Snow-Walker

Twenty-nine

The monster strained away;

the man stepped closer.

The monster’s desire was

for darkness between them.

The thing loomed in the doorway.

In the dim spaces of the hall it rose against the rafters, a pale glimmer wreathed with mist and smoke, snow scattering from it.

Before it, Kari seemed very small, in a wilderness of stone.

Brochael hung back in the shadows of the doorway, watching.

It was not an animal. Not a man either exactly, but like one, Jessa thought, very like one. Its eyes moved, fixing on Kari; it roared and slashed at him viciously.

Kari flinched, but held his ground.

The creature seemed wary of coming closer. It swung quickly and looked behind it, but Brochael jerked back out of sight.

Then Kari spoke to it. “Listen to me.”

The rune beast stared. For a moment Jessa thought a flicker of recognition showed in its face.

“This is what you want.”

Kari held out his hand. The snakeskin band dangled from his white fingers.

The creature looked at it, making a peculiar wordless murmur in its throat.

“She left this here. She left it for me, and it drew you here. Over all the miles, through forests, over mountains, this was what you hungered for. It has enormous power. I think it has enough to enslave you or to set you free. Enough to fill all the emptiness in you.”

He turned it, thoughtfully, in his fingers. The skin gleamed, fire red.

Wulfgar stirred uneasily. “Wasn’t that Gudrun’s?” he breathed.

Jessa nodded, unable to speak. She remembered Gudrun flinging it down like a challenge, her cold voice saying, “You’ll use them, as I did. We always do.”

Now Kari held the shadow bringer still, by what power she dared not think.

The creature’s claw reached out; Kari stepped back. There was a tense pause; then with a roar of pain the beast struck out. With one blow it sent him reeling; Wulfgar leaped up, and Brochael raced out of the shadows with a yell.

The rune beast hung over Kari for a moment; then with a whisper of dismay it turned, bewildered, from side to side. And Jessa saw there was a cage about it; a cage of light that glittered in the dull flame light, thin filaments that ran from roof to floor, like water.

The creature crumpled, hugging itself; for a wild moment it slashed and struggled against light and sorcery, but as if it realized how useless this was, it huddled still again, eyes bright.

Painfully Kari picked himself up. He looked down at the snakeskin.

“This is the key to your cage,” he said, slipping it on. “This. And she left it for me to use against my friends.” He glanced back quickly at Jessa and the others, a quizzical, unreadable look. “They don’t trust me. They lock me away. They’re afraid of what I have, and she wants me to hate them for that and move against them. Doesn’t she?”

The creature stared at him, only its eyes following his movements. He fingered the soft skin gently. “This would unleash you. You could destroy all of them, and you couldn’t touch me.”

“Listen to him,” Vidar snarled. “He’ll kill us all.”

“No,” Jessa said grimly. “He’s just making his point.”

The rune beast murmured, a strange sound.

“Exactly,” Kari said, as if he understood it. “I don’t hate them. They know that … most of them. I won’t use her gift against them. But if I don’t, what do we do with you? Because you’re hungry.”

He reached out his hand. The creature watched, its great head alert.

“I know that hunger,” Kari whispered. “I knew it for years, here—the emptiness, the darkness, without faces, without language, without warmth. Dreaming of nothing, my mind walking in white snowfields.”

The creature snarled; Kari jerked back, waving Brochael away.

“Be careful!” Jessa murmured.

“He knows what he’s doing.” But Skapti stood stiff, fists clenched.

“So you see,” Kari said, “I daren’t use this thing and I must. That’s what power is.” He seemed almost to be talking to himself now, Jessa thought, and her heart thudded as she saw him lean forward again.

“She sent you here for me to kill. For me to taste how that felt, and to want to taste it again. Oh she’s clever, my mother.” He looked closely at the creature, curious. “She left us both empty, didn’t she?”

The beast strained away, as if it feared him.

Kari held out the bracelet.

Jessa forgot to breathe; she saw Brochael jerk forward.

“Take it,” Kari whispered.

For a moment the creature’s eyes met his. He stepped closer, among the bars of light.

“Kari!” Brochael’s cry burst from him, but the Snow-walker took no notice. He crouched by the creature’s head, and dropped the snakeskin band over one sharp claw.

“Take it. Let it feed you. Then both of us can break free.”

Hands empty, he scrambled back.

Jessa gripped the back of the chair. Now, she thought, anything could happen.

The creature was staring at the tiny thing. Then it stood up and gazed intently down the smoky hall, as if it had seen all the silent, anxious watchers for the first time, had woken from a long sleep, or shaken off some nagging, insistent voice. It murmured, and there were almost words in the sounds it made to Kari, and he answered too, something Jessa could not hear.

And quite suddenly, though he did nothing, she knew that Kari was the focal point of the hall, that all the darkness and tension spread from him, and the danger too, and for a moment of sharp fear she knew he had them all in the power of his mind. Her vision shifted; for that time he was not the Kari she knew. He was someone else. A stranger. An alien.

The beast stumbled back. It shimmered; already through it she could see the doorway with its glint of stars. Thinner, frailer, the creature opened itself; snow fell through it now, it was delicate as melting ice, dissolving back into the runes and atoms the witch had forged it from. Kari wasn’t doing it; the creature itself was fleeing with its prize. And as it drifted away among mists, it subtly distorted, and at the last she was almost sure it was a man’s shape that was there, as if the long emergence was ended. For a second it wavered, between being and nonbeing. Then it was gone, and the hall was dark.

And they were all standing on a wide snowfield.

The sky was gray; the wind howling toward them over empty crevasses, so that Jessa’s hair whipped back and she gasped with the sudden biting cold. Behind her Skapti swore; Vidar cried out in fear.

The landscape was immense, a cracked glacier pitted with ravines, the snow gusting over it.

And far off a woman was walking toward them, a woman with long silvery hair, and she walked quickly, but all the time she came no nearer, until at last she raised her head and looked at them, and stopped.

Jessa stared at Gudrun. The Snow-walker was older; her smooth skin finely lined, her lips thin.

She glanced at them all, then at Kari.

“So you wouldn’t use it?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Even after they betrayed you?”

“That was your doing.”

“Not all of it.” She shook her head, wondering. “But to give it away. That I didn’t expect. Sometimes you surprise me, Kari.”

He stepped toward her, through the blue shadows. “Leave us alone now. Leave them alone. We have nothing that you need.”

Almost sadly, she shook her head, and Jessa’s stomach tightened with fear.

“I can’t,” the witch said. “I need you. I find I want to draw you back to me.”

Kari gripped his fists. “I’ll never come.”

For a moment she looked at him strangely. “No?” Then she looked beyond him, at Wulfgar and the others. “As for you, I lay this fate on you, my lord. The thing you love best, that thing I will have some day.”

Wulfgar kept his voice steady. “Not if I can prevent it.”

“Guard your hall well, then.” She turned away to Kari with a hard smile. “Don’t consume yourself with power, my son. Keep some for me.”

Wind gusted snow into their faces.

Then they stood alone on the great stone floor of the hall.