Chapter 7
The footprints approached the cave from the opposite direction of ours. They stopped at the entrance, then picked up again and ended at the face of the cliff. We blinked into the sunlight, searching around us for any sign of life. Nothing. The footprints were strange. Similar to ours, but narrower and longer. They were no one’s from our village, of that we were certain. Nor did they resemble any known animals.
“A traveller, maybe,” Ivar offered, but his heart wasn’t in it. And the question neither of us were asking aloud was, How did they scale the cliffs? It was perhaps thirty metres of sheer, icy rock face. There were no ropes or tools, nothing that would enable such a climb. Yet the footprints disappeared at the base. There was no mistaking that.
I stared up, expecting to find a pair of eyes gazing down, but there was just rock, and then the sky. Yet still I tensed, wracked by that unmistakable feeling of being watched. I’d felt it before, while playing hide-and-seek with the village children. Whenever I was the one seeking, peering around tree trunks and house corners, I could feel their little eyes watching me from their hiding places.
I held my hair in a fist to keep it from my eyes, and gazed at the cliff until Ivar pulled me away.
“We shouldn’t waste time,” he said, eyeing the direction from whence the footsteps came. “We could follow them, but it would mean hours and the day is getting on. We need to get back to the village.”
“Yes,” I agreed. Our voices were heavy with a sort of resigned emptiness. There were precious few people in Skane who would wander around a remote area such as this alone, in the wake of a storm. We were an exception. Either they were a fool, or they weren’t like anyone we’d met. And regardless of who or what they were, I didn’t fancy a meeting with them. “Let’s go.”
We strapped on our snowshoes, and I followed him away from the cave. More than once we turned to look back, but there was still nothing. Perhaps, despite the prints looking remarkably human, they were those of an animal that could deftly climb the cliff much easier than we could. Whether that was the most comforting answer or the real one, I couldn’t be sure. The only thing of which I could be deadly certain was the sudden, burning need to be away from here. Away from these caves. From this lake. The air felt haunted, the snow cursed.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Ivar’s voice filtered to me from up ahead. I blinked at the back of his head, out of breath and confused. I was thinking about footprints and being followed. “You want to talk to the Goddess.”
Ah. While, of course, that had filled my mind in the cave, I’d all but forgotten about it since we’d emerged. I had much to weigh – how would we reach the mountains? How would we ever convince anyone to let us go? What if we never made it? – and I needed to be somewhere alone. The image of a jōt camp littered with bones – both animal and human – was enough to deter anyone from going. And the jōt weren’t even the worst of it. Who knew what other horrors those mountains harboured. They could be home to almost anything; so much of the range was unexplored. But there was a saying I’d heard countless times, mostly when people recounted the stories of the first continental settlers of Skane. “Better a few lose their lives to save many, than many lose their lives to save a few.” So many had lost their lives to give Skane a fighting chance: some on the crossing from Löska, some after their arrival, killed by predators before they’d had a chance to build proper homes. Some had perished trying to reach the mountains. So many had given their all to fight for a new life in a new country. What was the life of one more girl, if it meant giving Skane a chance?
After all, my presence in the village would hardly be missed. Not by my father, anyway, and not by Anneka.
My mouth felt dry and coarse. “I need water,” I said, without responding to his previous statement. I didn’t need to tell him he was right; he already knew. I reached into my pack as we stopped walking.
Footsteps, not our own, continued on after our halt, then stopped.
We froze.
An echo? Unlikely. The trees were too open here, too far apart to offer such a response. With nearly identical timing, we both kneeled and unstrapped our snowshoes – they could help with walking distances but hindered our agility – ready for whatever came next. Under the semi-shade of the trees, the snow wasn’t nearly as deep as it was in the open air. I began walking forward again and Ivar did the same. We took perhaps another five paces, then stopped.
Again, footsteps echoed behind us, and then ceased.
Our knives were in our hands in a flash. We stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing back through the trees. I tried to separate the trunks from the shadows and the snowdrifts, searching for anything moving. The forest just sat there, still and calm and seemingly empty, save for our own presence, our shallow breaths of rising panic.
A feeling crept over me. It seeped through my skin, into my bones. The same one I’d felt at the cliff. The same one I felt during hide-and-seek.
Eyes.
Slowly, I turned to my right, staring into the forest. A form, standing between two trees, and a second one, not far behind it.
“Ivar.”
He turned, and froze.
They were tall, taller than either of us, and so, so skinny. Their bones protruded sickeningly from under their skin, which was visible beneath the leather armour covering their midsections. Yet, despite their slenderness, I could sense their strength from the ten metres between us. Flaps of the leather hung down to their knees, where their gaunt legs showed until they disappeared into the snow. Around their necks were slight ropes, dripping with what looked horrifyingly like bones.
Teeth.
