Douglas Niles - The Kinslayer Wars

Sithas dried his clothes and boots, every stitch of which had been soaked by sweat or melting snow, by the crackling fire. It brightened his night, driving back the high mountain darkness that had previously stretched to infinity on all sides, and it warmed his spirits in a way that he wouldn’t have thought possible a few hours earlier.

The fire spoke to him with a soothing voice, and it danced for him in sultry allure. It was like a companion, one who could listen to his thoughts and give him pleasure. And finally the fire allowed him to cook a strip of his frozen meat.

That morsel, seared for a few minutes on a forked stick that Sithas plunged into the flames, emerged from the fire covered with ash, blackened and charred on the outside and virtually raw in the center. It was unseasoned, tough, imperfectly preserved ... and it was unquestionably the most splendid meal that the elf had ever eaten in his life.

The three pines served as a backdrop to his campsite. Sithas scraped away the small amount of snow here and cleared for himself a soft bed of pine needles. He stoked the fire until he had to back away from the blazing heat. That night he slept for a few hours, and then awoke to fuel his fire. A mountainous pile of coals radiated heat, and the ground provided a soft and comfortable cushion until the coming of dawn.

Sithas arose slowly, reluctant to break the reverie of warmth and comfort. He cooked another piece of meat, more patiently this time, for breakfast. By the time he finished, sunlight was bathing the bowl-shaped depression around him in its brilliant light. He had made a decision.

He would bring Kith-Kanan to this valley. He didn’t know how yet, but he was convinced that this was the best way to insure his brother’s recovery. His course plotted, he gathered up his few possessions and lashed them to his body. Next he took several minutes to gather a stack of firewood-light, sundried logs that would burn steadily. He trimmed the twigs off of these so that he could bundle them tightly together. This bundle he then lashed to his back. Finally he turned his face toward the pass. The slope before him still lay in shadow, as it would for most of the day. Retracing his tracks of the previous afternoon, he forced his way through the deep snow, back toward the summit of the pass.

It took him all morning, but finally he reached the summit. He paused to rest—the climb had been extremely wearying—and sought out the speck of color that he knew would mark Kith-Kanan’s presence on the ledge in the distance. He had to squint, for the sunlight reflecting from the snow-filled bowl brutally assaulted his eyes.

He couldn’t see the ledge, though he recognized the water hole where he had collected their drinking water. What was that? He saw movement near the stream, and for a moment, he wondered if the sheep had returned. His eyes adjusted to the brightness, and he understood that these could not be sheep. Large humanoid shapes lumbered through the snow. Shaggy fur seemed to cover them in patches, but the “fur” proved to be cloaks cast over broad shoulders.

They moved in single file, some ten or twelve of them, as they crossed the valley floor, taking no notice of the depth of the snow.

With a sickening realization, Sithas understood what was happening: The hill giants had returned, and they were making their way toward Kith-Kanan.

Sithas studied the hill giant that led the column of the brutes, perhaps two miles away and a thousand feet below him. The monster gestured to its fellows, pointing upward. Not toward Sithas, the elf realized, but toward . . . the ledge! His brother’s camp! The dozen giants trudged through the snow of the valley floor, making their way in that direction.

Sithas tried to spot his twin, but the distance was too great. Wait ... there!

Kith-Kanan, he realized, must also have seen the giants, for the wounded elf had pulled a dark cloak over himself and was now pressed against the far wall of the ledge. His camouflage seemed effective and would make him virtually invisible from below as the giants headed toward the cliff. The column of giants waded the stream. The one in the lead gestured again, this time indicating the path in the snow that Sithas had made in his travels back and forth for water. Another giant indicated a different track, the one made by Sithas on the previous day.

That slight gesture gave him a desperate idea. He acted quickly, casting around until his eyes fell upon a medium-sized boulder resting in the summit of the pass and cracked loose from the bedrock below. Seizing it in both of his hands, grunting from the exertion, he lifted the stone over his head. The last of the giants had crossed the stream, and now the file of huge, grotesque creatures was nearing the cliff wall.

Sithas pitched the boulder as hard and as far as he could. The rock plummeted down the steep, rock-strewn pass. Then it hit, crashing into another boulder with a sharp report before bouncing and smashing again and again down the mountain pass, Breathlessly Sithas watched the giants. They had to hear the commotion!

Indeed they did. Suddenly the twelve monsters whirled around in surprise. Sithas kicked another rock, and that one too clattered down the pass, rolling between the two huge boulders that he had slipped between on the previous day’s climb.

Now the beasts halted, staring upward. Breathlessly Sithas waited. It worked! He saw the first giant gesturing wildly, pointing toward the summit of the pass, toward Sithas! Kith-Kanan was left behind as the entire band of the great brutes turned and broke into a lumbering trot, pursuing the elf they probably thought they had “discovered” trying to sneak through the pass. Sithas watched them advance toward him. They plunged through the deep snow in giant strides, each stride taking them farther from Kith-Kanan. Sithas wondered if his brother was watching, if he had seen the clever diversion created by his twin. He lay still, peering around a boulder as the monsters approached the bottom of the pass.

Now what could he do? The giants had almost reached the base of the pass. He looked behind him. Everywhere the valley was blanketed by deep snow. Wherever he went, he would leave a trail so obvious that even the thick-witted hill giants would have no difficulty in following him.

His attention returned to the immediate problem. He saw, with sharp panic, that the giants had disappeared from view. Moments later he understood. They were so close to the pass now that the steepness of the slope blocked his vision.

His head seemed fogged by fear, his body tensed with the anticipation of combat. The thought almost brought a smile to his lips. The prospect of facing a dozen giants with his puny sword struck him as ludicrous indeed! Yet by the same token, that prospect seemed inevitable, so that his amusement quickly gave way to stark terror.

Carefully he crept forward and looked down the pass. All he saw were the two monstrous boulders that had bracketed his ascent of the pass on the day before. As yet there was no sign of the giants.

Should he confront them at those rocks? No more than one at a time could pass through the narrow aperture. Still, with a brutally honest assessment of his own fighting prowess, he knew that one of them was all it would take to squash his skull like an eggshell. Also, he remembered the precarious balance of those boulders. Indeed, one of them had shifted several inches merely from the weight of his touch.

That recollection gave him an idea. The elf checked his longsword, which was lashed securely to his back. Quickly he unlashed the bundle of firewood and dropped the sticks unceremoniously to the ground. He hefted the longest one, which was about as long as his leg but no thicker than his arm—still, it would have to do.