Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Part 140

If that were true, he couldn't do it without his pack-brother. And yet how could Wolf go with him, when he had to look after the cubs?

As Wolf was trying to get his jaws around this, a bad scent hit his nose. He caught the smells of the Stone-Faced One, and a fierce hunger to kill. And the smell of owl.

Wolf's fur stood on end.

He forgot about the roe buck and set off in pursuit.

It was the time when the light begins to turn: the clans call it the demon time.

Rip and Rek had been unsettled for a while, but Torak couldn't work out why. Maybe, like him, they were missing Renn and Wolf. Maybe it was this strange, windless cold.

Hungry, he paused on the cliffs above the river, woke up a small fire, and chewed a slip of dried horse meat. The banks were still too steep to climb down, and he'd had to backtrack almost two-thirds of the way to the resting place. He wasn't proud of himself.

He tossed a few crumbs in the ferns for Rip and Rek, but to his surprise, they ignored them. Instead, they flew to the top of a pine tree and gave long, penetrating calls: rap-rap-rap. Intruder.

Torak made a quick search, but found nothing.

With agitated caws, Rip and Rek flew away.

When you have ravens for companions, it's wise to heed their warnings. Drawing his knife, Torak made a second, more careful search.

At the foot of a rocky outcrop a short distance from the fire, he found an owl pellet. It was huge: longer than his hand and three times as thick as his thumb. Peering, but not wanting to touch, he saw that it was made of packed fur and bones, mostly weasel and hare. No wonder the ravens had fled. Like many creatures, they, too, feared the eagle owl.

Torak pictured the great bird alighting with its prey on the rocks above his head: ripping the carca.s.s to shreds and gulping it down, then spewing out the pellet of bones.

Rising to his feet, he scanned the rocks above.

One moment he was gazing at mottled granite; the next, the eagle owl raised its tufted ears and hissed at him.

It was so close that he could have touched it. In one frozen heartbeat, he took in the powerful talons and the cruel, curving beak. He stared into the unblinking orange glare. He recoiled. Its pupils were black pits of nothingness. Nothing except the urge to destroy.

The owl gave a piercing cry, spread its enormous wings, and flew away, forcing Torak to duck.

He watched the owl disappear into the Forest. His palms were clammy with sweat.

Swiftly, he put the fire back to sleep and gathered his gear.

Further on, he found a pine marten's mangled remains. The owl had not eaten. It had killed for pleasure.

He saw one of its wing-feathers, barred with tawny and black, and coated with an unclean dust that smelt of rottenness. He'd found one just like it on the day the Soul-Eaters had taken Wolf.

That was when it hit him.

The owl had flown west.

Towards the resting place.

Towards the cubs.

FIVE.

Torak couldn't reach the resting place for the brambles. He slashed at them with his knife, he tore at them with his hands. He couldn't see what was happening, but he heard the ravens' strident caws and the snarls of a furious wolf. Darkfur was defending the cubs alone. Wolf was still out hunting.

At last Torak tore free and stumbled into the resting place. He saw Pebble cowering under a juniper bush at the edge of the cliff; Shadow lying by the ash tree at the far end: a crumpled heap of black fur. He saw Rip and Rek mobbing the eagle owl as it swooped to s.n.a.t.c.h the fallen cub. He saw Darkfur springing to the defence.

Yanking his axe from his belt, Torak raced to help her. The owl tilted its wings and soared out of reach. Torak caught a blast of foetid air as it swept back towards him. He flung up his arm. The owl struck him a dizzying blow on the forehead. As he fell to his knees, he saw it swoop with outstretched talons at Pebble's hiding-place.

Dashing the blood from his eyes, Torak struggled to his feet and ran to fend it off. He was almost there when Darkfur made a desperate leap to save her cub. The owl twisted with blinding speed, and the she-wolf's jaws clashed empty air. To Torak's horror, Darkfur landed at the very edge of the cliff. Frantically, she scrabbled. Her claws raked frozen earth. She fell.

Torak saw her hit the water far below. She went under, came up struggling. The river was too strong. She went under again.

