“Something is hunting us,” Ta-se-ho said suddenly.
Gas-a-ho nodded sharply. His face became slack, like a person walking in sleep.
Nita Qwan took his bow from its deer hide case, took his best string from inside his shirt. It had been drying there for two days, and it was warm.
Carefully, trying not to display his near-panic and the trembling of his hands, Nita Qwan strung his bow. He rubbed it a little before he bent it, and he listened as he pressed it down.
It didn’t crack. Either the bow was not so very cold, or he had prepared it well.
The string bit into the grooves in the horn tips, and he was armed.
Only then did he give voice to his fears. “What is it?” he said, watching the fog around him.
Ta-se-ho shook his head. “It is only a feeling,” he said.
Gas-a-ho surfaced from inside his mind. “Flying!” he barked.
His right hand shot up, and a flash of lightning left his hand. It was an angry orange white and it left a dazzle on Nita Qwan’s eyes.
There was a detonation that made them all flinch, following Gas-a-ho’s lightning bolt by about one beat of a scared man’s heart.
Just over Nita Qwan’s head, something screeched.
The old man thrust with his spear-the spear moved faster than sight could fully perceive, and then everything happened at once-Gas-a-ho was down in the snow, blood flowering around him, and there were black feathers in the air around them, and Nita Qwan found himself fitting a broad-headed arrow of irkish steel to his bow. He was conscious that he had already drawn and loosed twice.
“Move!” Ta-se-ho said.
Nita Qwan got Gas-a-ho onto his own toboggan. The younger man was bleeding from a terrible wound right across his back where a talon had sliced through his backpack straps and into the meat of his shoulders. But even as he got the man onto his toboggan and began to pull, the blood flow slowed and then stopped.
Nita Qwan tried not to look up. He got the tumpline and brow band of Gas-a-ho’s ruined pack over the younger man and tied the neatly sliced ends to the thongs that ran the length of the body of the sled.
Ta-se-ho put himself in the straps of the now heavily overloaded toboggan. “I’ll pull,” he said. “You watch the sky.”
Nita Qwan took up his bow.
The old man leaned into the straps and began to run.
Above them, something gave vent to avian rage-a long, slow scream that froze the blood.
“Trees,” Ta-se-ho panted. “We need to reach the trees.”
“How far?” Nita Qwan asked.
The old man put his head down and ran.
It is very difficult to run on snow and ice with a bow in your hand and snow shoes on your feet. Harder to do so and watch the sky above you.
The wind came again-a gust, then a sudden wall of wind, so hard that it seeemed to lift them and move them along the surface of the inland sea. It came from behind them, pushing them forward.
In a hundred heartbeats, the fog began to break for the third time that day. The sun was setting in the west-already, the day had a red tinge.
The tree line of the shore was only half a mile away.
The great bluff towered over the lake, a pinnacle of stone that rose many, many times the height of a man. Up close, even in a state of fear, Nita Qwan could see that the whole pinnacle of stone was carved-or perhaps moulded. It was fantastically complicated, even from this distance a terrifying, massive evocation of fractal geometry.
But more immediate was the pair of black avian shapes wheeling in the air above and behind them. They were half a mile away, too.
The two men ran on.
The two predators banked and came on again.
Nita Qwan turned, saw their intention, and planted three shafts in the snow beside him.
He loosed his first shaft when the range was too long. His second shaft vanished into the air, and he had no way of judging his aim. His third shaft went into one of the great black monsters.
The fourth shaft…
At this range, he could see that the nearer creature had a great deal of trouble remaining airborne, and had Ta-se-ho’s spear deep in its side and a long burn mark.
The farther creature had a beak full of teeth-an unnatural sight that chilled the blood. It projected a wave-front of fear that caused Nita Qwan to lose the ability to breathe. But he got his fourth arrow on his bow, raised the shaft…
He loosed, the toboggan pulled by the old man seemed to explode, and Ta-se-ho leaped like a salmon.
His shaft vanished, black against black, into the mess of feathers on the farther monster’s breast.
Orange lightning played over it.
Ta-se-ho caught his spear-shaft. He was dragged-he was flying for a hundred paces.
The barbed spearhead ripped free of the great black bird even as it turned its teeth on the old man.
He fell.
Blood vomited on the snow-the bright orange bird blood fell like rain.
The great black thing fell onto the ice.
The ice cracked and broke.
Nita Qwan could spare the old man no more attention. The mate of the fallen creature turned for another pass.
Nita Qwan undid his sash, dropping his heavy wool capote in the snow. Then he took four more arrows from his bark quiver and pushed them into the snow.
“I can’t hold the wind,” Gas-a-ho said, as clearly as if they’d been having a conversation.
Nita Qwan registered that without understanding.
His adversary levelled out, wing-tips flexing up and down in the cross-breeze.
As fast as he could, Nita Qwan loosed all four arrows into the oncoming monster’s path.
The second one scored into a wing, and the giant bird seemed to lose fine control over its flight. It screamed, and the third arrow struck its breast-it paused, and the fourth arrow missed.
It passed well to the north of them, low, over the land, and kept flying.
The ice was breaking behind them.
“Save him,” Gas-a-ho said. “I will hold the ice.”
With one last glance at the sky, Nita Qwan threw his bow down atop his friend and took a hemp rope from his toboggan. He ran across the groaning ice towards the black water and the orange blood like fish roe on the snow. The setting sun threw a red pall over the whole ice field.
Ta-se-ho was alive. He wasn’t swimming or floating.
He was walking.
They were deep in the bay, but the black water was only a hand-span deep here, and the old man was slopping along, and cursing.
Again, they built the biggest fire that they could. By luck, or the will of the spirits and gods, Nita Qwan found a whole downed birch tree nearly free of snow. While the wounded Gas-a-ho and the old man curled around Tapio’s pot, Nita Qwan broke and stacked birch as fast as his frozen fingers and exhausted, post-combat muscles would allow. He stamped the snow flat, laid old rotted logs on it, and built a fire.
Ta-se-ho nodded. “That fire will tell every living thing on the inner sea we are here.”
Nita Qwan paused, his tinder box in hand.
Ta-se-ho shrugged. “I’m wet through and he’s lost a lot of blood. We can die right here, in a couple of hours, or risk the fire.” He shrugged.
But even frozen and afraid, they did not lack cunning. Nita Qwan’s hastily chosen campsite was close to the base of the spire of worked rock, in what was virtually a chamber cut into the living rock, closed on three sides. It took him four tries to get his tow to burst into flame, but he did-and he got a beeswax candle lit in the still air, and then put the flame to a scrap of birchbark.
In minutes, he had his companions stretched out under the canopy of a whole tree fire, the heat over their heads too much for a man to bear. The only way to be near it was lying flat, and the stone walls around them reflected the heat.
Nita Qwan bent over Gas-a-ho, but the younger man managed a weak smile. “I’m patching,” he said.
Ta-se-ho nodded. “Leave him, Nita Qwan. He’s deep in his art. Now that he’s warm, he’ll have more spirit.”