Heart of Black Ice Read online

  “I did know that, but I didn’t remember it. I was convinced that once I reached Kol Adair, my gift would suddenly return, that I would achieve the end of my quest. But no, the words say only that I would behold what I needed.” He looked eastward beyond the pass. “And from here, through a trick of a mirage, we saw Ildakar, far away, shimmering as the shroud of eternity flickered. That is why we headed there, and eventually I did indeed get what I needed, the heart of a wizard.”

  Nathan suddenly winced as pain shot through his chest. Ivan’s heart beat harder, pounding as if trying to break free of his rib cage, fighting back against its new owner.

  Verna saw his grimace. “What is wrong? I’ve seen you rub your chest before. Does your heart still bother you?”

  “The heart is not entirely mine.” He gave her a wan grin. “At least that is what Chief Handler Ivan seems to think.”

  Loosening the laces among the ruffles of his shirt, he tugged open the front to reveal the long white scar on his breastbone. “This was where Fleshmancer Andre tore out my heart and replaced it with Ivan’s to give me my gift back. Andre wasn’t sure the scheme would work, and I’m quite certain that Ivan had no wish to participate.” He tugged the laces tight against the chill breezes on the pass. “It wasn’t my choice either, but I had tried everything else. A prophet without prophecy and a wizard without the gift—I felt quite useless, Verna.” He wondered whether he had ever used her first name before. “At the time, I accepted what I had to do, and now there is no reason to second-guess it. I do have my gift back, and I will fight against the enemies of the land. That is all I can do.”

  Verna placed a comforting hand on his knee. “And what does the rest of the prophecy mean? ‘And the Sorceress must save the world.’”

  “That part is for Nicci, I believe, but she’s been doing that all along.”

  After a brief rest, the company moved on down the western slope. The lead horses picked their way in single file along the rougher and more jumbled terrain. In many places the road had been damaged, strewn with fallen boulders or swept away by sheets of ice and snow.

  Holding on to the saddle horn, Zimmer rocked back and forth as his horse traversed the uneven ground. He glanced back over his shoulder. “Our avalanche certainly caused a lot of damage, Prelate.”

  Nathan raised his eyebrows. “Your avalanche?”

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Verna said as the first line of horses picked their way across an angled white field.

  Dislodged pebbles and ice chunks still pattered down the slopes. Though Nathan felt uneasy about the unstable terrain, he could only imagine how difficult this passage would be for many thousands of marching men in full armor. By the time they reached Cliffwall, their small group should be a week or more ahead of the main army.

  As the party veered around the broad fan of a fresh jumbled snowfield, Nathan realized the white blocks were studded with dark forms, a glint of polished armor, the sharp edge of a shield. A gauntleted hand reached out of the frozen mass. As the company approached, cawing ravens took wing from their feast of frozen meat.

  “Those are bodies!” Nathan realized just how many corpses there were; not just hundreds, but thousands. “Dear spirits!”

  “One of General Utros’s expeditionary armies,” Verna said. “We found them camped just below Kol Adair, beneath the heavy glaciers.”

  Zimmer pulled up to a halt beside them. “We estimated they were ten thousand men marching in the general direction of Cliffwall. We stopped them.”

  Amber, Peretta, and Oliver called out as they stopped by the edge of the avalanche field. “Some of the ice melted, but the bodies are still frozen!”

  “Not so frozen that the crows can’t eat them,” Peretta said. “By summer, all these bones will be picked clean.”

  Nathan tried to grasp what he was seeing. “What did you do? How did you cause this?”

  Verna seemed quite pleased with herself. “Renn was the only wizard among us, but there were Sisters of the Light and many gifted Cliffwall scholars. Together, we used magic to melt the ice in strategic places, which lubricated the glacier sheets. Gravity did the rest.” She shrugged as if it had been a simple exercise.

  At the edge of the ice field, Nathan stared at the innumerable buried bodies, the armor, helmets, and the exposed faces with pecked skin.

  The morazeth nodded with admiration. “Ten thousand?” Thorn asked.

