(Ken Bulmer is a popular and prolific writer in several genres, which include his pseudonymous ‘Strike Force’ and ‘Fox’ series (as Adam Hardy) and the ‘Dray Prescot Saga’ (as Alan Burt Akers). A long-time science fiction novelist and editor (he compiled the annual New Writings in SF anthology for several years), he still finds time to write the occasional short story. The two characters featured in the ‘Vorkunsaga’ series first appeared in his sword & sorcery novel Swords of the Barbarians and he subsequently continued their adventures in Naked As a Sword, which we published in the very first issue of Fantasy Tales in 1977. It is therefore with great pleasure that we present another chapter in the exploits of Torr and Tara Vorkun with Ice and Fire.)
“If, brother, I point out that you were singularly unwise to believe the lying tales of that pig of a headman, you will become angry—”
“Probably—”
“Nevertheless, I shall do so.”
Snow like a myriad clammy hands swirled murderously about the struggling figures of Torr and Tara Vorkun. The snow-veiled mountain flanks, glimmering black with serrated fissures, appeared ready to topple over onto them. “Yes,” panted Tara, plunging bodily on through the snow, a white ghost figure with her breath a plume shivering into breaking ice crystals. “I surely shall. You great oaf!”
“I agree it is cold,” remarked Torr in a way to infuriate his twin further.
“Cold! You credulous cretin! I am a mere block of ice.”
“These mountains do not last for ever. They are short and sharp, not like the mountains of home.”
“And cold, dolt. Cold!”
“The village headman said this pass was quick, he did not say a snowstorm would—”
“He also said he wouldn’t use this pass.”
“But not why—”
“Save your breath for climbing.” Tara’s words cut as icy and dagger-sharp as the icicles glistening from the overhang. “If we are not over the pass by nightfall—”
“The daylight is going,” agreed Torr in his infuriating way.
Tara whooshed a disgusted breath and then closed her mouth. Her slim vigorous figure was muffled under the sheepskin they had bought in the foothill village with one of her bangles. Its fellow rested about her brother’s massive shoulders. They bore on, bashing heavily through the drifts, heads down, fighting the snow and the cold. Torr hauled up the flap of sheepskin over his head concealing his soft brown hair that hung straight to his shoulders confined by a strip of good curlish leather. Young, Torr Vorkun of Darkholm and Drugay, powerful and athletic and a swordsman—and now hungry and, most of all, cold.
His lean face was as yet unlined; but that smoothness and the good humour that set a crinkle at the corner of his mouth, were like to be marked and dissipated by this night’s folly.
The way trended up, black and shafted with phantom lines of snow. The cliffs with their glistening silver coatings appeared to draw in, tighter and more menacing with every step.
“By Chomath the Defiled,” panted Torr, hauling up. “What is that?” His broad hand found and gripped his sister’s arm.
Silently, standing together in the driving snow, they stared upon the hideous faces glaring sightlessly upon them.
The two stone monsters flanked the trail. Squamous, squat, sculpted by some long-dead master hand, they crouched balefully upon stone representations of skulls and monsters and the bones and corpses of children. Long-dead evils were manifested in the appearances of these two—devils?—that Torr considered they must be. Their mouths formed triangular gaps of hell, their chins long, their hollowed eye sockets reticulated, and from the stone-parchment of their skins tendrils of slime suggested suppurating poison bursting out from every pore. Above each blasphemous head reared an architrave which shielded the statues. Clearly they crouched upon their rotting corpses, clear and identical and perfectly visible in the lowering gloom of the dying day.
“Guardians,” said Torr. “But guardians of what?”
“Lumps of stone chiselled by a diseased mind,” snapped his sister. She wrenched her furs around under the sheepskin and felt for the hilt of her sword Kastrader. The warmth of her own body reached her questing fingers with a reassurance she recognised and welcomed. “Come on, loon. I’m frozen. Let us reach the top of this Amadis-forsaken pass.”
The wind hissed and the snow skittered about them. The eternal long-drawn ululation of the wind echoed as Tara spoke, echoed with another and spine-tingling howl.
