She clutched her bags and huddled as far back in the doorway as she could, holding her breath as the searchers stepped out into the corridor. She could make out only a little of what they were saying but thought she heard one of them say, “she will be unhappy” and her heart slammed in her breast. Khimabu? Had her beloved’s wife sent someone to kill her?
To her relief, the men turned in the other direction and their voices grew quieter. Summoning her courage, she leaned cautiously out from the doorway and looked toward the two men just before they disappeared around the corner of the passage.
White. Their armor was white. And on their heads they wore the sharply peaked helmets that proclaimed them Queen’s Teeth. What could the queen’s own guard want with her?
Oh, great gods, she thought. Viyeki warned me that the queen wanted to send all mortal concubines back to the slave compounds. Have her guards come for me, then? Or is it something worse? She remembered her secret cabinet and the things hidden there—things that would mean her death if someone saw them. She had secured them as well as she could, but had thought she only had to hide them from the servants. Oh, merciful halls of heaven, have they found my hiding place?
But even that terror faded into insignificance when she realized that she was no longer safe even in her master Viyeki’s house. The Queen’s Teeth might return any time, and then the most fortunate thing that could happen to her was that she would be returned to the slave compounds, to be raped by any noble with a taste for mortal flesh, no matter how powerful an official her beloved might be. More likely Khimabu would simply arrange for her to be killed. Because Viyeki was gone.
The time for planning and preparing was gone, too. Tzoja needed to flee for her life.
The horses could go no farther up the increasingly treacherous slopes, and Makho declared they were to be left behind before the Talons climbed any farther, so they found a cave with a freshet of water from a source deeper in the mountain. The entrance was slippery with ice where the water trickled out, but inside the cave was dry.
Nezeru found the blocks of pressed fodder at the bottom of the saddle bags and, with the mortal Jarnulf’s help, crumbled a dozen of them in a corner at the back of the cave for the horses. Saomeji built a fire near the opening, and Kemme and Makho, who were both still weak from their injuries, settled next to it.
“We will warm ourselves for an hour, Singer,” Makho declared. “But after that we must climb again.”
“I beg you to reconsider, Chieftain,” said Saomeji. “We need to rest longer—look, Kemme’s wound is bleeding again. We may have dealt with the Skalijar, but there are other creatures in these mountains, not least the dragons we actually seek, who know the smell of blood.”
“Also,” said Jarnulf, scattering the last of the fodder, “some of us cannot climb so well in darkness. In any case, I doubt we need to keep hiding our presence by climbing only in darkness. The giant said he cannot smell any trace of the bandits or any other two-legged enemies.”
“Do not seek to instruct me, mortal,” the chieftain said.
“You two.” Saomeji gestured at Nezeru and Jarnulf. “Go and find us something to eat. A night of full bellies will do us all much good in the morning.”
Makho pushed himself up to a sitting position, his face almost as hard as Queen Utuk’ku’s silver mask. “Do you give the orders here now, Singer?”
“My apologies, Hand Chieftain. Of course not.”
Makho stared at Saomeji for a long moment, then turned to Jarnulf. “You and the blackbird, go out and be useful, as the Singer suggested. I am tired of looking at your faces.”
“Bring back meat,” said Kemme. “We are not Zida’ya, to live on flowers and bee’s milk.”
Jarnulf turned and walked out of the cavern, splashing through the water that spread into a tiny cataract at the cave’s mouth. Nezeru followed him. Why did Makho keep throwing them together? Did he hope to entice her into some treacherous alliance with the mortal?
Goh Gam Gar was sitting just outside the cavern, his thick, yellowed pelt his only protection from the bitingly cold winds. “If you two are going out to rut,” the giant said pleasantly to Nezeru, “you had better dig a hole in the snow. It will serve you for a nest, too, should you bear offspring. Still, they will be thin-blooded, mostly mortal whelps with such a father. I doubt they will survive. But perhaps it is only the rut itself you seek, eh, Sacrifice?”
