Winter Song (31 page)

    "No," Coeo said in Isheimuri, then switched to Kazakh: "The Others." He made what was clearly a genuflection.

    "Others?" Karl asked.

    Karl had learned to read Coeo's body language. The humanoid looked uncomfortable. "Others. Not like Coeo, or you. Or her." He indicated Bera. "They can look like any of us."

    "Where are these others?" Karl remembered Bera's stories of mysterious shapeshifters.

    Coeo shook his head. "Gone." He turned away, indicating that the conversation was over.

    Loki said,
It implies that the shapeshifters were here be
fore even the trolls, in which case if the shapeshifters are
intelligent and not extinct, then the Pantropists committed
an involuntary offence by landing here.

    Maybe, Karl sub-vocalised, neither group should be here. If the stories are true.

    He said to Bera, who was staring at him with raised eyebrows and a "What was that about?" look: "Coeo hinted that he thinks that they're painted by shapeshifters. Oh, and he considers us as being like him. Isn't that progress?"

    Bera's "Hmm" was non-committal. She followed Coeo down the corridor, hanging onto a hank of his fur, the humanoid's sonar pinging off the walls.

    The subterranean path must have run for several kilometres; after a while it brightened, and when they reached it they saw a crack no wider than Karl's hand in the tunnel's ceiling. Karl guessed it ran all the way to the surface, but it was too narrow to test.

    After that there were similar cracks every few hundred metres, through which light could shine, not enough for Bera to switch off the torch, but it did alleviate the stygian gloom outside the torch-beam.

    About a kilometre later they reached a cavern bright with daylight. "Water!" Bera gasped, but then flinched when she touched it. "Damn! That's hot!" She cautiously filled some of the now-empty bottles.

    When they had filled them all they resumed, across a narrow ridge that ran right across the cavern, dividing the pools up as if it were artificial. Karl had seen too many natural formations that looked man-made to make assumptions, but he kept thinking of the Others, as Coeo had called them.

    Every so often one of the bubbling pools would spit. Coeo was protected by his thick fur, but Karl and Bera both hissed whenever the water found a gap in their clothes.

    They were near the far side of the cavern when Bera stumbled and nearly fell.

    Coeo moved faster than Karl would have believed possible and caught her, but they wobbled on the ridge, and toppled forward.

    Coeo put his hand down on the ridge, and Karl heard him hiss, "Hot," and snatch it away.

    "You OK?" Karl called from behind.

    "Watch your footing," Bera called as they stepped onto the cavern floor.

    When they were all clear, Bera dressed Coeo's scalded hand.

    "What's the Kazakh for 'I'm very grateful'?" Bera said, then repeated Loki's translation.

    "He says," Karl translated back, "that it's nothing."

The spear that was hurled at Ragnar missed him by half a metre, but vital seconds were lost while his befuddled brain registered what it was. But instinct took over and when the trolls charged, he had just enough wit to draw Widowmaker.

    The trolls must have outnumbered Ragnar's men ten, even twenty to one, but fortunately there wasn't room for the enemy to spread out. Arnbjorn had his rifle, while the others chose to use bows so the trolls fell in huge numbers before they reached the humans, who kept advancing along the path as they fired their weapons.

    Ragnar preferred to hear the thud of tempered steel biting into troll-flesh over girly weapons like bows and rifles, and even though the trolls carried spears as long as his arm, he knew that he was a match for any one of them. He had cut three down before the creatures retreated in headlong flight.

    Only then did the significance of the trolls using tools hit him, and for a moment his world tilted. "They're using weapons," he said, in wonderment.

    When the last troll had fled, Ragnar turned to the others and saw that they had lost Bjarney. Ragnar had known the man who became his second tenant-farmer since before Hilda had been born. It was like losing a brother. Ragnar chanted three verses in Bjarney's honour, but his heart wasn't in it, and for the first time, he wondered on the wisdom of chasing the utlander.

    But the chase had a momentum of its own, and later all such thoughts were forgotten.

