Darkwell - Douglas Niles [79]
Darkness was almost complete, yet this figure walked with precise steps along the very edge of the precipice. When it reached the high drift, two mitten-covered hands emerged from the cape. The figure took a blunt, hoelike object from its back and quickly cut a footpath through the drift. It followed the path as it was cut, and even as the snow drifted across the path behind it, the figure emerged on the other side of the drift and continued up the ledge.
Finally it stood at the crest of a sheer ridge, where the full force of the north wind carried the snow up the far side. Ducking against the increased force of the gale, the figure began to descend. Moving steadily through the night, as the snow grew deeper, it pushed its way down the high mountain ridge and into the still snowy but less windy reaches below.
The snow lay heavy on the low country, drifting into deeper and deeper piles. Here the figure paused and awkwardly reached beneath its cape to pull forth a pair of snowshoes. Attaching these to its feet, it shuffled onward, still making slow, steady progress against the storm.
The body was entirely cloaked in fur – the fur of winter garments. Only a pair of wide eyes, with large brown pupils, were visible beneath the furs, and even those eyes peered from the depths of a fur-lined hood and woolen scarf.
All night, and into the white dawn, the figure never once stopped to rest or eat or drink. It followed an unmarked trail, somehow finding its course through a snowy wasteland of leafless trees and barren hills.
Then it climbed across a broad, snow-swept hillside and found a wide path entering a hilltop grotto, concealed by high limestone walls and somewhat sheltered from the violence of the storm. Here, in this small vale in the hills, the traveler finally paused.
Here it stood still for some minutes, looking around the grotto. Finally the figure pushed through a drift of snow higher than its head to reach a niche in one of the limestone walls. And there it found what it sought.
The traveler knelt beside another creature, this one a great white horse, now blood-spattered and torn. The stallion's flanks were still and its eyes were closed, but a wisp of steam emerged faintly from its bloody nostrils.
The traveler removed the mittens, revealing humanlike hands that were very slender, with long, narrow fingers. Gingerly those fingers reached for the stallion's head.
* * * * *
The Starling rounded the head of Oman's Isle and at last raced with the wind. She leaped foaming crests of gray sea in her eagerness to make the shelter of Iron Bay. There, in the most powerful bastion of the northmen inhabitants of the Moonshaes, Koll and Gwen would certainly find shelter from the ravenous hordes that had fallen upon their home.
At least, that was the plan. Koll guided the little vessel through rough seas that he knew heralded the first storms of winter. The pair had eaten no food in two days and had drunk the last of their water twelve hours ago. Not until the Iron Keep hove into view did he allow himself a measure of optimism, but finally it looked as though they would make safe landfall.
The fortress loomed high above the bay. The dark stone of its walls gave it the reddish-black hue that had provided its name. Though not truly made of metal, the Iron Keep's walls were hard and its position unassailable. It had stood for a hundred years as a symbol of northern might, and no doubt would stand a hundred more.
Koll and Gwen, far from shore in the bay, could not see the cleric Hobarth poised beneath the walls of the fortress. Nor could they see the masses of undead swarming from all across Oman's Isle to finally converge upon the fortress. They were not aware of the Claws of the Deep emerging from the shore of Iron Bay to march upon the fortress from seaward.
And they could not hear the words of Hobarth's powerful chanting as he called upon the might of his god to