‘So they fled,’ she sighed, more relieved than she dared con-template. Yet her aged and crooked hands still shook and even she sensed it: fragility. That she was composed of four souls, four awarenesses, made her particularly susceptible to … shattering.
‘They are close. A day’s journey. Gathered together.’
‘Yes, I sense them. A last stand, perhaps.’
Pran Chole added nothing to this, as there was no more to say. The mummified sinew of his joints clung to his bones as if he were strapped together, all animated by the eldritch ritual of Tellann. Most of the dried leather flesh of his face remained, though patches of it had fallen or been worn away. Mostly along the ridges of bone: the sharp edges of the cheekbones, the upper orbits of his empty sockets, or where the flesh had been thinnest, such as across his forehead where the skull peeked through, smooth and polished like old seasoned wood. The skullcap of the ancient deer he wore as a helmet had fared far worse. Grey with age it was, and utterly dried. It would probably weigh next to nothing in her hands. Its muzzle where it rode high above Pran’s head was longish and narrow.
She knew she was drifting … delaying.
‘Summoner,’ Pran began, and he always used this form of address when he wished to be stern with her. She could almost hear him clearing his throat, had he breath to do so. ‘We cannot delay any longer. We must confront them.’
No. We mustn’t. She had made her decision. ‘This time you must remain behind.’
If a desiccated mien of bared grinning teeth could express surprise and dismay, Pran’s features came closest. ‘Summoner …’ his breathless voice whispered. ‘Do not cast us off.’
‘I alone must speak to them. You have brought me this far and for that I thank you. Now you must remain. I’ll won’t-’ She stopped herself. ‘That is, I cannot risk losing any of you.’
‘And what of you?’
‘You know I will be safe. Fetch my horse.’
He inclined his head until the empty sockets of the beast skull seemed to stare at her in direct remonstration. ‘As you order, Summoner,’ he murmured in his sad dry voice.
He shuffled off and she went to talk to Kilava. A cold wind buffeted them all, slicing down out of the mountain heights. The beaded laces of her shirt rattled and her long tangled grey hair tossed about her face. She drew it aside. She sensed something, far in the heights behind the dense cloud cover. But just what it was she couldn’t be certain. Oddly enough, she had no interest in the Jaghut themselves, or their sorcery. Her purpose was not to prosecute the Jaghut; her purpose was to bring an end to the ritual of Tellann. No doubt, however, it was this stirring that had so distracted Kilava these last two days.
She stopped next to the squat muscular woman whose midnight black hair, being even longer than hers, lashed violently in the gusting wind as if reflecting her angry thoughts. She stared north for a time, trying to see what this elder Imass Bonecaster might be seeing.
‘You have not seen a Jaghut refugium before, have you?’ Kilava asked.
She shook her head. ‘I am a child of the warm prairie.’ She might not have seen one, but in response to the Bonecaster’s question there came a cascade of images provided by the three awarenesses that shared her being: Nightchill, crossing one such windswept waste beneath hanging curtains of flickering lights tinged pink at their frills; Tattersail, sailing past gleaming cerulean cliffs of ice far taller than those they glimpsed just to the south; even Bellurdan, sharing a fire with a Jaghut elder within one of these remaining enclaves.
‘I see them through other eyes,’ she said.
Kilava nodded her understanding. ‘What I see troubles me. It has been a long time …’ she glanced to her, ‘an unimaginably long time — but what I sense hidden there reminds me …’ She frowned then, losing whatever memory it was she hunted. ‘Well, perhaps we will have to chase the Kerluhm even there.’
‘I hope it will not come to that.’
The Bonecaster turned to Pran, Tolb, and the waiting T’lan. Silverfox looked as well. How painfully few this remaining handful, some thirty only. Yet incalculably precious to her.
‘You have hurt Pran’s feelings,’ Kilava observed.
‘They have no feelings.’
Kilava raised one silken black brow. ‘You know that is not so.’
‘Yes,’ she sighed, exhausted. She was just so tired of their company. Their rigidity. Their silence. Their unrelenting … alienness. ‘Yes,’ she sighed again. ‘They feel twice with their spirits what they can no longer feel with their flesh. I know this.’
‘Do not forget it. It is too easy to forget.’
Pran arrived, leading the watered and rested mount. Tolb followed, his withered hands clasped at his ragged belt. ‘We are to remain behind,’ Pran told Kilava.
The Bonecaster eyed him. ‘I see. Yet why should the Kerluhm listen to her now?’
Silverfox stroked the bay’s neck, avoiding her gaze. ‘I’m not going to ask this time.’
‘Then perhaps I should follow at a distance,’ Kilava offered.
Silverfox felt her brows rising. This was a day of days. The legendary Kilava being obliging. ‘There is no need.’ She added, mounting: ‘You would be too far away to intercede in any case.’
But the three Bonecasters were paying her no attention. All three had turned to the north, as had the faces of the rest of the Imass. She glanced that way, shading her eyes. What was it? She sensed there, behind the bunched soot-black clouds, the stirring of Omtose — was that it?
Then she saw it. Through her own Bonecaster’s vision she glimpsed a kind of wave descending the upper slopes. Invisible, yet visible by the disturbance it evoked as it came, like a wave through water. It came on, descending the slopes at astounding speed.
Kilava spun to her. ‘Protect yourself!’ she ordered.
She could only gape. What was this thing?
Then a hammer struck her across the head and she tumbled sideways off the horse to land numb with the shock of it. Pink coloured the swirling visions that assaulted her. She sensed her awarenesses, like survivors lashed to a raft, battling to remain afloat. The most potent of them, Nightchill, appeared to swim before her. Not in ten thousand years have they dared! she snarled, enraged. Bizarrely, behind the cracks widening between her shared essences, came the bellowed joy of Bellurdan as the giant gloried in the unleashed puissance washing over them. Darkness took her then.
*
A jolt awoke her to the utter blackness of a deeply overcast night. Except in one direction: bright mage-fire flickering in greens and blues far off. She was being carried over steep ground while lying flat in some sort of litter. Distant thunder rumbled and murmured and she thought it odd that a storm should be rising — perhaps it was all these clouds. She closed her eyes.
When she woke again it was day, or a fog-choked attempt at one in any case. Branches of conifers passed overhead. The ground was rough. Four T’lan Imass carried her. Again distant rumblings and eruptions rolled over them in sharp distinct blasts; were they moving into a thunderstorm?
‘What happened?’ she asked, rather groggily.
Kilava’s head appeared in her vision. Black flakes of dried blood marked where her nose must have bled. ‘You are with us still — good. They were of course quite worried.’
‘Worried that I had fallen apart?’
The Bonecaster nodded her agreement. ‘Something like that.’
She rubbed her forehead where it seemed as if a spike had been driven between her eyes. ‘What happened?’
‘We are privileged,’ the Bonecaster remarked with something like very dry humour.
She blinked, not certain she understood. ‘Privileged?’
‘To witness something thought long gone from the world. The birth … well, the rebirth of a Jaghut ice barrier. The T’lan are understandably rather … angered.