“It’s a cold-drake,” Steelmind said flatly. “Thank you, Neta; that was precisely the right thing to have done. You saved us all - except for poor Gacher. I hope his death was a swift one.”
:It was,: Neta confirmed.
“I don’t understand. I’ve studied all the weirdlings we were likely to find up here. Cold-drakes are normally dormant in the summer,” Steelmind continued as he wiped his hair back from his face. “I wonder what woke this one up?”
“What’s a cold-drake?” Keisha wanted to know.
Kel interrupted the conversation, coming in beside them for a noisy landing, his beak agape with agitation. He swung his head around, counting them silently, and heaved an enormous sigh of relief to see the humans all present. “I sssaw the drrrake!” he said, “But you all rrrran beforrre I completed a ssstoop.”
“It’s just as well that you didn’t connect with it, Kel,” Darian told him, dismounting and clasping Kel’s neck - even though his own legs were still shaky. “One gryphon is no match for a cold-drake.”
“Will someone please tell me, what’s a cold-drake?” Keisha repeated insistently. “And why couldn’t I move or think?”
Darian and Steelmind exchanged a look, and Darian answered. “A cold-drake is a magical construct, like a gryphon; they were created during the Mage-Wars as offensive weapons, but the problem was that they couldn’t be controlled, and turned on their own side as often as not. They’re eating machines.”
“But they use mind-magic,” Steelmind continued. “They freeze their prey in place, then move in and strike, or dine at their leisure depending upon their mood. That thing caught all of us, every one that could see its eyes. If Neta hadn’t done what she did, we’d be sliding down its throat right now.”
Karles hung his head, as if he was ashamed that he had not somehow resisted the cold-drake’s gaze. Steelmind noticed, and turned toward the Companion. “No one is immune from a cold-drake,” he said, for Karles’ benefit. “I don’t care who or what you are. When you’re in front of a cold-drake, you belong to the cold-drake.”
Shandi patted Karles’ neck sympathetically. The Companion didn’t say anything that Darian could hear, but he understood the Companion’s chagrin; he shared it.
You’d think I would be able to shake that damned thing off. . . . How had he managed to get so completely under the monster’s power in so short a time?
I didn’t even get a good look at it before it had me!
It took one look at Hywel to realize that he did not have the worst of it. Darian was, by comparison, a war-hardened general compared to the young Ghost Cat warrior. In his past he’d been routed, ambushed, beaten up, surprised, attacked, and scared out of his wits before. It was Hywel’s first time for being totally, utterly helpless, face-to-face with death when there was nothing he could do about it. Hywel looked just as white as the Ghost Cat itself.
“How are we going to get past that thing?” Hywel stammered, aghast. “Does it ever sleep?”
“Yes, but they’re like spiders; they sense the vibrations of the ground if anything bigger than a mouse walks on it, and wake up immediately,” Steelmind told him. “I don’t think we could drive it off or lure it away either - they are very, very territorial. If we want to get through that pass, we’re going to have to kill it.”
“Oh, great,” Darian muttered, as Hywel’s eyes went round. Being magical constructs, cold-drakes were, to some extent, designed to be immune to the effects of magic. “What I don’t understand is why it isn’t dormant - it’s summer.”
“It’s also cold.” Steelmind looked over his shoulder at the mountain behind him. “With this shadow falling over the pass for most of the day, and being so high up, it doesn’t ever really get warm. That’s probably why there aren’t any animals here - the drake has hunted the place bare, and the animals don’t get a chance to recover their numbers in the summer.”
“It could be awake because it didn’t get enough to eat to support dormancy,” Wintersky said thoughtfully. “Unless it moves to a new territory, it’s going to starve to death.”
“Well, we can’t stand around and wait for that to happen,” Darian replied with irritation. “And it just got fed.”
Kelvren dipped his head toward Neta and intoned solemnly, “I am sssorrry forrr yourrr losss.”
Neta returned the gesture, and her gaze went from buck to buck. :It is a risk Gacher knew he was taking by volunteering for this journey. He knew before coming that such things could happen to him. It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.:
Darian could only nod, even though he knew Neta was speaking to the bucks and not to him. As much as he had questioned the human morality of Neta’s powers, those same powers had just unquestionably saved their lives.
Darian’s mind was soon preoccupied, thinking on the ways to get around the drake. Wintersky went from one dyheli to another, checking them for injuries and making a mental inventory of what gear was lost when they fled. We’re so close -
“We could go back,” Shandi pointed out. Dead silence dropped over them all; Darian looked at each of his party in turn. Shandi wouldn’t look him in the eyes. Hywel looked solemn and frightened; Wintersky thoughtful. Steelmind just shrugged. Only Keisha met his eyes completely, and looked just as determined as he was to continue.
“We can’t stop now,” Keisha said firmly, and cast a withering glance at her sister. “That would be giving up.”
Shandi shrugged off the criticism. “It’s no shame to give up under the right circumstances.”
Keisha didn’t even dignify the comment with an answer; instead, she turned to Steelmind. “Do you have any idea what we can use against this creature?”
“Not at the moment,” the Tayledras replied, with a look of admonition at Shandi. “But we’d better think of something other than bows and arrows.”
“Heat,” Darian muttered, after half a candlemark of debate. “That’s the key, I think. They thrive in cold, and even magically generate it. It might not be directly vulnerable to magic, but if we can weaken and confuse it with heat, we can kill it.”
“You think,” Shandi put in.
Darian was getting more than a little irritated with Keisha’s sister. Every time someone suggested something, she had a quelling remark. “Look,” he said finally. “You wanted to come along on this journey. I didn’t ask you for your help, but you, and Anda, and your Companions decided you needed to be with us, so you came. We’ve established a safe route back through the tribes, so why don’t you just go home? You’ve been helpful, but you aren’t doing anything that we can’t afford to lose.”
Shandi sat straight up, offended; Keisha, on the other hand, moved slightly closer to Darian. Steelmind raised an eyebrow, and licked his lips. “Is there a problem, Shandi?” he asked carefully. “Why are you trying to discourage us from going on?”
“I - ” She looked around uneasily. “We already have so much information about the Northerners - and we know that Wolverine poses a danger to us back home if they continue to expand. Don’t you think we have a duty to get back with that information?”
“Don’t you think we have a duty to help our friend find his parents?” Steelmind countered. “That was why we came here.”