Karluk · The High Country, Frost Fang Highlands
1716
Fifty-eight days, and Karluk’s boots had worn through twice. Down in the Bearclaw valleys it was already summer. Up here the frost still came every night and clung to the stones until the sun stood high. The wind off the peaks smelled of snow that would never melt. Around the fortieth day he stopped listening to his body. It did what he asked a little slower each morning and he worked around that decline the way he would a horse beginning to go lame.
Out of the thirty who rode out with him, twenty-two were left. Four had turned back. Two were injured in the second week, and Borgün recalled two more when a dispute at home needed settling. Four more were dead. They had died three weeks before in a running fight through a pass that Karluk could not remember clearly. It came back to him as arrows in the cold. A man named Iskel died in Karluk’s hands before he could finish what he was trying to say. His wife would want to know what it was, and Karluk had not heard it.
Iskel was on his left when it began. Somewhere in the middle of the fighting, Karluk found himself shouting orders at men who could not hear him. Then, without thinking, he turned toward the spot where Yassa had ridden beside him for two years. There was no one there. Only empty ground and the wind blowing through it. He had not thought of Yassa for two weeks before that. Since then, he thought of him most nights.
You’ve barely said a word since Rulf told you, Yassa had said in the dark at the horse line. I used to know when you were grieving and when you were planning. Now I can’t tell.
He was right. Karluk lay on the frozen ground with his hands jammed under his arms. On the worst day of his life he had answered his friend with a count of men and a promise. The count was true. It was also a way of saying nothing at all.
When I get back.
He rolled over and put the thought away. Twenty-two men needed him thinking about something else. There was nothing to be done about Yassa from four hundred miles out.
On the fifty-eighth morning Rulf rode up beside him and did not need to say anything. Karluk smelled the camp before he saw it. Under the woodsmoke was the sour trampled smell of a place lived in too long by people with no plans to leave.
“That’s them,” Rulf said.
The camp lay in a hollow below a ridge, a cluster of tents around a central fire. Karluk stretched out in the treeline and counted for the better part of an hour before he moved. Sounds carried up to him on the cold air. A man was laughing, and an axe knocked on a chopping block. An hour was a long time to lie still in a cold that had already taken two men’s toes. Twice someone behind him shifted and dry needles crackled under a knee. Twice Karluk put a hand back without turning his head and both times the shifting stopped.
He could see twelve men. There were likely more inside the tents. In the middle of the camp a man sat on an overturned crate near the largest fire. He was broader through the chest than anyone else in the hollow. He sat as still as someone who never needed to prove he was the most dangerous one there. A maul stood upright beside the crate, and his hand rested on its head like an old man’s hand on a walking stick.
“Ghurat,” Rulf breathed. “I’ve heard the name. He’s the one holding the ransom terms.”
From the treeline Karluk could not see his family. More than once a figure came out between the tents with a hitch in its stride and he thought of his mother’s bad hip. Each time it was a man. Mira would have been the easiest to spot. She was small and never once let her size stop her. Her raven-black hair hung in a single braid down her back, and a freckle sat high on her left cheek. At six she was told it made her look fierce and she took that as a compliment.
Karluk made himself breathe through it. He had breathed through every day of not knowing whether any of them were alive. “We go at dusk,” he said. “Rulf, take half the men around the north side. As quiet as you can manage. I want every tent but the big one cleared before Ghurat knows we’re here.”
He did not take his eyes off the camp. “He’s mine.”
“He’s an earth elemental user,” Rulf said. “We don’t know whether he’s push or pull.”
“Then we find out at dusk.”
The attack went wrong in the first thirty seconds. Rulf’s half cleared the outer tents fast and clean. For a few heartbeats it seemed the plan might work. Then someone shouted a warning and the whole camp woke at once.
Karluk broke from the treeline at a dead run. By then Ghurat was on his feet with the maul in both hands. Three people stood behind him. His mother stood near him, with his sister beside her. Mira was twenty-two now and thinner in the face than a year ago. Beyond them stood his brother. He was nineteen and skinny in a way that two months of captivity did not fully explain.
“Far enough.” Ghurat’s voice was unhurried, almost bored. “Another step, and I’ll kill one of them.”
Karluk stopped. The firelight reached almost to his boots. Past it the hollow was blue with dusk, and smoke from the big fire hung low between him and the three faces he had ridden fifty-eight days to see. He had fought exhausted and hurt before. But never with three of the only people left to him standing eight feet from a man who calmly used them as a shield.
“What do you want?”
“I had terms. Your Bearclaw friends never sent anyone to hear them, so I’ll give them to you instead.”
Ghurat’s calm eyes moved along the treeline, counting. “My lookouts spotted you at the second pass. You brought thirty. I make it perhaps twenty now. Leave them where they stand and walk in alone. Then we’ll talk about what your family’s freedom is worth to you.”
He let that sit. “Do anything else and I start with the boy.”