    They rounded a bend in the path and looked out across Isheimur. There across the plain, gleamed white, a vast frozen lake.

    They still had one pair of glasses from their supplies with which Ragnar surveyed the lake. He couldn't be sure even with magnification, but he thought he saw the shrine jutting from the ice.

SEVENTEEN

Karl and the others entered the tunnel on the far side of the springs. This tunnel wasn't lit by the fissures leading to the surface, so they journeyed into darkness. Coeo led, his sonar thudding off the walls and floor, which was regular enough for them to move briskly without fear of stumbling. Bera held on to a hank of his fur, and Karl held on to her backpack with one hand, leading Teitur with the other.

    Karl had never feared enclosed spaces, but without the fissures to ventilate the tunnel it felt hot and clammy, so that sweat trickled down his back, his chest, even his face. Sulphur wafted from somewhere, mingling with the other – unclassifiable – mineral smells.

    The darkness stifled conversation; Karl found questions dying unasked in his throat, as did any more than a few bars of a tune. The others seemed to feel the same, and they moved in silence save for the clop of Teitur's hooves on the stone floor, and the rich, dull thuds of Coeo's sonar pings. Instead Karl settled for counting his footsteps, and every time he reached a thousand, saying, "Still here."

    "Me too," Bera replied, and even Coeo grunted something in mangled Kazakh.

    It was only when he noticed a faint glow that Karl realised that they had been following an upward incline in the tunnel, so shallow that he hadn't realised they were ascending. "Daylight," he said. "Up ahead."

    "Good." Bera turned her torch on. "Let's hurry up. I really don't like this place."

    "No," Karl said. "Coeo leads. Not much point in having sonar and not using it – if there are cracks in the floor, it won't do us any good if you've already fallen down one, will it?"

    She eventually said, "I suppose so." She still walked level with Coeo's shoulder.

    The light grew gradually stronger until they emerged into a narrow ravine, blinking in Gama and Deltasol's watery sunshine. Karl's eyes ran with the unaccustomed brightness, and when he had wiped them, he saw Bera doing the same. Only Coeo seemed unaffected.

    "I hoped that we were shortening the distance, but I never guessed that we'd cut right through them!" Bera laughed gleefully. "Rather than have to climb them, we've shortened the journey another way!" She flung her arms around Karl and did a little dance in his arms, even patting Coeo's arm. The humanoid started, then relaxed, and clumsily patted her arm back.

    They faced a broken, boulder-strewn landscape full of rocks and pebbles rather than the gravel and silt-like soil on the far side of the hills. There was also more vegetation, Karl noticed, although it was still straggly shrub and scrub. He pointed at a blue cactus-like plant with pink flowers. "That implies there's water."

    "Are there sandurlund sites below ground?" Karl asked Coeo. He had no idea what the Kazakh for the little animal was, but with the lingua-weave it was best not to think of such things, but leave them to the lingua-obsessed who dissected back-translations, comparing their odder variations with glee.

    "Some," the humanoid said. "Sometimes they dig too close to hot springs, or they're unlucky, and the water changes course underground. Then you may find boiled sandurlund thrown up out of the geysirs. That's why there are so many dauskalas around." He pointed to where a dozen bat-like shapes circled in the thermals, their screeches echoing off the surrounding hills.

    "Is he talking about those bloody dauskalas?" Bera said, watching the sky.

    "She's nervous of them," Karl explained to Coeo. He struggled to follow some of their subsequent conversation – even with the nanophytes' modifications, his hearing still couldn't catch the highest notes of Coeo's language.

    "Coeo says you've nothing to worry about," Karl translated. "The dauskalas can't carry off a human."

    "That was a long conversation for so little," Bera said. "Either that or he uses very long words." She smiled, but there was an edge to her voice. "Or was he playing the Oracle?"

    "Why not?" Karl said. "You're always complaining that I ask you too many questions."

    "I don't complain," Bera said, "I merely observe."

    Karl squinted up at her. "Observe this!" He blew her a big, fat raspberry.

    "Hmmph," she said.

