withering attacks.
Earl Dobbin was not faring so well. He had collapsed to one knee and was swinging his pitifully small sword at the last ogre's legs, barely managing to duck the wild swings of his foe's large club. The other earls lay scattered among fallen ogres, either dead or unconscious from the bite of poisoned arrows.
Tavis dispatched the ogre attacking Earl Dobbin first, then quickly killed one of the brutes fighting Morten. The bodyguard finished the other himself, cleaving the warrior's heavy skull with a single, terrible blow of his battle-axe.
The ogre had hardly hit the ground before Morten was glaring up at his savior. 'Tavis!' he thundered.
'Come down here!'
The scout shook his head. 'Not yet,' he said. 'Not until you and I come to an agreement.'
Morten snorted. 'The only thing I'll agree to is splitting your head.'
'Really?' Tavis replied. 'I should think you'd be more interested in saving Brianna-I am.'
This calmed the angry firbolg a little. 'Tell me where she is,' he demanded. 'I'll make your death an easy one.'
Earl Dobbin rose, his face red with fury. 'You don't have the right to make such an agreement!' he said, grabbing the bodyguard's burly arm. 'The king sent us to bring these thieves back to Hartsvale, not to rescue his daughter!'
Morten jerked his arm free. 'Brianna was my responsibility. If I can save her by letting a few thieves die an easy death, then so be it.' The firbolg continued to glare at Tavis. 'Now tell me.'
'Right now, the princess is somewhere on the Needle Peak glacier with about a thousand ogres,' Tavis explained. As he spoke. Basil and Avner came up to stand at his side. 'They're taking her to a place called the Twilight Vale.'
Morten scowled. 'Where's that?'
'The Twilight Vale lies somewhere in the shadow of the Great Glacier, far north of the Ice Spires,' Basil explained. 'But if you want to return Brianna to Hartsvale, I'd suggest you free her long before then.'
Morten narrowed his eyes. 'Why's that?'
'The Twilight Vale's sacred to the giants,' Tavis explained. 'We don't know why the ogres are taking Brianna there, but if they succeed it'll be impossible to get her back.'
Morten considered this for a moment, then asked, 'Where'd you learn all this?'
'We happened upon the guide who helped the ogres kidnap Brianna,' Tavis explained. 'Basil interrogated him.'
The scout said nothing about the roles of Runolf and the king in the princess's abduction. As much as Morten wanted to save Brianna, Tavis did not think the bodyguard would defy Camden's wishes to do so.
Morten considered Tavis's information for a moment, then nodded in satisfaction. 'Good enough. I'll make your death quick,' he said. 'Now, will you come down here peacefully, or do I have to hunt you down?'
'I'll let you take me back to Hartsvale or kill me on the spot,'Tavis offered, 'but only after we rescue Brianna.'
Basil quickly stepped forward. 'Please understand that he's speaking only for himself,' the verbeeg said. 'Avner and I have no intention of letting you kill us at any time.'
'Doesn't matter,' Morten replied, shaking his head. 'I couldn't accept Tavis's deal, even if it included you all.'
The scout frowned. 'Why not?'
The bodyguard snorted in derision, then waved his hand at the carnage in the gulch. 'You let me lead eighteen good men into this, and now you expect me to place my faith in you?'
'Let you!' Tavis exploded. 'We tried to stop you. If you had followed the boy, you'd all be alive and well.'
Morten frowned in confusion. 'What boy?' he asked. 'We never saw any boy!'
'You didn't see Avner at the mouth of the gulch? He dropped out of a tree and ran up the ravine!'
Morten shook his head. 'We saw nothing but bodies and a blood trail leading up here. We were afraid the ogres had trapped you here. There was no boy.'
His head reeling with the implications of what the bodyguard had just told him, Tavis stumbled back from the edge of the gulch. He spun around and found Avner slowly backing away. The boy's face was pale with fear, and tears of shame were welling in his eyes.
