DEATH THAWED SLOWLY, painfully.

The man was aware of little more than dancing sparks at first, and a dry sound like bones snapping, though he could not see them. He rolled in a sea of thunderous darkness, his flesh afire, every nerve flayed open and cast across a bed of coals.

The weak die, someone said. The strong endure.

How long his journey through blind hell lasted, he never learned. When the ship upon which his soul drifted at last struck the shore of consciousness, and he clung to it with all his fearsome strength. The man remembered that the pain was life—flesh burned by the cold, screaming in protest. He could feel the damaged skin of his hands and face, and the warmth of a flame nearby. The comforting popping of a fire. Sweat trickled down his back. Against him, something soft but unyielding. A body, pressed close.

It rose and fell in steady rhythm. He pressed his face into it, took in the animal smell. A woman, he thought, catching the faintest floral scent above the odor of human flesh. He felt her skin all along the length of him, and the comforting weight of heavy hide blankets piled above them. Perhaps roused by his stirring, she moved in turn, rolling to face him.

Her hair was an oily black curtain, hiding half her face. He could see only one eye, a dark glint in the shadow, and a small nose above broad lips. She was young, but not a girl. Her breasts brushed his shoulder as she settled down. The banked fire snarled behind her, and occasionally spit a whirl of sparks. Its soft glow glimmered off her sharp cheekbones and slim brown shoulder. Her dark eyes studied him.

Charms clattered on a bracelet as she raised a hand to touch his face. Suddenly wary, the man caught her hand in an iron grip. Next to dead he may have been, but he was strong, hard as the ices that nearly killed him. She made an uncomfortable sound, but did not resist.

He studied the bracelet. It bore dozens of bone chips, upon each of which was graven a crude rune. Some bore flecks of paint, but most were the dull yellow of old bone. Dimly, he recalled this bracelet. A hand grasping from the dark, clutching at him. A woman’s face, too dark to make out, hair spreading around her head like the raven wings of death.

“You saved me,” he said. His voice was hoarse, nearly broken. She watched him, but said nothing. Instinct made him release her. Her hand hung in the air for a moment, and then lowered, slowly, thin fingers tracing the line of his jaw. He hissed where they touched the winter-burned flesh of his cheek and nose. She watched, eyes unknowable pools of shadow.

Her fingers found the corner of his jaw, and pulled his head forward, slowly, until their lips brushed together. She locked him in a kiss. Her nipples stiffened against his chest, and one warm leg shifted over his bare thigh, drawing him closer into her heat.

The man found more strength than he would have reckoned he had.

* * *

When he woke, she was gone. The man cast the blankets aside and sat up on his elbows. He was a giant of a man, and bore the heavy muscle of an old veteran. His chest and shoulders bore the memory of cruel bronze and iron, and his face was webbed with scars. His broad nose was broken where a shield had crushed it in his youth, and it had never healed right. His beard had grown out during his long trek north, nearly as wild as the mane of coarse black hair that hung to his shoulders. He stank of sweat and stale flesh, and knew it, but those thoughts meant nothing.

He was in a hut of some sort, though the construction was unfamiliar. The ceiling was conical and low at the edges. There was no light save what leaked through the chimney at the center of the roof high above. That thin gray light meant it was yet threadbare day, but the weather seemed little improved. A bed of coals lay in the center of the floor, and the air was already a bracing cold as their light began to fade. A few rudimentary shelves stood at the walls, laden with bundles wrapped in oiled skins and piles of chopped wood. Off in the dark on the other side of the hut, he saw an open crate. It stood on two skids of curved wood. The sides were picked out with bits of stone that glittered wet in the low firelight.

A cradle. The man stood over it, but it was empty. He scratched at his beard, wondering.

The woman was nowhere to be seen. Though some dim part of him craved her, longed for the sweet warmth of her flesh, he wanted his sword more. In such a strange place, one could never be too careful, he thought, glaring around at the shadows. He was a wary man by nature and experience, and his close brush with death had only whetted that suspicious edge. He let out a quiet, ragged noise of relief when he saw his blade propped near the door, which stood at the head of three stone steps. It was built partly underground, he realized, and wondered where in the hells he was.

He stalked over to his sword, and found his other items there, too. Slowly, working through each ache, the man pulled his legs into the tattered hide trousers, and tied the fur lined moccasins around his feet. The shirt was hardly salvageable. His fingers brushed the hilt of his sword, but something told him to leave it. He had other things to attend to first. The man moved to climb the stairs, but thought better of it, and went to get one of the blankets from the heap to wrap around his shoulders.

