by the smell of stale fish. Probably seagulls, she guessed. There were numerous openings leading into buildings placed all around the walls, though none of them had doors or shuttered windows in place.
“Look here,” called one of the Arktos warriors, Sanga, probing with her foot into a blackened pit near the gateway.
It was a fire scar, with chunks of burned logs sitting amid a heap of flattened, soaked ashes. “Cold,” she said, reaching down to touch the debris. Sanga pointed at the charcoaled logs, which still showed cracks from a not- terribly-distant burning.
“But this was a fire sometime over the last summer.”
“Be alert,” Moreen called. “Let’s stay together.”
She led them across the courtyard toward the wide stairway they had noticed from beyond the gates. With Bruni and Nangrid at her sides, the chiefwoman started up the steps, the rest of her warriors following in a loose formation.
“There!” hissed Tildey, pointing with her bow toward a shadow doorway across the courtyard, on the lower level. “Something moved.”
“All right. We’ll back down the stairs and check it out,” Moreen said.
Bruni, on the bottom step, now took the lead. Moreen cast a glance above, at the rim of that rampart. Her harpoon was light in her hand as she waited until the others had started down. Safely on the courtyard, the big woman started toward the door Tildey had indicated. Nangrid and Moreen started to descend backward, still facing the upper terrace.
In another instant attacking creatures were everywhere, woofing and roaring and charging, spilling out of every door, each shadowy alcove. The chiefwoman saw tusked faces, mouth gaping. Thanoi spilled across the upper terrace, lumbering toward the top of the steps, big feet slapping the flagstones. A big bull came first, pausing above to wave his heavy spear and roar. Moreen threw her weapon, catching the brute in the belly. Nangrid shot her arrow at another, grazing the beast’s shoulder, giving it a momentary pause before it started down the stairs.
Thanoi charged into the courtyard, a dozen or more coming from each of the two towers flanking the yawning gate. Tildey shot, dropping one, while Bruni raised her voice in an ululating yell and charged right at another of the growling tuskers. Her stone-headed axe came down hard, crushing the monstrous skull. Recovering quickly, she spun around and bashed another walrus-man aside, while Tildey calmly fired more arrows into the mob.
Now the tuskers were charging down the stairs in a great mass, three score or more, perhaps a hundred of them. Moreen threw her second harpoon, then skipped out of the way as the tusker pierced by her cast tumbled and writhed down the stone steps. Nangrid shot again, holding her ground as the chiefwoman started downward.
“Come on!” Moreen cried, and Nangrid turned to run. Spears clattered around them, a volley cast by the tuskers who roared down the steps toward them. Abruptly the archer’s eyes grew wide and she fell forward. Moreen reached to catch her companion but Nangrid toppled right past her, the stout shaft of a tusker spear jutting cruelly from her back.
The thanoi were right on top of her now, and the chiefwoman stabbed and thrust with her last harpoon, unwilling to cast it away. The attackers halted for a moment, and she backed down, past Nangrid’s motionless body. Moreen reached out a hand, but the tribeswoman made no move. A swath of crimson blood spilled from her chest, fanning out and slicking the stairs in a gruesome waterfall.
Biting back a sob, the chiefwoman stabbed again, slicing open a tusker’s belly. She cried out in rage as the brute fell atop Nangrid’s body, but she had no choice but to keep backing down the steps. More of the monsters charged, starting to move past her on both sides. Another spear flew from below, piercing the thigh of a huge walrus-man, and Moreen sprang down the last few steps to join her comrades on the floor of the courtyard.
They fought their way toward the gates, a desperate knot of Arktos in the midst of a teeming mass of enraged thanoi. It was only Tildey’s alarm that gave them any chance of escape. If the band of humans had reached the top of the stairs before the attack, they would have been surrounded and overwhelmed, for by far the greatest number of walrus-men had been waiting on the upper terrace.
Bruni led the way through the smaller throng of tuskers in the courtyard, bashing her axe first to one side, then the other. The thanoi attacked fanatically, but many of them fell, skulls or faces or shoulders crushed by her powerful blows, and gradually the rest fell back in the face of her inexorable onslaught. Tildey launched the last of her arrows and slung the bow over her shoulder, hacking and stabbing with her long-bladed knife.
Another Arktos fell-Marin, Feathertail’s young mother-and she too was lost in the mass of pursuing thanoi. Moreen thrust the harpoon again and again, clattering against tusks, puncturing leathery skin. Somehow she held the throng at bay, aided by the spears of several comrades.
They were through the gates, those who still lived, and here for a moment the Arktos arrayed in a dense line, spears and harpoons bristling as a wall. Moreen dreaded a massed charge, knowing that the tuskers could quickly overwhelm them with a sudden, brutal rush.
It seemed, though, that the monsters were content to have driven them from the citadel. At least, they hesitated for precious moments, many clasping hands to bleeding wounds, growling and snapping at the humans. Here and there knots of walrus-men clustered around ragged bodies, and Moreen’s eyes blurred with the awareness that six or eight of her warriors had perished in this shockingly sudden, brutal battle.
Finally the surviving warrior women turned from the gate, moving down the path at a trot, eyes warily watching the citadel for signs of pursuit. Still the walrus-men held their ground, jeering and snorting, clattering their spears together, slapping their flat feet against the ground.
The sounds were mocking and cruel, and they rang in Moreen’s ears all the way down the twisting, mountain trail.
16
The wind howled across the vast expanse of the Snow Sea. The frigid blast of air came from the southernmost end of the world, and it roared through the deep mountain canyons. This part of Krynn had already lost the sun, and for weeks it had been freezing in a lightless, lifeless glacial winter storm.
Tornadoes preceded each phase of the storm, picking up snow, ice, pieces of monstrous debris and strewing them across the land.
A wall of ice blocked the northern advance of the storm. On one side rose the mountain called Winterheim. The storms could not defeat that steep, lofty slope. Beyond the mountain was the great, frozen dam, a barrier extending a hundred miles or more across the wasteland of southern Icereach.
The monstrous storm hesitated at the Ice Wall, reaching with frigid fingers over the top, sending snow and rock tumbling down the face of the dam before falling back. Growing ever more powerful, ever more angry, the Sturmfrost held back like a living, sentient beast, watching … and waiting.
“Are you certain that you are prepared for the Reciting of Ancestry?” Stariz asked Grimwar. The high priestess wore the black robe of her station, and held the obsidian mask before her as she scrutinized her husband.
The prince had the strange sensation that he was being studied by two powerful ogres. One he had married, with square-block face and protruding jaw. Beneath her was the image of Gonnas, carved in black stone, vacant eye-slits dark and menacing.
“Yes!” he declared. “How many times must I tell you that?”
“Until you have completed the ritual,” she growled back. “I truly wonder if you realize how important it is … how much of the future rests upon your shoulders. I was not here, in Winterheim, during the debacle of four years ago, but even in my father’s remote barony in Galcierheim, the displeasure of our god was respected and feared.”
“I understand,” he said, wishing that
