Silence from the Void-Cat

Dirk van Houten is screaming before the twilight moons even set.

\"Bram! Get your lazy hide off the ground!\"

The elder's raw bellow echoes across the frozen pumice, bouncing off the sulfur ribs of the fissure. Nobody answers. Twenty-nine clan refugees stir beneath their greasy reindeer blankets, coughing up ash and grumbling into the bitter cold. I sit thirty paces away against my basalt rock, my hand resting flat over the bison horn bound to my ribs. Under the thick wool of my tunic, the sharp flint point of Bram's snapped ash spear presses against my hip bone.

Cold stone against cold bone. A reminder of what sits four inches deep in the frost of the scree cleft.

Dirk kicks an empty fur roll near the rear sled. The hide flops over, stiff and hollow. Bram’s drag-harness lies curled in the gravel like a dead adder.

\"Where is the boy?\" Dirk shouts, spinning toward the hunters. He grips a notched elk-horn club, his gray beard stiff with frozen spit. \"Roelof! Did you set him on watch?\"

Roelof shakes his head, pulling his mittens tight. \"Bram went to piss near the scree before midnight. I never saw him come back to the circle.\"

\"Fool probably crawled into a warm vent and fell asleep,\" another hunter mutters, rubbing crust from his eyes.

\"Or broke an ankle in the cracks,\" Dirk snaps. He points his club toward the narrow opening where the basalt shelf cuts into the outer scree. \"Roelof, take two men. Go down the cleft and drag him out by his collar. If he lost his spear, I’ll take the hide off his back myself.\"

My fingers tighten on the leather strap of my horn.

If Roelof walks ten paces into that cleft, he will not find a sleeping boy. He will find a circle of black, clotted blood and a footprint large enough to crush an elk calf's skull. And if the beast who made that print is still perched on the overhang, Roelof will die before he draws breath to scream.

\"Don't send them in there, Dirk,\" I say.

My voice carries clear over the gravel. Dirk turns, his bloodshot eyes narrowing at me across the thirty paces of empty ground.

\"Keep your mouth shut, girl,\" he growls. \"Tend the coal.\"

\"I am tending it,\" I say, rising to my feet. I do not touch the spearhead in my belt, but my chin lifts. \"Look at the steam, you blind old ox.\"

Dirk freezes, his club halfway to his shoulder.

A dozen clan members turn their heads toward the fumaroles scattered across the crust. Usually the sulfur smoke rises in pale, straight plumes toward the sky. Not today. The vapor is flattening out, curling low along the pumice like gray grease poured across cold water. The bitter reek of rotten eggs is suddenly sharp enough to burn the back of my throat.

\"The high wind is turning,\" I tell him. I step forward, keeping my boots steady on the frost. \"The warm air from the vents is dying. A freezing gale from the second Star-Wound is rolling over the rim right now.\"

\"It's just twilight mist,\" Dirk mutters, but his voice lacks its bite. He looks up at the rim.

Above us, the pale sky is bruising into leaden purple. A bank of fat, greasy clouds rolls over the volcanic teeth like an avalanche of wet soot. The first pellet of sleet strikes my cheek—hard, sharp, and cold as knapped glass.

\"That is not mist,\" I say. \"That is granular sleet. When that squall drops into this crack, it will drown the sleds in three inches of slush. The coal will die. And if your three hunters are out wandering the scree looking for a boy who walked off, they will freeze before they find their own thumbs.\"

Roelof lowers his spear. He looks at Dirk, his shoulders hitching in plain dread. \"She's right about the clouds, Dirk. That sky looks rotten.\"

Dirk's jaw clenches hard enough to make his beard twitch. The glare in his eyes is plain as day—he despises taking a path I point out, and he despises that twenty-nine lives depend on the dry birch punk smoldering beneath my ribs.

