The eastern slopes of the Border Mountains, two days’ march north of the Greyhorn. Late winter.
The snow did not lie.
That was the first thing Durgan had taught him, back then, many years ago, when Korrin’s beard had barely reached his chest. Men lie. Orcs lie. Even dwarves lie, when the beer is good enough. But the snow doesn’t lie, lad. It tells you everything that’s passed over it. You only have to be able to read.
Korrin could read.
He knelt at the edge of a small hollow, between two black rocks that jutted from the white like the dorsal fins of a fish, and read. Hares. Two, perhaps three, two days ago. A fox that had followed them and then given up. A chamois that had stood here scenting the air and then bounded down the slope in great leaps, in a hurry chamois did not usually have.
And beside them, right across the hollow, something else.
“Korrin?”
Ottar stood behind him, up at the edge, the crossbow in his hands. He still limped a little when he had walked a long way, but he no longer complained about it. He complained about very little since the Greyhorn. Nor did he ask so many questions any more.
Korrin sometimes missed them.
“Come here. And tell me what you see.”
Ottar came. He slid the last stretch down on the seat of his breeches, caught himself on a rock and stopped beside Korrin. He looked into the hollow.
He looked for a very long time.
“That’s a hole,” he said at last.
“It isn’t.”
“It is. There. A hole in the snow. As if someone had thrown a rock into it.”
“And there?” Korrin pointed to the left. “And there? And back there, at the edge?”
Ottar followed his finger. A second hole. A third. A fourth, already half drifted over, up at the rim of the hollow where the slope rose again. In a row. At equal distances.
He opened his mouth. Then he shut it again.
“Those aren’t holes,” he whispered.
“No.”
Korrin stepped down into the first print.
It came up past his knees. The snow inside was not loose, as it would have been after a fall, but pressed hard, smooth, hard as ice, the way snow becomes when something very heavy has stood on it for a very long time. At the bottom of the print, under the snow, the earth was torn open. Small stones had been ground up. Not pushed aside. Ground, into grey grit, as if under a millstone.
Korrin laid his hand flat on the bottom of the print and spread his fingers.
Three toes. Broad at the front, narrow at the back. Each toe as long as his forearm, and at its end a deep, narrow notch in the frozen ground, where something hard had bored into it. Claws. Or nails. Or something for which Korrin had no word.
He stood up and paced out the distance to the next print.
Eleven paces. Eleven dwarf paces. From one foot to the next.
“By all the halls,” Ottar said quietly behind him. He was still standing at the edge and had raised the crossbow, as if whatever had made these tracks might come over the crest at any moment. “Korrin. What is it? An orc? A big orc?”
“No orc is that big.”
“A bear?”
“A bear has five toes. And a bear walks on four legs.” Korrin pointed at the row of prints. Right, left, right, left. A pair. Not four. “This walks on two.”
Ottar said nothing.
Nor did Korrin. He stood in the snow, between the prints, and felt something creep up the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the cold. He had spent his whole life in these mountains. He had read orcs and wolves and bears and once, twenty years ago, a griffin that had strayed from the high valleys. He had believed he knew every track the snow could tell.
He had been wrong.
They followed the tracks west.
It was not hard. Whatever had made them had taken no trouble to hide itself. It had gone straight ahead, over crests and through hollows, through a stream whose ice had shattered under it like glass, through a little wood of crooked mountain pines.
In the little wood Ottar stopped.
One of the pines had been snapped. Not felled, not broken by a storm. Snapped, at the height of a man’s chest, the way a child snaps a twig, and the trunk had not broken but splintered, into long, pale fibres that smelled of resin. The bark above it had been scraped off. In a broad band, as wide as Korrin’s shoulders.
And in the scraped patch, among the fibres, something grey was hanging.
Korrin pulled it out. It was hard. Rough. It felt like a piece of rock, but it was thin as leather and soft on one side, almost damp, and it smelled. Of wet stone and of something else beneath that, which reminded Korrin of the smell of the caves deep under Orvundar, where the air had stood still for a thousand years.
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Skin.
He held it between his fingers, and for a moment he thought of something else. Of a wall at the Greyhorn that had turned grey, lustreless, like ash, and then crumbled, under a slender white hand that had barely touched it.
The same colour.
He put the piece of skin in his pocket and said nothing to Ottar about it.
In the afternoon they found the camp.
It lay in a shallow dip beneath an overhanging rock, where the wind did not reach, and you smelled it before you saw it. Smoke, cold and old. Fat. And blood, a great deal of blood, which in the cold had not rotted but frozen, in dark, glistening patches on the snow.
Orcs. Six, perhaps seven. Korrin was not sure, because not enough of them was left to count.
Ottar turned away and was sick in the snow. Korrin let him. He had done the same himself, the first time, long ago, and Durgan had let him, and afterwards Durgan had given him water and said nothing about it.
He walked slowly through the camp and read.
The orcs had camped here. A fire, furs, a heap of mountain goat bones. A spear leaning against the rock. They had not expected an attack. No one had kept watch, or if they had, then in the wrong direction. They had been asleep.
And then something had stepped in among them.
It had not fought. That was what frightened Korrin most as he read the tracks. The orcs had fought. He saw it in the prints of their boots, running apart in every direction, in the weapons lying in the snow, in a broken scimitar and an axe whose blade was bent as if someone had struck an anvil with it. But the thing had not fought. It had simply been there, in the middle of the camp, on its two enormous feet, and had struck. Again and again. Until nothing moved any more.
And then it had eaten.
