The Giant Among Us (19 page)

“Good,” Brianna replied. “Ill see you on the morrow.”

Arlien gave her a curt bow, then went to the door and paused there. “I suggest you don’t waste all of your newfound vigor praying to Hiatea,” he said. “You’ll soon have need of your strength. Tomorrow may come sooner than you think.”

10
Cold Camp

A long, uncanny trumpeting trilled over the glacier, at once as shrill as a wyvern’s cry and as full as a dragon’s roar. Tavis stopped walking and ran his eyes over the milky miles of snow ahead. He saw the dark crags of a few scattered peaks poking through the ice, but otherwise the terrain looked exactly as it was: a vast, barren sheet of snow and ice thick enough to bury entire mountains.

“I didn’t call for no rest,” growled Slagfid. He shoved Tavis after Bodvar, who was breaking trail through six feet of fresh snow. “Keep going.”

Tavis limped forward again, as anxious as Slagfid to maintain a steady pace. The scout judged the magic would fade from his runemask no later than dawn, returning him to firbolg form. Before then, he had to reach the frost giant camp, learn where Hagamil was meeting Julien and Arno, and slip safely away. To complicate matters, he had no idea how much farther he had to travel. Glaciers like this one could swallow entire mountain ranges, spanning distances so huge that even giants could not cross them easily. The war party might not reach camp until after Hagamil had fallen asleep for the night, and Slagfid would hardly be anxious to awaken his chief and report a botched mission.

Despite his mangled toe, Tavis soon caught up to Bodvar and had to slow his pace. Although the snow was barely knee deep, it was heavy and wet, and Bodvar had been breaking trail for most of the journey. The warrior’s breath came in wheezes and gasps, and his legs were so weak that he had to catch his balance with each step.

The scout looked back at Slagfid. “Bodvar can barely walk,” he said. “The rest of our journey will go faster if someone else breaks trail.”

“Bodvar wouldn’t be breaking trail if he’d held onto that traell, like I told him,” Slagfid growled. “But you’ve got me in trouble, too. You can break trail if you want”

Tavis made no move to accept the frost giant’s offer. “You’ve seen my toe. I’d spend more time floundering than breaking trail.” He did not add that the effort of impersonating a stone giant had left him nearly as exhausted as Bodvar. The muscles in the scout’s legs were quivering like aspen leaves, and his breathing was so heavy he could hardly see through the curtain of white vapor rising from his mouth. “Call Egarl up. He should have come back to look for us.”

“That’s for me to decide.” Slagfid eyed Tavis suspiciously. “I don’t see why you’re in such a hurry, Sharpnose. After losing that bow, Hagamil’s going to be no happier to see you than Bodvar.”

“I’m not frightened of Hagamil,” Tavis replied.

“Then you’re a fool,” Slagfid snorted.

Seeing that the frost giant would not be swayed, the scout limped after Bodvar. Slagfid was right about one thing: Tavis was a fool. Since learning where ice diamonds really came from, the scout had told himself the same thing at least a hundred times. He wanted to gouge out his eyes for not seeing that Arlien was a fake, and to tear off his own ears for failing to hear the ring of falsehood in the man’s silky voice. What a chuckle the prince must have had when Tavis warned him to be wary of Cuthbert!

Arlien would probably be with Julien and Arno when they delivered Brianna to the frost giants. If so, the scout would make the prince pay for his treachery.

As he contemplated his vengeance, Tavis’s stomach began to burn. He would have no weapons when he returned to firbolg form. His broken sword still lay back at Shepherd’s Nightmare, and Avner had his bow and quiver.

Fortunately, unless the youth had undergone an unexpected change of character, Avner wasn’t likely to return to Cuthbert Castle as instructed. He was far more likely to follow the scout onto the glacier. Assuming he didn’t freeze to death or fall into a hidden crevasse, Tavis would actually be grateful for the boy’s disobedience.

Another eerie trumpet rolled over the ice, reminding Tavis of the most significant danger to Avner. Plenty of creatures made their homes on glaciers, many of them predators. If one of the beasts happened to catch the youth’s scent… the scout saw no use in picturing what would happen.

Ahead of Tavis, Bodvar suddenly pulled up short. “Praise Thrym!” he puffed. “A rider.”

