength of Brianna’s father and male ancestors, but this was the first he had heard that the princess shared the gift. “I wonder what other secrets you and the king have been keeping.”

Without waiting for a reply, Tavis climbed up to help Morten. By the time he reached the top of the chasm, the bodyguard had already disappeared onto the glacier. From the constant chime of clanging weapons, it sounded as though the firbolg was hard-pressed to defend himself against the ogre pack.

Tavis braced his back against the granite cliff and peered over the lip of the glacier. Directly ahead lay two dead ogres, one with a dagger through his throat and the other missing a head. Morten stood a short distance away, surrounded by the whirling clubs and darting spears of more than a dozen of Goboka’s savage warriors.

What the scout saw on the other side of the glacier concerned him more than Morten’s situation. The shaman’s huge figure was just cresting a ridge of moonlit snow. He was coming, with a large troop of warriors at his back, from the direction of the ice hut. Tavis didn’t understand how Goboka had reacted so quickly to his failed plan. The ice hut was on the far side of the glacier, too far away for the shaman to have heard the fight between Morten and the sentries guarding Brianna.

The scout drew his sword and thrust the tip into the soft snow, using it as a handhold while he pulled himself onto the glacier. A dozen paces away, Morten continued to battle the ogres, spinning first in one direction and then the other, his battle-axe slicing through the air in long graceful arcs. With their primitive weapons, his foes could not penetrate his whirling guard, but neither could the bodyguard assault them. As Morten tried to bring his axe to bear, three of the brutes moved forward to strike at his flanks, forcing him to redirect his efforts into driving them back. The ogres were locked into combat just as tightly as the bodyguard. Two of them lowered their clubs and reached for their poisoned arrows, only to have Morten assail them with a vicious series of cross-strikes.

Once he felt the glacier beneath his feel, Tavis hefted his sword and silently rushed across the snow, announcing his arrival by slicing into an ogre’s neck. The target’s head flew off and crashed into another warrior, who was so startled that he howled in alarm and dropped his guard. Morten took quick advantage of the brute’s surprise, cleaving him down the center with a single axe-blow. The battle turned against the ogre pack then, and the flashing blades of the two firbolgs made quick worn of their enemies. Within moments, more than a dozen of the brutes lay motionless, their lifeblood draining out to form dark stains on the glacier’s milky surface.

“You’re no idle braggart,” Tavis said. He kneeled down to clean his bloody sword in the snow. That was fine axe work.”

“You helped,” Morten grunted. He looked toward the horde of ogres approaching across the glacier, then said. “I wasn’t expecting them so soon.”

“Me either,” Tavis said. “It’ll complicate our escape.”

“What of Brianna?” the bodyguard asked. “Can she run?”

“The princess is well enough,” Tavis said, using snow to numb the painful bile she had left on his hand. “But her ordeal has certainly taken its toll on her manners.”

“I’m sure the king will show enough gratitude for both of us,” said Brianna’s voice. “But I have no intention of growing maudlin just because I’m free from the ogres. I’m hardly fool enough to believe that you-or Earl Dob bin-saved me out of the goodness of your hearts. And why you brought Avner along, I’ll never understand. This is no place for a child!”

The scout spun around in time to see the princess crawling out of the nunatak hollow. She had wrapped a foul-smelling bear skin around her shoulders, securing the improvised cloak in place with a small piece of rope. Tucked into this makeshift belt was the dagger Tavis had left beside her on the ledge, and from one hand dangled the rope to which the humans were tied.

Morten rushed to her side. “Milady, are you well?”

“Better than you were when I last saw you,” she replied. “But you look fine now. What happened?”

Morten looked away, as though ashamed that he had not died in the battle with the ogres. “Tavis and his thieves took me to the castle,” he explained. “Simon healed me.”

Brianna glanced toward Tavis. “My gratitude.” For the first time, there was a hint of warmth in the princess’s voice. “I’ll see to it that Father rewards you.”

“I doubt that will be as easy as you think,” Tavis replied. “But right now, we have more pressing concerns.”

The scout pointed across the glacier. Goboka was now so close they could see the moonlight gleaming in his eyes, and his horde was close behind. Most of the ogres seemed to be armed with clubs or spears, but those running closest to the shaman’s immense form carried their bows in their hands. Apparently, the shaman hoped to ensure Brianna’s safety by allowing only his most trusted marksmen to fire arrows.