Torg did not flinch. He was shorter than Karluk by a hand and broader through the chest. His hair was the same black as Karluk’s, cropped short while Karluk wore his long. He had their father’s dark eyes, as Mira did. He stood as he always did, relaxed and patient. He was a herder and used to waiting on animals that came when they were ready and not before. He had stood that way for two months. There was a new hardness in his face. It was the flat stillness of someone who had already decided how this would end and would not give Ghurat the pleasure of watching him afraid.
That should have comforted Karluk. It did not. It only meant that Torg had learned the lesson Karluk was taught at fourteen in a pit. It had come to Torg just as hard.
And he went after them, Karluk thought. Nineteen, with a herd he was proud of and no idea what he was doing. He went anyway. This is where it got him.
“All right,” he said. “Alone.”
Behind him his men held where they stood. He walked forward with his hands open. His sword hung at his hip and the bow hung across his back. Sixty feet of open ground lay between them. He counted the paces.
At thirty feet the bruise on his mother’s face came clear. Someone had hit her. It was yellow at the edges and at least a week old. She saw him see it and lifted her chin. He kept walking and his expression did not change. That cost him more than the fifty-eight days had.
Ghurat waited until Karluk was twenty feet from him. Then he moved the family back one pace. In that instant Karluk understood that the man never intended to honor any terms.
“Get them out of here!”
Two men hauled them back toward the tents, rough but not cruel. The moment they were off the open ground Ghurat smirked. “Now. Let’s see how strong you are.”
Ghurat’s men came out of the tents and stood around the edge of the firelight to watch. None of them moved to join in. By then the bow was off Karluk’s back and an arrow was on the string. He loosed three shots inside three seconds. None of them landed.
Each time the ground in front of Ghurat heaved. A thin plate of packed earth tore up whole and slammed into the arrow’s path a half-blink before it could find him. This was not stone he made. He wrenched it up from wherever his eyes fell and let it drop the moment the arrow struck.
Pull.
Rulf’s warning came back to Karluk three seconds too late. As long as Ghurat stood on open ground he would never run out of stone. And he was closing the whole time he blocked. He came without hurry, and each stolen plate of earth bought him another six feet. The distance that made the bow worth anything was disappearing.
Karluk loosed one more arrow. The arrow went high, and Ghurat ducked under it without breaking stride. Then the maul was close enough to kill him. There was no time left to nock another. Karluk dropped the bow and drew his sword. He met the first swing with steel.
It went badly from the first exchange. Ghurat fought as if the maul weighed nothing. He changed its angle in the middle of a swing, which no weapon that size should have been able to do. Steel rang on iron. Every blow Karluk caught jarred him to the shoulder.
For twenty seconds he did nothing but parry and give ground. His breath cut in and out of him and tasted of the fire’s smoke. He did not feel the scrape across his forearm until blood soaked his sleeve. There was no opening anywhere. Every time he thought he saw one, Ghurat was already somewhere else. His arms began to tire. His boots were worn almost to nothing and they slipped on the soft ground the two of them were churning up.
He is better than you.
A swing came in low and Karluk threw himself sideways to clear it.
He is simply better than you with this weapon.
By the ninth exchange he was fighting on reflex alone. He got lucky instead of good. The maul came around high and fully committed. Karluk’s blade caught the haft instead of the head and drove it down and wide into the dirt just as Ghurat’s whole weight came in behind the swing. It was not a chance to kill. It was barely a chance at all.
He took it anyway with a short vicious cut across the outside of Ghurat’s left thigh. It was shallow and more graze than wound. But the blood came fast and dark through the torn cloth. Ghurat did not cry out. For a second he went still and looked down at the cut, half insulted and half surprised. Then he drove his fist at the empty air, and the earth answered him.
A stone the size of a fist burst up out of the ground at Karluk’s feet with the force of a swung hammer. It hit him in the ribs with a flat crack and lifted him clean off his feet. He dropped his sword. He landed hard and badly. He skidded through the churned dirt with all the air driven out of him in one hit. The skid carried him clear of the maul and left him within arm’s reach of the bow he had dropped earlier. His hand was closing around the grip before his lungs started working again.
Karluk got up moving with an arrow already rising. Ghurat was tearing a second stone out of the earth and hurling it overhand. Karluk backed and circled him. He drew and loosed between breaths while he wove through stones that would break bone wherever they struck. They whistled past his head and thudded into the ground behind him. Ghurat came on steadily behind a wall of thrown rock. But he needed to gather each stone first, and each time he sent a rock it took a fraction of a second. That fraction of a second was the only gap Ghurat gave him, and Karluk shot into it.
The first true hit took Ghurat high in the left shoulder. The next stone left his hand half a beat slower. Karluk swung wide and forced another throw. His second arrow went deep into the thigh he had already opened. For the first time Ghurat’s stride broke. Karluk did not stop.
