until I spy a fleck of orange light flickering in the saddle of Cuthbert Pass: the signal blaze at Gap Tower. I swing toward the flame, wondering what fires they will light this time, and soar up the canyon.
In the forest below, dark shapes glide along the edges of the snowy leas and slip quick from the shadow of one tree to the next. They are hulking, disfigured masses, but they move with a slow, silent grace that belies their brutal temper. The fomorians have arrived sooner than I thought, but it hardly matters. Already I see the queen’s tower listing atop the frozen waterfall.
My eyes, as keen as those of any raptor, spy the queen. She stands halfway up the headwall, her ribs heaving, my nephew bundled in her arms. Brianna watches me soar up the valley, then turns and races along the trail to a nearby cliff. She raises the child above her head, as though she expects me to believe she would actually hurl him to his death.
Now will I tame her. I swing my talons forward and voice my woeful screech. So loud and so shrill is the cry that it blasts the snow from the mountainsides and shakes the canyon with rumbling avalanches.
Avner was wondering if the last of the fomorians had passed when the shadowroc’s screech broke over the canyon. Even inside his hiding place, a boulder heap near the bottom of an avalanche chute, the cry was the loudest, sharpest noise he had ever heard. It made his ears ache and his head throb, and so he did not immediately hear the rumbling. The stones around him began to tremble; wisps of powdery dust fell past his nose. Then came the roaring: a low, muffled, basal murmur at the base of his skull. No one who had experienced that soft growl would ever forget it.
With Kaedlaw fastened tight to his chest, Avner leapt from his hiding place and rushed toward the gully wall. He had dug enough victims from avalanches to know that any risk-even being caught by fomorians-was better than being trapped beneath hundreds of tons of snow.
Avner reached the craggy wall in three steps. The cliff was shaking and clattering with the force of the approaching cataclysm. He refused to look toward it; to do so would waste a precious second and petrify him with fear. He grabbed a spear of rock and pulled himself up. Kaedlaw’s head banged against the stone, but if the child complained, the scout could not hear it. The avalanche was closer and larger now; the mountain was groaning beneath its fury. The rumble sounded like thunder.
Avner grasped the edge of a massive granite flake. Something cracked in the base of the slab, and it tilted toward the gully. He pulled harder and scrambled up the sheet in two steps. It began to tip faster. The scout stood on top, clutching a rocky spine that ran along the rim of the gulch.
The avalanche arrived with a mighty boom, spraying billowing white clouds high into the air. A wall of loose snow slammed into Avner’s side. He swung his legs up, hooking a foot over the gulch rim, then hoisted himself onto a windswept ledge of dry granite. He rolled onto his side, panting and quivering with fear as he stared into the raging white river that had nearly carried him away.
Avner never saw the fomorian who speared him. A sharp blow struck his side, then a huge blade slipped between his ribs. His entire torso erupted with cold fire. Blood filled his mouth, and a deep voice yelled, “I got one, me!”
Avner hooked an arm around the shank of the spear and jerked it toward the gulch, at the same time kicking backward with a heel. His foot slammed into a huge ankle, and he felt the body at the other end of the shaft toppling forward.
“Hey-arrgh!”
The fomorian tripped over Avner’s legs and fell into the thundering avalanche, jerking the spear from the scout’s body.
A gout of warm blood shot from Avner’s mouth, then a strange, gurgling rasp filled his throat. His limbs began to ache terribly, but he was too shocked to realize he was banging them against the ground until the avalanche passed and he heard them clattering against the stones.
Avner forced himself to hold still. Kaedlaw felt warm against his breast, but the cold fire inside his chest was seeping through the rest of his body, down through his bowels into his legs, up through his shoulders into his arms. Blood kept filling his mouth, and he had no more healing potions. He had used the last of those-it couldn’t have been only the day before yesterday-in the Silver Gorge. He was going to die.