Nezeru stepped around him, mindful as always of the giant’s long, powerful arms. “Silence, monster,” she said, but she could feel a burning in her cheeks and was sure her half-mortal skin betrayed her. “You lie to sow distrust. You accuse others of what you want for yourself.”
The giant laughed and the icicles shivered above the cavern entrance. “Oh, fear not—you are safe enough from me. Goh Gam Gar would split you like a skinned rabbit on too large a stick.”
She set her jaw and marched away. Jarnulf was waiting a dozen paces ahead, gazing out across the uneven peaks and the deep valleys, all covered in snow. “Such helpful traveling companions,” was all he said. “We are fortunate.”
Nezeru thought it would be a good idea to go back down the mountain, to places where they had seen stands of evergreens which might hide game, but Jarnulf only shook his head. “And what if we kill something large? I do not think much of having to carry it back up the mountain to the cave. No, we should go upward. We will scout a little of tomorrow’s journey, and if we find anything to shoot, we can drag it back down instead of bowing our backs.”
So they clambered up, trying to find the best footing they could but not always succeeding. Once Jarnulf stepped onto snow that gave way beneath him; he disappeared into a crevice so quickly he did not even have time to cry out. For a brief instant Nezeru thought him lost, but when she clambered as close as she dared to where the crust had given way, she found that he had only slipped down a few feet below the surface. She slid her pack out until he could grab it by the strap. After much slipping and sawing, he at last managed to scramble out of the hole.
“My thanks,” he said, and once more displayed the expression she could not imagine from any Hikeda’ya, a broad grin. “That might have been unpleasant.”
How did the giant sense my complicated feelings about this mortal? Nezeru wondered. Not that it is lust I feel, as the beast suggested. Nothing so obvious. But I must be more careful around the others.
At last she and Jarnulf reached a flat stone plateau at the edge of a scarp. It fell away so severely that Nezeru could see no bottom to it, only an increasingly muddled view of shadows on snow. The rest of the plateau stood on the other side of the abyss, some three dozen paces away across empty space.
Movement on the far side of the drop caught Nezeru’s attention. She held her hand out to stop Jarnulf when he came up behind her, then made the signal for silence when he started to speak. She had spotted a huge mountain goat standing on the farther plateau.
“Nezeru,” her companion said, slightly louder this time, but she signaled him even more violently to be quiet. In what seemed one smooth gesture, she flicked her bow from over her shoulder, raised it, nocked an arrow, and released. The shaft flew across the chasm like a beam of light and struck the goat in its side. The animal took a stumbling step, then slumped down onto the edge of the plateau, its head dangling over nothingness. It tried to lift itself a few times, as if to die on its feet, but the arrow had gone too deep and within moments it had gone still.
“I admire your eye and your aim,” said Jarnulf as he looked at the dead mountain goat, its long hair set a-flutter by the stiff wind.
“You are not the only one who can hit a target,” she said.
“Yes, but neither of us has wings. How do you propose we retrieve it?”
She bit back an angry response when she realized he was right—the two sides of the plateau did not join, so there was no way across the chasm to retrieve her
prize. For a moment Nezeru almost felt as if she might weep like a mortal, like her own mother, great useless tears of humiliation. “I am a fool,” she said at last. Between the earlier jibes of the giant and her own reactions, she had failed to make certain they could get to the other side before she shot.
“There is always more to killing than simply killing,” said Jarnulf as he stared out across the gulf.
“Do not tell the others,” she pleaded. “Please, say nothing.”
“You think I would sell your mistake to try to gain favor with your companions?” His expression was as flatly empty as any Hikeda’ya’s. “I think you do not know either them or myself very well, Sacrifice Nezeru.”
