Ashes of a Black Frost

was tough. If he managed to make it this far, he’d eventually make it the rest of the way home to himself.

“So then. . what happened to you?”

Yimt pointed to the hole in his uniform over his chest. “Courtesy of that yellow-bellied coward of a snake, Kritton,” he said, spitting out the words.

Konowa was still staring at the frost-burned scar tissue visible through the hole when what Yimt said registered.

“Kritton? He’s here?!” Konowa asked in disbelief. “How?”

“Can’t say I know how he gets around these days, but I can tell you about the why.” Yimt took the next several minutes to explain the scene in the library. “Buggers were looting the place like rats in a cheese shop. They had wagons-full of more knickknacks, bric-abrac, and artifacts than you could shake a stick at. But even that would be excusable,” Yimt said, showing his rather expansive view on a soldier’s right to grab a few items in the course of a good battle, “if Kritton hadn’t got it into their heads they needed revenge. He’s turned them. Any one of ’em could’ve put a musket ball up that elf’s backside and been a hero, but not a one made a move. And the weaselly elf bastard shot me.”

Konowa closed his eyes for a moment then opened them, looking past Yimt. “We saw the mutilated bodies. I recognized a lot of the muscle cuts. We learned how to skin deer that way back in the Hynta. Kritton is poison all right, but they didn’t have to drink his swill. They made their choice. I can’t worry about that now. The regiment is just outside the fort.”

“But how on earth did you survive a musket shot at close range like that?” Pimmer asked. “Were you wearing armor beneath your uniform?”

Yimt smiled, showing off his pewter-colored teeth. “In a manner of speaking. A dwarf rib cage is like iron, hell, it actually is part iron. It’s all the crute we chew. If he’d shot me in the gut it would have been a very different story, but lucky for me the bastard aimed right at my heart.”

“Incredible. You’re indeed full of surprises, my friend. Do you have any idea where they were headed?” Konowa asked.

Yimt scratched at his beard. “I think they’re trying to head back home.”

“There’s no way the tunnels go all the way to the coast. They’d have to surface somewhere. .”

Konowa looked around him. “Viceroy, any indication on your map of any other secret entrances into this place?”

Pimmer turned over another empty crate and with some difficulty kneeled down and spread the map out on it. He held out the storm lantern which Konowa grabbed and positioned over the map.

“I’ve spent some time looking over this, but I’m afraid I just don’t see anything indicating a tunnel leading into the fort.”

“What’s this bit of scribble over here?” Yimt asked, pointing a finger at a small rock formation outside of the fort a few hundred yards off its southern side.

Pimmer leaned over for a closer look. “That’s just the privy. In Birsooni it translates as hole of dark earth, which I took to refer to midnight soil, which we all know means sh-”

Konowa coughed. “They wouldn’t build a latrine outside the fort like that. Couldn’t that also mean tunnel opening? Everything would look dark down there without light?”

“But why all the way out there? Why not bring it right into the fort?”

“Geologic reasons perhaps,” Yimt said. “Might have been too difficult trying to tunnel through this stuff. Everything looks like it was done fast and with less than a master stone mason’s attention to detail.”

“Whatever the reason, that could be a tunnel,” Konowa said. “If it is, then we need to explore it.”

Pimmer rubbed his chin as if debating his next words very carefully. “Not to throw a damper on things, but won’t that take time, time we don’t have.”

Now you worry about time. “We’ll make time,” Konowa said, making sure his tone gave no room for argument. “RSM, when the regiment arrives, I want that rock pile searched. If it’s a tunnel entrance, I want to know what’s down there. Viceroy, look at that map again. If there are any other oddities on there that could mean a tunnel or hole or anything like that, I want to know.” His words were coming out faster than he intended, but he didn’t care. Visyna and Kritton were both alive, and they were somewhere nearby. He knew it. And he was going to find both of them.

“This does shed new light on things,” Pimmer said, standing up and wandering off with his map held close to his face. Konowa watched him walk over to where Tyul was sitting and plop down in front of him. He spread the map out between them, sheltering it from the snow with part of his robe, and began talking. The elf ignored him though Pimmer didn’t seem to notice.

Konowa turned back to Yimt, who was staring up at him with a questioning look.

“What?”

“It’s just that the last time I saw you look that happy, you were killing something,” Yimt said.

Was Konowa going mad? He’d just walked through a field of horrors and this is how he reacted? But it wasn’t that. He struggled to understand the feeling swelling inside him. It was. . balance. All his life he’d been angry, thinking that one day he’d find peace and be able to come to terms with the world and his place in it. But he’d had it all wrong. He’d been miserable with his anger, but it gave him purpose. To lose it would be to rob him of something important. He needed his anger, but he needed more, too. He needed to be part of something. For a long time the regiment had served that role. It was his family. The time in the forest during his banishment had been hell. He realized that despite his outward bravado he wasn’t so different from everyone else. He wanted to be part of something more than himself. Maybe he could find it with Visyna. All he knew for certain was that the time was coming when he would have to make choices. Permanent, inviolable choices.

Konowa looked at Yimt and decided he could risk revealing a little of what he was experiencing. “What do you call it when you suddenly realize something that makes your whole life make sense? Everything just comes into view like a fog has lifted?”

Yimt snapped his fingers. “You, Major, just had what they call in technical terms an e-piff- anny. It’s named after some lass from way back. It means you came to an abrupt understanding of something. It’s like when you wake up after a night at the pub and for a minute you don’t know why your bed is wet and lumpy and your beard smells like the wrong end of a goat, not that there’s a right end, and you suddenly remember the wife chasing you out of the quarry with a battle-ax yelling at you not to come back until you sober up.”

“Ahh, that sounds. . possible,” Konowa said, surprised that he actually got the gist of what the dwarf was saying if not the full meaning. “Um, I’ll probably regret this, but a goat?”

“Turns out I stumbled into the local cheesemongers shop a few doors down and took a table of cheese curds as a big bed. Wound up buying seventy-five pounds of a right tangy cheddar. Lucky for me the wife had put up some prune preserves, because after two weeks of eating cheese I was-” whatever Yimt was going to say was thankfully interrupted by a shout from the front gate.

“Major, you’d better get over here!”

Even before Konowa made it to the front gate he knew it was trouble. He sprinted the last few yards and came to a stop by the soldiers standing guard. They were all pointing down to the desert floor.

“Rakkes, sir, hundreds and hundreds of the buggers! They’re swarming in from all over.”

The chill that ran down Konowa’s spine had nothing to do with the black acorn. The regiment had yet to reach the bottom of the hill, but the rakkes already had.

“They just came out of nowhere, Major. One minute it was quiet and the next they were everywhere.”

Konowa gripped the edge of the wooden gate. The snow-covered desert plain below the hill was dotted with hundreds of rakkes. They bounded through the snow from every direction, all homing in on the regiment now stranded several hundred yards from the bottom of the road leading up to the gate. Deep in the heart of the swirling dark mass of rakkes, a vortex of black light spun on a wobbling axis. Images of a twisted, mangled figure walked in the center of it. The rakkes kept well clear of the spinning darkness. Konowa cursed under his breath.

“What is that thing?” Corporal Feylan asked, using his musket to point.

“One viceroy too many,” Konowa said. Corporal Feylan brought his musket tight into his shoulder ready to fire.

Konowa reached out a hand and knocked the muzzle down. “That’s a thousand yards if it’s a foot. You