"Let's go, then, Haudo!" Terve squealed. "Let's climb to the top!"
Haudo glared at her. "It is unseemly for someone to interrupt the telling of a Tale of Origin," he reminded her loftily. Terve grew silent. "Anyway," he added in ill-humor, "no one's been to the top of Reaver's Rock. It's too slippery."
Terve opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again after a nasty look from her brother. Feigning nonchalance, she pulled a snack of fresh raw fish from a packet and munched it. Haudo resumed his tale.
"Many, many winters past, the great polar bear that shaped the lands of The People placed here, at this very spot, a holy gift, a fruitful place." Haudo repeated that last phrase. It sounded so grown-up. "A holy gift, a fruitful place. A place that would hold the polar bear's gift of reaver ice, the dense ice from which The People would fashion, with much prayer and singing, the frostreaver. The frostreaver, weapon feared by the enemies of The People, is the gift of the polar bear."
"You said that, Haudo." Two frown lines broke the smoothness of the smudged skin between Terve's eyes.
Haudo closed his eyes and inhaled slowly. When he finished exhaling, he was outwardly calm. "For centuries, The People have gone to the secret places along Icewall Glacier to harvest the ice, to bring to their tribes the material that only the tribes' Revered Cleric can fashion into the frostreavers. Such is the intricacy of these weapons that each one takes a month to fashion."
"I know that, Brother," Terve muttered.
"The frostreaver is the gift of the polar bear," he reiterated, just to annoy her. "The frostreaver is the only weapon that will stave off the bull men and thanoi, foes of The People."
Terve looked around her and shivered. The mention of the walrus men and the minotaurs, who made periodic forays into the Icereach to steal slaves and sealskins, sent her edging a little closer to her big brother. Haudo pretended not to notice. He continued his tale of the ice bear, the reavers, and the debt that The People owed to the polar bears. No Ice Folk man or woman would slay a polar bear; the one who did, even accidentally, owed the bear's spirit seven days of fasting and prayer and many gifts.
"Haudo." Terve spoke quietly for once.
"Terve," he complained, "I'm trying—"
"Haudo, The People don't need great fires to make the skin ropes, do they?"
"What?" Without moving, Haudo absorbed the growing fear in his sister's eyes. Then he turned around and faced the wind, to where the fires of his people had sent thin spires of smoke into the southern air only a short time before.
Now the air was black with smoke. Even this far away, Haudo could smell burning fur and skins. He could have sworn, too, that he heard screams, but of course that was impossible.
"Haudo?" Terve was suddenly standing, pressed against him. He placed an arm around his little sister's shoulders. She's too little to be motherless, he thought. "We must go to the iceboat, Terve."
"What has happened?" Terve was on the verge of tears, but a child of The People does not cry easily. She still clutched her basket of reaver shards.
"We will see, Little Sister." He righted the boat, helped Terve into it, and set the sail. Soon he was running alongside, guiding it onto the packed snow, then leaping into the iceboat when the sail caught the wind. They sped silently toward the smoking village.
Haudo pulled up the iceboat and hid it behind a ridge of mounded snow. The village was a short distance away, behind the ridge. "Stay here," he ordered Terve.
The twelve-year-old boy crept along the back of the ridge, remembering everything his father had told him about tracking game: Heed your nose and heed your ears. They will tell you as much as your eyes. Even before he slipped his head above the ridge, he smelled the acrid stench of the minotaurs. He caught, also, the greasy fish smell of the thanoi, the walrus men, who contended, against the proof of thousands
of years of legend, that the Icereach was theirs, not The People's. And Haudo smelled something else—a nasty odor of garbage and rancid meat. Then he peered at his village, barely keeping from coughing in the smoky haze, and his breath caught in his throat. "Two-headed beasts!" he whispered.
He wanted to jump back, to avoid seeing the image he knew would never vanish from his mind. His kinsmen, his friends, lay sprawled in death on the blood-soaked snow. Minotaurs, walrus men, and the two-headed monsters brought body after body forth from iceblock huts and skin tents. A few bodies twitched. An old man moaned, and one of the two-headed brutes hurried over, waving a spiked club over its head.
Overseeing it all was the robed figure of a man, silhouetted against the southern sky.
As quietly as he'd ever moved in hunting seal or walrus, Haudo raced through the shadow of the snow ridge to the iceboat and Terve. The little girl, for once, had followed orders. She sat huddled in the boat. Haudo said only, "We must leave, little sister." She nodded mutely.
Soon the iceboat was speeding across the snow to their kinsmen's village, several days' journey to the northwest.
* * * * *
Kai-lid awakened with a start and sat up. The half-elf, keeping guard, looked over at her but said nothing. Caven and Kitiara and Wode lay wrapped in blankets around the fire. Xanthar perched above them, watchful. The eyes of the undead, as always, gazed at them from the darkness.
The mage sent her thoughts forth. Xanthar?
I saw it, too, Kai-lid. The devastation of the