The frost giant was looking toward a nearby nunatak, one of the craggy stone peaks that occasionally jutted up through the surface of the glacier. A deep trench encircled the pinnacle, for during the day the spire’s dark rock gathered enough heat from the sun to melt the ice around it. Like the mountainous nunatak itself, the hollow was huge, easily the size of a small canyon, and lumbering out of that icy gorge was the hulking, shaggy form of a woolly mammoth.

The creature seemed remarkably small, perhaps because of the young frost giant riding him. The youth’s legs easily straddled the beast’s huge back, his feet dangling almost to the ground. The scene reminded Tavis of a human child riding the family sheepdog.

“Hey, you!” Bodvar waved at the distant youth. “Come break trail for us!”

Slagfid offered no objection to the request, perhaps because he sensed Bodvar could not continue much longer.

The young rider stopped and peered toward the war party. His mount dug its saber-curved tusks into the ice and gouged a large cake from the glacier.

“Who’s that?” the youth called.

“It’s Bodvar, with Slagfid and his war party.”

The boy’s mount wrapped its pendulous trunk around the ice it had gouged free, then flung the block at something behind it that Tavis could not see. A bloodthirsty howl echoed off the snow. The mammoth lurched forward, raising its hairy trunk to voice an angry bugle. The two calls combined to create the eerie trumpeting Tavis had heard before.

Unconcerned by the strange noise, the young giant grabbed his mount’s ear and yanked it around, guiding the beast down the glacier to meet the war party. The scout noticed a pair of poles running from the creature’s saddle toward the ground behind it, where the rods were lashed to the sides of a narrow, chitinous head with bulbous black eyes and a muzzle full of sharp fangs.

Tavis saw a pair of spiny headwings flare out from the sides of the ghastly face, and he suddenly understood the mammoth’s nervous behavior. The beast behind it was a remorhaz, one of the most vicious and brutal of all glacial predators. The monster’s body resembled that of a twenty-foot centipede, with blue segmented sections and two dozen sticklike legs ending in razor-sharp claws. The thing was scuttling along behind the mammoth, hissing madly and flailing at the mammoth’s tail with its face tentacles. Only the poles lashed to its head prevented the ravenous creature from hamstringing the mammoth and devouring it on the spot.

Slagfid pushed by Tavis and took Bodvar’s place at the head of the line. When the youth arrived, he reached down to scratch the mammoth’s woolly ear. “My thanks, Frith.”

“Your thanks are nice,” said Frith. The boy was young enough that he still had a slender face, with the yellow fuzz of his first beard sprouting on his chin. “A new axe would be better.”

Slagfid nodded. “I’ll see that Bodvar gives you one.” He peered over the mammoth’s rump at the hissing remorhaz. “I see you’ve got yourself a nice little ice worm.”

Frith nodded proudly and motioned at the nunatak behind him. “I’ve been keeping him down there.” The youth peered down the war party’s line. “You got that Tavis Burdun-alive, I mean? We could throw him to the worm and have us some fun.”

“No, Gavorial killed Tavis Burdun,” Slagfid reported.

“Too bad,” said Frith. “We’ve got an ogre back at camp, but you know how fast hell go. Hagamil could use the fun tonight.”

Slagfid winced. “He’s in a bad mood, is he?”

Frith nodded. “And it’ll be worse if I don’t get back there.” The boy yanked on his mammoth’s ear, turning the beast up the glacier. “Don’t get too close to my worm. He’s hungry.”

Slagfid stepped back, allowing the remorhaz to slink into the trail behind the mammoth. With only seven body segments, the creature was not particularly large, but it was definitely hungry. The white stripe down its back had turned bright pink from the heat of its appetite.

Once the ice worm had scuttled past, Slagfid reluctantly started up the trail. With the remorhaz hissing and growling at its tail, the mammoth moved at a brisk pace, plowing through the heavy snow as though it weighed as much as a cloud. Within half an hour, the frost giants were all huffing from the exertion of staying close to the beast. Bodvar and Tavis could not keep pace, even with Slagfid threatening to unleash the remorhaz on them. They soon found themselves being dragged along by a pair of bitterly complaining helpers.

After an excruciating length of time, they came to an uneven ring of nunataks formed by the rim of an ancient volcano. Frith slowed his mammoth and commanded, “Call.”

The beast raised its trunk and let out a long, wavering trumpet The sound was answered by a tremendous chorus of similar calls from inside the ring. A frost giant sentry appeared on the summit of a nunatak and waved the war party on.

