The wound was healing fast, but Sunbright's fingers protruded through the slit for just a second. In that second, the nimble thief rammed the pommel of the great sword into Sunbright's numbed fingers. Then the gap sealed, or tried to, for the sword blade projected from inside the monster.
Exhausted by her mad dashes, Knucklebones dropped, unable to close for fear of being sheared herself. She could only pray to Shar, the God of Thieves, the Greater Power of the Gray Waste; with herself trapped in a white waste.
The lurker fought, rolled, curled, twisted, but even banging the ground couldn't shake the steel blade from Sunbright's iron grip. Through a mist of her own breath, Knucklebones watched, fascinated, as the barbarian's trapped arms flexed, pushed, unbent.
Then the great hooked sword Harvester of Blood sliced through the lurker like an axe through fog.
One second the white rolled body was whole, the next a rent six feet long slit it like a fish. From the rent spilled a gasping, blue-faced, white-smeared Sunbright, who collapsed on the snow, melting it with his body heat.
Knucklebones wept for joy out of one good eye, ran to her huge lover, and grabbed his shoulder to pull him upright. The ravenous snow lurker was already curling back, slithering, pursuing.
"Run-at an angle-to its path!" Sunbright wheezed. He was pale but smeared with blood, eyes red, throat raw. Assisted by the thief, he gamely jogged in his big boots across the trampled snow.
They ran and ran, stumbling and lurching, always at an angle from the deadly pursuer that rippled along the snow after them with the smooth grace of a manta ray swimming under water. Yet slowly the two humans pulled away, for the huge beast was tired. And finally, glancing over her shoulder, Knucklebones saw nothing.
"Wh-where did it go?"
Sunbright slammed to a halt, sobbed for breath so hard he drooled, but he pointed out a shimmering square on the snow. Knucklebones saw the white surface ripple and tremble, then lie smooth as if never trodden. The effect was all the weirder because their footprints began just at the edge of the silent square. The lurker had burrowed under the snow within seconds.
"Will it come after us?"
"No, but let's keep-walking-anyway." Plodding, trudging, they left the disturbed spot far behind. Only then did Sunbright collapse to his knees and wash his bloodied face clean with snow.
"I must be-" he rasped, "-the only barbarian to ever-escape a snow lurker! Thanks to your deft hand."
"I was afraid I'd split your skin to the skull!" she admitted. Knucklebones's knees were weak, so she sank beside him. The barbarian didn't mind the snow and cold, but she found kneeling so chilly it was painful. Born in a lofty city that drifted south in winter, she had barely seen snow a dozen times in her life. Now she was surrounded by leagues of it. She'd never get used to this frozen wasteland. There wasn't even wind to fill it.
"There were ants, too," she panted. "Big white ones that bit."
"Just a nuisance. Brush them off."
Knucklebones fingered her ear, and found bloody scabs. Her flesh was too numb to feel much pain, despite a fur-lined hood.
The two were dressed for the weather, at least. Knucklebones wore a coat of brown sheepskin with the fur turned inward and the sleeves cupped into mittens. Her legs were clad in blue wool leggings tucked into boots made of reindeer hocks with the hair still on. At her back hung an ox hide pack stuffed with jerked meat, oatmeal, and dried fruit. Her long elven blade hung on a thong to thump on her small bosom, immediately handy. Beside it was strung a yellowed knucklebone, her namesake, the hardest bone in any animal's body. With the hood up, all that showed were tufts of dark, unkempt hair, a pale nose reddened by cold, and one good eye with a slight slant. The other bore an old knife wound and a leather eye patch. Under her coat she wore woolen sweaters. Her fingers were deeply indented from brass knuckledusters-hence part of her name-but she'd shucked them because the intense cold made her clumsy.
In contrast, the tundra-born Sunbright wore little.
Red woolen leggings were tucked into iron-ringed moosehide boots stuffed with moss for insulation. A long green shirt reached to his knees, but only a thick scarf and sheepskin mantle hung from both shoulders, with a pack and Harvester's scabbard binding the mantle in place. He wore no hat, despite that his temples were shaved and his white-blonde hair dragged back into a topknot and horsetail. When the wind blew and Knucklebones's teeth chattered, Sunbright dragged the scarf up to warm his ears. Just to look at his naked forearms and chin made Knucklebones shiver.
As did looking at the naked land. For the thousandth time, she turned a circle for a landmark. Anything would do: a hill, a tree, a bush. But there was only snow-clad tundra, rising slightly in spots, dipping here, but altogether too flat. Even the horizon was a blur, white snow meeting a white sky. She had no idea of their direction, destination, or distance covered. Left alone, she'd go mad in hours, run screaming in circles, crying like a child until she collapsed and died. Or was eaten.
"Are there many carpet beasts out here?" she asked. Even her voice was lost in the wastes, like the squeaking of a baby rabbit. She barely reached Sunbright's breastbone. He could have slung her across his shoulders like a lamb.
"Lurkers? No, not many. There's not much for them to eat. And when they do catch something, reindeer mostly, though sometimes polar bears, they curl up and digest for months. My people kill them when they can. I should have been more alert, should have seen its track."
"Track?" Knucklebones said. She couldn't even trust the ground she walked on. White on white, it always looked too far or too near, so she blundered like a drunk.
"A lurker follows the vibrations of our feet. It swims under the snow, circles to get in front of you, so you step on it. Lucky I threw you clear."
Lucky nothing, the thief knew. A lifetime on the tundra had saved him. Both of them, actually, for she wouldn't last a night if Sunbright died.
"I should have seen the outline. And ant steam." To her puzzled look, he explained, "The ants are cold-blooded, but storing food underground in their burrows makes heat and wisps of steam. Ants often burrow near lurkers to pick up scraps of food, and they swarm over the beast's hide after lice. They help each other survive. Everything up here works together."
And eats each other, Knucklebones thought. "How much farther to your tribe's hunting grounds?" she asked, for perhaps the millionth time.
"Not far now," he answered patiently. "In fact, that's why I missed the lurker. I was excited about getting home." He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sunset. The sun had only risen a hand high in the southeast, and after only four hours sank toward the southwest. Nights were twenty hours long, so they mostly traveled by starlight. Why they hadn't been eaten long ago-by lurkers or polar bears or wolves or ants-Knucklebones couldn't fathom, but Sunbright's knowledge of the land and its inhabitants had steered them around danger. Usually.
He pointed into the gathering dusk and said, "There. Where the land begins to fall again. A shallow rill feeds a frozen stream that drops off a low cliff at a rookery into an arm of the Narrow Sea. My people ice fish at this time of year, then pack the sledges and search for reindeer before spring. It won't be more than six hours on."
"What will you do when you arrive?" Knucklebones phrased the question delicately.
Sunbright rubbed his stubbly jaw, picked an icicle of blood off his upper lip, and said, "I have no idea."
Knucklebones stifled a sigh. In the few months they'd been together, he'd explained how he left his tribe, the Rengarth Barbarians of the tundra. How his father, Sevenhaunt, a great shaman, had died suddenly, mysteriously wasting away. How Owldark, the new shaman, dreamed a vision that showed Sunbright the ruin of his people, and so demanded his death. How his mother, Monkberry, warned her only child to take his father's sword and flee. How he'd fled to the "lowlands," as barbarians called all territories south, for no single individual could survive on the tundra. And of his adventures to hell and to the future, where he met Knucklebones, then returned. How he'd conquered death. How in a few years, the boy had grown to a man, then a warrior, and finally a shaman.