David Cook - Soldiers of Ice

The five dog-men acted quickly to take control of their prize. Martine was so weak and consumed with fatigue that she practically fell into their arms. She knew surrendering was a risk, but if it worked, it would at least get her off the ice. She denied to herself the other possibility that they just might kill her.

Under the leader’s command, the group stripped her of weapons with brutal efficiency, even finding Jazrac’s pretty little knife, before lashing her wrists with a spare bowstring. Her torn shoulder hurt terribly, but at least they hadn’t killed her outright.

“What do we with it?” the smallest gnoll in the group yipped finally. The fur of its hide was still raw beige and downy. It was barely more than a cub, Martine guessed.

“Kill it.” The snarl came from a stocky male, the long jut of its muzzle barely visible under the cowl of its hood.

The leader of the pack, its hood pulled back as it surveyed the glacier, flicked a loose ear in irritation. “No killing now,” it barked in gravelly whisper. “Later back in camp. We will share meat with our females.” A sharp finger prodded the Harper’s side, as if testing the thickness of her fat. “Or maybe we eat it all ourselves.” The group broke into a coughing laugh, stomping their snowy feet with approval.

It was clear her captors didn’t realize their prisoner understood every word of their guttural language, knowledge gained from her years as a huntress. Nor was she about to tell them. It might be the only advantage she would get, so it was best to keep her knowledge concealed for now. Doing her best to play dumb, Martine waited for the last of their chuckles to die.

“And the lights on the tall ice?” the runt asked with a nod toward the crest of the plain. “Do we go closer?”

The bareheaded one, its thin white fur wisping in the breeze, shook its head from side to side. “We came to hunt, not to look at colored lights. Now we have good game. We go.” There was no debate against the old gnoll’s decision, and Martine could tell it expected none.

The group made a quick descent, their keen night sight allowing them to move easily through the darkness. Martine, her bound hands hampering her balance, unable to see the path in the blackness, stumbled along trying to keep up. None of the hyenalike men ever once slowed its pace or suggested concern for the struggling human. Each slip and fall was rewarded with a savage jerk or shove to set her back on course, the fire in her shoulder renewed.

Even at their breakneck pace through the starlit night, Martine tried to note their passage. It was an attention to detail born of habit. The curl of a drift, the switchbacks of their trail, even the grating shifts of crumbling snow beneath her feet were like islands of reality in a nightmarish sea of ice. The slide they were on was not fresh. She could tell by the way the wind had sculpted the snowy blocks and by the stiff-crusted drifts that nestled in the hollows. Near the base, where the slope tapered off, the path crossed a ribbon of ice that left the ranger confused. Even in the starlight, it glinted with clear purity, reflecting the night back in the smooth ripples of its surface. It should have been jagged and cracked, the way ice gets when it warms and freezes, but she could only imagine it as a flowing river.

She noticed, too, that there was something about the ice that spooked the gnolls. Their rapid pace broke as they neared its edge, and they crossed almost gingerly. The eyes of those closest to her were filled with fear, constantly straying to one another as if waiting for some hidden peril. Once they were off the ice, the tension faded as quickly as it had risen.

At the leader’s barked call, the pack plunged across the snowy moraine at the glacier’s base. They followed the winding moraine straight into the woods, moving along a well-packed track that cut through the waist-deep snow.

In the darkness of the screening branches, Martine had no opportunity to take sightings and therefore had no clear idea where they were when the pack finally rounded a dense thicket and broke into a shimmering clearing. Five dark arches of primitive longhouses were nestled at the forest’s edge. The tang of pine smoke and burnt meat filled the air.

“Harrrooo!” the pack’s leader howled before stepping into the clearing. A deep-throated howl blended with the echo. Satisfied, the pack hurried across the trampled snow, past cold fire pits and snow-buried mounds of wood to the largest of the longhouses, an arch of bent wood clad in birch and leather that flapped in the breeze, as if welcoming the hunters with ghostly applause.

The leader threw open the thick hide doorway and barked at Martine to go inside. She stumbled at the sill, and a gnoll shoved her through, mistaking the near fall for hesitation. The inner curtain was pulled aside, unleashing a thick rush of humid odors, a mixture of leather, blood, smoke, flesh, birch, and sweat. A mumbled snarl rising from a horde of throats greeted her entrance.

The lodge was filled with warm yellow flickers of fire that made Martine blink. The long hall was draped with furs and hides. The work was sloppily done. The coverings didn’t always match up, leaving the frame of woven saplings that formed the longhouse’s arch exposed. Elk skulls and antlers hung from the arch as macabre decorations, alongside soot black strips of jerky. The general impression was that of a moldering cellar. The ranger could guess the rest of the lodge’s construction a layer of pine boughs for insulation, capped by the outside shell she’d already seen.

This place is a tinderbox waiting for a spark. The thought came nervously to the Harper’s tired mind. Perhaps it was prompted by the source of the glow, a long fire trench dug at the far end of the hut, filled to the edges and beyond with glowing coals.

The fire illuminated a tangle of furry bodies that covered the floor, a carpet that drew back before the blast of winter air that accompanied her entrance. Tawny, spotted arms stretched curiously while muzzles raised to sniff the new scent that had suddenly intruded upon them. Ears twitched; fleshy lips curled back from needle-sharp fangs.

Just beyond the sprawled mass, at the far end of the lodge, stood a high bench, the only recognizable piece of furniture in the place. The wooden benchtop was heaped with elk robes and mantles stitched together from the pelts of innumerable sables. Planted deep in its center was a burly gnoll. He dozed upright, robes pulled around him till they fell away from his shoulders like the talus slope of a mountain. Even asleep, his immense size and his passive dominance over the rest of the pack left no doubt that he was the chieftain.

“Forward,” grunted her guard. The command prompted another of her guards to step forward and force a path through the pack, which reminded Martine of dogs or wolves sleeping in huddled mounds to generate warmth as she gingerly stepped through the narrow passage.

Unlike the party that had found her, most of the gnolls in the hall were nearly naked, their winter gear hung from the arches near the entrance. Propriety was served only by simple loincloths and ornaments of bone, wood, and feathers. Each was covered with tarnished white fur, dappled with spots that ranged from red to black.

“What is it?” The chorus of whispered voices slithered through the cramped lodge.

“Human.”

“Trouble.”

“We kill it?”

“And eat it”

“Too stringy.”

“What is this you bring me?” rose one voice above all the others, speaking with presumptive authority. The whispers stilled only slightly.

“Tonight we found new game, Hakk,” the old gnoll boasted, shoving Martine forward roughly. Pain shot through the Harper’s wounded shoulder, penetrating through her freezing numbness. With a strangled moan, the woman lost balance and sprawled onto the dirt floor just before the fire pit The landing caused another searing stab of pain, which left her sweating, almost writhing before the coals.