David Cook - Soldiers of Ice

Finding Astriphie was no problem. The hippogriff’s body was splayed across the glacier, smears of its blood trailing, sledgelike, in the beast’s wake. Astriphie had struck the top of an ice cap, shearing that away in a neat gauge: Pinion feathers decorated the bloody grooves where the animal had slid, and Martine could see clearly the long scratches where the beast had clawed the ice in its death slide. At the base of another mound lay the hippogriff, its mighty wings ripped and pierced by jagged splinters of ice. The beast’s eaglelike head was twisted around at an impossible angle. Below the neck, the left half of the mount’s feathered rib cage was caved in; white angles of bone and tissue showed through the remains of the downy hide. Steam rose from the blood and viscera spilled onto the snow, partially held in by the tangled straps of the Harper’s saddle.

Martine suddenly felt the intense cold penetrating deep through her body. She collapsed to the ice, seized by violent trembling, and tears mixed with blood in her eyes. Breathing was possible only in lancing heaves that sucked in swirls of icy air. Her throat burned with each spasmodic gasp.

Even after the fit passed, Martine could not move for a long time. The cold ground, smooth-slick and red, sapped her energy, making it harder than before to rouse herself. It would be nice just to sleep here with Astriphie … The thought whispered insidiously in her mind.Surely she could just lie here and rest a bit before doing anything else…

Martine swore as she realized what was happening. It was a decidedly creative oath, laced with a sea dog’s salt and bitter references to geysers. The thought of what Jazrac might think of her less than ladylike tongue made Martine appreciate her cursing all the more. It helped immensely. Before she realized it, she was up on her feet, wavering unsteadily as she surveyed the crash site, looking for Vil.

Unsupported by snowshoes, her feet sometimes broke through the snow crust in places where the surface was a deceptive sheet of old snow. Every time it happened, the glacier seemed to try to swallow her whole. As she labored her way out of another snowy morass, she sardonically thought how fortunate she was to be on the smooth ice field here and not in the tangle of crevasses they had seen from the air.

The Harper found Vil about a hundred yards from the hippogriff’s corpse. Luck had favored Vil more than Martine, providing him with a soft landing in the lee slope of a powder-crusted hummock. From the tumbled track through the snow, it appeared that the woodsman had hit near the top of the hummock and then slid to a rest near the bottom. There he lay, still sprawled out and unmoving. Hurrying to him as best she could, Martine was relieved to hear a choking gasp as she rolled his body over.

“Are you okay?” she demanded as she began examining him for broken bones.

“I’m—” Vil winced as her hands prodded his hip. “I’m all right.” He heaved himself to his feet stiffly. “How about you?”

Martine shrugged stoically. “I’m walking.”

“Good. And the hippogriff?”

“Dead.” The wind swept away the pain in her words.

Vil didn’t offer any condolences. “We’ve got to gather our supplies and move on,” he said brusquely as he started plodding across the snow.

“I’ve got to finish my mission.”

The man wheeled on Martine, wind whipping his crinkled face. “Your mission? Just what the Nine Hells is this about?” His voice wavered furiously. “When you needed a guide, I trusted you, and now, after damn near killing me, you want to go on. You’ve already killed your horse. Isn’t that enough?”

“I didn’t—”

“Then why in the hell did you fly so close?”

“I took a chance, okay? And it wasn’t a horse, it was Astriphie, my hippogriff. Astriphie’s dead, and I didn’t want that!” Martine shouted back, shivering with cold and fury. The wind caught the tears as they welled in her eyes and blew them across her cheeks. Biting back her words, Martine blindly stumbled past the man. “Go home if you want to. I’m staying here.”

The Harper cursed Vil, cursed the ice, cursed herself. The man was right, of course. She should not have pushed Astriphie so close to the rift. Her eagerness to finish the mission quickly meant everything was in ruins. All she could do was try to continue, even if that meant risking her own life. Pulling up the hood of her parka, she hid her face against the cold.

The snow crackled with Vil’s steady pursuit. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he shouted over the gusts.

The Harper nodded a bitter acceptance. “We cannot stay.”

“I must” She did not break her short, struggling strides. “Is your mission that important?”

“It is to me.”

“You could die out here.”

“I won’t” Words of false confidence, she thought bitterly. “What are you doing here, anyway?” The man would not relent. “What are you hiding?”

“Nothing! My business is my own, that’s all.” Martine stepped back warily from the man as his tone became increasingly demanding.

The woodsman stopped her with a mittened hand on her sleeve. A swordsman’s suspicion filled his face. “Who are you? Someone I should fear?” The honed words sliced through the defenses of polite trust between the two. The tenseness of his body and the hand hovering close to the sword were signs of his nervous state.

“You think I’m evil?” Her own body slipped into fighting tension to match his, a dog and a cat sizing each other up. “I don’t know. Tell me otherwise.”

With the pair of them alone in a world of arctic white, Martine knew the truth was her only defense.

“I’m a Harper,” she stated in flat, cold tones that matched their surroundings. “Sort of, anyway. I’ve come up here to close that fissure.” She slowly pointed toward the turmoil overhead.

“A Harper?” Vil echoed doubtfully, though his body eased somewhat.

“Yes. You know, agents of good and—”

“I know what Harpers are. I just didn’t expect to find one here.”

Martine was growing increasingly testy, having bared her secret only to be met by doubt. “I didn’t choose to come here. I was sent.” She beat her arms together for warmth. “I’m supposed to close that that thing before something unpleasant happens.”

Vil looked away. “Torm’s eyes,” he swore softly, “a Harper.” Dropping his hands away from his weapons, he turned back to face her. “Why didn’t you say something? I was ready to kill you.”

“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have let you,” she said as she started toward Astriphie. “Harpers are supposed to keep their activities secret. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Now that you know, will you help me?”

Vil fell in beside her, his suspicions gone, and the two trudged back to the hippogriff’s corpse, quietly listening to the sounds of the glacier as it cracked and rumbled beneath their feet. Already the hippogriff’s body was cool, and the bloody carcass had begun to freeze over. Ice and feathers cracked as the two humans set to the grim business of recovering their supplies.

What they recovered wasn’t promising several blankets iced up with blood and a little food that hadn’t been scattered in the crash. “It’s not enough,” Vil announced. “We need more food.” He drew his thick-bladed skinning knife and gestured toward Astriphie’s carcass. “It must be done. You can keep watch.”

Up here there was nothing to watch for but stinging snow, yet Martine gratefully accepted Vil’s excuse not to help as the woodsman, with the cold practicality that matched the terrain, sliced strips from Astriphie’s haunch. Bloody meat plopped onto the snow as he sawed at the carcass. Finally, the work finished, Vil skewered the meat on arrows and jabbed them into the snow, leaving the meat to dry in the breeze.