CHAPTER 17
WHAT HOWLS IN THE ICE
The climb up the throat of the Sierra Nevada became a test of medieval endurance.
Within a few hours the dry brush of New Mexico was entirely buried under a thick layer of grey snow.
The freezing wind came up the gorges howling like a wounded wolf, beating against the steel plates of the rotating reaper Gideon had mounted on the pack horse.
The metal was now so cold that anyone touching it without gloves would lose skin.
Nero led the march on foot, sinking his high boots knee-deep in snow.
He kept his eyes fixed on the tracks of the Russian hunters, the promyshlenniki, that they had found down below.
But the trail had changed character. The broad prints of heavy nailed boots, which had earlier advanced in a straight and measured line, had suddenly turned chaotic.
The Russians had begun to run. There were marks of falls, empty rifle casings dropped in the snow, and pools of frozen blood shining like rubies in the whiteness of the ground.
“They were ambushed,” Elena said, holding her reins with fingers stiff from cold.
Her dark eyes scanned the crowns of the immense pines surrounding the trail.
“But there are no horse tracks and no moccasins. Whatever ran these men down… was on foot. And it was fast.”
Gideon’s teeth chattered as he beat his arms against his chest to move the blood.
“Fast is putting it kindly, vaquera. Look at the length of that thing’s stride.”
The inventor pointed to the left side of the trail.
Parallel to the tracks of the panicking Russians ran a single line of prints in the deep snow.
They were not human, and they were not a bear’s.
They were long, narrow marks with deep claws that tore the frozen ground.
The distance from one print to the next was nearly three metres — an impossible leap for any living creature.
The Camp of Meat
Following the trail of blood, the three of them reached a clearing sheltered by three giant pines.
This was the camp of the Czar’s hunters.
Two tents of heavy canvas were slashed from top to bottom, as though they had been struck by scythe blows.
Five men in heavy bearskin coats and Russian boots lay stretched out on the ground.
But there were no bullet holes in them. Their bodies had been opened with a brutal violence, chests split and entrails exposed to the cold of the mountain.
The most terrifying thing, however, was the silence of the animals.
The Russians’ three horses were still tied to the trunks.
They were dead, frozen standing up, their white eyes wide with pure terror.
Their throats had been cut with surgical precision, but not one piece of meat had been eaten.
The thing did not hunt out of hunger. It hunted for sport.
Nero came up to one of the Russian corpses.
The man was still holding a Berdan military rifle.
The barrel of the weapon was twisted as though it were a twig of soft wood.
“This wasn’t done by a bear, and it wasn’t done by men,” Nero murmured, his low voice swallowed by the wind.
Gideon, however, had stopped looking at the dead man. He crouched, took the twisted rifle out of the fur hunter’s stiff hands, and turned the weapon against the white glare of the snow with the care of a man handling a church relic.
“Nero,” the inventor called, and there was something strange in his voice; it was not fear, it was covetousness.
“Look at the bolt on this thing. Look at the fit of the breech. This doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in Hartford, it doesn’t exist in London, it doesn’t exist in any workshop I know of on this continent.
A peasant of the Czar doesn’t buy a gun like this in a shop, because there is no shop that sells it.
This came straight out of an arsenal of the Empire, and somebody on the other side of the world had it shipped in secret. ”
Nero glanced sidelong at the barrel bent like a twig.
“And what good does knowing that do us now?”
“None at all,” Gideon admitted, tucking the ruined rifle under his arm all the same.
“But if I come off this mountain alive, my friend, I am going to copy every screw of this contraption. And one day every gunman between the Missouri and the Pacific will carry a grandchild of it in his saddle, without the faintest idea where the grandmother came from.”
His glacial blue eyes focused on the white fog beginning to come down out of the treetops, cutting visibility to less than five metres.
Suddenly the trio’s mounts began whinnying hysterically.
Nero’s black stallion tried to rear, hauling violently on the reins, its eyes fixed on the dense crown of the pine above that camp of dead men.
A sound echoed through the fog. It was not the wind.
It was a long, high, melodic whistle, mixed with a child’s laughter that seemed to come from every direction at once.
Elena felt her blood freeze in her veins.
She knew the stories her father used to hear on the Santa Fe Trail — legends about creatures the oldest natives refused to name, demons that lived on the snowy peaks and fed on men’s terror before harvesting their souls.
Gideon ran to the pack horse’s flank, tearing the tarpaulin off the rotating gun with shaking hands.
“Nero… that damned cannibal business down below was nothing next to this,” the machinist stammered, aiming the ten steel barrels at the roof of dark branches above them. “Tell me your lead kills haunts.”
Nero cocked his modified Colt Paterson with a dry and lethal click. He did not fall back a single inch.
“If it bleeds red, Gideon…” the hunter pronounced, the shadow of his hat covering his face. “It dies the same.”
The fog swallowed the camp of the dead Russians, the horses frozen on their feet, and the slashed tents. Somewhere among the giant pines the whistle started up again — closer now. And this time it came with the exact cadence, hoarse and unhurried, of Nero’s own voice.
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