Chastened and furious with herself, she now let him set the pace. Her thoughts remained tangled, but as time passed and Jarnulf said nothing, she managed to clear her mind enough to concentrate once more on the hunt. At last, they found another goat, this one in a place they could reach. Nezeru again took the shot—Jarnulf insisted—and again it struck home. A short time later, they had retrieved their kill and stood once more on relatively flat ground. Nezeru thought the huge mountains seemed to be watching them, like cloaked gods against the gray sky—perhaps wondering why such strange, tiny creatures trespassed in their domain.
“There are dark clouds on the northeastern horizon,” she said. “A storm is coming.”
“Right you are,” Jarnulf said. “And this would be a bad place to be caught. I had hoped we might bring down a second goat to keep the giant sweet, but he will have to share with the rest of us.”
Nezeru and the mortal took turns carrying their kill across their shoulders as they made their way down the mountain, but the beast was heavy and the footing became increasingly treacherous as the winds rose. Jarnulf at last dropped the carcass to the ground and began to drag it behind them, leaving a blood-tinged rut in the snow. “And now you see why we went uphill, not down,” he said.
“You have made your point, mortal,” Nezeru told him. “You are a better hunter than this Hikeda’ya.”
“No, I am the more practiced hunter,” he said. “You have a keen eye and light feet, and your aim is nearly faultless. But I have been keeping myself alive in the wild with only my own wits and my own weapons for many years. Even Makho, I think, has not had to do that.”
After long moments, silent but for the swish of the carcass dragging across the snow, Nezeru abruptly said, “You still have not told me all the truth.”
Jarnulf didn’t answer immediately, which might have been because he was negotiating a difficult stretch of downhill climb, trying to keep the sliding weight of the mountain goat from dragging him over the edge. “Do you mean to ask why am I still here?” he asked at last. “I gave your chieftain an answer to that days ago, whether you heard it or not—whether any of you believed it or not.”
So the slow game still continues, she thought. “Do not treat me like a fool, Rimmersman. That was no answer and you know it. Why did you save us and why are you with us? Why did that bandit of the Skalijar recognize you?”
“What do you wish me to say, woman of Sacrifice? That you have plumbed my deepest secrets? That I left my task as Queen’s Huntsman, risking punishment, so I could travel with your Hand into the eastern wilderness? And why would that be? To enrich myself somehow? How would that work, pray tell?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that you have not told the whole truth. You recognized that bandit, the one with but one eye, and he recognized you. I saw. Do you deny it?”
Jarnulf stopped. The dead mountain goat slid a little way farther down the slope. Its eyes were filmy, and its swollen tongue protruded from its mouth as though the creature’s downhill journey had exhausted it. “Why should I? Yes. Yes, I knew him. His name was Dyrmundur. We were companions for a while, when I was young.”
Her heart sped with triumph and sudden alarm. “How can that be? You grew up in the slave barracks of Nakkiga—or at least that is what you claimed.”
He shook his head. “I did not lie about that, or anything else important. Yes, I grew up in a slave barn. And when I first became a queen’s huntsman, I used that opportunity to escape. Would you have done differently? Well, perhaps you would have. For a while after, I lived with the Skalijar, but their anger was not mine, nor was their fight.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember, please, that we are trying to outpace a storm, Sacrifice Nezeru. If we stand here until I answer all your questions, we will die. Surely they taught you that, whatever you may think, even the queen herself does not rule the snow and wind, not here.” He began to make his way down the slope, forcing her to follow him to hear what he said. “The only one who could bespell the weather is gone, sent back to perdition at Asu’a.” He smirked. “Do not look so surprised. Yes, I know of Asu’a. In fact, I have seen it, if only from a distance, which is more than I think you can say.”
She wanted to know more, but he was right: the darkening sky said they had only a little time. “We shall keep moving, then, but you will not silence me. So you were of the Skalijar once, those . . . mortal bandits. Why did you leave?”
“Because they were foul and cruel, and what they wanted was meaningless. Because they nursed old hatreds that had nothing to do with me, who was not born in Rimmersgard. My ancestors were slaves of Nakkiga, and so was I. Why should I care whether Rimmersmen worship Usires the Aedon or the old gods they brought out of the lost west?”
