Chapter 22
They didn’t exchange many words in the next day’s light, however.
It was just too damn cold.
When they awoke, it was to frost furring the grass and glazing the mud of the night before. The rain had stopped, only to be replaced with intermittent flakes of snow. Above them, the basalt overhang dripped steadily from the melt their combined body heat and the dregs of the fire produced.
Fern’s brain itself had frozen over, unable to muster any thought not related to her next movement or staving off the chill that penetrated her fur. Her head was too muzzy and her paws too stiff to even properly bemoan the warm bed she’d left leagues behind.
There was little to pack. After hastily breaking their fast with cheese and water for them and a pail of oats for Bucket, Astryx rehitched him to the cart.
All three of them bundled themselves onto the wagon, Fern wrapped in a patched blanket and Astryx in her oilskin cloak.
The frosted tarpaulin creaked and popped as ice shattered.
Bucket’s hooves cracked through the scrim of ice on the muddy road as he plodded onward, chuffing and blowing in an aggrieved way.
The temperature steadily plummeted until the ice no longer broke so readily beneath every hoofbeat, and the sound changed to a dull clunking that echoed eerily between the snow-sugared birches and bastion oak.
Gradually, the grade increased as the road rose in a sinuous curve up the skirts of a prodigious mountain range.
The snow line drew closer, a pearlescent white sometimes invisibly blending with the overcast sky.
Last night’s conversation resurfaced when Astryx glanced at Fern, her lips blue and her breath a frosty plume.
“Are you sure?” she asked, tossing her head to indicate the frigid ascent before them.
“I know why I’m here. You didn’t like my answer, but I didn’t get one from you at all. Is your reason good enough for this?”
Drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders, Fern replied, “Maybe my reason is just that I’m stubborn. Besides, it’s a little late for second thoughts now, isn’t it? I’m not walking back through this mess unless you toss me off the back of the cart and roll me down the hill.”
Astryx glanced back the way they had come, calculating.
With some astonishment, Fern realized that Astryx was considering backtracking. She hadn’t entertained that for a second when she’d first discovered Fern in the back of her wagon.
“It’s definitely stubbornness,” said Fern, tingling with bashful gratification.
The elf faced forward again, and they both shut up for a while, consumed with the business of being cold on a wooden bench.
Even Zyll had withdrawn mostly into her coat, with only a wedge of forehead and her eyes peeking from above her pocket-lined collar. Fern decided there was something satisfying about the fact that the goblin wasn’t immune to the cold.
The road wended ever onward, although now in many places it was blown over with powdery snow that Bucket trudged through in misty fountains of white.
Thankfully, it wasn’t actively snowing, although flurries were sometimes borne on the wind that sighed and whistled down upon them from the peaks.
It also brought with it a peculiar and intermittent, keening chime that Fern only gradually became aware of.
“What is that?” she mumbled through painfully chapped lips.
Before Astryx could answer, one of Zyll’s hands appeared from within a sleeve and pointed into the snow.
Fern wasn’t sure what she was indicating at first, although she saw what looked like a pair of low, stony walls studded with short capstones lining the road ahead.
As they drew closer, however, she saw that the capstones were actually something like tiny bell towers, each with a brass bell suspended within, gently blowing in the gusts.
Occasionally, a clapper would graze its bell, or even strike it more directly, and the chimes and shivery whines were issuing from them.
“Monks,” explained Astryx, pointing up the slope. “There’s a Tarimite monastery on the other side of that peak. The membership is all rattkin, if I recall.”
Nigel, bared an inch, cleared his throat and adopted a lecturing tone.
“Indeed, a rather curious circumstance, all of them worshippers of Tarim, the Sixth God, he of the One and the Many, ineffable and insatiable. Mm, did you know, each of his limbs has a name, inscribed upon every one of the bells the Tarimites tend. The brass itself is very particularly cast, what with—”
“Please stop,” begged Breadlee.
Fern made a face. “Penitents,” she said, with distaste.
Astryx studied her with bemusement, but said nothing.
They passed between the murmuring bells and though their eerie song put Fern ill at ease, she was glad for their presence when the road disappeared entirely beneath drifts, with the low walls the only suggestion of their path forward.
As the road curved in a meandering arc around a white-crowned bluff of dark stone, an involuntary gasp escaped Fern.
Before them the icy slope fell away entirely into a vast chasm whose other side was just visible behind sheets of snowdust skirling from higher peaks.
Spanning this yawning emptiness, a great, stone bridge, onto which their path directly led.
It was clearly a Tarimite structure, although how old, gods knew.
Twin pillars bracketed each end of the bridge, with a narrow span of stone between them, several stories up.
With a start, Fern realized that these pillars were actually towers, and the slim notches that ringed the top were windows.
The span between them was in fact an open-sided walkway, which gave her vertigo even to consider.
Carved into the caps of the towers were images of the Sixth God, hooded and cyclopean and overly tentacled, and below, ranks of Tarimite penitents marched across the stonework, their tails curved back above their heads with lanterns threaded on them.
She shivered, and not from the cold. Encrusted with ice, the tower windows vacant, wind tugging spills of snow from every edge, the bridge filled Fern with an unexpected sense of sadness, loss, and the frailty of legacy.
“Fuckbuttons,” she murmured, quietly enough that she hoped Astryx wouldn’t hear over the breath of the mountains. Then, louder, “Is it safe to cross?”
Astryx seemed distracted, a slight frown on her face as she flipped her hood back to scan the snowfields leading up to the bridge. “It’s absolutely safer than finding another way around.” Then, without waiting for comment, she flicked the reins, and they got moving.