A third arrow pierced Ghurat’s knee from an angle that dropped Ghurat half a step. A fourth arrow hit the calf below it. By the time the fifth arrow hit the top of his foot the whole left leg would no longer handle his weight. He went down on one knee. His throwing changed with it. The stones came faster now and wilder. They went where Karluk had been half a second before instead of where he was.
Now.
From his knee Ghurat tore the largest stone yet out of the ground. He hurled it overhand with everything his good arm had left. Karluk did not dodge it. He ran straight at it. As the stone went past, he planted one boot on its leading surface and let the stone’s own weight throw him up and over. He hung in the air for half a second and loosed the arrow already on his string.
Ghurat got the maul up and blocked it on the haft, fast and desperate. Karluk hit the ground running, and the landing went into his ribs where the first stone had struck. His next arrow was in the air before the first stopped shaking in the wood. It took Ghurat below his collarbone while his eyes were still behind his own raised arms. Another arrow was on the string before the big man lowered them.
Ghurat looked down at the shaft jutting out from his chest. His face showed no pain yet. There was only the stunned concentration of a man still working out how to turn this fight around. He looked up.
The next arrow was already on the way. It hit him in the throat, and whatever he meant to say came out as blood. Karluk walked the rest of the way, slowly. Something in him went very quiet and very certain.
Ghurat was on his knees with both hands at his sides. The maul lay still in the dirt beside him. He watched Karluk walk over with another arrow already drawn. Karluk loosed the arrow into his face from six feet. It was the only shot in the whole fight he did not have to think about. Ghurat fell.
The stones lay scattered across the churned ground. They were ordinary stones again, as though none of them had ever been anything else. Sound came back to Karluk in pieces. Somewhere among the tents a man was weeping, and Rulf was giving hoarse orders over it. He looked down and found his hands shaking, the bow still in the left one. He could not make the fingers open fully.
Ysolde reached him before Rulf did. She came across the churned ground as fast as the bad hip would carry her. She was saying his name over and over. Mira was there too, and Torg. Karluk knelt in the mud with his ribs hurting where the stone had struck. Both arms were barely his own. He held all three of them at once badly, and he did not let go for a long time.
His mother smelled of two months without washing. Under that she smelled like herself, as she had when he was small. Mira had one fist knotted in the back of his coat. With the other she struck him once between the shoulders, hard. Then she held on as tightly as the rest of them. Behind them Rulf’s men were already cutting the others loose. Six of the eight taken with the family from the outpost were alive. Two had not lived.
“I’m sorry,” Karluk said into his mother’s hair. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
“Two months,” she said. She was already scolding in the voice that used to call him in off the hills after dark.
She pulled back to look at him properly. What she saw stopped the scolding before it really began. “You look like something that crawled here.”
“I did, almost.”
Up close the bruise ran from her cheekbone to the hinge of her jaw. He lifted his hand toward it. She caught the hand and put it down again between them, and that was all she meant to say about it. Torg was staring at the body.
Karluk knew that look. Nineteen was old enough that this should not break him but he knew better than to trust that. He had been nine the first time he learned how little age had to do with it. “He’s not going to hurt you again,” Karluk said. “Or any of you. That’s finished.”
Torg did not answer. He wiped his palms down the front of his thighs once and then again, though there was nothing on them. Smoke from the big fire drifted across the hollow and hung still where he stood. He was no longer looking at the body. He was looking at the arrows and at the bow that put them there, in his brother’s hand. Eight arrows stood out of a dead man and the rest lay scattered across ten feet of churned ground.
After that he stared at the sword lying in the dirt where it fell. It had been drawn and used, and it was not the thing that won. Torg said nothing about any of it. Karluk did not press him. There would be time for the boy to find his own way through what he had seen, just as Karluk had once stumbled through the night his father’s door was open. The difference was that Torg would not have to find that way alone.
“The animals we have left should survive the winter,” Torg said. “If I’m careful with them.” They were the first words he had spoken since the fighting ended.
“I’ll send men back with you.”
“I have men.”
He had three. Two were boys. Karluk let the matter rest. His brother had used the voice he kept for decisions already made.
Rulf crouched beside Ghurat’s body and looked at the maul. “You want it?”
Karluk looked down at the weapon that almost killed him. A trace of warmth remained in the haft from the hands that had held it. “Yes, I want it.”
His family kept close enough to touch him, as though distance alone might make him disappear again. The maul was too heavy for a man who fought with a bow. Still, Karluk bent and took hold of the haft. Men who had heard Ghurat’s name would know the maul on sight. The weight pulled against his battered ribs. Pain flashed behind his eyes, and for a moment he could do nothing but stand there and breathe through it.
They camped that night in Ghurat’s hollow and slept at his fire. Karluk sat in its light with his ribs bound tight and his family gathered close. Ysolde fell asleep against his good side. Her weight slowly settled into him as the fire sank, and he did not move her. For the first time in fifty-eight days, he believed sleep might come. Bearclaw lay four hundred miles behind him. Yassa was still waiting back at the horse line for the answer Karluk had promised him.
For one night, Karluk let him wait.