    Karl was tempted to observe that a trinary was an inherently unstable relationship, that he and the women had married Jarl for precisely that reason – that and that his lean, smooth-skinned husband was good-looking enough to overcome Karl's strongly hetero leanings.

    But he had the feeling that such a comment might provoke an eruption. He frowned. Is that why she's so moody? Surely she's not jealous of Coeo? He decided that he should be more attentive.

    Karl craned his neck. "Apparently the dauskalas have an internal mechanism for heating the blood by exchanging heat from the blood going to the wings, with that returning to the body; so the wings are cold but the body's warm, even on one of their more epic flights."

    "Fascinating," Bera said.

    "Isn't it?" Karl ignored her sarcasm. "Is that where your phrase 'as cold as a dauskala's touch' comes from?"

    "Probably."

    Karl squinted at her. "OK, I get the message. Dull, dull, dull. Let's move on." He quickened his pace.

    But their extra speed didn't last long. When they had first left Skorradalur they had travelled more than fifty kilometres a day without much effort. The last three days they had covered barely half that.

    Teitur limped a little at first, then more badly as the hours progressed to Gamasol-set, until Karl and Coeo had slowed to a stroll. Bera dismounted and led him, and still he lagged behind them.

    The group walked in silence. Karl sensed that the time was coming when they would have to kill the faithful little horse. A quick, painless death's still more merciful than marooning him in the desert to die slowly of thirst or from predators, he thought sadly. Bera will know when it's time.

    When the shadows were long, the sky clear of dauskalas and the cold too biting to allow Karl to keep his shirt off any longer, he saw Bera weeping quietly as she walked, and knew.

    "Bera." He put his arm around her shoulder. "Do you want me to do it?" He wasn't sure that he could, but for her sake he would try.

    She wiped her eyes impatiently. "No, I'll do it. Normally we don't hesitate to cull, if there's any sign of temperament or weakness that could be carried on. But this is different. He's served me ever since I was a child and he should live another decade at least. We know that we're going to outlive them, that they grow old before our eyes, but to see him reduced to this…"

    Karl nodded, noting the horse's ribs sticking out, bony souvenirs of their odyssey, the tired swaying of his head from side to side. He thought of Ship, for the first time in too long. They give their lives for us, he thought, and we take it for granted.

    Soon after they stopped for the night.

    Bera emptied the last of the horse-feed into a bag which he gave to Teitur. "A last meal," she said. "It's not as if we can eat it, is it?" Karl decided that it wouldn't be right to say that in an emergency, yes, he could eat the horse-feed. Better to leave her some consolation.

    Bera loaded the rifle. When Teitur had checked that there was no more food to be had, she wrapped her arm around his neck and kissed him on the nose. "Farewell, my lovely boy," she croaked. With her free hand she pointed the rifle-barrel between his eyes, and fired once.

    The rifle absorbed much of the recoil but it still jerked her hand away. Teitur spasmed and then – it seemed in slow motion – toppled over.

    Bera checked Teitur's pulse, although Karl couldn't see how he could still live. Routine is her consolation, he thought.

    She took up her knife, waving away Karl's help. "Could you make a fire like the other night?"

    Karl wasn't sure that he could spare any more nanophytes – those that he had were long overdue maintenance, but he didn't argue. "I'll gather vegetation." He spoke to Coeo, and they walked in two halves of a great circle.

    Almost forty minutes later, Karl dropped his feeble haul beside the corpse.

    Bera had laid out their furs and was sat among them, resting her hand on a stack of Teitur-steaks wrapped in horse-skin packets as if assessing them. The horse's cadaver lay outstretched nearby, much as he had fallen, but with the skin stretched away from where Bera had cut the steaks.

    "I decanted his blood into whatever empty bottles we had," she said, eyes red, her teeth chattering between sentences. "I feel like a vampire, I've drunk so much horse-blood lately." She stood. "I'll help you," she said.

    "No need," Karl said. "You sit–"

    "No!" Bera continued, more calmly. "I need to do something."