  “An impressive score,” Lyesse added.

  Nathan turned to the prim prelate, seeing Verna in an entirely different light. “I had no idea you were so bloodthirsty, my dear.”

  “I can be, when it’s necessary.”

  “Yes, I suppose you can. I have seen you do many hard things over the years.”

  Nathan and the prelate had an often contentious relationship. She considered him dangerous due to his gift of prophecy, and after he’d escaped from the Palace of the Prophets, she had tried to hunt him down. Nathan had only wanted his freedom, living his life for the first time, even though he was already a thousand years old. He had indeed found adventure and love, more than once.

  He sighed. “After Clarissa was killed, I was so angry at you that I broke your jaw.”

  Verna hung her head. “I am sorry about that.”

  “You’re sorry? I’m the one who smashed you in the face.”

  “Many things were different then. It healed.”

  Nathan thought of beautiful, innocent Clarissa, and then Prelate Ann, whom he had also loved … and much more recently there was Elsa, who had sacrificed herself in a blaze of glory with her transference magic. “Not everything heals completely.”

  He kicked at the armored glove of a body that was buried in ice and snow. Without gloating further over the massacre, he and his companions moved on toward Cliffwall.

  CHAPTER 31

  Yes, she would take the head of the Norukai king. That would be her new trophy, her new quest, and Adessa considered it a worthy one.

  She felt alive again with a purpose, a true morazeth purpose. The sack with the wizard commander’s head bumped against her hip as she sprinted along the river with Lila beside her.

  The severed head had fallen silent, and Adessa was glad not to listen to his taunts, not to look at his rotting face. Maybe the Keeper had silenced him for good. What worried Adessa, though, was that Lila didn’t seem to hear the wizard commander at all.

  When the young woman explained what had happened to Ildakar, Adessa felt the solid ground of her life drop out beneath her. She had asked herself repeatedly whether killing Maxim was enough of a purpose, in and of itself. And now that he was dead, what did she have left, other than carrying the head back to Ildakar? A city that no longer existed.

  Even that had been taken from her. The emptiness was a void filled only with Maxim’s mocking laughter, but now Lila had given her a new mission. Bannon meant nothing to her, but Adessa did care for her morazeth sister. Therefore, Lila’s quest was her own quest. Besides, she liked the idea of killing King Grieve.

  The two women could run for hours with only brief rests. Lila had insisted on the need for speed, because although the Norukai would stop to anchor at intermittent times, the serpent ships moved swiftly along the Killraven. In order for their plan to succeed, they had to get ahead of the three vessels so they could lay their trap.

  The game trail turned into a footpath, then an actual road as they reached the outskirts of a tiny fishing town. The two women gave it a wide berth, because encountering people would only delay them. But when they stumbled upon a hunter trudging back to his home with a small gutted deer over his shoulders, the man was so startled to see the morazeth running toward him that he dropped his kill and grabbed his bow. The two barely paused as they raced past him.

  Lila called over her shoulder, “Warn your village! Norukai ships are coming, and they will kill your people, burn your homes. Get everyone to safety.”

  The man gaped at them, but they had already vanished into the forest. Adess
a pointed out, “This means we must be ahead of the raiders. Otherwise that village would have been destroyed already.”

  Lila pushed on with greater speed. “We have a chance to set up an ambush, if we find the right place to do it.”

  By late afternoon they came upon an elbow of dry land that jutted into the river. Lila paused and looked around with a critical eye. She smiled. “We can build a bonfire here where the Norukai ships are sure to see it. We will taunt them and bring them closer.”

  “I will challenge them.” Adessa responded with a predatory grin. “If he is not a coward, King Grieve will face me.”

  As sunset approached, knowing the raider ships were coming, though they would anchor when night set in, the two morazeth moved through the underbrush breaking off dead branches and hauling dry marsh grasses, which they piled out on the spit of land to prepare a big fire.

  Adessa found a fallen tree with a hollow interior that would make an adequate drum. Together, they dragged the hollow log to the edge of the water, where Adessa could sit in front of the bonfire and make loud, rhythmic pounding. One way or another, she would command the attention of the Norukai.