And their faces. So narrow and angular, their own teeth large and broken, ragged, wispy hair growing only from the backs of their heads, near their necks. Their bald heads were a map of scars, lines crossing this way and that. In their hands were long knives, carved from what looked like stone. Eyes white as snow. Pupils black as charred wood.
I’d never seen anything like them before, but somehow I knew. I knew what they were.
They stood perfectly still, unblinking, staring at us, as we stared at them.
Then they screamed.
As if they were in one another’s heads, they erupted in a piercing screech that I was certain would reach the Kall Mountains themselves and lunged towards us. Those long, powerful legs carried them across the distance in seconds, barely giving us time to blink. The world fell away into blinding white light until all I could see were those forms coming towards us, until all I could feel was every hidden store of energy bursting to the surface in a reckless bid for survival.
Ivar growled as he braced his feet in the snow against the onslaught, and I gripped my knife so tightly my knuckles began to ache. Already, it was slick with sweat as my body surged to life.
Now I knew why we’d always been told not to venture so far from the village. No one would hear us out here. They would only find us – what remained of us – perhaps days from now, perhaps weeks from now.
Ivar’s knife clashed with stone. I had seconds to take it in before my own attacker was upon me. We’d all learned how to use knives, but only to fend off a wolf, or even a bear, on the hunt. We’d never been prepared for this. Never been trained in hand-to-hand combat.
And these … creatures. Fighting wasn’t an art form for them, that much was clear. They held knives, but they bore down in a way that made it obvious they most often relied on their own brute strength to disable a victim. If they got their hands on our bodies, we would break like a twig on a dead tree.
My own knife met stone, and the force sent a wave of pain through my body. I wouldn’t be able to keep this up. I could perhaps withstand one or two more of those before the air left my lungs. I’d have to find another way to defend myself.
They kept screeching as they attacked, as if the noise somehow gave them strength. Thinking as quickly and as clearly as I could in the brief snatch of time before the next blow, I took in my opponent. It was large. Skinny, but tall and bulky. Agile in its own way, though not like me. I could move faster than the monster. Spinning to my right just in time to avoid the next blow – its knife crashed into the snow where I’d been standing a second before – I ducked and lashed out, my blade barely nicking its exposed leg. A wound opened up instantly and dark blood ran into the snow. Its scream changed then, but whether it was from pain or anger, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t have enough time to decide. It spun, the arm with the knife slashing out in a wild arc, ready to sever me in two. I jumped back, losing my footing and falling into the snow.
At the same moment I realized any breath could be my last – would be my last – Ivar’s attacker released a deafening howl and it momentarily distracted my own. I used the second of interruption to roll away and leap to my feet, blinking the snow out of my eyes. Ivar was latched on to the back of his own opponent, whose knife had become deeply lodged in the trunk of a tree. The sight of just how deep into it he’d cut, knowing the power it would take to get it that far, turned my stomach.
My opponent, seeing I’d got away, screamed again and held the knife high over its head with both hands. On a sudden impulse, I ran directly towards it. As I’d faintly hoped, I surprised it, and I stuck my knife into the first exposed skin I could find. It was that place just below the neck, before the chest bone. There were many veins there, ones I knew could kill it if cut.
I didn’t have the chance to wait and see. The monster grabbed me by my hair and flung me away from it into the snow, as if I was one of those rag dolls mothers made for their children. Blood poured from its neck as I struggled to find my footing. In the background of my senses, I became aware that now only my attacker screamed. Had Ivar killed his opponent, or had his opponent killed Ivar?
I couldn’t stop to think about it, no matter how much I wanted to. Not in this moment, anyway. My attacker was still coming for me, and my arsenal of ideas was all but empty.
Suddenly, the creature lunging for me stopped advancing, and its head jerked unnaturally. Behind it, I could just barely make out Ivar, hanging on to its hair with all his body strength. I knew what to do. Gripping my knife as tightly as I could, I ran forward and put all of my force into burying the knife in the creature’s exposed neck. It gargled, still trying to emit that piercing scream. Its arms flailed, searching for any purchase it could find. Finding none, it wobbled a little bit, then fell. Its body thudded into the snow.
Absolute silence followed.
My hands shook violently. Dark blood stained the snow around us. The creature Ivar had engaged lay slumped against a tree, bleeding from its neck as well. They were so, so awful. Large and fierce and grotesque.
I half-sat, half-fell into the snow, my right hand still tightened into a fist where I’d stuck the knife into the creature’s neck. Wrapping my arms around myself, I met Ivar’s tired eyes. His chest rose and fell with ragged breaths. So much passed between us in that look. So much knowing and thankfulness and exhaustion. This journey to the caves, this fight against the monsters, it meant a great deal. It meant a beginning, and an end. It meant life in Skane would never be the same again.
It meant the Ør had finally found us.