Frith led the way across a narrow isthmus of snow between two nunatak hollows, then the group emerged in the volcano’s snow-filled caldera. The frost giants had made camp in the heart of the crater, around a flat area that could only be a frozen lake.

The encampment was one of the coldest and loneliest places the scout had ever visited. The frost giants sat in the frigid moonlight in groups of two or three, conversing in quiet tones or not speaking at all. Most of the children were already asleep, lying in beds of fresh snow or, at most, a small shelter dug into a steep slope. The mammoths were gathered at one end of the lake, near a deep pit they had gouged through the ice. There was no fire or light anywhere.

As Frith guided his mammoth down the slope, several of the giants below pointed toward Slagfid’s war party. A gentle murmur started to build. Drowsy children roused themselves from their beds, wiping the sleep from their eyes with handfuls of snow. The entire tribe drifted toward the far end of the caldera, where the mouth of a huge cavern yawned in an ice cliff.

Slagfid’s face grew increasingly stormy as the procession crept toward the cavern. Finally, when Frith reached the bottom of the slope, Slagfid clasped a burly hand around Tavis’s arm.

“AH those giants expect to see Tavis Burdun’s body, Sharpnose. They’re not going to be happy about taking your word for what happened,” the frost giant growled. “So you’d better tell your story well, or Hagamil’s liable to feed us both to Frith’s worm.”

“I’m sure you have a much better idea of what they want to hear,” Tavis said, realizing it would be impossible for him to tell a convincing tale. “Why don’t you recount events for me?”

Slagfid’s lip twisted into a disdainful sneer. “I imagine you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

The frost giant thrust Tavis’s hand away, then turned and stomped off toward the cavern. The scout stood where he was, too preoccupied to follow.

Bodvar clamped a reassuring hand on Tavis’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. It won’t be as tough as he makes out,” said the giant. “You’re a stone giant. Nobody’ll notice if you lie a little-especially about how we lost the traell and the bow.”

Bodvar started forward, pulling Tavis along. By the time they reached the ice cave, a sharp blue light was glowing from the interior. Frith dismounted and set to work loosing the remorhaz poles from his saddle. Slagfid motioned for Tavis and Bodvar to come inside, then ducked through the entrance.

When the scout followed, he found himself standing inside a vast ice vault. Long, spiraling icicles depended from the arched ceiling, many with jagged ends where the tips had been knocked off by careless passersby. The frost giants stood along the sides of the chamber, around a deep pit hewn into the floor. The listless, hunch-shouldered figure of an ogre sat in the bottom of the hole, his claws reduced to bloody nubs by long hours of clawing at the walls of his icy prison.

At the far end of the room stood the tribal shaman. He was a haggard, one-eyed giant with yellow patterns tattooed on his bald head and the fur of a white mammoth pulled tight around his chest. In his gaunt hand he carried a brilliantly glowing scepter that supplied the only light in the cavern.

Slagfid stopped at the near edge of the ice pit. “Halflook, fetch me Hagamil,” he demanded. “Tell him that Slagfid has returned with good tidings!”

Halflook’s red-veined gaze darted from Slagfid to Bodvar to Tavis, the muscles of the empty socket working as though it still contained an eyeball. The shaman let his attention rest on the scout and shook his scepter several times, and blue reflections danced wildly across the cavern walls.

“Good tidings, you say,” Halflook echoed. His gaze drifted toward the cavern mouth, growing distant and unfocused. “Perhaps better than you know.”

Slagfid shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Enough of your babble,” he growled. “Get me Hagamil.”

“As you wish.”

Halflook’s eye rolled back in its socket, then his chin tipped into the air and his tongue rose out his mouth, dancing between his lips like the winged head of a remorhaz.

“I welcome your return, Slagfid.” The voice that rumbled from the shaman’s mouth was deeper and more gravelly than the one Tavis had heard earlier. “We’ve all been awaiting you.”

When Halflook’s head tipped forward again, Tavis was astonished to see a piercing blue eye in each socket. The giant’s face suddenly looked much fuller, and his gaunt body seemed stout and robust. Even the tattoos on his bald pate were changing before the scout’s eyes, sprouting into long yellow braids.

A pair of comely giantesses wrapped in sleeping robes appeared out of the shadows. They flanked the giant on both sides, casting arrogant glances at the other females in the room.

The giant ignored the women and ordered, “Tell me of your journey, Slagfid.”

“Hagamil, I have won much honor for us,” said Slagfid.