He was working on a small hut in one corner – basically a shitty lean-to made out of smaller logs and branches.
There was a fire roaring in a pit at the center of the fort. Other than that, there wasn’t much inside the walls.
But there was a hell of a lot outside.
For one, there were about thirty skiris milling around. A half dozen were picking at the bloody, ragged carcass of a deer. In fact, scraps of bone and skin littered the ground all around the fort, probably from meals past.
But what really made my blood run cold were the pens on the southern wall of the outside of the fort. They were crudely constructed, basically just a perimeter of dozens of straight tree limbs stuck upright in the snow.
Inside the pen were three women.
Blue-skinned women – Lelia’s people. Captured members of her tribe.
They were completely exposed to the elements, and huddled in misery close to one another.
They could have easily pushed through the walls of the pen and escaped – if it hadn’t been for the three skiris keeping watch just ten feet away.
I deduced what was going on almost immediately.
The guy in the center with the gun had somehow gotten the skiris to do what he wanted (probably through the threat of shooting them, though I had no proof of that).
And what he wanted was to build a fort… and capture a bunch of women. What he wanted the women for, I could pretty much guess, since they weren’t doing any manual work.
But he didn’t dare keep them inside the fort. Probably worried they would murder him in his sleep.
So he kept them outside, guarded by monsters, until he wanted them. Then he went out and fetched one, brought her inside, did what he wanted, and then threw her back in the pen with the others.
My blood went from ice-cold to boiling.
What kind of lowlife, piece-of-shit psychopath would enslave women?
Even if he wasn’t raping them, what kind of fucking monster would leave them in a pen built for pigs, exposed to the cold like that?
I wanted to kill the motherfucker.
But I knew better than to just go back, get Lelia and the other women, and charge in without a plan.
For one, he had a small army surrounding him. Lelia and her friends and I had been able to take down four skiris when they invaded our camp – but 30? Not in this world possible.
And the murdering rapist at the center of it all had a rifle. With my bow and arrows, I could reliably hit my target at 40 feet out. Beyond that, it was a crapshoot.
I was guessing the rifle’s range was more like 500 to 1500 feet, depending on how good a shot he was and if he had a scope.
If we were going to rescue those women, we were going to have to be goddamn strategic about it.
My mind raced through the possibilities.
A night attack?
No – wake one monster up and the rest of them would follow.
Set the fort on fire?
I was guessing it was green wood, so it wouldn’t burn easily. Not to mention we would be endangering the women in the pens, which I wasn’t willing to do.
Somehow trigger an avalanche that could take all the skiris out?
Number one, it would endanger the women again. And number two, though there was plenty of potential to trigger one on the peaks I was climbing, any avalanche that hit that plateau would just slow down and peter out. The area was too flat and too wide to sustain the speed and power needed for an avalanche to wipe them all out.
I decided to get closer in order to scout out the terrain a little more.
After another hour of climbing, I reached a spot where I had a better view.
Far below me was a roughly 60-degree slope that extended down to the plateau. Massive snowdrifts had built up along the slope. I had no idea how deep it got, but because the plateau was so flat and the snow had nothing to do but build up over time, I was guessing all those snowdrifts were pretty deep.
It would be a real bitch for a skiris to wade up through all that snow… but much easier for a bunch of people with snowshoes to go down.
If we could reach the top of the slope, we could snowshoe down to the plateau and attack the fort, which was about 200 feet away.
But there was still the problem of the 30 skiris standing in our way.
I could figure that part out later, once I worked out if I could get the women in place.
If I had to bring them the way I had come, then no, it was impossible. They would all have to be excellent climbers with their own crampons and ice axes. I didn’t have the ropes or the time to belay them all up the mountainside.
But there might be another way.
I climbed over the cliffs for the next two hours until I reached the top of the slope. Then I started looking around for another way up there.
As luck would have it, there was a sort of goat path through the mountains – difficult to climb without tools, but not impossible.
I took off my crampons and put up my ice axes, then worked my way back down the goat path. I wanted to make sure that Lelia and the others could reach the slope down to the fort without using any rock-climbing equipment whatsoever.
Everything was fine and dandy until I reached a massive overhang above the timberline. Literally everything was doable until that point.
But the overhang was impassable on the left and right without climbing gear – and it was a 60-foot drop to the ground below.
I could get them up here, no problem – but for them to get back down to the ground safely and quickly, they would need
