Forty Days: The Scree Run

The dark had weight. When the blue flame plunged into the gorge, the temperature on Qilla Ridge dropped four degrees in ten strides, turning the blood on the stones into an open summons.

Rumi-qa did not waste breath cursing the dead corporal. Dying of lung-frost before the wolves even started chewing would be a sloppy way to end a desertion. He shoved the royal writ into his tunic against his ribs, secured the pouch of iron nails, gripped his poleaxe at the balance point, and ran. He needed to reach the shelter of the lower canyon cleft before his own sweat froze solid inside his wool mantle. The forty days remaining on the imperial decree meant nothing if he died as cold meat on an exposed goat path.

The bypass sloped downward toward the western canyon shelf, but the path was an icy ribbon of shattered limestone barely wider than a man's shoulders. To his left, the cliff rose vertical and black; to his right, empty air dropped five hundred feet into the ravine. Behind him, the scrape of claws on stone came fast, rhythmic, and heavy.

A full-grown Yana-wolf weighed as much as a pack mule, built with thick forelegs for digging through frozen crust and broad ribcages that held heat against the deep winter. They did not sprint in a blind rush. They hunted in a three-part pincer: two flankers high on the scree to herd the prey, and a crusher following the blood scent along the low ground.

A low growl vibrated above him.

Rumi-qa glanced up. Ten paces overhead, a gray shape bounded across the rock ledges, dislodging sprays of gravel. The high flanker was outpacing him, angling toward the narrow pinch where the trail cut through a notch in the cliff. If that beast reached the notch first, it would turn and hold him until the crusher closed the rear.

His left ribs flared with sharp heat where the militia spear had torn the meat. He clamped his elbow tight against his side to bind the torn wool against the bleeding flesh. The hearth-stone in his tunic was dead, cold as river slate, and the freezing gale was already turning his sweat to frost along the back of his neck.

He reached the crest of the descent.

The trail here crossed an unstable limestone shelf that hung out over the lower gorge like a cracked tooth. Decades of freeze and thaw had driven deep fissures along the hinge where the shelf met the main cliff wall. Snow had drifted into the cracks, concealing the drop, but Rumi-qa knew the pitch of this rock. In the vanguard, three seasons of clearing alpine roads taught a man how mountain stone broke under load.

A heavy thump shook the gravel ahead.

The lead flanker landed directly in the center of the notch, twenty paces in front of him. It stood nearly waist-high at the shoulder, its shaggy pelt matted with grease and ice, its yellow eyes reflecting what little starlight broke through the storm clouds. It lowered its heavy skull, teeth clicking together in a wet snap.

Behind him, fifty paces back on the ridge, the crusher rounded the bend. The second beast was larger, broad-chested and scarred across the snout, its breath rolling from its black jowls like steam from a boiling pot.

Rumi-qa stopped five paces short of the hanging shelf.

He did not raise the axe to strike the beast in front of him. A poleaxe could split a wolf's skull, but the impact would leave the shaft trapped in bone while the crusher broke his back from behind.

He dropped to one knee on the frozen scree.

With his left hand, he pulled three long carpenter's nails from the corporal's leather pouch. He shoved the iron spikes point-down into the primary frost-fissure running along the base of the limestone shelf, spacing them three inches apart along the fault line.

The lead wolf crept forward, claws clicking on the icy shale, its shoulders bunching for the leap.

Rumi-qa flipped the ash poleaxe in his grip. He swung the square iron poll of the axe head downward with the full drive of his shoulders.

The hammer struck the first iron nail with a sharp clang.

The wedge bit into the frozen seam. Rumi-qa struck the second nail, then the third, delivering three crushing blows in the span of two heartbeats.

The dead corporal had kept good gear. It was remarkably polite of the provincial garrison to supply the exact hardware required to dismantle their own mountain. The forged iron did not bend; it acted as three expanding wedges driven into stone already strained by winter ice.

A sound like splitting timber ripped through the ledge.

The crack shot across the shelf, tearing through the limestone base.

The lead wolf lunged, launching its heavy body into the air.

At the same instant, the rear crusher charged across the shale, adding its immense weight to the vibrating slab.

The shelf gave way.

Two hundred tons of rock, compacted ice, and shale sheared clean off the cliff face.

The lead wolf hit the crumbling edge as it dropped out from under its paws. Its claws tore uselessly at empty air, its growl turning into a shrill, startled yelp as the entire stone platform broke into a roaring slide. The rear crusher tried to check its momentum, but the moving gravel dragged its back legs over the lip.

Both beasts vanished into the dark, engulfed in a deafening cataract of falling boulders and pulverized snow that thundered down into the gorge.

Rumi-qa did not wait to watch them fall.

As the shelf snapped, he threw himself backward into the narrow drainage gutter against the solid cliff face. He dug the curved rear hook of his axe head into a vertical rock cleft, taking the strain in his right shoulder. The shock pulled hard against his injured ribs, tearing the wound wider, but the iron hook held his weight while the mountain fell away beneath his boots.

A cloud of choking stone dust and ice spray washed over him.

When the roar faded into the lower valley, only a sheer drop remained where the trail had been. The path was gone. Below him, forty feet down a steep chute of packed snow that had gathered in the canyon cleft, the ground leveled out into a dark, wind-scoured ravine.

Rumi-qa pulled his axe free from the cleft and slid down the snow chute on his heels.

He hit the drift at the bottom with a dull jar that knocked the breath from his chest. He rolled through the crust, coming to a stop against a wall of dry black basalt.

He lay still for several breaths, his face pressed into the freezing grit. His left side throbbed with a steady, sickening pulse, and his hands were losing feeling in the wind.

He pushed himself up with the axe haft. His numbed fingers brushed a flat slate marker set into the basalt wall. Tucked beneath the stone ledge was a traveler's cache: a dry bundle of resin-soaked pine shavings wrapped in oiled hide. He jammed the tinder into his pouch. In a winter where dry fuel bought life, finding cached kindling in a wind-gutter was worth more than an imperial gold coin. He had severed the pack's pursuit, kept his blood inside his skin, and secured the unpatrolled canyon cleft that bypassed the lower garrison gates entirely.

Above him, the high ridge was silent. The slide had severed the approach; any surviving wolves on the upper spine were cut off by a forty-foot wall of raw limestone.

Before him, set deep into the basalt wall of the ravine, a narrow horizontal fissure opened like a mouth. The opening was barely wide enough for a man with a pack to squeeze through, but the air drifting from inside smelled of dry dust, old lichens, and sheltered stone. No snow had drifted past the threshold.

Rumi-qa checked the ties on his tunic, gripped his dagger in his belt, and ducked into the fissure.

The howling wind vanished the moment he cleared the outer stone lip. The dark inside was absolute, but the ground was flat, covered in centuries of pulverized slate.

He took three slow steps forward, his boots sliding quietly over the dry dust. He needed to bind his ribs, scrape tallow from his rations, and find enough dry lichen to start a spark before the frost locked his joints.

A sharp metallic snap clicked in the darkness three paces ahead.

The sound was unmistakable: the forged steel pawl of a heavy hunting arbalest catching on the release nut.

"Step back toward the draft," a voice said.

The voice was low, fast, and light, but the edge on it was razor-honed.

"Move your right hand two inches away from that axe haft," the voice continued from the gloom. "If the wood taps the floor, you take two inches of square iron through your collarbone."