  The two women waited as darkness fell and the river sounds grew louder, more sinister. Adessa stared out at the empty river, penetrating the gloom with her eyes, listening intently. She smiled at her companion. “Can you hear it?”

  Gruff voices carried on the water, along with the creak of wood.

  Lila tucked her dagger into its sheath, checked the small agile knife at her side and Sturdy strapped to her back. “I will get ready. Give me the diversion I need, and I’ll save Bannon. That is our mission.”

  Adessa responded with a wolfish grin, then a glance at the sack. “We will keep their attention, don’t worry.”

  Lila sprinted off along the riverbank to take her position in the bushes, while Adessa ignited the bonfire. The flames quickly caught the reeds and grasses, burning fast and hot. The signal blaze rose high, demanding the attention of the serpent ships.

  As she moved to the hollow log, a muffled voice came from the sack at her side. “The Keeper wants you.”

  “The Keeper will have all of us in our time. I wish he would take you now.”

  “Poor Adessa…” Maxim said in an oily mocking voice.

  “Silence!” Adessa’s shout echoed across the river, and she heard surprised responses from the Norukai vessels.

  She sat cross-legged next to the hollow log and hammered on the trunk with a wooden branch, pounding out a loud drumbeat. When Maxim’s head continued to mock her, she just beat the stick louder, drowning him out.

  When the fearsome serpent ships came closer, attracted by the blazing fire and the pounding beat, Adessa stood and went to the river’s edge. Her silhouette would stand out clearly against the bright flames. From the ships she heard taunting jeers, burly raiders pointing at her as if she were a fool.

  She shouted loudly enough to be heard over their catcalls. “I am a morazeth from Ildakar, and I challenge King Grieve to a fight. I mean to kill someone tonight.”

  Cloaked in the last light of dusk, the serpent ships approached closer in the main river channel. Raucous shouts came back over the water in response to her challenge.

  Adessa stood her ground, calling back to them. “Is Grieve a coward to face me himself? Very well, let him send a lesser Norukai, or two, if you think that is what you need to fight a morazeth.”

  A smaller boat dropped into the water from the lead ship. Two barrel-chested Norukai, their faces slashed into permanent hideous grimaces, rowed to where she waited on the spit of land by the bonfire. Each man carried ominous weapons, which Adessa ignored. She had her short sword, her dagger, and her agile knife, which was little more than a rune-marked handle that no Norukai would recognize. She also carried the bloodstained sack with the head, refusing to relinquish her trophy. Maxim would come with her.

  She waded into the shallow river to meet the landing boat. Adessa glowered at the Norukai greeting party as if their presence were an insult. “A disappointingly small escort. The Norukai don’t fear me enough yet.”

  The raiders growled, as if incapable of normal human speech. She climbed into the boat even before it came to shore, then sat imperiously at the bow while the Norukai rowed toward the serpent ship. She turned her back to the men and cradled the stained sack on her lap.

  Norukai crowded the rail on the upper deck, watching her with strange curiosity. From the waterline, Adessa scanned their faces, trying to determine which one was Grieve.

  She saw a scarred, white-skinned man poking his head up and down, scuttling sideways to get a better view. “My Grieve!” The albino cocked his head at the burly man beside him, who wore a thick chain around his waist and had bone spines implanted in his shoulders. “My Grieve, King Grieve! Make her grieve.”

  With the sack secured to her waist, Adessa left the landing boat and climbed a ladder up the side of the serpent ship’s hull. She showed no fear as she stood among the raiders.

  “Death is in the air,” Maxim whispered from the sack. “Someone will die. Who will you fight? Who will you kill, or who will kill you? Best prepare yourself, Adessa.”

  “Be quiet.” She climbed onto the deck and planted her feet firmly on the scrubbed wood. As the Norukai crowded around her, she drew her sword, standing defiant. “Is King Grieve brave enough to face me? I want his blood.”