As Bucket’s hooves rang on the wind-scoured pavers of the bridge, Fern braced herself for the whole thing to shiver or sway or crumble out from under them with a crack of shearing stone.
Nothing of the sort happened. Not so much as a tremble.
She began to relax.
Halfway across the bridge, everything went wrong.
A figure emerged from the right-hand tower at the opposite end of the bridge and strode to the center of the path where they stopped, facing the cart, their hair tugged sidelong by snow-flecked gusts.
“Well,” said Astryx grimly.
She didn’t pull back on Bucket’s reins, and he continued to advance.
Fern held up a paw to shade her eyes, as though that would help her to see any better.
Nearsighted or not, she still knew who it was.
The orc warrior with the many braids.
She was bundled in a quilted jacket and heavy pants, and she held a hooked axe down and away from her thigh.
“Oh shit,” Fern said, beginning to turn and look back the way they’d come.
Astryx brought her up short with a hand on the shoulder. “Behind us, too. Three of them.” She looked disgusted with herself. “I should have checked the towers before we rode out onto the bridge. Foolish.”
Then she reached up to bare an inch of her blade. “Nigel. I’m going to ask for quiet. If there’s speaking to be done, I’ll do it.”
Fern heard what sounded like a sharp intake of breath from him, then a miserable, “As you wish, my lady.”
“Another bounty hunter?” murmured Fern, gripping the clasp of her cloak so fiercely that the cold metal bit into her paw.
“Seems likely,” replied Astryx.
Fern had seen the Oathmaiden single-handedly defeat a small army of Four Fingers thugs, so she wasn’t sure why she was nervous this time.
Maybe it was the implication of patience on the part of the orc before them. She’d clearly been following them, biding her time until they were at their most vulnerable atop this forsaken bridge.
Maybe it was the memory of the look on the woman’s face when they’d bumped into one another back in Bycross.
Maybe it was the deadly seriousness in Astryx’s tone.
Or maybe it was just the precipitous drop on either side of their cart.
“What are we going to do?” whispered Fern.
“When I say the word, you both get down from the wagon. Put it between yourself and whoever is closest. You need to be able to move. To run. This isn’t going to be like it was with Chak.” The elf’s voice was pitched low and freighted with deadly certainty.
Zyll started digging in her pockets.
“No,” said Astryx, and for a wonder, the goblin stopped. The elf glanced at Fern. “Remember the knife.”
The prospect of using Breadlee for anything but sharpening pencils had never once occurred to Fern and seemed ridiculous even now, but nevertheless, she jammed her paw into the satchel and found him at the bottom. Her fingers closed over Elder steel, warm to the touch.
Then there was no more time for discussion.
“Stop the cart,” called the orc, hefting her axe and grabbing the shaft near the head with her opposite hand.
Astryx complied, making a peculiar clicking sound with her tongue and gently tugging the reins. Bucket clopped immediately to a halt.
Fern wanted them to do anything but stop, but she supposed trying to run the orc down was a good way to end up with that axe embedded in Bucket’s skull.
“Once I start talking, get down from the cart,” hissed Astryx. “Remember what I said.”
She rose and tugged the tie of her oilskin cloak so that it fell away, tumbling in a gust. It caught on the edge of the wagon. Then she leapt down, unsheathing Nigel before she touched stone. He stayed quiet, as he’d been bid.
“Didn’t say anything about getting out of the cart,” drawled the orc. “But I guess for the Oathmaiden, I can make an exception.”
Now Fern did look behind and saw the orc’s three companions advancing their way. A rangy, red-haired man with a shortblade and a face as sharp as one, a stone-fey woman in black carrying an undrawn bow, and another orc in a parka balancing a heavy maul on his shoulder.
Their pace was unhurried.
Fern supposed she should be thankful she wasn’t already riddled with arrows.
She slid Breadlee from the satchel.
“Thank gods, I can hardly see a damn thing from in there,” he said. Fern got the impression he took in the scene. “Oh, hey, this may be your chance to finally get some real stabbin’ in!”
“Shhhh!” she whispered fiercely. “I’m not stabbing anybody!”
“Gods, not everything is about you! This is my shot to show Astryx that I’m the kinda sharp that matters!”
Astryx had moved to stand a few yards in front of Bucket, about twelve paces from the braided orc who sauntered toward her, carving away that distance. The wind blew harder, fresh flakes borne on every gust.
The Blademistress shouted, “You know who I am. I’m waiting for you to tell me who you are or what you want, but it’s cold, and I’m not feeling as patient as usual, so I’d appreciate it if you’d get on with it.”
That was their signal. Fern threw off the blanket and tugged Zyll’s sleeve to get her moving. She began to clamber down from the cart with Breadlee held clumsily in her right paw.
Fern froze mid-motion when she registered the humorless smile on the orc’s face.
“I wasn’t planning on any of that,” replied the woman, pitching her voice to carry over the wind.
“Not much of a talker, really. But like I said, I’ll make an exception for the Oathmaiden.
” She pointed the head of the axe at Zyll standing on the buckboard, then at Astryx.
“I’m Tullah. You won’t have heard of me.
I’m going to kill her. But first I’m going to have to kill you, because you’re the sort of person that makes that necessary. Hadn’t decided about the other one.”
Fern could hear the consternation in Astryx’s voice, even though she couldn’t see her face. “The bounty’s no good if she’s dead.”
Tullah’s harsh caw of laughter echoed amongst the crags.
“I couldn’t give a frigid fuck about a bounty.”
Then she was sprinting.