Tavis cupped his hands to his mouth. “The axe’s magic!” Basil had said the weapon could control weather. “Are you hurt?”
“Can’t understand you,” came the reply. “Come forward.”
Though Tavis had long ago learned the wisdom of pushing his arrows into a cork pad fastened in his quiver, he took the precaution of checking his supply. He had lost half-a-dozen shafts, but the runearrow remained in place. The high scout pushed it deeper into the cork, then squirmed into the passage and crawled. He stayed flat on his belly and kept his eyes pinched shut against the blowing ice and sand. Every now and then he risked raising his head to peer forward, and eventually he found himself a mere arm’s length from the strange pearly hue at the end of the passage.
Though Tavis could see only the top half of the chamber, it looked as vast as a castle bailey. The ceiling was formed by the haphazard vaulting of a dozen huge monoliths, which had fallen together like the steepled fingers of two gnarled hands. Ribbons of snow and ice were whistling around the room and whirling down upon him with bone-battering force.
“Orisino?” Tavis could not tell whether the verbeeg was waiting at the tunnel mouth, for the interior of the passage remained black as soot to the very edge of the vast chamber. “Are you here?”
The wind was roaring so loudly that Tavis barely heard his own voice. He repeated the question, then finally crawled to the brink of the gray room.
Ahead lay a craggy funnel littered with the petrified bones and abandoned possessions of hundreds-if not thousands-of dead giants and ’kin. Upon every ledge lay heaps of frost-rimed armor and curving spines; from every rock spur dangled rotting haversacks and yellowing pelvises; against every crag leaned tarnished shields and smirking skulls. At the heart of this gruesome mess, in a small space kept meticulously clear of clutter, stood Snad’s skeletal form.
In the light of the chamber, it became apparent that the giant’s flesh had not fallen away. Rather, it had grown almost transparent. Tavis could see the heads of his two arrows lodged deep inside his foe’s torso, yet he could also make out the ghostlike contours of an ancient and withered face. Snad looked to be at least four hundred years old.
The giant was touching the heft of an enormous hand axe whose blade was buried deep in a granite cleft. The eight-foot handle angled up from the floor at a steep incline, so that the pommel hung within easy reach of Snad’s long arms. The entire shaft was made of ivory, and wondrously carved with scenes of godly might. The huge head, fashioned from obsidian as black as a mountain’s heart, was bound to the handle with golden twine.
A lump of awe formed in Tavis’s throat. Without realizing it, he slipped from his hiding place and started down the slope. Even without Basil’s description, the scout would have recognized the glorious weapon below as Sky Cleaver, the lost hand axe of Mighty Annam, and he had to have it.
Tavis soon realized he was not the only one who coveted the axe. Orisino huddled in the bones at the edge of Sky Cleaver’s small clearing, and his eyes were fixed on the prize. The verbeeg grabbed a spear from the rubble and began slowly pacing back and forth beyond the hill giant’s reach. As the scout approached, he heard the two talking.
“You’re being selfish and stingy, Snad,” Orisino said. “All I want to do is touch it.”
“No! Snad the One, not stupid verbeeg.” The hill giant’s voice was quavering more than it had been a few moments earlier. Snad shot a scowl up at Tavis, then added, “And not stupid Tavis Burdun, either!”
Orisino cast a jealous glance at Tavis, then slipped away from the safety of his bone pile. “You can’t even pull it out of the ground, Snad! Let me try!”
“Snad the One!”
“You’re not!” the verbeeg yelled. “You’ve had centuries to pull it free!”
“Liar!” Snad slipped around to place himself between the axe and Orisino. “Snad only find axe last winter-after he kill old Kwasid.”
The name brought Tavis to a halt. Not many years before, he had known a fire giant by that name. But Kwasid had been an athletic young fire dancer-hardly someone that even a dull-witted hill giant would call old.
“And how old are you Snad?” Tavis yelled down.
“Still plenty young to be the One.” Snad kept his eye fixed on Orisino. “Fifty summers.”
Tavis gasped. At fifty, a hill giant was barely an adult. The high scout began to consider the wisdom of turning back while he still had the strength-then Orisino leapt for the axe’s ivory handle.
Tavis’s reservations vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. He found his runearrow in his hand, nocked and ready to fire, and in his heart there burned a fierce desire such as he had not known since his wedding night.
Tavis aimed at Orisino’s heart.
Snad’s ancient foot lashed out and caught the verbeeg in the chest. The chieftain crashed back into the bones from which he had crawled, and Tavis switched targets without thinking. The runearrow caught Snad squarely in the ribs.
“esiwsilisaB!” Tavis yelled.
Nothing happened, except that Snad reached up and snapped the shaft off at the head.
“Stupid firbolg magic can’t hurt the One!” Snad chortled. He cast a suspicious glance at Orisino’s motionless form, then stepped away from the axe to finish what he had started. “Kill verbeeg dead this time-then kill Tavis Burdun.”
“esiwsilisaB!” Tavis repeated.
A resounding crack shook the cavern, then a brilliant blue light flared inside Snad’s translucent body and scattered his dark bones in every direction.
The rumble had not even faded before Orisino was on his feet and charging the axe. The ivory hilt was nearly as long as the verbeeg was tall, but that did not stop him from wrapping both arms around the shaft. He braced his feet on the floor and tried to pull it free.
“Come to me!” Orisino cast a nervous glance in Tavis’s direction, then stooped beneath the motionless handle and pushed against it with his shoulders. “By Karontor, I shall have you!”
“Wrong god.”
Tavis dropped Mountain Crusher and stretched both hands toward the axe. Then, speaking the ancient syllables that Basil had made him repeat a thousand times in the last two days, the high scout called Sky Cleaver to him:
“In the name of Skoraeus Stonebones, Your Maker, O Sky Cleaver, do I summon you into the service of my hand.”
With a groan as ancient as Toril itself, the mighty axe pulled its dark blade from the cleft and rose into the air. Orisino leapt up and snatched the ivory handle with both arms. The axe shook him off as a dragon shakes off a mountain lion, then floated into the scout’s waiting arms. The weapon stood as tall as its new owner, with a head as big as his chest. It was so heavy that the mere act of swinging it would drain the last ounce of Tavis’s strength, but he did not care.
Sky Cleaver belonged to him.
15
Tavis sat upon a moonlit drumlin, staring down at the narrow rift as though he could force it open through will alone. The crevice ran northward across the frozen plain for nearly a thousand paces, ending beneath a cloud-scratching wall of ice that could only be the Endless Ice Sea itself. Nowhere along its entire length was the fissure as wide as a dagger blade, yet the titan’s trail stopped here at the near end, beneath a lonely, ice-caked inselberg that Basil had dubbed Othea Tor. Somehow, Lanaxis had descended into that narrow cleft, and with him he had taken Brianna.
The high scout would have her back, and it did not matter that a titan had locked her away in a prison of solid bedrock. Tavis was the One Wielder, and he would have whatever he wanted. With Sky Cleaver in his hand, there was no enemy he could not slay, no riddle he could not solve, no evil he could not conquer. He could do whatever he wished, have anything he wanted-anything, that is, except what he needed most: sleep.