Douglas Niles - The Kinslayer Wars

Sithas’s first expedition, to the west, lasted nearly four weeks. He pressed along snow-swept ridges and through barren, rock-boundaried vales. He saw no life, save for the occasional spoor of the hardy mountain sheep or the flying speck of an eagle soaring in the distance.

He traveled alone, having persuaded One-Tooth—only after a most intricate series of contortions, pantomimes, threats, and pleas—to remain behind and guard Kith-Kanan. Each day his solitude seemed to weigh heavier on him and become an oppressive, gnawing despair.

Winds tore at him every day, and as often as not, his world vanished behind a shroud of blowing snow. The days of clear weather that had followed Kith’s injury, he now realized, had been a fortunate aberration in the typical weather patterns of the high mountains. Winter closed in with a fury, shrouding him in snow and hail and ice.

He pressed westward until at last he stood upon a high ridge and saw ground falling to foothills and plains beyond. He would find no mountainous refuge of griffons in this direction. The route he followed back to Kith-Kanan and One-Tooth diverged somewhat from the trail he had taken westward, but this, too, proved fruitless.

He found his brother and the hill giant in good spirits, with a plentiful supply of meat. Though Kith could not yet bear his weight on his leg, the limb seemed to be healing well. Given time, it would regain most of its prior strength. After a night of warmth and freshly cooked meat, Sithas began his search to the north. This time his quest took even longer, for the Khalkist Range extended far along this axis. After twenty-five days of exploring, however, he saw that he had left the highest summits of the range behind. Though the trail northward was mountainous and the land uninhabited, he could see from his lofty vantage that it lacked the towering, craggy summits that had been so vividly described in Kith-Kanan’s dream. It seemed safe to conclude that the valley of the griffons did not lie farther north.

His return to camp took another ten days and carried him through more lofty, but equally barren, country. The only significant finds he made were several herds of deer. He had stumbled across the creatures by accident and watched them race away, plunging through the deep snow. It was with a sensation approaching abject hopelessness that he plodded over the last ridge and found the camp nestled in its cave and remaining very much as he had left it. One-Tooth was eager to greet him, and Kith-Kanan looked stronger and healthier, though his leg was still awkwardly splinted. His brother was working on an intricately carved crutch, but as yet he hadn’t tried walking with it. By now the food supply had begun to run short, so Sithas remained for several days, long enough to stalk and slay a plump doe. The deer’s carcass yielded more meat than either of his previous kills, and when he returned to camp with the doe, he was surprised to find Kith waiting at the cave mouth—standing and waiting.

“Kith! Your leg!” he asked, dropping the deer and stepping quickly to his brother’s side.

“Hurts like all the fires of the Abyss,” Kith grunted, but his teeth, though clenched, forced his mouth into a tight smile. “Still, it can hold me up, with the help of my crutch.”

“Call you Three-Legs now,” observed One-Tooth dryly.

“Fair enough,” Kith agreed, still gritting his teeth.

“I think this calls for a celebration. How about some melted snow and venison?” proposed Sithas.

“Perfect,” Kith-Kanan agreed.

One-Tooth drooled happily, sharing the brothers’ elation. The trio enjoyed an evening of feasting. The giant was the first to tire, and soon he was snoring noisily in his accustomed position outside the mouth of the cave.

“Are you going back out?” Kith asked quietly after long moments of contented silence.

“I have to,” Sithas replied. They both knew that there was no other alternative.

“This is the last chance,” Kith-Kanan observed. “We’ve come up from the south, and now you’ve looked to the north and the west. If the valley doesn’t lie somewhere to the east, we’ll have to face the fact that this whole adventure might have been a costly pipe dream.”

“I’m not prepared to give up yet!” Sithas said, more sharply than he intended. Truthfully, the same suspicions had lurked in his own subconscious for many days. What if he found no sign of the griffons? What if they had to march back to Silvanost on foot, a journey that would take months and couldn’t begin until snowmelt in late spring? And what if they returned, after all this time, empty handed?

So it was that Sithas began his eastward search with a taut determination. He pushed himself harder than ever before, going to reckless lengths to scale sheer passes and traverse lofty, precipitous ridges. The mountains here were the most rugged of any in the range, and any number of times they came very close to claiming the life of the intrepid elf.

Every day Sithas witnessed thundering avalanches. He learned to recognize the overhanging crests, the steep and snow-blanketed heights that gave birth to these crushing snowslides. He identified places where water flowed beneath the snow, gaining drinking water when he needed it but avoiding a potential plunge through the ice that, by soaking him in these woodless heights, would amount to a sentence of death by freezing.

He slept on high ridges, with rocks for his pillow and bed. He excavated snow caves when he could and found that the warmth of these greatly improved his chances of surviving the long, dark nights. But once again he found nothing that would indicate the presence of griffons—indeed, of any living creatures—among these towering crags. He pressed for two full weeks through the barren vales, climbing rockstudded slopes, dodging avalanches, and searching the skies and the ridges for some sign of his quarry. He pressed forward each day before dawn and searched throughout the hours of daylight until darkness all but blinded him to any spoor that wasn’t directly in front of his nose. Then he slept fitfully, anxious for the coming of daylight so that he could resume his search. However, he was finally forced to admit defeat and turned back toward the brothers’ camp. A bleak feeling of despair came over him as he made camp on a high ridge. It was as he rearranged some rocks to form his sleeping place that Sithas saw the tracks: like a cat’s, only far bigger, larger than his own hand with the fingers fully outstretched. The rear, feline feet he identified with certainty, and now the nature of the padded forefeet became clear, too. They might have been made by an incredibly huge eagle, but Sithas knew this was not the case. The prints had been made by the great taloned griffon.

Kith-Kanan squirmed restlessly on his pine-branch bed. The once-soft branches had been matted into a hard and lumpy mat by more than two months of steady use, and no longer did they provide a pleasant cushion for his body. As he had often done before—indeed, as he did a hundred or a thousand times each day—he cursed the injury that kept him hobbled to this shelter like an invalid.

He noticed another sound that disturbed his slumber—a rumble like a leaky bellows in a steel-smelting plant. The noise reverberated throughout the cave.

“Hey, One-Tooth!” Kith snapped. “Wake up!” Abruptly the sound ceased with a snuffling gurgle, and the giant peered sleepily into the cave.

“Huh?” demanded the monstrous humanoid. “What Three-Legs want now?”

“Stop snoring! I can’t sleep with all the racket!”

“Huh?” One-Tooth squinted at him. “Not snoring!”

“Never mind. Sorry I woke you.” Smiling to himself, the wounded elf shifted his position on the rude mattress and slowly boosted himself to his feet.