Damn his luck! He had thought he would do better for the queen’s son; at least make it to Wind Keep.
Avner still heard a bellowing voice. The sound was coming from lower down the slope: another enemy. The young scout braced his hands on the mountainside and pushed himself into a seated position. He could see the fomorian now, a pear-shaped shadow down at timberline.
Avner coughed up a mouthful of bright blood, then summoned the courage to look at his wound. It was as big around as his fist, and deeper than he wanted to know. With every breath, a froth of brilliant red blood came bubbling out of the hole. There would be no sewing this wound shut.
Avner pulled his dagger and cut Kaedlaw free, then laid the baby on the lee side of a boulder. The young scout choked on a mouthful of blood, reminded himself to spit, and unbuckled his sword belt.
“There, Awn see him!” yelled a fomorian. “Maybe kid, too!”
Awn was so close that Avner could hear the stones clattering beneath the hunter’s feet.
“Give me strength, Hiatea,” Avner gasped. “For Kaedlaw.”
Without removing his sword from its scabbard, the scout used it to push himself to his feet. Awn was less than twenty paces down the mountainside, his eyes fixed on the ground beneath his feet as he clambered up the ridge. A dozen more misshapened silhouettes were a fair distance below at timberline, and beyond them the forest was swimming with shadows.
Avner glanced at Kaedlaw. “Too many,” he gasped. “Just too many.”
Leaving Kaedlaw behind, Avner hobbled down the hill to the largest boulder he could find. He shoved the tip of his sword scabbard beneath the uphill side, turning it edge-on so the blade would not snap as he pried at the rock. He let the whole of his weight fall on the pommel. The ridge was steep enough that the stone did not need much encouragement. It tipped forward and went bounding down the slope.
The boulder did not strike Awn, nor did it unleash a landslide, as was Avner’s desperate plan. It simply bounced fifty paces down the mountainside, sending a crashing boom across the canyon each time it hit, and sailed into the avalanche gully.
Awn stopped and looked up. “Stop, you!” he said. “Awn hurt you good, him!”
Avner hacked up a mouthful of bright, frothy blood, then staggered over to the next boulder. The fire had left his body, and now he felt only cold. There was such a rushing in his ears that he could barely hear Kaedlaw’s growling, and his vision was fast narrowing into a black tunnel. He slipped the tip of his sword under the rock and collapsed over the end.
The stone rolled away. It hopped once, then bounced toward Awn. The malformed warrior cried out, not yelling but whimpering, and the last thing Avner saw were the fomorian’s arms rising to catch the bounding boulder.
The shadowroc’s monstrous talons sank a dozen feet into the mountainside. Again, the gloomy wings beat the air, blowing Brianna and her rat-child against the slope. The enormous bird backed away. His shadowy claws tore huge masses of stone from the trail, leaving the queen trapped between two gaping chasms. He circled off to release his burden, and untold tons of rock and earth plummeted through the frozen surface of the tarn below.
Brianna gathered herself up and raised the decoy over her head, determined not to allow the shadowroc’s deafening screech to stun or disorient her again. She ran to the chasm and waited until the immense bird turned back toward her, then raised the rat-child over her head.
That was when the first bellowing giant-kin voices began to reverberate up the canyon. Brianna faltered, worried for Avner and Kaedlaw, and the shadowroc dipped a wing to turn toward the sound. The queen let out a loud, mournful wail to draw the bird’s attention, then hurled her burden into the chasm.
The rat-child shrieked in terror, then thumped off the rocks below and fell silent. The shadowroc folded his wings and dived, giving voice to a watery screech that did no more than send a shiver down Brianna’s spine. She sank to her knees and buried her face in her hands, wailing in what she hoped would be a convincing imitation of grief.
More bellowing echoed up the canyon, followed by the boom of tumbling boulders. Brianna resisted the temptation to look down the valley. The crashing was caused by giant-kin trying to dig their fellows from the