Outside, the world had the gray cast of corpseflesh. The cold stung at him immediately, driving barbed shivers down his spine and flanks. He slapped at the exposed flesh of his arm where the sleeve was ruined, trying to summon blood to the surface. It was a losing battle, for even his blood knew that now it was time to rest, to hunker and wait out this bitter chill. But he could not.

Snow fell in slow, steady lines. There was no wind, which was a thin mercy, but it had the effect of making everything seem dreamlike and unreal. Around him stood the conical roofs of other pit huts: a whole village strand of them, stuck up out of the banks of white that gathered on their bases. Among them, not a one had smoke coming out of their chimneys.

Something was wrong. At each hut where he stopped, he found doors broken in, and the insides smashed. He found no sign of the woman. In some, eyes straining in the dark, the man thought he could make out dark stains on the ground, but he could not be sure. With the ground frozen, and snow heaping inside, it was impossible to tell what had happened, though suspicion gnawed at him.

They watch you. The thought came unbidden, an echo. A voice from the ring on his finger. Awake now, and guarded.

But he could see nothing moving in the snow. Barbarian senses honed by years living in the depths had sharpened him to a killing edge, and he stared now with the flat, calculating gaze of the predator. He waited, lips parted to hear better, flexing his fist around the ring.

Far off, a wolf’s howl rose. Then another, and a third. He grinned to hear it.

Another sound picked up on the wind, strange and reedy. Curious, he followed it through the snow, leaving the huts behind. The banks were higher here, and he kicked his way through until he found the source of the noise: the woman, playing a wailing tune on a thin pipe. It was a music unlike any he had ever heard, haunting and airy, thin as the air itself. She wore a long slitted cloak that let her arms move freely. He stood off a ways listening and watching. The pit huts were thirty or forty paces behind them, the roofs nearly invisible, white against white.

Beyond lay a level field of white. A lake, he judged, beginning to fit together shards of memory. The dire wolf had known his terrain, and dared not to venture out onto the water. Was the ice kept thin by some dim inner heat, slumbering below the surface? Or had they feared the village? It mattered not, he decided, for in his mindless rage, he had not heed the wolves’ wary warning, and he had falled through the ice anyway. The woman must have saved him.

She played her mournful tune beside seven or eight piles of snow. The man knew what those were, and understood now why the houses were empty and dark.

Stooping, he pushed the snow away until he found a stone. He kept digging until he had an armload of rocks. Only then did he approach the woman and the graves. She stopped her playing and watched as he set a stone on each of the piles. When he was done, the man went to stand beside her. They stared down at the graves.

“My people build cairns for the dead,” he said. A sudden lash of wind kicked up snow around them, and tore her hair from the hood of her cloak, veiling her face. When it settled, he said, “Do you play for their ghosts?”

She stared at him. Damn him, she probably didn’t understand a thing he was saying.

The man touched his chest. “Ulrem,” he said. He waited, but when she said nothing, he turned back to the graves. “How did they die?”

She pointed up into the distance. North, he marked, by the place of the sun. A dark peak loomed above them, its sheer black walls picked out by white snowy lace. There lay his object: the sullen, ice-crowned head of the valley, where the two great ridges met in a rising spire. Mount Aemir.

The First Mountain, the knifelanders had called it.

Evil dwells on the mountain, the echoes of the ring said, sensing something beyond his perception. He did not doubt it. It had the loathsome aspect of a miserable old god, plotting vengeance out here at the very periphery of the world.

“Is that,” Ulrem said, pointing towards the snow shrouded summit, “what killed them, too?”

She stared at him in maddening silence. He tried again in another tongue, and another, but got nowhere. The cold was sinking back into his bones, and his patience was running short. Ulrem had been heading towards that very mountain before he’d fallen through the ice.

“Do you know Valkir the Seer?” he said, bending low so he could study her black eyes. The woman nodded. “Does he live up there on the mountain?”

She shook her head.

“Akale’s ashes!” he swore, turning away. “I walked a hundred leagues to get here! To speak to him. They said he lived in a fortress high on Mount Aemir. I was told he knew the meaning of this.” He held up the ring to his face, staring at it. His fingers curled into a fist around it and his expression darkened into a brutal scowl. “That he could tell me what I am.”

The village woman took his hand, and Ulrem was so surprised that he nearly snatched it away. Her fingers folded around his heavy hands, pulling him back to her. She pointed at the graves, and then up at the mountain again. Insistence and pleading in her eyes. He knew that look. Knew what she wanted him to do.

Ulrem glared up at the mountain, and knew he had no choice. He owed her a debt. That was the hard law of honor graven in his bones.

“I need my sword.”