Korrin looked at the bones. Not the mountain goats’.
He looked away.
At the edge of the camp, under the overhang, lay something that did not fit the picture. He knelt in front of it and brushed the snow away.
A chain.
No ordinary chain. Each link as thick as Korrin’s wrist, of black, roughly forged iron that he did not know. Not dwarven iron. Not human iron. It was badly made, full of slag and bubbles, but it was heavy, so heavy that Korrin could barely lift it. The chain ran ten, twelve links through the snow and ended in a ring.
A collar. Or a fetter. Big enough that Korrin could have stepped through it without stooping.
It had been broken open. Not unlocked. Broken open, at a place where the iron was thinner, and the ends were bent outwards, the way you bend a twig before it breaks.
Beside the ring, half in the snow, lay a dead orc. He was bigger than the others and wore rings in his ears and a long braided leather thong around his hips. A whip. Notches had been cut into the handle. Many notches.
Korrin looked from the whip to the chain. From the chain to the ring. From the ring to the tracks leading away from the camp, west, straight ahead, without haste.
“They were leading it,” he said quietly.
Ottar had stepped up beside him. His face was grey. “What?”
“The orcs. This wasn’t a camp. It was a guard.” Korrin laid his hand on the broken ring. “They led it on the chain. Like an ox. Like a dog. And at some point it decided it had had enough.”
“Where were they taking it?”
Korrin did not answer. He looked east, where beyond the mountains lay the valley in which the fires had burned, in rows, with trenches between them, straight as if drawn with a cord.
Orcs don’t build siege towers.
Then the songs are old.
“To the Greyhorn.” He did not like saying it. “Or to whatever comes after the Greyhorn.” The source of this chapter is g.com.
They followed the tracks until evening.
Korrin knew it was foolish. A scout who found something he did not understand went back and reported it. He did not follow it. Durgan would have torn his head off. But Durgan was dead, for seven years now, in a gorge, and Korrin had done many things since that Durgan would not have liked.
And he had to see it. He had to see it with his own eyes before he stood before the king. Otherwise no one would believe him. Men had not believed him once before, seven years ago, when he told of orcs marching in ranks.
The sun sank ahead of them, red and low, and dazzled them, and their long shadows ran out behind them across the snow. The tracks led up a broad slope onto a ridge beyond which the mountains fell away westwards. Down to the forests. Down to the valleys of men.
Just below the ridge Korrin stopped and raised his hand.
Ottar stopped at once. He had learned that, at the Greyhorn.
Korrin lay down in the snow and crawled the last stretch. Slowly. On his elbows. Until he could see over the edge.
Below him the slope fell away, steep and white, to a line of dark firs that marked the beginning of the forests. Beyond, very far off, in the last light, a plain. And right on the horizon, little more than a glint, the shimmer of a river.
Eastreach. The land of men.
And at the edge of the forest, among the first firs, something stood looking back.
Korrin saw it for only a breath. Then it stepped in among the trees, and the shadows took it in, and it was gone. But the breath was enough.
It was big. Bigger than the firs at the edge of the forest, which were no small trees. It stood stooped, with hanging shoulders and arms that reached almost to the ground, and in the evening light its skin had the colour of wet granite. It had no neck, or if it did, it was as thick as its head. And when it turned its head, when it looked back up the slope, straight at the spot where Korrin lay, he saw two eyes.
Small. Deep in the grey skull. And they did not glow the way a wolf’s eyes glow at night. They were simply there. Calm. Dull. And so hungry that Korrin felt it all the way up on the ridge.
Then it turned away and walked into the forest.
Eleven dwarf paces. From one foot to the next.
Korrin lay in the snow a long time after it had vanished.
Ottar crawled up beside him. He had seen nothing. He had come too late. But he saw Korrin’s face, and that was enough.
“What was it?” he whispered.
Korrin did not answer at once. He thought of his grandfather, who had told him stories when he was small, on long evenings in the warm halls that smelled of beer and forge fire. Stories of the first wars, a thousand years ago, when the dwarves had defended the mountains against things that now appeared only in songs. Things with skin like stone. Things that could not be killed with arrows and barely with axes. Things that grew slow in sunlight and hungry at night, and that could not be tamed, not with gold and not with whips and not with chains.
Are there still any, Grandfather?
No, child. Not for a thousand years. Our forefathers buried the last of them in the deeps, under the mountain, and sealed the entrance with runes.
“Korrin?”
“A troll,” said Korrin.
Ottar stared at him. Then he laughed, a small, disbelieving laugh that died at once in the cold.
“There are no trolls. Not any more. They’re stories. They’re …”
He broke off.
Korrin looked at him. He did not say it. He did not need to. He watched Ottar understand it himself, watched the words form in his face that he had spoken one autumn morning on the wall of the Greyhorn, an eternity ago.
In the songs they don’t.
“The songs are old, lad,” Korrin said quietly. “I told you so.”
He stood up and brushed the snow from his knees. The sun had sunk behind the mountains, and above the ridge the first stars were coming out. Down in the forest, somewhere among the black firs, a tree crashed.
Then another. Further away. To the west.
“We go back. Tonight. We go to Orvundar, and we tell the king. And then we write to the men.”
“They won’t come.” Ottar’s voice was thin. “He said so. At the Greyhorn. They never come.”
“I know.” Korrin pulled his hood over his head. In his pocket, at his hip, he felt the piece of grey skin, hard and cold as a stone. “But this time they don’t have to come.”
He looked west once more, over the dark forests, to the distant river, which no longer shimmered.
“This time it’s coming to them.”