Now Torr felt under his furs, gripping onto the hilt of his sword Lycheaper. He turned a frowning face back down the trail. “That’s all we need now.” He made his voice firm yet light. “You are right. Let us push on.”
Even in this weather, in this wilderness of mountain and ice, the wolves were slinking along the backtrail, following them.
“If, brother,” said Tara, paying him back in his own coin. “They are mere wolves.”
A score of paces up the trail a second pair of obscene statues stood lowering in the lines of driven snow. This time they faced inwards. Torr and Tara passed between without a second glance. Through the keening of the wind blustering the snow about their ears the sharper hunting calls of the wolves struck ominous warnings.
Once they had fought their way over these hills the plains lay open before them, the plains and the unending vistas of grass of which they had heard, with cities and rivers and forests and all the wonders of the world. They struggled on and upwards and the enclosing mountains rang with the roar of the wind and the savage howls of the pursuing wolves.
Two more leering statues were passed, and then two more. The crags grew cruel underfoot and snow splayed whitely away in drifts across the black ground. Despite their exertions both Torr and Tara shivered and their teeth chattered. Cold like this belonged to the unlettered hells of myth. Soon Torr came to the grim and unwelcome conclusion that they might not reach the top of the pass, and no thanks to the wolves for that.
“Keep going,” he grunted, and plunged on. Step for step Tara slogged on with him. The waning light threw oddly-shaped shadows in the whirl of whiteness all about. A mass lofted ahead almost at the head of the pass. A black mass, foreboding, forbidding, leaning over the lines of snow. The westering light threw all the face of the rock into deepest darkness. The craggy outcrop squatted in the pass like a fist in the mouth.
“No—” said Tara, and she halted, and stared up, and shivered.
Torr shouldered on, feeling the murderous rage in him.
The pass was open, the village headman had said. Choking with the bitter anger in him Torr pounded through the clinging whiteness, feeling the ground hard and icy underfoot, brought up face to face with the crag. He saw the trail, climbing by a series of ice-slimed hand and footholds. The breath gushed from him in a geyser of relief. The way was difficult and painful; but there was a way.
He turned to beckon on Tara and saw his sister withdraw her blade from the body of a wolf.
With a murderous snarl Torr ripped his blade free and plunged thigh deep back down the trail. Snow spouted away from him. He flung himself forward.
Lycheaper flamed.
The wolf that would have leaped full on Tara’s back and knocked her headlong for the others to tear out her throat and guts, screeched his own agony. The long grey-white form span away with the force of the blow, the cruel-jawed head slopping to the left as the body toppled to the right.
But there were others, many others, and they ranged up the trail like grey-white ghosts.
Their eyes sparked ruby fires through the lines of falling snow. The wind was caught and cupped here in the lee of the stoppering crag. The footholds were treacherous, the light deceptive. But Tara and Torr Vorkun were mistress and master of the arts of the sword. The wolves howled and screeched and hurled themselves on, lethal grey-white forms of sinew and muscle. Kastrader and Lycheaper bit. The snow wolves died.
Working together, as they had so often fought the man-hunting predators of the mountains of home, the twins sliced and hacked and step by step drew back nearer to that stoppering crag. The cold and the bewildering snow flurries did not hamper the wolves. This was their hunting ground.
“’Ware fallen rocks,” spat out Torr.
“Your left, brother—”
Torr had time to fling his fur-swathed left arm up across his face and so bash clumsily into the side of the leaping wolf’s head. The beast yowled as it toppled away, and Lycheaper slashed down in a blurred crimson streak. Torr backed off, Tara at his side, their weapons glistening slickly before them, twin brands of destruction. Now into the frigid air smells rose, the raw stink of spilled blood, the smoking stench of scattered entrails.
Some rupture of the earth’s surface had tumbled down this mass, and chips and sherds of stone lay haphazardly. The twins skipped nimbly over the detritus following where Torr has already gone lumbering on in fury. Further in the snow had been swept away as though by a supernal broom wielded by the Witch of the Storm. The snow wolves, bellies low, eyes afire, crept up the trail after them.
“That cleft,” said Torr, pointing with his sword. The wedge-shaped opening at the side of the trail was formed of two fallen boulders of immense size, leaning against each other.
“Shelter and a defence for our back. . .
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