'You lied,' Tavis said. His voice was not as angry as it was astonished and hurt. 'You lied to me.' * 8* The Glacier
The nickering returned, a series of soft, chattering snorts somewhere above the rim of the icy crevasse. Brianna's talisman, dangling from a piece of rune-inscribed bark in Tavis's hand, slowly spun in the darkness and pointed toward the sound. The tip wavered there a moment, then whirled back in the direction it had been pointing earlier. The silver spear began to sweep back and forth, never holding its position more than a second.
'Phaw! We can't trust that amulet,' Morten growled, keeping his voice low. He wore a fresh bandage around his neck, for the last few days of hard travel had sapped his recuperative powers so much that the wound on his throat had begun to fester. 'We know where Brianna is. Let's just go get her.'
Tavis did not answer. His eyes were fixed on the heavens, searching for the source of the strange nickering. He could see only a narrow wedge of purple starlit sky, for the scout and his rescue party were climbing through a lateral crevasse, an abyssal ice canyon that ran the entire length of the Needle Peak glacier. Gleaming blue walls loomed to both sides of them, impossibly high and so close together that any of the three giant-kin present could have touched both sides by extending his arms. In the bottom of the rift, cold, dead air hung heavy around their numb faces, while the frigid torrents of a tiny melt-water stream gushed over their frozen feet.
Despite the cold, Tavis's face was flushed with excitement. At dusk, Avner had climbed a few hundred feet up Needle Peak to survey the glacier. He had seen the ogres making camp not far above, at the base of a huge ice wall. Several brutes had been erecting an ice-block hut, and the youth had seen a smaller form, almost certainly Brianna, lying in the snow nearby. After hearing the boy's report, Tavis and his companions had decided to sneak up the lateral crevasse to rescue Brianna.
It had been shortly after they started the long journey up the glacier that the nickering began. The sound was soft and plaintive, so bushed that at times Tavis thought it might be nothing but the distant groans of flowing ice- until he looked down and saw Brianna's talisman swinging toward the sound.
Tavis turned to Basil and raised the wobbling amulet. 'This happens each time we hear that snorting,' the scout said. Although he did not say so, he recognized the sound as that of a horse-most likely Blizzard. 'Why does the talisman spin?'
'His m-m-magic's f-f-failing,' chattered Earl Dobbin. He and Avner were suffering more from the freezing cold than the three giant-kin. 'What do you expect from a ch-charlatan?'
The scout ignored the comment and waited for Basil's reply. If it had been up to Tavis, the lord mayor would have returned to Hartsvale with the other earls who survived the ogre ambush, but Morten wouldn't hear of it. The burly firbolg did not trust Tavis or his companions and had agreed to work with them only if Dobbin came along to balance the odds. Even when Basil had pointed out that Dobbin's peers were all suffering from injuries and could use a healthy man's assistance on the journey back, Morten had insisted that the lord mayor come along.
Casting an angry glare at Dobbin, Basil said, 'I assure you, I am no charlatan. The talisman is wavering for good reason.'
A terrible thought occurred to Tavis. 'Has Goboka vexed your rune?' the scout asked. Given that the shaman's warriors had failed to return from their ambush, the ogre would be a fool not to assume his pursuers would try for Brianna tonight. 'Can he do that sort of thing?'
'A powerful shaman like him? Of course he can,' Basil replied. The verbeeg paused, then smiled proudly. 'That's why I didn't use a rune that would lead us to Brianna herself. I employed one that's designed to locate lost property. I doubt Goboka has thought of that.'
'What nonsense are you babbling?' demanded Morten.
'Simply put, the talisman isn't pointing at Brianna,' the verbeeg explained. 'It's pointing at her belongings- in this case, her clothes and, I believe, at her horse.' He cast his eyes toward the crevasse rim, where the soft nickering continued.
'That's ridiculous!' Earl Dobbin scoffed. 'No horse could follow over the t-terrain we've c-crossed!'
'Lord Mayor, I'd think you, of all people, would know better than to underestimate Blizzard.' Tavis could not