When Brianna saw the charging pack, she handed the coil to Morten. “Pull that up,” she ordered. “Fast.”

“How are the humans?” Tavis asked. “Are they well enough to run?”

Brianna raised her brow, regarding the scout as though he had lost his mind. “It was all I could do to save their lives,” she said. “They were practically ice blocks.”

“We’ll carry them,” Morten said.

With an effortless jerk, the bodyguard pulled the two humans onto the glacier. Brianna had swaddled them both in furs, so that Tavis could tell them apart only by the relative size difference between the boy and the man. The princess cut the rope binding them together, then passed Avner to Tavis and Dobbin to Morten.

“What about Basil?” Morten asked, throwing the earl over his shoulder.

“We won’t save him by waiting here,” Tavis replied, hefting Avner onto his own shoulder. “He can catch us later.”

“Who’s Basil?” Brianna asked.

Tavis turned away from the ogres and started to run, at the same time explaining, “The verbeeg you saw in my barn.”

“He’s a part of this?”

The princess had hardly finished her question when a tremendous shudder rumbled up from the heart of the glacier. Tavis’s feet slipped from beneath him, and he dropped to his side, his fall cushioned by the soft corn snow on top of the glacier. Brianna and Morten also fell The bodyguard landed atop his burden, drawing a muffled cry of anger from Earl Dobbin.

“Did Goboka do that?” Morten gasped.

Tavis looked back and saw a great crevasse opening across the glacier, more or less above the ice cave through which they had crawled. Dozens of ogre warriors had already disappeared into the rift, and more were spilling into it as the abyss widened.

“It wasn’t the shaman,” Tavis reported. “My guess is that Basil’s rune caused that explosion.”

Morten stared at the growing crevasse in awe, then shook his head and picked up the bundle containing Earl Dobbin. “We can’t tarry here.”

As Tavis considered Basil’s absence, a growing knot of concern formed in his stomach. Nevertheless, he gathered Avner’s bundle and rose to his feet, then started across the glacier. Whatever the verbeeg’s fate, they could not help him anyway.

The scout quickly realized that he and his companions would never escape by trying to outrun the ogres. To survive, they had to make their pursuers slow down-and he knew just the place to do it. He angled up toward the great ice wall that had stopped the ogres in the first place.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” Brianna demanded. Her eyes were fixed on the sheer ice cliff ahead, which loomed like a bank of clouds rolling down from the valley above. “We’ll be trapped. We can’t scale that wall!”

“I don’t intend to. I’m just trying to get us into that ice fall.” The scout pointed to the base of the ice wall, where the glacier tumbled down a hundred paces of steep slope in a jumbled heap of mansion-sized blocks and jagged spires. “If we can’t escape the ogres in there, we aren’t going to.”

Tavis continued up the glacier. When he reached the bottom of the ice fall, he pulled Bear Driller off his shoulder and glanced back to check on the ogres. They were still out of range, but wouldn’t be for long. The scout turned uphill and began to climb, probing the snow ahead with the tip of his bow.

“Follow my trail exactly,” Tavis said, panting from the exertion of running through snow. “Ice falls have lots of crevasses.”

The scout was counting on that. Ice, like water, flowed faster on steep slopes, which caused more crevasses to open. These rifts were smaller than those on gentler grades, and therefore were more easily concealed beneath thick layers of snow. With any luck, the scout had more experience than his pursuers at negotiating such mazes of hidden danger, so the ogres would be forced to follow in his footsteps in a snakelike column-at least until he decided it was time for them to scatter.

Within a few steps, Tavis began to see long, faint shadows ahead. He twined his way around each of these areas, for the differences in color marked sagging surfaces where the snowpack hung suspended over the unseen maws of hidden crevasses. Often, the scout stopped running long enough to push Bear Driller into the snow ahead. Usually, the tip struck a solid surface of ice, but every now and then the bow would sink as though he had plunged it into water. When that happened, the scout would retrace his path a few steps down the mountain, then carefully probe his way around the end of the concealed chasm until he could resume the climb.

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.