The owl was harrying Pebble's juniper bush, the ravens beating it back. Shouting and swinging his axe, Torak threw himself into the attack. At the corner of his eye, he saw Wolf burst from the Forest and leap at the marauder. The owl wheeled, evading axe and fang and claw. It kept coming back. It had killed before and it meant to kill again.

Torak glimpsed Pebble shaking with terror beneath the juniper bush. If he stayed hidden, he had a chance, but in the open . . .

Torak barked a command, stay, but at that moment, Pebble's courage broke. He bolted from his hiding-place and made for the brambles. The owl s.n.a.t.c.hed him in its talons and soared into the sky.

Torak threw down his axe and unslung his quiver and bow. His fingers were slippery with blood, he couldn't get the arrow nocked.

With awesome power, the owl rose out of range, Pebble hanging limp in its talons. Mockingly, it circled. Then, in a wide, lazy arc, it turned and headed south.

Rip and Rek sped after it with raucous cries.

Wolf disappeared over the edge of the cliff.

As Torak stood swaying, he saw his pack-brother skitter down the rocks and run along the bank, frantically sniffing for his mate. Then, finding no scent, Wolf raced over a fallen pine that spanned the river, and vanished into the Forest, in a futile effort to save his cub.

SIX.

The eagle owl was taunting Wolf. Dangling the cub from its talons, it flew back to make sure that he was following, then glided out of reach. Wolf's paws scarcely touched the ground as he raced after it.

Up the rise he loped, and down into the valley where he'd had his Beginning. His claws clattered as he sped across the Bright Hard Cold that had once been the Fast Wet.

The owl swept so low that he heard the hiss of its wings. Then it rose over the treetops and disappeared.

Tirelessly Wolf ran, as only a wolf can run. But at last he halted. The wind was at his tail, he couldn't catch the scent, and he couldn't see the Up for the trees. He could no longer hear the caws of the ravens.

Wolf felt in his fur that this time, the owl wasn't coming back.

A great emptiness opened inside him.

Darkfur was gone. The cubs were gone. This could not be.

The cubs were part of him. He could no more lose them than he could lose a paw. And he and Darkfur were one breath. As one wolf, they hunted in the Forest. As one wolf, they sensed which cub was planning to stray too far, and which had got stuck in the brambles. When they howled, their voices rose together into the Up.

This could not be.

Wolf lifted his muzzle and howled.

Wolf's howls drifted to Torak as he knelt on the clifftop. Such desolation. Grief without end.

Torak resolved that his pack-brother would not bear it alone. He would go after him and find some way to comfort him.

But as he got to his feet, the resting place went round and round. He touched his forehead. His fingers came away red.

Better do something about that, he thought muzzily. And yet he made no move to open his medicine pouch.

The resting place was a dismal mess of ravaged snow. Shadow lay by the ash tree, as if asleep. There was no blood. The eagle owl must have s.n.a.t.c.hed her up, then dropped her from a great height. The fall had killed her instantly.

Kneeling by the corpse, Torak pictured her small souls padding about, seeking Wolf and Darkfur and her pack-brother. He longed to help her, but he didn't think wolves had death rites, or Death Marks. He'd asked Renn about that once, and she'd said that wolves don't need them. Their ears and noses are so keen that their souls always stay together, and never become demons. So instead, Torak simply prayed for the guardian of all wolves to come and fetch Shadow's spirit soon, before she got scared.

As for her body, he carried it to the edge of the brambles and laid it on a bed of ferns. There let it lie, with the moon and the stars wheeling over it; and in time, like all creatures, it would become food for the other inhabitants of the Forest.

It was dark. There was a ring around the moon, which meant it would get even colder. He couldn't go after Wolf tonight. He'd have to sleep here and head off at dawn.

Numbly, he collected his scattered gear and woke up a fire in front of the shelter he'd left only that morning. Then he took dried yarrow from his medicine pouch and pressed it to his forehead, bandaging it with the buckskin headband he'd worn when he was outcast.