  The raiders guffawed. Grieve stepped forward, a truly hideous man. “Why would I waste my time fighting you? If I need practice, the Norukai are more worthy sparring partners.”

  “You’ll fight me because I want to kill you,” Adessa said.

  The Norukai laughed at her audacity, and even Grieve chuckled. “A woman doesn’t always get what she wants. I have disappointed many who lusted after me.”

  The scarred sailors snickered. Adessa stared at him without answering. Grieve looked at the bloodstained sack at her side. “What is that? A gift for me?”

  She set the sack on top of a barrel and pulled down the cloth to reveal the rotting head.

  The albino shaman capered in delight. “The axe cleaves the wood. The sword cleaves the bone!”

  “Quiet, Chalk.” As Grieve leaned closer, his scarred mouth drew down in a frown. “Who is this? Why would I want such a gift?”

  “It is not a gift for you. This is Wizard Commander Maxim from Ildakar. I was ordered to take his head.” She remained stony. Now that her hands were free, she touched her short sword. “I intend to take your head as a second trophy.”

  The Norukai crowded closer, amused by the impending fight. As the darkness thickened, they brought lanterns to illuminate the open deck, clearing an area for combat. Grieve held his wicked war axe in his right hand.

  “All right, let’s play,” he said.

  The two faced off.

  CHAPTER 32

  Disheartened and angry after so many soldiers had died in the meadow of deadly flowers, General Utros’s army marched into the mountains. As their provisional leader, First Commander Enoch rode his warhorse, donning a crimson cape to indicate his rank. His brass helmet gleamed in the sun, but his entire body felt like iron, heavy and harder than the stone he and all the soldiers had been for centuries.

  With the general himself on his way to Orogang, Enoch needed to lead more than a hundred thousand fighters, but he had never been an inspirational commander like Utros. So many soldiers had already died since awakening from the petrification spell, and they had all lost their families many centuries ago when they had left home for the last time under the banner of General Utros.

  Utros was the one who inspired that undying loyalty, and although Enoch tried to hold the army together, he could tell that cracks were showing in their ranks. A handful of stragglers from Ildakar had picked them off, one by one, and then hundreds more died in the field of poison flowers, a trap. That had been a great blow to their confidence in him.

  Enoch had not been at the forefront that day, but riding among the
ranks to encourage the marching companies. His vanguard had been so easily provoked by a few gadflies, so heinously tricked. By the time Enoch had arrived to join the charge, the broad meadow was already strewn with writhing bodies.

  Now, riding endlessly through the mountains, Enoch squeezed his fists, feeling the stretch of his leather gauntlets. He wanted to bash each one of the rebels against a rock. Even a thousand casualties had no significant effect on the gigantic force, but it was like a sword thrust through the heart of their morale.

  And he was in command.

  The soldiers were without supplies and starving, and they knew it, though kept alive thanks to the unsettling spell that altered their digestion and metabolism. Their instinct forced them to strip the greenery off trees, grasses, and bushes, like locusts. They devoured any animal they caught. Enoch had a sick suspicion that if the bodies of those fallen soldiers had not been impregnated with the deathrise poison, some of his most desperate troops might even have eaten the human flesh. But he had rushed the thundering force up to the next ridge, away from the poisonous flowers and all that tempting meat.…

  Enoch drove the army harder as they climbed into the more rugged mountains. He wished General Utros would come back and join them again. The army needed their general, though Enoch dreaded explaining such a failure to Utros once he returned.…

  The marching force stretched out for half a mile, heading into the mountains, up above the tree line and toward the highest pass ahead. Raising a gloved fist, he shouted loudly enough for the front ranks to hear his words, which would then be passed along down the line of soldiers. “Scouts have found a large mountain lake ahead! We will camp there for the night. Just another hour, and we’ll be there.”

  Finally, they reached a cliff-ringed bowl below the last line of high peaks, where a clear mountain lake welcomed them. This would be their final camp before a vigorous push up and over the pass of Kol Adair. The first ranks set up camp around the lake, finding patches of dry ground to sleep on.