“On foot!” Kellen shouted, vaulting from Firareth’s saddle and giving the destrier the command to leave the field. Mounted, the Elves were vulnerable to attacks against their horses—the Shadowed Elves had proven that to them time and again this night.
On foot, a chance against these greater numbers. Perhaps.
Once more, his world narrowed to a series of feints and targets, as Kellen’s mind forced his aching cold- stiffened muscles to obey. Each foe he killed was one less for his war brothers to face, and no matter what they did here, Ysterialpoerin was warned.
In a distant part of his mind—the part that must assess things, even now— he’knew the battle was going against them. Time and again he felt his comrades die, and fed his fury at their deaths into the fight. Though it cost him dearly in his exhaustion, he summoned Fire, and set a dozen of the enemy burning like torches.
But fire was easy to put out in the midst of a snowfield, and in the moment he was distracted by setting the spell, two Shadowed Elves got past his guard, swarming him like starving rats. It was his cloak that saved him as much as his armor—the coldwarg fur was heavy and thick; it tangled their blades, buying him the vital moment he needed to throw them off.
The ground began to shake.
Kellen hadn’t thought there was anything that would make a Shadowed Elf break off an attack once one of the creatures had begun. But the two that were attacking him actually cowered back, and in their moment of inattention, Kellen killed them both.
Suddenly the pit behind him exploded upward and outward as if it were a stopped-up fountain, spewing ice, stone, and earth high into the air.
And something was rising with it.
Kellen’s first confused impression was “snake”—and he hated snakes—but this was only as much like a snake as the Deathwings were like true bats.
It was the white of dirty snow. It had a head vaguely similar to Ancaladar’s, but there all resemblance ended. The eyes were dead black and malignant, the body that of a serpent’s—if a serpent were large enough to swallow bulls without choking. It radiated cold like a palpable force—the temperature dropped quickly enough to make Kellen’s face hurt, and the pooling blood on the bodies of the Shadowed Elves he’d just killed froze solid with an audible crack.
“Ice-drake!” Sihemand shouted.
One of the creatures Shadow Mountain had bred in the Lost Lands. They radiated cold and exhaled poison.
“Get to the horses!” Kellen ordered. Suddenly it was difficult to talk.
He looked around. The rest of the Shadowed Elves were gone, faded into the darkness. They’d run the moment the ice-drake had burst free.
And the temperature was still dropping. He’d thought he’d been cold before. Now he knew he’d never known the meaning of the word. The ice-drake radiated a cold as intense and deadly as a forging-furnace’s fire. He backed unsteadily away from the pit. His blood-drenched surcoat was frozen to his armor; it tore like paper when he moved.
The ice-drake towered over him, rising as high as the tallest trees in the forest of Ysterialpoerin before arching its neck and beginning to lower itself slowly toward the snow.
Kellen switched to battle-sight, but instead of the familiar overlay in glowing blue and red—showing him the creature’s attack-pattern, and where he might attack in turn—he saw nothing but the same queer fog that had surrounded the coldwarg when they’d been Demon-bespelled.
“Kellen!” Isinwen shouted, rousing him from his daze. “Run!”
He tried, but by now he was so cold that even to move was agony. He managed a few steps and fell, and knew that he couldn’t get up again.
“
Cold. Even the ice-drake’s presence was lethal. If he stayed here any longer, he would freeze to death.
The ice-drake appeared in front of him, its chin landing in the snow with a soft thump. It opened its jaws. They were large enough, Kellen realized with a distant sense of astonishment, that he could just walk down its throat. But that obviously wasn’t what it had in mind.
