Bitter Frost on the Horn

Hot tallow stinks worse when the frost bites your nostrils, but if the plug cracks, thirty people die in the dark. I press my mittened thumb against the mouth of the bison horn slung across my ribs, feeling for the faint pulse of heat through boiled leather. Ten paces ahead, the rim of the Star-Wound drops into a gullet of yellow sulfur fog. All I want is to reach the crater floor before the gale freezes my fingers to the bone, but someone behind me is already shoving.

"Keep moving, Grietje," Dirk van Houten says. His breath puffs gray over his beard. He prods my shoulder with the butt of an ash spear. "The draft is picking up. We lose the trail in this smoke, we freeze on the ridge."

"Push me again, Dirk, and I drop the horn," I say. I do not look back. "Then you can warm your clan with your own spit."

He grunts, but the wood pulls back from my coat. Men like Dirk think fire is a gift until they have to carry it. To the grown hunters, I am not a person. I am a walking clay stove who still has to carry her own frozen bedroll.

The scree shifts under my sealskin boots. Sharp basalt gravel rattles down the slope, clattering into the fissure. The air here tastes of rotten eggs and scorched flint. This Star-Wound tore the bedrock ten ages ago, leaving a jagged scar that drops two thousand feet into the lower shelf. Below us, volcanic heat fights the twilight winter, but up on the lip, the planar winds belong to the frost.

A squall screams across the ridge.

The wind does not blow straight; it swirls in violent, freezing funnels that rip at fur cloaks. I turn my back to the gust instantly, crouching low over the horn. Inside the curved black shell, buried in crushed charcoal and dried peat, sits our single living coal. It was dug from the great hearth three migrations ago and has not slept since.

Moisture is the killer. If sulfuric sleet gets down the bone quill, the coal chokes. If the tallow seal shrinks from the cold, wind rushes the chamber and burns the heartwood to white ash in thirty heartbeats.

The temperature plunges with a sudden, vicious snap.

Ice forms along the rim of my hood. Through my mittens, the steady warmth of the horn turns cold on the windward side. The draft is shifting from west to north, pulling damp sulfur vapor directly down our necks.

"Down! Get down!" Roelof shouts from the front of the line. The sled dogs whine, their bellies pressed flat against the gravel.

Nobody is looking at the ground. They are all watching the sky, terrified of the sleet clouds rolling over the planar rim.

I slip my mitten off with my teeth. The cold bites my bare skin like a line of iron needles. I do not guess. I sniff the vent hole carved from a hollow goose quill at the horn’s tip. The scent is wrong. It smells like damp soot instead of dry peat.

The draft is reversing. The gale is forcing wet air back down the quill.

I pull a cake of stiff sheep tallow from my belt pouch. My fingers are already turning numb, gray at the knuckles. I scrape a thumbful of grease across the quill’s intake, narrowing the bore to a pinprick before the moisture can drown the coal. Then I blow three measured breaths into the rear exhaust.

A tiny prick of orange light gleams deep through the horn's translucent wall. The heartwood takes the air. The faint, sweet smell of smoldering birch returns.

I jam the plug tight, smear fresh fat over the seam, and pull my mitten back on.

My knuckles throb with burning pain as blood rushes back, but the horn stays warm against my ribs.

"Grietje!" Dirk is barking again, sliding down the scree toward me. "What are you doing stalling on the ledge? The rear sled is stuck!"

"I just kept your children from freezing into blue meat tonight," I snap. I stand up, blocking his view of the horn with my shoulder. "Give me the dry birch punk from the sled pouch."

"That is communal stores—"

"Give it to me, or build your own fire with dry dung and prayers."

Dirk’s jaw works under his graying beard. He glares like he hates that I am nineteen and have more say over the clan’s blood than his council elders, but he cannot strike the girl who carries the sun in her pocket. He wrenches a fist-sized ball of dry yellow punk from the pouch at his belt and shoves it into my chest.

"Move," he mutters.

I tuck the tinder into the dry lining of my coat. A small victory, but out here, two ounces of dry fungus is worth three horses.

The line of thirty refugees stumbles deeper into the sulfur cut. The yellow mist thickens, wrapping around our knees like curdled broth. Huge basalt needles rise out of the fog, black and wet with mineral runoff. Every step takes us further from the wind, but the sulfur stings my eyes and coats my throat with acid grit.

Then the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

It is not the wind. The wind is dying down, muffled by the sheer basalt walls of the ravine.

It is a sound. Or the absence of one.

The sled dogs have stopped whining. The lead bitch, a scarred mastiff who fought three dire-wolves on the last pass, drops her ears flat. She does not bark. She presses against the runner of the sled, trembling so hard the wooden frame rattles.

I stop on the narrow goat track. Ten paces ahead, Dirk and the others vanish into the rolling yellow fog, their boots crunching on the cinder path.

Behind me, the ridge stands empty.

I look up.

High above the path, thirty paces up the sheer black wall of the fissure, a shelf of volcanic glass juts into the fog. The yellow sulfur smoke parts for three seconds, pulled aside by an eddy in the planar draft.

A silhouette stands on the obsidian shelf.

He is massive. His shoulders span broader than two hunters standing side by side, his bare forearms wrapped in heavy leather thongs. Across his chest hangs a harness of black sinew and polished rib bones. But it is his head that makes the breath freeze in my throat.

He does not wear a hood. He wears the skull of an extinct void-cat, its massive curved fangs hanging past his cheekbones like ivory scythes. The hollow eye sockets of the beast stare directly down through the smoke.

Right at me.

Not at the sleds. Not at the dogs or the meat bundles.

At my chest, where the ember-horn rests against my heartbeat.

My breath locks in my lungs. My boots seem rooted into the frozen scree. No hunter from the plains grows eight feet tall. No sane exile survives the Star-Wound alone without a clan hearth to warm his blood.

The skull tilts. Slowly. Deliberately.

The sulfur steam boils up from a crack below, thick and yellow. In the span of a single blink, the ledge is empty. Only the black glass shines under the twilight moon.

"Grietje! Keep up!" Roelof’s voice drifts back through the sulfur soup, thin and nervous.

My hands shake inside my mittens. I force my legs forward, picking my way over a cluster of jagged basalt rocks where the trail bends into the ravine floor.

Then I freeze.

Right in the center of the path, where the crust of sulfur and frost should be unbroken, sits a footprint.

It is not Dirk's boot. It is not Roelof's.

The print is three inches deep in the packed ash, pressed so hard the frozen ground has cracked like thin ice. It is twice the width of any man’s foot, the heavy tread patterned with raw hide bindings.

The toe does not point down the path toward the migration.

It points across it, angled directly at the spot where I am standing.

He is not watching the clan pass. He is hunting where I step.