The scream that cut through the air wasn’t the roar of stone on ice. It came from a living being’s throat.
Runa whipped her head around. The mountains were all spiralling around the black fortress, looming over it ready to thunder down and push it back underground. Where had the scream come from?
Another glacier tore past their camp, strange creatures with huge glowing eyes frozen into its green-glass ice. Snow filled the air as it grated against the wards. The moment of wonder as the sun un-set was over. They were in the heart of a storm of ice and rock and a thousand deaths that would come as swiftly as she would swat a gnat.
The sky cleared, and for one blink of time as the glacier swept past, Runa saw a figure clinging to the ice far above. Someone else trapped in the worst stirring of the Cauldron she’d ever known.
Someone who hadn’t managed to make camp before it hit.
The world lurched. Black stone burst up through the cascading ice, a tower covered in carvings that made Runa’s gut tighten. The mountains were closing in, but the fortress was fighting back.
Ninnius lifted his head, exclaiming in excitement. He reached into his robes for a small, metal-banded chest. Runa reached out to smack him down again. To her mixed surprise and relief, Anklopher got there first.
“But that’s—”
“I know! But we can’t publish on it if we die out here!”
The tower grew, piercing ice and snow. The glacier split around it. Runa searched for the figure she’d spotted and didn’t look away even as the snow whipped back around them, hiding the mountain and the tower both.
Runa stood. She pointed behind herself without looking, at the wardpole at the centre of their camp.
“Don’t let that fall down,” she ordered the wizards.
“What are you—”
“The wards’ll keep everything out, so long as the wards stay up. The five corners in the ground won’t help you if the centre pole collapses.”
“I know that,” Anklopher snapped.
“Good.” Runa kept her gaze on the place where the lone figure had vanished, and strode out into the storm.
Riding the Cauldron was like nothing else. The ground kicked under her feet like it was trying to buck her off and her blood lit up in her veins. Twenty years ago, she’d followed this terrifying joy to the Cauldron for the first time, leaping on a vagrant scrap of cursed hillside as the long-dead lich’s magic pulled it in.
Now she rode it again, not to seek adventure, but to help some other poor sap escape it.
Ice scraped and screeched around her. She leapt from foothold to foothold, dodging as snow exploded beside her and another black tower thundered up from the deep.
The Blood Lord. There was a name no troll liked to hear.
But he was dead. They were all dead. Famously. The Seven who’d sought immortality together, fallen out, almost destroyed the world and eventually killed each other for keeps instead.
There was nothing left of any of them. So what did the wizards mean, they’d been looking for—
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She grunted and shook herself. That was a question for shaking out of the wizards later. The only questions that mattered to her right now were safe foothold where, next handhold where, find a path how.
Towers rose like a wall of night to one side and Runa sprinted and skidded beside them, a breath or less ahead of the snow and rock tumbling in their wake. The storm parted. There! She changed direction, angling up towards the sheer ice cliff the figure still clung to.
She yanked her axe free, leaping up and driving it into the ice as an anchor as the cliff whipped past. Then climbed, hand over hand, until she reached the hunched figure.
“Hey!”
Frightened eyes met hers. Dark eyes, ringed with ice-crusted lashes, in a face muffled by a furred hood and wool scarf that covered mouth and nose. A heavy pack pressed the woman against the ice like a turtle trapped under its own shell. She had her own anchors in the cliff: twin blades that had cut the ice like butter and now lodged firm.
The air was so thick with magic it filled Runa’s throat and dragged against her bones.
“We’re not safe here!” she hollered over the roar of the storm and the crash of breaking stone. “Come with me!”
Not waiting for a reply, she grabbed the woman around her midsection and yanked her off the cliff face.
She didn’t move.
“Let go!” Runa yelled.
“Can’t!”
The woman’s voice was shrill with panic. She was holding onto the anchored knives for dear life. Runa growled with frustration. Twenty years, and she still hadn’t met a treasure-hunter who had their priorities straight.
“Magic swords aren’t worth your life! Let them go!”
The woman laughed, wild and helpless. “That’s not—”
She met Runa’s frustrated glare. Something glossed over her eyes, silver and uncanny. Her mouth made a silent oh of surprise, and she let go of the knives.
Runa didn’t waste time wondering. She held the woman tight against her side and skidded down the ice cliff as it creaked and turned sideways, forced aside by another black turret. Whatever this fortress was there was a hell of a lot of it. But Runa had a few tricks of her own up her sleeve. The campsite glowed in her mind like a beacon and she headed for it, slinging the woman over her shoulder and sprinting through the storm.
She didn’t know how she did it. She had a sneaking suspicion she shouldn’t investigate the question too deeply. But ever since she first rode a curse into the Cauldron, she’d had an affinity for its movements. She would never tell anyone this, but sometimes she thought the blasted landscape here was like a closely packed flock of sheep; a hundred bumbling beasts, bumping and shouldering each other for space, and she could always see just before the last moment exactly where each of them would shove next.
So she sprinted out from under the ice cliff she’d just skidded down, the moment before it fell and shattered on the mountainside below. She threw herself and the dark-eyed woman into a chasm the second before it lurched and surged skywards, one narrow wall tumbling away and opening a path along a narrow bluff. The mountain twisted and she twisted with it, circling closer to the campfire with its delicate weave of warding spells. It would have been easier if the woman had dropped her pack, but there was no time to untangle her from it now and anyway, Runa was in her element. There wasn’t space in her mind to feel anything, only to do, but if there had been, she might have felt…
Triumphant.
As though she knew the Cauldron deeper than it knew itself. As though the next step from understanding it would be conquering it.
That sort of shit.
Then there it was straight ahead, the glow of the campfire and the glimmering webbing of the wards. Thank all the gods and liches for those wards. The castle and the snowy mountain range and the ice and rock and danger of whatever other realms had been dragged in with them were all warring for the same space, and the campsite bobbed between them like a bubble in a pot of stew.
Runa put on a final burst of speed. The whirling snow hissed into steam before it even touched her. The woman on her shoulders yelped in alarm.
Hells, her eyes were probably glowing. One of the wizards was sure to ask a question about that.
But that was fine. She could answer any number of questions, soon as they were all safe.
The air went from frozen to bitter in a single breath. Loose rocks skidded beneath her boots, sludging aside as mud pushed in. The bog was gaining a foothold, curling a tendril of sour air and muck around the campsite and dragging it deeper inside.
She could live with that. They could all live with that.
Then something changed. The ground beneath Runa’s feet stilled menacingly.
One of those bumbling sheep got a look in its eye that wasn’t there a moment ago.
She didn’t stop to think. In one movement she slung the woman off her shoulders and tossed her to the safety of the campfire. The woman stumbled under the weight of her pack, and one of the wizards steadied her.
And the world disappeared in an avalanche that blotted out the sky.