\"Where do we go, then?\" he demands, his tone sour as spoiled curd. \"We can't outrun a blizzard on flat ash.\"

\"The flue,\" I say, pointing toward the eastern cliff wall. Two hundred paces down the trail, a dark gash cuts deep into the basalt face. Steam puffs from the opening in rhythmic, hot sighs. \"The steam says it's a deep chimney. Earth-heat in the stone. If we drive the sleds inside, the rock walls will shield the fire from the slush.\"

Dirk spits into the gravel. \"Pack the gear! Move the sleds! Leave Bram’s pack on the rear runner! If he has any wits left, he’ll follow the smoke!\"

The clan dissolves into frantic scuffling. Mothers shove whimpering children into hide bundles; hunters heave on the rawhide traces, dragging the heavy runners through the ash.

I take the lead, keeping twenty paces ahead of the first team.

My legs ache with every stride, but my eye stays locked on the ground. The volcanic crust here is thin, a brittle honeycomb of hardened basalt scum over boiling mud. A single careless step from a loaded sled could crack the shell and boil a family alive. I plant my ash staff firmly with every second pace, tapping the black rock, listening for the hollow ring of empty caverns beneath.

Thump. Thump. Crack.

I wave my left hand, veering four paces to the right around a dome of yellow sulfur that hums with trapped steam. The lead sled follows my tracks precisely. For all Dirk’s bluster, he doesn't question my boots on the crust. Out here, fire-keepers learn the sound of thin earth before they learn to sew hide.

The sleet turns vicious before we reach the cleft.

It does not fall like soft northern snow. It drops in hard, icy pellets that rattle against my wolf-fur hood like hail. Each grain stings the bare skin of my nose. Ice glazes the hem of my skirt in seconds, stiffening the wool into clattering boards.

I tuck my chin into my collar, wrapping both arms tight over the bison horn.

Inside the horn, the ember sleeps beneath a plug of dried tallow and moss. But if ice water seeps past the rawhide seal, the coal will hiss, blacken, and die. If the ember dies in this squall, we are carrion before the moons shift.

\"Hurry!\" I shout back over the howling draft. \"Get the runners inside!\"

We tumble into the mouth of the volcanic flue just as the storm breaks fully over the plateau.

The roar of the wind cuts in half the moment we pass the basalt threshold. The flue is narrow, barely five paces wide, but the air inside is warm and thick with sulfur damp. Heat radiates from the basalt walls like a baking stone pulled from an oven. The clan collapses against the rock in an exhausted heap, chests heaving, frost melting off their eyebrows into dirty streaks of soot.

I push past them, walking deeper into the chimney until the noise of their panting fades.

Thirty cubits in, the flue turns sharp to the left, revealing a raised shelf of dry, red-tinted basalt. A deep fissure of earth-heat hums beneath the stone, warm to the touch and shielded from the draft.

I drop my pack onto the shelf. My fingers are stiff with frost, but I work the rawhide knot at my chest, easing the horn free.

I pull the bone quill from the tiny vent hole. A thin, fragrant curl of birch smoke spirals out into the warm cavern air. The heart of the coal glows dull red inside the hollow horn, alive and hungry.

I breathe a quiet sigh of relief against the polished horn.

Then a cold drop hits the crown of my head.

I look up.

High above my ledge, twenty cubits into the dark stone ceiling, a narrow crack splits the volcanic rock. The storm has reached the mountain's crest. Through the fissure, a steady trickle of gray sleet filters down, hissing as it strikes the hot basalt five paces from my bedroll.

The wind shriek through that overhead crack is deafening. A scouring, freezing whistle that tears through the cavern rafters.

I listen.

I strain every nerve in my body, waiting for the heavy, rhythmic scrape of shale. Waiting for the low, resonant rattle of a predator’s lungs that shook the wolves hours ago. Waiting for the voice that rasped into the dark about thin blood.

Nothing.

Above the ceiling vent, across the blinding white squall tearing over the crater rim, there is only the howling gale. No eight-foot silhouette perches on the crags. No hollow cat-skull gleams in the dark.

Since we entered the sulfur fissure, the monster has shadowed my every breath, closer than my own shadow.

Now, with sleet pouring through the mountain's cracked skull and my fire hanging by a thread, the rim is empty.

The void-cat has gone completely silent.