The sky was darkening quickly now, blackness swirling overhead like the smoke from a gigantic chimney. “So you returned into what you call slavery? That makes no sense. Why would you do that?”
“Better a slave with a roof above his head, however crude, than a man lost in the wilderness, soon to starve or freeze. That was how it seemed to me.” Jarnulf gave her a keen-eyed look. “But if we are to play this game of questions, then you must answer the same one that began the contest. Why are you here, Sacrifice?”
“That is a waste of a question, mortal.” She lifted her hand to help him down a pile of snow-covered rocks and onto the ledge where she stood. For a moment, even through their gloves, she felt a strange, strong connection, and she spoke as much to cover her confusion as anything else. “I was sent by the queen herself. I am of the Order of Sacrifice. The queen’s word is as the beating of our own hearts.”
“I’m sure,” he said, letting go of her hand and reaching back for the goat’s leg. He eased the carcass over the top, down the stones, and onto the stony lip beside him. “But that is not what I mean. The queen herself chose you. A great honor—an astounding honor! And to die for the queen is, I’m sure, your fondest wish. But why should the queen, or whoever might have acted for her, choose you?”
“I was first among my file in the Order of Sacrifice! I defeated five others Sacrifices with only my hands!”
“Ah. And did Makho do the same?”
“In his day, yes! He is many years older than I am.”
“And Kemme?”
“He is Makho’s friend. He is also a fearsome warrior.”
A swirl of snow began to spin past them. “Yes, he is, but otherwise not tremendously distinguished. In fact, Kemme is as stupid as a bag of stones. And Saomeji, for all his subtlety, is also young, is he not? Not to mention that he is a halfblood like yourself?”
She wiped melting snow from her eyes with her sleeve. “What do you reach for, slave-taker?”
“Just a curious thing—that this so-important mission, which has seemingly taken you across the whole of the north, to this place where some say the last dragons live, and which is commanded by Makho, undoubtedly one of the fiercest warriors of your Order of Sacrifice, should otherwise be made up of such . . . disposable minions.”
She was not certain what the mortal meant to suggest, but it made her furious. “Why do you seek to undermine us, Jarnulf? What does it benefit you?”
“Ask instead what your queen wants of you, Sacrifice Sister Nezeru—or rather, I suspect, what Akhenabi wants, because from what I have seen and heard, it is his hand behind this mission, though he seems not to care if it fails.”
“You dare . . . ?” she began, but never finished what she meant to say, not because she hadn’t puzzled it out yet herself, but because of the sudden appearance of a snarling white shape that fell onto Jarnulf from above, as if it had dropped out of the storm. For a moment Nezeru saw nothing but a rolling, screeching ball of white that bumped and slid perilously close to the ledge’s end. Some animal that had attacked them, perhaps a white wolf or a bear, but she could make out little of it in the fluttering snow except the red wetness of its maw as it tried to bite Jarnulf’s face.
She could not draw her sword swiftly enough to help—already the mortal and his attacker had rolled too close to the edge, but one of her arrows had fallen from her quiver, so she snatched it up and thrust it as hard as she could into the bristling white back of Jarnulf’s attacker, then pulled out another and plunged it into the hairy shape as well. She felt them both hit bone and then slide deeper, but the thing would not let go. She tried to struggle to her feet so she could draw her sword.
“My . . . knife!” Jarnulf gasped, twisting his head free from the claws of the furiously writhing animal.
Nezeru saw the weapon on his belt, but before she could reach it, the two combatants rolled again and stopped partway over the edge with Jarnulf on his back, so that nothing lay beneath his head and shoulders but a deadly fall down the scarp. Nezeru finally managed to pull her sword, but for agonizingly long moments she could not use it because man and beast were struggling so violently she feared she would stab Jarnulf instead.