Chapter Thirty-Two Elvine #3
Upon emerging from the shelter, Elvine discovered that it lay at the edge of a snow-covered spit of land stretching away to north and south.
Even before she sought the spear’s guidance she knew it would point her towards Aerldun’s Eye, still visible as a faint glimmer above the northern horizon.
The spirit’s promise regarding the weather had been fully met.
She saw not a single cloud in the pale blue of the sky and the sun was a welcome caress upon her skin.
“One more day,” Veltta warned as the company set about readying itself for the march. “That’s all our supplies can sustain us before we must turn back.”
“It will suffice,” Elvine assured her, looping the sled’s ropes about her shoulders. “Tell your crew to keep their weapons handy. Most likely they’ll need them before the day is out.”
They found the first body after an hour of dragging the sleds across uneven ground. A man Elvine found impossible to age lay mostly covered by snow. His raised arm, bare but for an iron manacle, was frozen in place, and he grimaced up at her in a horrid parody of a face forever caught in mid-laugh.
“Slave,” Veltta said, nodding to the manacle. “Couldn’t keep up, so they set him free. Would’ve been kinder to cut his throat.” From the murderous glint in her eye, Elvine judged the captain intended to do some throat cutting of her own before long.
The found another body a quarter-mile on, a woman lying face down and stripped to the waist. Her ribs and spine stood out in stark relief along the veined marble of her back.
A hundred paces on they came upon a cluster of abandoned sleds, more bodies littering the surrounding snow.
These had at least been given the mercy of a slashed neck.
Not all were slaves. A dozen paces on, Elvine found two men sitting back to back, their beards encrusted with ice and skin blackened by frostbite.
They still wore their swords and, though it was difficult to tell, she felt sure she recognised one as a member of Ilvar’s menda.
“Did murder then sat down to die,” Veltta concluded, expressing her frustration by delivering a hard kick to the head of a frozen warrior.
“She’s close,” Elvine said, feeling the spear tug her notice to a ridge barely two miles distant. Tightening her gloved fists on the sled’s ropes, she started forward, obliging Colvyn and Varnyr to do the same. “No more stops until we find her.”
The depredations of the previous day troubled her no longer as she forged a path across the frozen ground.
The warmth of an unconcealed sun and the heat of her desire to finish this hunt served to stave off the cold.
The ridge was the tallest they had yet encountered in this frozen domain.
Its jagged summits were bare of snow, its slopes steep and forbidding.
As the great, serrated blade of rock loomed above, Elvine worried that the spear would compel her to climb it.
So it was with some relief that she felt the spirit guide her towards a deep crack in the ridge’s ice-encrusted base.
“We have to go in there?” Colvyn asked, eyeing the fissure with evident reluctance.
It was perhaps twenty feet high and only a few feet wide, as if formed by a giant knife slashing open the irregular wall of ice.
Moving closer, Elvine peered into a dark tunnel, the tracks of her quarry ending where snow gave way to a smoother surface.
Like her brother, she found the prospect of proceeding inside deeply unappealing, but the spirit was clear.
She draws close to it, child. If you wish to stop her, there can be no delay.
“Close to what?” she asked, unable to shake her trepidation despite the unabated desire to capture Lore.
Something ancient, the spirit replied after a reflective pause.
And powerful. For the first time, Elvine sensed a need in the spirit’s thoughts.
So far, her attitude to this hunt had been one of willing cooperation, but also arch observation.
As if it mattered only as an occasionally amusing distraction.
Now, Elvine fancied she felt a tingle to the weapon’s haft, its occupant thrumming with a new-found urgency.
“You know what’s in there,” Elvine said. “Don’t you?”
I do. And I’ll not deny the danger it poses to you and these others. But know this, allowing Lore to claim it will mean disaster for this world.
“And if you claim it?”
The spear vibrated in Elvine’s grasp with enough violence to almost jar it from her grip.
The sense of need it communicated was so potent she let out a gasp, fighting the impulse to cast the weapon away.
You have never understood, the spear said, impatience now joined with urgency.
Not my nature, or your own. I pose no danger to this world.
You can trust me or not, child. But if you don’t, you will soon reap a dire reward for dithering so.
Although Elvine felt the power of the spirit’s need in full, she also failed to sense even the smallest mote of deceit. Throughout the many miles travelled together, the spear’s inhabitant had never played her false.
“Elvine?” Colvyn asked, coming to her side, face drawn in concern.
“Draw your sword, esteemed brother,” she told him in Ishtan as she entered the tunnel with an unfaltering step. “And tell the others to do the same.”