Frostfell_ The Wizards - Mark Sehestedt [85]
A quick swipe of his knife sent the huge wolf back, and the creature reared on its hind legs. Gyaidun saw its rider raising his spear-and an arrow struck the rider in the throat. He jerked back, and the sudden change in weight overbalanced the wolf. It fell back, raising a huge cloud of snow that the wind tore away. Now riderless, it regained its footing, faced Gyaidun-and three arrows struck it in quick succession. What began as a snarl ended in a scream, then the wolves of the Vil Adanrath were on it, clawing and biting and tearing.
* * * * *
Amira heard the clash of steel on steel and followed it. In the darkness, she almost ran into the combatants. Two warriors faced off, their swords clashing, and in the murk of the predawn storm, Amira could not at first tell them apart. Both had skin only slightly darker than the snow in which they stood, and both sported a long mane of silver hair tossed by the wind. Each wore clothes cut and sewn from animal hides, but one was taller and had the larger form of a human, and the other-now that she was close enough, she could hear it, no mistake-was growling like a beast unchained.
She raised her staff, pointed it at the larger of the two combatants-and the sky overhead blazed. A burst of light, like a tiny piece of the sun itself, glowed in the air several dozen feet above the valley, lighting all the land beneath in harsh contrasts of frost white and blue shadow. A spell from the belkagen, Amira felt sure. Still, in the fierceness of the snowstorm she could see little but whirling white beyond the two men trying to kill each other.
The human-in the new light, she saw him clearly as one of the Frost Folk-was startled by the sudden flare. The elf before him was not. The Vil Adanrath warrior brought his single-edged blade across the human's stomach in a horizontal swipe-so hard that Amira felt blood splatter her face four paces away. The pale human's knees collapsed even as his entrails spilled on the snow before him, but the elf was already gone, seeking another foe. Amira followed him.
* * * * *
Even with the new light blazing overhead, Gyaidun could not see more than a dozen paces in any direction. But he knew where to go. Just as a blindfolded man can come to the fire by following the heat in the air, so Gyaidun knew where to find the thing in the ash-gray cloak. This cold was beyond anything an autumn snowstorm could muster. Gyaidun had the protection from the elements offered to him by the blessings of his covenant as athkaraye to the Vil Adanrath, and his body was swathed in thick hides and furs, but even he was beginning to feel the harsh bite of the unnatural cold. Rather than fleeing, he waded into it, following the source of the thing that drank in all warmth and life.
Trudging through snow that reached almost to his knees, Gyaidun passed the corpses of one of the Vil Adanrath and his wolf brother, both mangled and torn. The sounds of battle surrounded him-the growling of wolves, steel striking steel, and the screams of men and elves killing and dying.
In the near distance, through the sounds of fighting, Gyaidun thought he heard the belkagen, his voice raised in chant. Power within the words infused the air. Even a warrior like Gyaidun, unskilled in the arcane, could feel it, a drumbeat rhythm in the earth that resonated in the air around him. The wind slowed, then stilled, and like the drawing aside of a curtain, the snow stopped falling. One moment the air in the valley was thick with snow, and the next the night air was clear as starshine.
Twenty paces away, seated on the back of a winter wolf so huge that it would have dwarfed a Tuigan horse, was a figure of frost and shadow, the ash-gray cloak swathing a deeper darkness within. In the bloodied snow before him were two dead winter wolves, their bodies a garden of arrow shafts, two dead Siksin Neneweth, one lying a few feet from his head, the other