The musty smell of yarrow reminded him of when he'd hit his head going over the waterfall, and Renn had treated his wound. He missed her. He wondered if he'd been wrong to have left the Raven camp without her. At the time, he'd been convinced he had to be on his own. But maybe that had been Eostra's trick. She wanted him alone. And now she'd made brutally sure that he stayed alone, by sending her creature to slaughter the pack and lure Wolf away.

From the south came his pack-brother's howls. Torak did not howl back. He knew the only howls Wolf wanted to hear were those he never would again.

At dawn, Torak found a precipitous way down the cliff-face and half-climbed, half-fell to the bank below.

Wolf's trail led across the pine trunk that spanned the river, but Torak did not follow it. First, he headed downstream, searching the ground beneath the cliff. Maybe maybe Darkfur hadn't been killed in the fall. Maybe she'd got ash.o.r.e, and was lying battered but alive . . .

The snow was untouched, the shallows crusted with unbroken ice.

Torak crossed the Horseleap by the pine trunk, and checked the other bank. Again, nothing. Darkfur was gone.

Gone, gone, echoed Wolf's lonely howls.

Torak started along his pack-brother's trail. When the snow-crust is too hard for paw-prints, a wolf leaves barely any trace a few flakes of frost brushed off a branch, a frond of bracken bent slightly out of place but Torak tracked Wolf almost without having to think. His trail headed south, up the side of the valley and down into the next: a rocky, steep-sided gully.

Torak recognized it at once: the valley of the Fast.w.a.ter. When he was little, he and Fa used to camp there in early summer, to gather lime bark for rope-making.

The river was frozen now, but three summers ago it had been a torrent. Torak recognized the big red rock shaped like a sleeping auroch. Beneath it he had found a pack of drowned wolves lying in the mud. And a small, wet, shivering cub.

Crossing the frozen river, he started to climb.

He went very still.

An arrow had been lashed with a twist of creeper to the trunk of a birch tree about ten paces above the auroch rock. It pointed east, towards the High Mountains.

Holding his breath, Torak climbed closer. He studied the fletching, but didn't dare touch. The arrow had belonged to Fa.

As if his father had spoken aloud, Torak heard his voice in his mind. Help me. Set my spirit free.

Maybe Fin-Kedinn was right, maybe Eostra was making use of Fa's arrow. But Torak couldn't forget that lost spirit calling in the night. If Eostra was summoning him to her mountain lair, then so was Fa.

And yet if he headed east, as Fa's arrow begged him to, he would be abandoning Wolf.

Torak stood irresolute, fists clenched inside his mittens. Should he follow the dead, or seek the living?

He knew what Fin-Kedinn would have done.

Facing the invisible Mountains, he lifted his head. 'You tried to separate me from my pack-brother,' he shouted to the Eagle Owl Mage. 'Well, you won't succeed. I won't let you!'

Turning his back on his father's arrow, he headed south.

To find Wolf.

SEVEN.

It turned colder and colder as Fin-Kedinn headed north.

The night before, there had been a ring around the moon, and the stars had flickered with an intensity he'd rarely seen. Storm on the way. The clan would have pitched camp early. He must do the same.

He crossed the Tumblerock at the Boar Clan camp, then made his way into the valley of the Rushwater. He was now less than a daywalk from the Windriver, where the Ravens had camped in the time of the demon bear. He thought of the day when Renn and her brother had brought in two captives: a wolf cub squirming in a buckskin bag, and a bedraggled and furious boy . . .

The Rushwater echoed noisily between its ice-choked banks, but the Forest had a peculiar, waiting stillness. Fin-Kedinn realized that he'd seen no birds all day, save for a few last, lonely swans flying south.

And no people. The frosts had killed the grey moths, but the victims of the shadow sickness remained terrified, and their terror infected others. Most people were staying close to camp, only braving the Forest when hunger drove them.

So it was good to encounter a small Viper hunting party: three men and a boy, hurrying west to rejoin their clan. They'd caught two squirrels and three woodpigeon. It wasn't much, but they urged Fin-Kedinn to come with them and share.